A Torch Kept Lit Read online

  Gloom set in. But a year later, after the German surrender, the wine broker’s jubilant letter came: In fact, the wine survived and would be shipped in a matter of weeks; which indeed it was.

  A few years later, for the purposes of insurance, my father brought in to his house in Connecticut, to assess his cellar, a Frenchman whose English was insecure. The enologist spent a half hour surveying the wines, taking notes. After he was done he came up to my father’s study and said solemnly, “Your wine is valueless.”

  “Oh?” my father said. “I had thought it very fine wine.” “That’s what I said,” the expert said. “Valueless!” It was with some relief that it dawned on us what a Frenchman can do in search of the English word “invaluable.”

  Father was devoted to his 10 children and every year distributed what he could of his material belongings. Doing that, you can move quickly toward self-liquidation, if you have 10 children. Some months after he died, each of us received a notice, with an accompanying check, of our share of his probated estate. The checks were for $62. The jolt came when, a few months after that, a revenue agent appeared. He wanted to look at the deceased’s wine cellar. My father had absentmindedly forgotten to list it as an asset, or to give it away to his children.

  But our consolation, year after year, for more than 20 years, was prolonged. Whenever any of us visited the lovely house in northwest Connecticut, we would be served the wines Father had accumulated, those lovely things that had slept peacefully, gaining flavor and enhancing their power to delight, through a world war and several occupations. It is a wonderful way to remember one’s benefactors, isn’t it? To drink wine in their memory?

  A portrait survives, from 1898, of Aloise Steiner at three: an angel with brown hair, heavy-lidded blue eyes twinkling with surprise, and a perfect little nose above a downturned mouth, slightly agape. Her head is tilted up, leaning rightward, her fist perched thoughtfully under her right ear; all that’s missing, really, for the little girl to be hosting Firing Line is a clipboard and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major.

  DENIS BRIAN: Apart from being a language purist and a conservative, how else are you like your father?

  WFB: I’m decisive. I’m very fond of my family, but that’s hardly a unique quality.

  DENIS BRIAN: […] And your mother? Have you any similar traits?

  WFB: Since she’s absolutely perfect, anything I said would be self-serving. [laughs]

  —Denis Brian, Murderers and Other Friendly People: The Public and Private Worlds of Interviewers (1973)

  By all accounts Aloise Steiner Buckley provided, in the family’s busy households at Great Elm and Kamschatka, the Buckleys’ summer home in Camden, South Carolina, the indispensable counterpoint of sweetness and light to Will Buckley’s sternness. “If Father was in an authoritarian mood,” said Patricia Buckley, “Mother would try to soften it.” “It was Mother who was with us day in and day out,” recalled James Buckley, renowned today as a former U.S. senator and federal appellate judge. “Hers was the dominant influence when it came to such essentials as faith, love of country, and consideration for others.” Buckley biographer John Judis characterized Aloise’s marriage to Will as “happy and fruitful.”

  It would survive more than forty years, the first half of which Will scrambled, often with little success, to recoup the fortune that he had lost in Mexico City, leaving Aloise alone—sometimes without money to pay the bills—to manage the affairs of their growing and demanding family. In 1918, they had their first child, Aloise, then six others in quick succession—John in 1920, Priscilla in 1921, James in 1923, Jane in 1924, Bill in 1925, and Patricia in 1927. Reid would come in 1930 and Maureen in 1933, when the Buckleys were living abroad, and Carol in 1938.

  Aloise was the more outwardly demonstrative Catholic, apt to pray spontaneously, to invoke the Lord in conversation or in the short stories she wrote and told her brood at bedtime. From this rooted faith came endless good cheer. Aloise loved it when young Bill, rejecting pagan myths, hid the family’s Santa costume, and she sometimes could be seen bowling in three-inch heels. “God,” Reid would say, “was that woman fun.”

  “Aloise Steiner Buckley, RIP”

  National Review, April 19, 1985.

  She bore ten children, nine of whom have written for this journal, or worked for it, or both, and that earns her, I think, this half-acre of space normally devoted to those whose contributions are in the public mode. Hers were not. If ever she wrote a letter to a newspaper, we don’t remember it, and if she wrote to a congressman or senator, it was probably to say that she wished him well, and would pray for him as she did regularly for her country. If she had lived one day more, she’d have reached her ninetieth birthday. Perhaps somewhere else one woman has walked through so many years charming so many people by her warmth and diffidence and humor and faith. I wish I might have known her.

  ASB was born in New Orleans, her ancestors having come there from Switzerland some time before the Civil War. She attended [H.] Sophie Newcomb College but left after her second year in order to become a nurse, her intention being to go spiritedly to the front. Over there. Over there. But when the young aspiring nurses were given a test to ascertain whether they could cope with the sight of blood and mayhem, she fainted, and was disqualified. A year later she married a prominent 36-year-old Texas-born attorney who lived and practiced in Mexico City, with which she had had ties because her aunt lived there.

  She never lived again in New Orleans, her husband taking her, after his exile from Mexico (for backing an unsuccessful revolution that sought to restore religious liberty), to Europe, where his business led him. They had bought a house in Sharon, Connecticut, and in due course returned there. The great house where she brought us up still stands, condominiums now. But the call of the South was strong, and in the mid-Thirties they restored an ante-bellum house in Camden, South Carolina. There she was wonderfully content, making others happy by her vivacity, her delicate beauty, her habit of seeing the best in everyone, the humorous spark in her eye. She never lost a Southern innocence in which her sisters even more conspicuously shared. One of her daughters was delighted on overhearing an exchange between her and her freshly widowed sister who had for fifty years been married to a New Orleans doctor and was this morning, seated on the porch, completing a medical questionnaire, checking this query, exxing the other. She turned to Mother and asked, “Darling, as girls did we have gonorrhea?”

  Her cosmopolitanism was unmistakably Made-in-America. She spoke fluent French and Spanish with undiluted inaccuracy. My father, who loved her more even than he loved to tease her, and whose knowledge of Spanish was faultless, once remarked that in forty years she had never once placed a masculine article in front of a masculine noun, or a feminine article in front of a feminine noun, except on one occasion when she accidentally stumbled on the correct sequence, whereupon she stopped—unheard of in her case, so fluently did she aggress against the language—and corrected herself by changing the article: the result being that she spoke, in Spanish, of the latest encyclical of Pius XII, the Potato of Rome (“Pio XII, la Papa de Roma”). She would smile, and laugh compassionately, as though the joke had been at someone else’s expense, and perhaps play a little with her pearls, just above the piece of lace she always wore in the V of the soft dresses that covered her diminutive frame.

  There were rules she lived by, chief among them those she understood God to have specified, though she outdid Him in her accent on good cheer. And although Father was the unchallenged source of authority at home, she was unchallengeably in charge of arrangements in a house crowded with ten children and as many tutors, servants, and assistants. In the very late Thirties her children ranged in age from one to 21, and an in-built sense of the appropriate parietal arrangements governed the hour at which each of us should be back from wherever we were—away at the movies, or at a dance, or hearing Frank Sinatra sing in Pawling. The convention was inflexible. On returning, each of us would push, on one of the
house’s intercoms, the button that said, “ASB.” The conversation, whether at ten when she was still awake, or at two when she had been two hours asleep, was always the same: “It’s me, Mother.” “Good night, darling.” If—as hardly ever happened—it became truly late, and her mind had not recorded the repatriation of all ten of us, she would rise, and walk to the room of the missing child. If there, she would return to sleep, and remonstrate the next day on the forgotten telephone call. If not there, she would wait up, and demand an explanation.

  Her anxiety to do the will of God was more than ritual. I wrote to her once early in 1963. Much of our youth had been spent in South Carolina, and the cultural coordinates of our household were Southern. But the times required that we look Southern conventions like Jim Crow hard in the face, and so I asked her how she could reconcile Christian fraternity with the separation of the races, a convention as natural in the South for a hundred years after the Civil War as women’s suffrage became natural after their emancipation, and she wrote, “My darling Bill: This is not an answer to your letter, for I cannot answer it too quickly. It came this morning, and, of course, I went as soon as possible to the Blessed Sacrament in our quiet, beautiful little church here. And, dear Bill, I prayed so hard for humility and for wisdom and for guidance from the Holy Spirit. I know He will help me to answer your questions as He thinks they should be answered. I must pray longer before I do this.”

  A few years earlier she had raised her glass on my father’s 75th birthday, to say: “Darling, here’s to 15 more years together, and then we’ll both go.” But my father died three years later. Her grief was profound, and she emerged from it through the solvent of prayer, her belief in submission to a divine order, and her irrepressible delight in her family, and friends. A few years later her daughter Maureen died at age 31, and she struggled to fight her desolation, though not with complete success. Her oldest daughter, Aloise, died three years later. And then, three months ago, her son John.

  She was by then in a comfortable retirement home, totally absent-minded; she knew us all, but was vague about when last she had seen us, or where, and was given to making references, every now and then, to her husband, “Will,” and the trip they planned next week to Paris, or Mexico.

  But she sensed what had happened, and instructed her nurse (she was endearingly under the impression that she owned the establishment in which she had a suite) to drive her to the cemetery, and there, unknown to us until later that afternoon, she saw from her car, at the edge of an assembly of cars, her oldest son lowered into the earth. He had been visiting her every day, often taking her to a local restaurant for lunch, and her grief was, by her standards, convulsive; but she did not break her record—she never broke it—which was never, ever to complain, because, she explained, she could never repay God the favors He had done her, no matter what tribulations she might need to suffer.

  Ten years ago, my wife and I arrived in Sharon from New York much later than we had expected, and Mother had given up waiting for us, so we went directly up to the guest room. There was a little slip of blue paper on the bed lamp, another on the door to the bathroom, a third on the mirror. They were: lovely notes on her 3 x 5 notepaper, inscribed “Mrs. William F. Buckley.” Little valentines of welcome, as though we had circled the globe. There was no sensation to match the timbre of her pleasure on hearing from you when you called her on the telephone, or the vibration of her embrace when she laid eyes on you. Some things truly are unique.

  Five days before she died—one week having gone by without her having said anything, though she clutched the hands of her children and grandchildren as they came to visit, came to say good-bye—the nurse brought her from the bathroom to the armchair and—inflexible rule—put on her lipstick, and the touch of rouge, and the pearls. Suddenly, and for the first time since the terminal descent began a fortnight earlier, she reached out for her mirror. With effort she raised it in front of her face, and then said, a teasing smile on her face as she turned to the nurse, “Isn’t it amazing that anyone so old can be so beautiful?” The answer, clearly, was, Yes, it was amazing that anyone could be so beautiful. —WFB

  When they more or less took over the Yale debating team, L. Brent Bozell, Jr., was undeniably Bill Buckley’s better: a lanky, red-haired Omaha native and merchant marine who outpointed Buckley for the Ten Eyck Award for oratory. The two were inseparable friends and destined to be linked forever. In 1949, still in school, Bozell married Buckley’s sister Patricia (Trish). Five years later, while the Bozells were on their way to having ten children, and with Trish having introduced Bill to Patricia Taylor, whom he would marry, WFB and Bozell teamed up once again: this time as coauthors of the controversial McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning, a pointillist defense of the anticommunist senator who was soon to self-destruct. It has been suggested that Bozell’s admiration for WFB in these early days led him to abandon some liberal ideas and even to convert to Catholicism. As early as 1958, however, Buckley biographer John Judis has written, hints of strain began to show, as when WFB rebuked his brother-in-law in a note: “It makes sense, I feel, not to be sarcastic in a serious communication for consideration by a board of high-strung editors….” Bozell’s influence in the conservative orbit reached its high point when he ghost-authored Barry Goldwater’s best-selling manifesto The Conscience of a Conservative (1960). By the mid-1960s, Bozell had moved his family to Spain and founded Triumph, a Catholic journal. WFB was supportive, but Bozell’s tone changed—he angrily accused NR and conservatives of exalting the Constitution over Catholicism—and the two men’s correspondence grew barbed before falling silent. Marvin Liebman told Judis that the feud was “very traumatic” for Buckley; Pat Buckley thought her husband’s celebrity had stirred resentment; in reality, Bozell was descending into mental illness. Although it references this “creeping invalidism,” WFB’s eulogy is unusual for how much of it he gives over to someone else’s eulogy: that of his nephew, L. Brent Bozell III, a notable conservative activist in his own right. It seems the elder Bozell’s dissolution, at first mistaken for stubbornness, remained so painful to WFB that he scarcely could bring himself to write about it. Even after the many years of estrangement, Bill called the son, as his father lay dying, with strict instructions that he was to be notified the very instant the inevitable came. When Brent called WFB two days later and told him, “Dad’s gone,” Buckley responded with an unrecognizable noise on the other end of the line—a despairing cry, almost animal in nature—and hung up.

  “L. Brent Bozell, RIP”

  National Review, May 19, 1997.

  Brent Bozell was a seminal figure in the early days of National Review. As an undergraduate at Yale he was renowned as a debater and orator (he had won the National American Legion Oratory award in 1944, and at Yale was president of the Political Union). His postcollege years (as an undergraduate he was my closest friend; he married my sister Patricia in our senior year) were crowded and exciting. He graduated from the Yale Law School in 1953 and moved to California anticipating a career in the law. During his law-school days he collaborated with me in writing McCarthy and His Enemies, a study of McCarthy’s activities up through the Tydings hearings in 1953. Soon after the book’s publication, Edward Bennett Williams, serving as attorney for Joe McCarthy, persuaded Brent to detach himself from Pillsbury Madison & Sutro in San Francisco and help defend McCarthy against censure by the Senate.

  The defense failed, but Brent and McCarthy had become friends, and McCarthy asked Brent to stay in Washington and write speeches for him part time. Brent did, and in the years ahead became close to Sen. Barry Goldwater. Retired Notre Dame dean Clarence Manion had set up a small publishing company and commissioned Brent to write a short book for Sen. Goldwater. In nine days. Brent (normally slow) wrote The Conscience of a Conservative. It had the largest sale of any polemic in American history. Its popularity contributed to Goldwater’s nomination for president in 1964.

  While working for McCarthy and for Go
ldwater, Brent served as Washington correspondent for National Review and as a Senior Editor. He competed twice for public office, once for the House of Delegates in Maryland, once for Congress. In 1960, he moved his family to Spain, intending to write a thorough examination of the Supreme Court under Earl Warren (The Warren Revolution was published in 1966 by Arlington House). While in Spain he felt the need to found a magazine devoted to Catholic thought. In 1965, the monthly Triumph was first published. It was a profound venture, theocratical in orientation, in one sense another expression of the totalist tendencies of the culture of the 1960s. In 1975 it discontinued, Brent Bozell’s creeping invalidism a factor in its demise, as also the gradual reconsolidation, during that decade, of conventions cast off during the abandon of the earlier decade. Triumph was in a sense the counterpart of Woodstock. The one argued the imperative of the licentious, self-indulgent lifestyle; the other, the ultimate satisfactions of faith, duty, and fidelity.

  The personal story was searingly and poignantly told at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the Dominican church close by Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where eight priests, including the priest who had married the Bozells in 1949, concelebrated a funeral Mass presided over by Father Michael Bozell, a Benedictine monk who was ordained a priest at Solesmes in France in 1994. The eulogists were two of Brent’s six sons. The story was told by Brent Bozell III, well known as president of the Media Research Center and as a syndicated columnist.