A Torch Kept Lit Read online

  It is not everywhere known that, under Mr. Shawn, the author was given the final say as to what parts of his book would run, subject to the limitations of the space designated for that book. On some points Mr. Shawn would not give way—animadversions, for instance, which he thought for whatever reason unfair or unjustified. “Mr. Buckley, I do wish you would eliminate that paragraph about Mr. [Jones]. You see, we do not run a letters page, and it isn’t quite fair to leave him without an opportunity to defend himself….” I don’t know how other authors handled him, but in almost every case, I yielded. His style was to cause the author to acquiesce in the change, rather than to dictate the change. With me this worked, though I remember a few cases in which, through an intermediary editor, I pleaded my case, and in all but one of these, Mr. Shawn yielded.

  Two years later, I sent him the first of my sailing books, Airborne, once again thinking the possibility remote that he would himself read it, let alone publish it. But he did, passing along, through Frances, some nice words about my prose. A year or two later I wrote him to say that I had completed a book about the United Nations, but doubted he would wish to read it because United Nations life was intolerably boring. He replied instantly by mail asking to see it and one week later wrote to say he wished to publish my United Nations book. I made the dreadful mistake of declining, finally, to release it to The New Yorker because of its ruling that no book published in the magazine could appear in the trade press until six months had gone by. My publisher didn’t want to let six months go by, and so I hurried out with it, only to discover that not more than 16 people in the entire world are willing to read any book about the United Nations. I was pleased to hear from Mr. Shawn that I had written the only book about the United Nations that was both “literate and readable.” I appreciated the compliment even though it was not hard to make, inasmuch as at the time there were no books about the United Nations, literate or illiterate, except an odd Brazilian memoir and a kind of coffee-table book by Conor Cruise O’Brien, designed to promote some artist.

  A year or two later I wrote him to say that I had cruised again across the Atlantic, and did not suppose that he would wish to consider yet another book on yet another Transatlantic sail. Oh but he would; and he proceeded to publish Atlantic High. Five years later I told him that only out of courtesy was I mentioning to him my manuscript, Racing Through Paradise, as it was inconceivable that The New Yorker would wish a third book by me with an ocean cruise as background. Inside of one week he advised me he wished to publish it. The last book of mine that he published was Overdrive, a sequel of sorts to Cruising Speed, in that it too was the journal of one week in my life. It was greeted as a most provocative, outrageous book, and was bitterly criticized by many reviewers. I winced at one reviewer, who wrote that perhaps Mr. Shawn’s imminent departure from The New Yorker had something to do with the manifest deterioration of his literary judgment, as witness his publication of Overdrive. When a few months later I wrote the introduction to the soft-cover edition of the book, a long (glorious!) essay examining the criticisms of the book, I sent him a copy. He called me to say, in gentle accents but without running any risk of my misunderstanding him on the subject, that the critics of my book had had other things in mind than the quality of the book, which he was pleased to have sponsored.

  I mentioned that he liked to speak to Frances. When a New Yorker check arrived for Overdrive, she called me in San Francisco to report jubilantly that the check was for $40,000. But later in the afternoon she called and said with some dismay that Mr. Shawn had telephoned her. “What he said was, ‘Oh, Miss Bronson, our bookkeepers have made a most embarrassing mistake on the check for Mr. Buckley, and I would be grateful if you would simply mail it back to us, and we will mail the correct check tomorrow.’ ” That could only mean, we both reasoned, that I had been overpaid. The following day a check arrived for $55,000. Mr. Shawn had his own way of twinkling at the world he treated so formally.

  An interesting postscript. When he had retired from The New Yorker, as you know, there were great protests from his adamantly loyal staff. About nine months later I said to myself: Should I write and invite him to lunch with me? I’d never have done any such thing while he was still the editor of his magazine, with powers of life and death over you. Such an overture might have been thought a venture in self-ingratiation. So I put it very carefully in my little note to him, saying merely that it would give me great pleasure to lunch with him but I recognized that he didn’t go out very much and that when he did he almost certainly had on his mind a professional objective. He called Frances a day or so later and said he would be most pleased to lunch, and a week or so later we met at the Carlyle, and talked together animatedly. He had read that week’s issue of National Review. I can’t believe that he (a hardy political liberal) read NR as a matter of habit, but could easily persuade myself that he had made it a point to read the current issue in order to prepare for our lunch. (He read, by the way, with the speed of light. Everything that appeared in The New Yorker he had himself read, some of it two and, as with my books, three or even four times.) The hour went quickly and pleasantly and there was a total absence of ambient pressure, I thought.

  The difficult decision came one year later. What went through my mind was this, that if I did not invite him one more time to lunch, he might think that the first invitation was done out of a sense of duty to a retired editor who had acted generously to me, and that now that he was so far away from the scene, I had no further interest in him. I decided to invite him again to lunch. He replied to Frances that he would like very much to have lunch, and suggested that perhaps some time in the fall would be good. That was in 1991. In the fall, he called Frances, to say that he still looked forward to our lunch but would rather not set a date for it right away, would this be agreeable? I wrote back that of course that would be agreeable; any time would do. I did not hear again from him until the letter I received the day he died.

  He was a mythogenic character, a man totally taken by his muse and by his determination to hold to the standards he respected. I hope someone, perhaps one of his talented sons, will one day produce if not exactly a “life” of William Shawn, a book about his priorities, his literary manners, his immense effect on our culture, and his enormous impact on his devoted admirers. —Bill

  A classical pianist and harpsichordist, Rosalyn Tureck was Bill Buckley’s favorite performer—in any artistic medium, any genre. That was because she had been, as he put it in her eulogy, “the greatest living interpreter” of the works of the composer whom Buckley termed, in a note he dispatched to Tureck’s deathbed, “the greatest genius of all time”: Johann Sebastian Bach. WFB’s boundless adoration of Bach and by extension his enthusiasm for Tureck—a Chicago native and five-time guest on Firing Line, usually at the piano—offer a window into one of the many childlike attributes Buckley determinedly carried into adulthood and, ultimately, old age. Hero worship on this scale bespeaks—I know from experience—a stubborn refusal to part with that facet of the childhood imagination that idealizes athletes, entertainers, and others who perform feats we know we could never replicate, on stages we know we could never ascend. Having debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1932, Tureck devoted her life almost entirely to playing, recording, and evangelizing on behalf of the works of Bach and other classical giants. She married at fifty, only to see her new husband, an architect, die that same year, and never remarried. WFB’s friendship with Tureck spanned decades, and she made special recordings, and even the pianist’s version of house calls, for him and Pat. Though his eulogy focuses on her art, Buckley makes a point of recalling Tureck’s eccentricities. “Rosalyn could sometimes be attracted,” he writes, “to personal drama.”

  She died (finally) on July 17. As it happened, only a few minutes after a Tureck tribute at the Mannes School in New York at which the audience—more accurately, the congregants—heard her playing on video and tapes, listened to a lecture or two about her accomplishments, and on to two young p
ianists who tried to communicate her authoritative style. They played, of course, J. S. Bach. She and Bach devoted their lives to each other.

  I approached her in the late Sixties, inviting her to appear on Firing Line to discuss a recent jab at Bach by a young protester in Los Angeles who had raged at a public rally that Bach had nothing to say to modern life. I knew her, as everyone who listened to Bach did, as the greatest living interpreter of his works. She had played the whole piano repertory, old and new—David Diamond wrote a piano sonata for her. Her first public performance in Chicago was done at age nine, and after intensive studies with fine artists in Chicago and at the Juilliard School, she began her exhaustive career, giving, gradually, only all-Bach programs. She played in every part of the world, earning, always, standing ovations, and taught music and musicology at Oxford, Yale, and Cal Tech.

  We became friends, and she appeared five times on Firing Line programs, on one of them defending the role of the performing artist against the claim that technology had anachronized the live recital, a claim flamboyantly advanced by Glenn Gould. There was nothing here to be confused with fuddy-duddyism: She was receptive to explorations at every level, even mastering the (New Age) Theremin after some years of study with its developer. She performed on the harpsichord and, indeed, on the clavichord and organ, but was supreme on the piano, writing, collaterally, technical papers and books on performance and musical structure.

  In 1977, she undertook at Carnegie Hall to play the Goldberg Variations before dinner on the harpsichord, and to play them after dinner on the piano, intending to display the strengths and individuality of the two instruments, at her singular hands. To do that one thinks of singing Tristan in the afternoon and Siegfried in the evening. At a reception—held at our quarters after the event—she declined to shake hands (dear Rosalyn could sometimes be attracted to personal drama). The Goldbergs are thought of as her signature piece. When she was 17, she undertook to learn this formidable work (I once timed her in it—118 minutes). After seven weeks she agreed to perform it for fellow students at Juilliard. Her teacher simply assumed that she would rely on the music, but she didn’t even bring it to the piano, tucking away only a few three-by-five cards giving the beginning bar of each of the 32 variations. “I never actually looked at them,” she told me.

  But playing the Goldbergs at my house (for the second time), seven or eight years ago, she told me she would want the music in front of her, in the event she wished to consult the score on one or two variations; though she never in fact did. She was then 80, so it was for over 60 years that she carried the music in her head, that and 35 hours of other music of Bach. That performance was the last of seven she gave for me. The first, in 1975, was “a birthday present.” It was recorded, and, with two later recitals at home in Connecticut, combined to produce two CDs, “great works of J. S. Bach,” which still circulate. But the surprise came when in 1995 she called to ask whether I would like her to play for me and my wife and guests the program of Romantic music she would perform a week later in Buenos Aires. Her audience was flabbergasted as she went through without music an hour of Mendelssohn, Brahms, Schumann, and Debussy, music she hadn’t played for 40 years, playing it now faultlessly and masterfully, from that huge repertory she carried in her head.

  Four weeks ago I had a telephone call from a friend of Mme Tureck. He spoke from the hospital to tell me that she was dying and probably would live only another day, in the event I wanted to send her a farewell note, which he would take her from his e-mail. “She has just finished her autobiography and will have the manuscript sent to you before the weekend. But if you want to write to her you need to do it in the next half hour, because I have to go out, and she isn’t expected to survive.” I completed a hasty note, which, via her attentive friend, she acknowledged warmly.

  “I don’t know the details of your incarceration,” I wrote, “not even whether there is any music at your bedside. There is, if you are interested to know, music at my bedside: the 48 [Preludes and Fugues] performed by Rosalyn Tureck. The recordings are truly sublime, and every time I experience any of it I am reminded of your incomparability. How fine to know that you have been of service to the greatest genius of all time, and how proud he’d have been to hear you perform.”

  She lived another eight weeks—not, really, a welcome extension of life—with the assertive cancer that killed her.

  Meanwhile, I had got to the last page of her 600-page book. It ends, “I gave a talk on my eightieth birthday to the North American nations which was aired from Washington, D.C., telephoned from London, in which I spoke of my musical development, and ended with the words, ‘I am still growing.’ Today, almost eight years later, I still can say, with equal conviction, I am still growing.” I, a mere listener, know what she meant by that, while doubting there is anywhere to grow in the art she developed in playing Sebastian Bach.

  When Neville Chamberlain descended from an airplane in London to announce, fresh from meeting with Hitler, that “peace in our time” had been secured, young WFB, then attending boarding school, witnessed the historic moment firsthand. A decade—and a world war—later, in 1949, WFB, by then a junior at Yale, traveled to Cambridge to see Winston Churchill speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “He was shorter than I envisioned, less rotund,” Buckley observed. Churchill struggled to the lectern, but then, as WFB recalled, “the hypnotizing voice boomed in, and our attention was on tiptoe.” “Are we winning the Cold War?” Churchill asked on that occasion. “This cannot be decided by looking at Europe alone. We must also look to Asia.” Like most Americans, Buckley viewed Churchill with awe—“the genius of Churchill was his union of affinities of the heart and of the mind, the total fusion of animal and spiritual energy”—but not uncritically. As WFB wrote in 1996:

  Mr. Churchill had struggled to diminish totalitarian rule in Europe, which, however, increased. He fought to save the empire, which dissolved. He fought socialism, which prevailed. He struggled to defeat Hitler—and he won. It is not, I think, the significance of that victory, mighty and glorious though it was, that causes the name of Churchill to make the blood run a little faster. He later spoke diffidently about his role in the war, saying that the lion was the people of England, that he had served merely to provide the roar. But it is the roar that we hear, when we pronounce his name.

  WFB recognized Churchill as a titanic figure in the struggle of civilizations, a fellow inheritor of the patrimony—he approvingly quoted Churchill as having remarked, after Chamberlain announced his devil’s pact with Hitler, that “all wisdom is not new wisdom”—but he insisted that our consideration of Churchill could not end at Yalta.

  “Churchill in the Balance”

  National Review, February 23, 1965.

  For as long as heroes are written about, Winston Churchill will be written about. The proportions are all abundantly there. He was everything. The soldier who loved poetry. The historian who loved to paint. The diplomat who thrived on indiscretion. The patriot with international vision. The orderly man given to electric spontaneities.

  The man who flunked everything at school and then kept a generation of scholars busy interpreting his work and his words. The loyal party man who could cross the aisle and join the opposition when principle called. The Tory traditionalist revered in his old age by the neoteric levelers.

  He was a very great man, and it is the crowning pity under the circumstances that he did not have that final ounce of strength to deliver Europe from the mess in which he left it after the great war to which he, as much as anyone else, committed the entire world. It is ungrateful to say of the dead, particularly of those few among the dead who were so distinguished in their lifetime, that they owed us more than they gave us. But Churchill is as much responsible as anyone else in our time for calling forth exacting judgments. The nobility of his utterances galvanized us to believe in the final possibilities of individual human beings, of statesmen, and of nations. His great orations during the war which
he told us he was waging, and believed that he waged, in behalf of righteousness, require the observer to apply the highest standards to his life and goals.

  All those men who were moved by the martial rhetoric of Winston Churchill to go out and die also figure in any obituary notice of Winston Churchill, and they are not appeased by glossing over the final imperfection of Churchill’s life.

  It was Churchill who pledged a restored Europe, indeed a restored world order after the great war. He did not deliver us such a world. No one else could so have stirred the world’s imagination as he, at that critical point in world history, to press for the final goal the war was fought to achieve—the elimination of the source of aggressive evil that finds us today, on Churchill’s death, not only living in a world in which more people are slaves than were slaves in the darkest hours of the Battle of Britain, but in a world that cares infinitely less about the wretchedness of these peoples than cared about such things even during the lackadaisical, disorganized thirties. At least during that period Churchill was there to bellow his indignation at the depravities of Adolf Hitler. Now, a generation later, it has become uncouth, dislocative, warmongering, to bellow against injustice even on a vastly magnified scale.