A Torch Kept Lit

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Who did he write to? Everyone who interested him or caught his attention.

  I have just bought a copy of Father Patrick Samway’s (S.J.) biography of Walker Percy. He mentions you on pages 302 and 303. I watched that Firing Line with Walker and Eudora Welty. I started writing to Walker in 1980 and we corresponded till his death in 1990. Once he sent me his privately published little book Bourbon, which is hilarious. What a blow he dealt to the 1960s with Love in the Ruins.

  The Walker Percys of this world (as if they were a breed) don’t maintain correspondence with listless minds or boring writers. It was so with others, some of whom I had introduced Charles to.

  Got a note from Tom Wolfe last week. He said he was doing OK. Also am rereading David Niven’s two autobiographical works and enjoying them. We corresponded from 1972 when I met him with you until his death. He called me on his last trip to SF….

  [Again:] I carried on some correspondence with [Malcolm] Muggeridge in the ’70s and ’80s & I think I have all his books…

  [A week or two later:]…Got a note from Tom Wolfe last week. He said he was doing OK.

  He sometimes circulated answers elicited by his letter-writing, even when one such left him bloody. He was well and truly zonked by the fearful Hugh Kenner’s reply to his complaint about my use of a word:

  I looked in your Right Word book for solipsism first & found it on page 427. In April 1973 Hugh Kenner wrote me about this word. You had written me that if I could find a substitute you would stop using it. Part of Hugh’s letter: “Dear Charles:

  “…But Bill’s point is precisely that there is no substitute for ‘solipsism.’ If what pains you about it is simply the fact that you seldom hear it, then the fault is not in the man who grinds it against your ears, but in the millions of part-time and largely inadvertent solipsists who are so convinced the universe emanates from them that they feel no need of a word to designate such a condition. Fish, on the same principle, know nothing of water, and for aqueous terminology you should not apply to a fish.”

  Hugh Kenner, having gone this far, did not stop, and Charles, though presumably chastened, did not mute the full thunder of the closing lines:

  “If on the other hand your ears are assaulted by its impacted sibilants (as the ears of Tennyson were aggrieved by the word ‘scissors’) then I can only fetch you the cold comfort that for a graceless condition the wisdom inherent in the language has afforded us a graceless word. And if, finally, your grievance is that Bill uses it too often, then I can only tax you with inconsistency, since you report that after one to two years of not hearing it from his lips you were wounded anew by a single occurrence—perhaps, I will grant, on the principle of a man who has been sensitized to penicillin. Such a man’s comfort should be that others need the remedy that inflames him, and that principle I commend to you. Hugh Kenner.”

  Charles loved it. Stylistic grace enlivened him, though his taste was not for the rococo, but for witty plain-spokenness. His own literary opinions were emphatic.

  In the [San Francisco] Chronicle this morning we had the story of the death of William Burroughs. Patricia Holt [the book editor] writes of it on the front page and mentions Allen Ginsberg, his former lover, as well as Richard Brautigan & Kurt Vonnegut. Happily I have only an embroidered recollection of them. I would not trade Jack London’s The Sea Wolf for the whole lot. Will they be remembered? I doubt it…I am so shocked by some of the revelations of Pamela [Harriman] that I can scarcely lay the book down.

  Charles’s health problems were recurrent, but he was fatalistic. He had been an alcoholic, he once told me, but he had quit drinking before I met him and seemed entirely indifferent to the absence of wine. But he persevered with his small cigars, and was amused by medical proscriptions….

  Bill: I noticed some other things the health freaks forbid: STEAK, EGGS, SALT-CURED COUNTRY HAM, SUGAR, TEA, COFFEE, COCA-COLA, BACON—SO watch out for these dangerous items. My cousin Joe Wallen of Johnson City, Tennessee, about every 3 months sends me a good supply of SALT-CURED COUNTRY HAM and several packages of GRITS. When I was growing up at Kyles Ford, Tennessee, my father raised Poland China hogs—they were enormous…in the 600-pound bracket. Hog-killing was a day I dreaded but we had the year round plenty of SALT-CURED COUNTRY HAM.

  Tom Wendel, a historian and friend, recently examined the subterranean library. Charles, he reported, had an ampler store of Mark Twain than anyone else this side of a public library. The Tennessee of the young Charles was Deep South country, where his cultural memories germinated.

  Going through some of my old family papers I was reminded that my mother’s family had slaves, and several of them (after they were freed in 1863) elected to stay on at my grandfather’s farm and were still there when Mama was married in 1900. My paternal grandfather’s family also owned slaves. One was sold in 1850 for $800.00. But I probably have told you this before. [He hadn’t. But now his mind turned, as so often it did, to his endless thankfulness for all that went well.]…Not a day passes that I do not think of all the things you have done for me over the last 27 years. I am grateful.

  Perhaps the Southern culture had something to do with his rooted devotion to his family, to the pleasures of literature, and the benefactions of his friends. I gave him a puppy years ago, a Cavalier King Charles whom he named Tres.

  I sent them [his cousins] a picture of you, me, and Tres taken in January 1983…only three months after you sent me Tres on 8 October 1982. This was the most precious gift of my life. Tres has been gone to Heaven 43 months and 9 days today.

  His sadness over the dog’s death (“the doggie’s death,” I’d have phrased it if talking to Charles) was severe. He had his melancholy moments, and I mentioned them once, in talking with him.

  You quote Chesterton on page 158 [of my book. Nearer, My God] that despair is a sin, and years ago you quoted that to me when I came by the Hilton Hotel at the airport at 7 A.M. to pick you up. I was down…and then you cheered me up…I never thought of despair again.

  There was never a favor done to Charles that was unremembered, uncelebrated. A few weeks ago he dispatched a handwritten note to Frances Bronson in my office. “I still love you, Frances, and will never forget your taking me to Paone’s for lunch in 1971, 26 years ago, and you picked up the check. You are a darling. Regards, Charles.”

  The above are fragments of mail received from him in the past three months. It would be a vigorous semester’s work to go through the bank of letters I have from him. He maintained in so many of them a metrical cadence that rang through with Biblical lyricism. As in the final sentence of one letter a fortnight ago when he spoke of a projected visit sometime in the near future. You must come, he said. “We will sit out on the porch and discuss with light frivolity the meaning of glimpses dimly seen as in twilight.” RIP, Charles Wallen, 1920–1997. —WFB

  In 1955, one of the first articles Alger Hiss published after his release from prison—still denying he had been a Soviet spy, rejecting the perjury conviction that had so exposed him in one of the century’s great political and courtroom dramas—was a spirited defense, in Pocket Book magazine, of Yalta. As a young State Department official, when he was actively spying against America, Hiss had helped organize the February 1945 conference at which the Allies divided up postwar Europe. Buckley, in an unsigned editorial in the very first issue of National Review, was incredulous; why hadn’t the editors of Pocket Book, in their lengthy editor’s note, mentioned anything about the author’s treachery? Wasn’t it pertinent? Buckley also seized on the moment in Pocket Book when Hiss conceded, “Soviet ascendancy in Eastern Europe has been dismaying to many.” “A Freudian slip,” WFB declared, “if ever we saw one!” As for all politically conscious Americans in the twentieth century, the Hiss case, for Buckley, was foundational: How you assessed the clashing testimony of Hiss, the fallen golden boy of New Deal Democrats, and his chief accuser, Whittaker Chambers, the rumpled ex-communist who produced the State Department microfilm that helped convict Hiss�
��not to mention the role of Richard Nixon, the young congressman who doggedly pursued Hiss—immediately placed you on the ideological spectrum, defined you, marked you for life. As the dominant news story of Buckley’s twenties, Hiss–Chambers propelled him into the controversial arts—and he stayed with it for the rest of his career. This included rebutting each new book or appeal from Hiss after he left prison; hiring Chambers at National Review and publishing their correspondence [Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr., 1954–1961 (1969)]; defending the Hiss verdict after Watergate (“To establish that Nixon was guilty of an impropriety,” wrote Buckley, “is not the equivalent of establishing that Hiss was innocent”); and heralding the publication of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (1978), the groundbreaking study by the historian Allen Weinstein, whose access to declassified FBI files enabled him to array, overwhelmingly, the evidence of Hiss’s guilt. The fact that The Nation and other liberal enclaves never admitted the obvious led Buckley to sigh in 1980: “It all approaches neurosis.”

  “Alger Hiss, RIP”

  National Review, December 9, 1996.

  Those of us involved, however indirectly, in the Hiss case waited with some curiosity to see how his death would be handled in the paper of record, the New York Times. The story was written by Janny Scott, and curiosity was justified. The headline on page 1:

  ALGER HISS, DIVISIVE ICON OF COLD WAR, DIES AT 92

  And, on the jump page, border to border,

  ALGER HISS, WHOSE SPY CASE BECAME A SYMBOL OF THE COLD WAR, IS DEAD AT 92

  The reader had to wait until the sixth paragraph to be informed that Hiss “was convicted of perjury.” The ensuing 68 paragraphs were given over to detailing both sides of the question on Alger Hiss. The writer did record the brief appearances on the scene of the Soviet general (Volkogonov) whose nonchalant statement (prompted by a Hiss devotee) to the effect that the KGB files had no evidence that Hiss had served as a Soviet agent had done an overnight facelift on the tatterdemalion Hiss loyalists. The general went on to divulge a few weeks later that he hadn’t examined all the files. And yes, the Times story recorded all the legal appeals Hiss had made and lost; it informed the readers that biographer Allen Weinstein had begun his scholarly book on the case thinking Hiss innocent, but then changed his views as his research progressively undermined, and then collapsed, the Hiss case.

  But the reader is left to conclude, after reading the long article, that in fact what we have here is nothing more than that some say tomato, some say tomahto. Indeed, we were specifically invited to think of it as in the category of the assassination of Kennedy and the murder of O. J. Simpson’s wife and her friend. Some people say Oswald did it, and did it alone. Some people think O. J. did it; some, including the jurors, think he didn’t do it. One wonders how the headlines would have read in 1935. “Alfred Dreyfus, Divisive Icon of Pre-War France, Dies at 76.” “Alfred Dreyfus, Whose Spy Case Became a Symbol of French Confusion, Is Dead at 76.”

  —

  The final paragraphs in the long story read: “Looking back, those who believe that Mr. Hiss was not guilty insisted he would never have accepted their support all those years had he not been telling the truth. In his long insistence, they found final proof. They said he had lived his life like an innocent man.

  “As William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of National Review, who viewed Whittaker Chambers as a moral hero and never doubted Hiss’s guilt, put it recently: ‘It’s probably understandable that he would feel that he had let too many people down.’ ”

  Back then, senior editors of National Review—James Burnham, Frank Meyer, Willi Schlamm, Priscilla Buckley—felt a personal involvement in the Hiss case, first as champions of Whittaker Chambers, later as colleagues. He came to National Review as a senior editor in 1957, arriving regularly in New York on fortnightly Mondays, until illness got the better of him (he died in July 1961). When Hiss was released from prison in 1954, the counteroffensive came in full thunder—legal appeals, books by his own hand, others by his sympathizers. The appeals failed, one after another, and the books were, one after another, overwhelmed. The forthcoming biography of Chambers by Sam Tanenhaus (a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club for April) will quiet anyone who has a remaining doubt.

  Should there be such?

  No, not really. Miss Scott of the New York Times was right to wonder why Mr. Hiss persisted in affirming his innocence. His supporters had the most obvious answer: To affirm one’s innocence is what an innocent person does. My observation to the New York Times was to the effect that there is the other explanation, namely that Alger Hiss didn’t want to let down his old dogged, loyal followers.

  But there is a third explanation for his surviving followers, which is that, in silence, they came first to doubt, then to disbelieve; but pride kept them in the Hiss camp. To have crossed that aisle would have been to acknowledge a weakness of mind or of character. Some years ago, exasperated by yet one more curtain call taken in his magazine by a Hiss trouper, I wrote to the editor (an acquaintance) and told him I would send him or his charity one thousand simoleons if he would submit to a truth test whose findings documented that he truly believed Hiss innocent. He changed the subject.

  Pride could account for the loyalty of the followers. But what, other than reciprocal loyalty, might account for Hiss’s persistence?

  There remains the reasoning of Nikolai Bukharin. In 1957, Chambers wrote me that he had been pondering two quotations. The second “is from Bukharin’s last words [in 1938] to the court which condemned him to death. I do not understand how men, knowing that, in our own lifetime, another man spoke these words at such a moment, can read them and fail to be rent apart by their meanings. Yet these words are scarcely known. I would print them bold and hang them at the front of college classrooms, not to be explained as a text, but to be seen often and quietly reflected on. Bukharin, it must be remembered, is literally innocent [of the crimes imputed to him by Stalin]….It is his uncommitted crime that he pleads guilty to. He said: ‘I shall now speak of myself, of the reasons for my repentance….For when you ask yourself: If you must die, what are you dying for?—an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness. There was nothing to die for if one wanted to die unrepentant. This, in the end, disarmed me completely and led me to bend my knees before the Party and the country….At such moments, Citizen Judges, everything personal, all personal incrustation, all rancor, pride, and a number of other things, fall away, disappear. I am about to finish. I am perhaps speaking for the last time in my life.’

  “Is there not a stillness in the room,” Chambers closed, “where you read this? That is the passing of the wings of tragedy.”

  I have from time to time thought that one measure of Alger Hiss as a man should never be overlooked. It is that he won the devotion of Whittaker Chambers, who knew him as friend and fellow conspirator. By continuing to plead not guilty, Alger Hiss was performing for his faith the same sacrifice Bukharin made by pleading guilty. —WFB

  The first mention of John V. Lindsay in the pages of National Review, in May 1960, described him as “the young engaging, and intelligent congressman from New York”—but it went downhill from there. The unsigned editorial, which exhibited some of WFB’s comic touch, mocked Lindsay’s “bright idea” of establishing a cabinet-level Department of Urban Affairs (an idea adopted, in the form of the Council for Urban Affairs, by the Nixon White House). “Such a department could handle…relations between Chicago and Detroit (they have been very bad lately), and the smog problem over Los Angeles—you know that kind of thing,” the editorial said, heaping scorn on JVL for “cutting right through all the deadwood notions about municipal government [and] state authority…by the Neanderthal Right.” Thus was Lindsay, a liberal Republican with a Yale education and chiseled good looks, branded a heretic in the burgeoning conservative movement. WFB’s campaign for mayor of New York City in 1965, on the Conservative Party ticket, was organize
d explicitly to blunt the forward progress of Lindsay. This derived neither from animus nor from obsession—WFB’s brother, Jim, was a close friend of Lindsay’s twin brother, David, and WFB noted drily that in the years preceding the campaign “I managed to go whole months at a time without thinking of John Lindsay”—but rather from the affront WFB regarded Lindsay as posing, by virtue of his posing as a Republican, to the foundations of American politics. “Lindsay is a Republican largely as a matter of baptismal affirmation,” WFB wrote in The Unmaking of a Mayor (1966). “Lindsay’s voting record, and his general political pronouncements, put him left of the center of the Democratic Party. As such he is an embarrassment to the two-party system.” The record reflects no rapprochement between the two men save the “wan smile” WFB detected on his opponent’s face when, during their televised debate, Buckley quipped that Lindsay could repay the great sense of obligation he was always saying he felt to New York by withdrawing from public life. Lindsay, of course, won, although WFB captured an impressive 13.6 percent of the vote, and vindication raced to Buckley’s door swiftly and often: four years later, when JVL lost the Republican nomination for reelection, returning to office on the Liberal ticket; when JVL ultimately reregistered as a Democrat, only to see his electoral viability evaporate; and by Gotham’s dismal arc. In The Ungovernable City (2001), Vincent J. Cannato reported that during Lindsay’s mayoralty, the city’s murder rate soared by 137 percent; its incidence of rape by 112 percent; assault, 64 percent; robberies, 209 percent; and car thefts, 84 percent; and that the percentage of New Yorkers receiving public assistance rose by an astonishing 16.4 percent per year. The fact that other major cities experienced similar trends provided little solace; even less so Gotham’s slide into fiscal default, which prompted Buckley, in 1977, to reissue The Unmaking of a Mayor, stamping its cover with the words VINDICATION EDITION. WFB’s two-paragraph eulogy is one of his shortest; his struggle to find something good to say remains palpable; his success, commendable.