A Torch Kept Lit

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Young Brent spoke of receiving a letter while at college from “Pop,” as he was known to his children, saying lightheartedly that he hoped never to be a burden to them. “Shortly after that letter arrived, Pop’s behavior became erratic, nonsensical, and when finally he was hospitalized came the shattering diagnosis: manic depression.

  “Dozens of times over the next 25 years the attacks would come, and with each bout, yet another blow, yet another public humiliation. He would lose Montejurra, the home in the foothills of the Shenandoah mountains which he loved so much. He could only watch helplessly as Triumph magazine, to whose survival he had given every ounce of energy, collapsed. There were the seemingly endless searches around the country just to locate him; in fact, around the world, as he brought on one crisis after another. There were arrests and forced hospitalizations, escapes and rearrests and recommitments. There was the never-ending parade of lawyers, police, doctors, and, yes, from time to time the State Department was on the line to brief us on yet another prospective international upheaval caused by this very unpredictable man.”

  —

  The mourners in the packed church listened attentively. Some hadn’t known how ill Brent was. “Manic depression by itself is enough to break the spirit of any man, but Pop was no ordinary man. He suffered from peripheral neuropathy, sleep apnea, osteoporosis, degenerative disk disease, asthma, and Alzheimer’s. One by one they came, and when it seemed that no part of his body had been left untouched yet a new illness was diagnosed. We wondered how he could endure so much, accept this torture with such nobility, with never one word of complaint.”

  The eulogist, searching for an explanation, came up with a passage from his father’s book Mustard Seeds. “There is no greater paradox in the cosmos,” the deceased had written, “than the apparent contradiction of our helplessness (‘without me, you can do nothing’) alongside God’s ‘helplessness.’ Oh, I know, God is all-powerful, and so on; but he cannot undo what he has done, and what he once did was to make men free. This means that he ‘needs’ us in order to get us to Heaven as his lovers, and in order to do his will in the world. All we have to do in order to frustrate those wishes—to render God ‘helpless’—is to say No. But God is not helpless, really, because he has mercy—himself. And what mercy does is convert, change our hearts. Which God never stops trying to do until we are dead. This means continued suffering for him, which is what Christ is all about.”

  Young Brent headed home with his eulogy. “Love, mercy, suffering. Those became the three pillars in a remarkable spiritual journey that would transform Pop from a good man to a truly holy man in his final days. It is said that a saint never aspires to that status except by abandoning himself completely to Christ and his suffering; if so, then Pop was saintly. Ask his friends, his brother and sister, his nephews and nieces, his extended family, so many of them here today, how that man could pierce the soul with such beauty, such warmth, such dignity, such friendship. Ask his ten children, who undertook that ‘burden’ he prophesied, a small price to pay to savor one more hour his wisdom and disarming wit. Ask his queen, his Juliet. No two ever loved more fiercely. Mom, your heart is heavy now, but let it also be joyful. He is where he is meant to be, and that is good. And just as you whispered in his ear, in those final days, that he would never be alone, he now whispers back in yours that he’s still with you, will always be with you.”

  “Little Brent,” as the eulogist is referred to by the senior members of the family, was in the room with his father when he died. Indeed all ten children were there. Little Brent closed by saying that his father was now “finally to be placed at the feet of his Creator, who will beckon him forward with his Song of Songs,

  Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one, and come!

  For see, the winter is past,

  the rains are over and gone.

  The flowers appear on the earth,

  the time of pruning the vines has come,

  and the song of the dove is heard in our land….

  Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one, and come!”

  —WFB

  On the evening of November 28, 1966, Pat and Bill Buckley were among the elite New Yorkers who bounded up the steps of the Plaza Hotel to attend the masked Black and White Ball thrown, with unprecedented fanfare, by Truman Capote. Tuxedo-clad, hands in pockets, WFB sported an outsized robber’s mask; Pat dazzled, as ever, in a Catwoman-like getup. Heralded as the party of the century, the Black and White Ball brought together Frank Sinatra and Andy Warhol, Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Candice Bergen, McGeorge Bundy and Norman Mailer, and cemented Capote’s status as a central figure of artistic and intellectual life in the mid-1960s. He had just published In Cold Blood, his “nonfiction novel,” previously serialized in The New Yorker, about the gruesome 1959 slayings of a Kansas family. A best-seller made into a movie, In Cold Blood helped usher in the “New Journalism,” in which writers such as Capote and Mailer, Jimmy Breslin, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Hunter Thompson, and Tom Wolfe dazzlingly applied the techniques of fiction to nonfiction subjects. To many, WFB’s books—particularly the more personal works, such as The Unmaking of a Mayor (1966), Cruising Speed (1971), United Nations Journal (1974), and the sailing volumes—made Buckley one of the most prolific and commercially successful New Journalists. That literary affinity and the mutual habitat of Manhattan’s Upper East Side accounted for the unlikely friendship between Capote and the Buckleys—until 1976, when the latter performed, in the pages of Esquire, the spectacular act of social hara-kiri WFB records below. Unusually, WFB wrote two eulogies for Capote: the first, for the syndicated column, the second, published in National Review, shorter—and more unforgiving. “What are the politics of Truman Capote?” Buckley had asked in Esquire in 1967. “In the liberal-conservative sense, there were no discernible politics, except insofar as the social Zeitgeist says that liberals are more beautiful than conservatives.”

  “Truman Capote, RIP”

  Syndicated column, September 1–2, 1984.

  The only time I was ever at a movie set was in 1976 when I went to the designated studio to pick up David Niven for lunch. But the scene being shot was not yet finished, and so I found myself waiting, at the camera end of the dining room set in which Lionel Twain was so foully murdered in Neil Simon’s Murder by Death. Three times, before the shot was over, Truman Capote, playing Twain, came into the room, leaned forward over the table, stumbled, was caught by a dozen hands in one of which was a bare bodkin plunged into Truman Capote’s back. Question: In whose hands was the dagger that killed him?

  At lunch David Niven commented that at that particular moment, everyone was suspect. Everyone seemed to have a motive to kill poor Truman Capote: “It’s like Murder on the Orient Express.” The background was Esquire magazine’s publication, a month or two before, of “Unspoiled Monsters,” the first part of Capote’s “novel,” Answered Prayers. That work finished Truman Capote’s social life as decisively as a hangman’s trapdoor. It collected brilliantly and with relish related every ugly fact and rumor about New York’s glitterati that Truman Capote, in years of knowing and mixing with them, had assembled.

  He seemed astonished, at first, that old friends hung up the telephone when he called, and that others took trouble to avoid him. And so he took refuge in booze and pills, pills and booze. And then one day, on television, in a high pitch of wrath, he lashed out by name at Lee Radziwill and a few others. Then there was word he was submitting to treatment. And then there was word he was not submitting to treatment. And then there was word that he had died.

  It was a most awful fall from the dizzy heights he had achieved in 1966, when all the world contended to receive an invitation to his famous Black & White Ball at New York’s Plaza Hotel. Some men left for Europe rather than risk the suspicion that they had not been invited. One woman hired a huge public relations firm, first to bring pressure on Capote to invite her, second, in the event that it failed, to elaborate ennobling reasons why she had not been invited.

  Oh,
those were the days for Truman Capote, fresh from the literary victory of In Cold Blood, which incorporated nothing less than the discovery of a new art form, he told the world, basking in self-contentment, some of it earned by his formidable talent, that included an ear wonderfully acute for detail, irony, and speech. His big new novel would secure him in the pantheon of American literature, he confidently predicted. But for many years he had begun to lean progressively on his social life rather than his professional life to sustain him, so that when the former collapsed, his remaining crutch became booze. And there was, really, not time enough, or clearheadedness enough, to resume serious production.

  One day he called and asked to be introduced to Gov. Ronald Reagan, because Capote was doing an hour’s documentary on capital punishment and needed access to the Death House in California. An unlikely, yet enduring, friendship was struck up between the Reagans and Capote. It had its own theatrical life when Capote ran afoul of a contempt citation and was sentenced to several days in jail, from which only a pardon by Governor Reagan could save him: It was all handled with dignity.

  “He’s quite a guy, and very interesting,” Reagan once said. “But you know, when you first meet him, it is kind of a shock.” The reference was to the exaggeratedly effeminate voice. A few weeks before they met, Reagan’s office was scandalized by the discovery of Reagan’s top aide in a homosexual spa off in the mountains. After Capote left the governor’s office, Reagan was seen to lean out of the door and bellow out, “Troll that feller in and out of the hall here a couple of times, let’s see if there are any left.” Capote would probably have put that line into his next book.

  The doctors have not told us what Truman Capote died from, but it was not old age. “Forsooth,” the Rabelaisian character says to his reproachful physician, “I do believe I know more old drunkards than I do old doctors.” But not this time around. And so, once again (in our day, in our country: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Cozzens) the reading world lost a half-dozen breakfasts at Tiffany that sat, ungestated, in the mind of a brilliant and essentially likable man, sat there smothered by booze, the consumption of which proved terminal. The same imbalance that created “Unspoiled Monsters” acquiesced in that fateful, sad exchange.

  “Truman Capote”

  National Review, September 21, 1984.

  In Cold Blood, a nonfiction “novel” about two murderers, was probably Truman Capote’s best book. Here he was able to apply his literary talents to the presentation of material derived from the external world, which excused him from having to imagine it. He did not have a powerful novelistic imagination, and in this, at least, he resembled Norman Mailer, whose In Cold Blood was The Executioner’s Song [1979], Mailer’s best book.

  Capote emerged at 23 with Other Voices, Other Rooms [1948], emerged as a writer and as a personality. The photograph on the dust-jacket, depicting a tiny androgynous dandy, reclining, with a blond doe’s stare, established the identity. His prose style, which some admired and for which he himself claimed a great deal, reinforced that idea. It was offbeat in its focus on odd details, consistently alienated, and “fragrant”—music for chameleons indeed.

  In his later years he had calamitous drug and alcohol problems, not so unusual for writers, and it is useless to try to diagnose his state of mind. Perhaps he had stretched his minor talent as far as it could go; perhaps, in his social life, he was, in Barbara Gordon’s phrase, dancing as fast as he could. He died last week in Los Angeles, at the age of 59.

  Johnny Carson was a comedian and the host of The Tonight Show on NBC for thirty years, starting in 1962. In an age before the Internet and social media, when the three television networks were Americans’ primary sources for entertainment, Carson’s program reigned supreme among talk shows, with Johnny himself emerging over time as a kind of national father figure who helped see Americans through the upheavals and calamities of the 1960s and 1970s. His witty nightly monologues reflected, like the work of no other entertainer of his time, the collective mood of the country. Although Buckley could be critical of Carson for oversimplifying national issues and slighting conservatism, WFB wrote frequently about Carson and appeared on The Tonight Show a half dozen times over a quarter-century span. In 1971, questioned about his often ridiculed patrician accent—Carson himself once did a sketch called “Monday Night Football with William F. Buckley”—Buckley told the Tonight Show audience: “There are certain kinds of accents that strike people as somehow stilted. I don’t think mine is, because it’s the only one I know.” In a 1985 appearance, Carson drew laughs by asking WFB why his arrival on set always made Carson feel like he was back in the principal’s office.

  “Johnny Carson, R.I.P.”

  National Review, February 14, 2005.

  If Johnny Carson could have managed it, no doubt his death would have been a private affair. Who would have been invited to his memorial service? We don’t know. That is the measure of his integrity as a private man. We don’t even know how many of his ex-wives would have been invited, or would have come.

  I was his guest a half-dozen times, and was always handled with great courtesy. He once confided to a critic that I was the only guest he had ever been frightened of. I don’t know what the circumstances of that odd situation were, and the critic didn’t pause to ask, and Johnny didn’t elaborate. As far as I know.

  As I write these words a memory flashes up.

  Scene: The Tonight Show. Guests: David Susskind and me (WFB).

  David Susskind is widely forgotten, but he was a singular presence on television for about 20 years. He staked out the ultimate talk show (he called it Open End) by the simple expedient of making it endless. He would start out at 9 P.M., on Channel 13 in New York (this was before it had become a part of the educational network), with one or more guests, and just talk on & on into the night, sometimes not closing down the program until after midnight.

  I was sometimes his guest, and he developed over several years an uncontainable sense of indignation…that I, and my views as expressed in National Review, should exist. At all. The hostility had come to something of a boil when Johnny Carson convened us for a joint appearance on The Tonight Show.

  Susskind began with a minute-long prewritten, memorized excoriation, and Johnny asked me to reply. I remember that Susskind had misused two words, so I thought to concentrate my reply on his solecisms, rather than on his political views. Carson was hugely amused and beckoned Susskind back into the fray, whereupon Susskind denounced my “noxious” views. I said to Carson that Susskind didn’t know the proper meaning of that word, Susskind shot back indignantly, “What is the proper meaning?” and I said, “I won’t tell you.” Johnny Carson was amused by everything, but I think he was especially amused that night, and on succeeding occasions when I was his guest, he would come into the Green Room before the program began to chat for a moment or two.

  Never about politics, at least not directly. But since I was always there to try to bring attention to a book I had written, he would touch on the subject of the book, being careful not to suggest to me that he had actually read it. It was unprofessional for any guest to suppose that Johnny had actually plowed through the books written by his guests.

  But there was an exception, and it taught me enduringly. The book was about a sailing trip I had taken across the Pacific Ocean. At the end of our eight to ten minute session he turned to the audience and said, “Now you people know there isn’t any way I can read every word of every book I mention. But I want to show you how thoroughly I read this book.” He opened his copy to the cameras and pointed out his own annotations on specimen pages. He told his ten million viewers: Go and buy this wonderful book.

  I was not about to let the viewers get ahead of me and rushed from the studio to a pay telephone, dialing my publisher: He must order a mass printing, in anticipation of the avalanche of demand for the book the following day.

  But Johnny’s audience, unlike Oprah’s, wasn’t tuning in to decide what books to bu
y. They wanted entertainment, and they got it, not from the contents of books being promoted on The Tonight Show, but from conversation by Johnny, and incidentally his guests.

  The last time around he said to me, “I’d like to schedule an entire hour with you.” I dined that night with a friend, who brought along Tonight’s producer. I mentioned the suggestion. He replied, “The last thing Johnny Carson needs is you on his show for an entire hour.”

  He was almost certainly right, but it was a nice thought, and I thought Johnny Carson a nice man, and if it doesn’t interrupt his privacy, I’ll say it in public. —WFB

  To his fellow Americans, Alistair Cooke was best known as the erudite host, from 1971 to 1992, of the award-winning PBS drama series Masterpiece Theatre. In his native Britain—he emigrated to America in 1937 and became a U.S. citizen four years later—Cooke was famous as the host of the weekly BBC Radio series Letter from America, in which the expatriate reported on events and personalities in the former colonies. Letter ran from March 1946 to February 2004—a span of nearly fifty-eight years—making it the longest-running program of its kind in the history of broadcasting. Cooke also authored two dozen books, including the runaway best-seller The Americans (1979). WFB’s friendship with Cooke—what a match!—began when the latter favorably reviewed one of Buckley’s books; fifteen years later, Cooke penned the introduction to On the Firing Line: The Public Life of Our Public Figures (1989), the anthology of Firing Line transcripts. A lifelong liberal, Cooke made only one appearance on the program, in November 1968, but the Manchester native was an avid viewer, reveling in WFB’s assumption all at once of the roles of “district attorney, mocker, lover of the last word, and—it must be admitted—confessor of grievous sins.” Buckley, in his acknowledgments, replied in kind: “There is no figure in television I admire more; and there are few writers who match the eloquence and shrewdness of his written work.” WFB’s eulogy for Cooke was unique: He wrote it in advance and sent it to the rapidly declining subject, then ninety-five; Cooke declined to read it. It is also the only eulogy of WFB’s that carried three sign-offs, and appears below in the semi-epistolary form in which it was published in National Review. Also below is a shorter appreciation WFB had published four years earlier, when Cooke was still alive.