Overdrive

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Today the questions were pretty much as expected, with, as noted, special emphasis on the huge looming deficit. One tries to make clear that in economics all matters are not necessarily weighed on the same scale. That is to say, although one dislikes large deficits, one doesn't therefore necessarily reason to the desirability of higher taxes. Better, I said, a rise in productivity and a relative decline in the public sector, though the symbol of the high deficit would hang heavy on Mr. Reagan's neck.

  Mr. Eckerd asked that I be permitted to leave without social interruption, as I had to drive to Tampa in time to catch the flight to New York; which I did, uneventfully.

  Tonight Pat and I (and others) are guests of Joe and Estee Lauder at a benefit for the New York City Ballet at the New York State Theater.

  My feelings about ballet have been ambivalent over the years. On the one hand I find dance beautiful as vision, discipline, and exercise. On the other hand, my mind doesn't readily integrate the dance and the music, so that I find I am primarily viewing the dance—or listening to the music —when of course the idea is to do both. I have the same land of problem with popular music, having for inexplicable reasons no idea at all what are the lyrics being sung, until someone, someday—maybe—sticks them in written form in front of me, without music to distract me. This is why I experience less than the satisfaction I should from the dance, though I am swept up by the beauty of what I see (Balanchine's Apollo, Robbins' Piano Pieces, Peter Martins' Symphony No. 1), and awed by the natural and developed talents required to make it all possible.

  Arlene Croce, who reviews ballet for The New Yorker, worked for National Review for a number of years, and we experienced with this awesomely sensitive human being a clerical difficulty, the kind of thing National Review seldom encounters, in part because we are permissive, in part because in response to that permissiveness the staff is extra conscientious. But Arlene's problem was late rising; and this was substantially owing to a hunger for the ballet which was fanatical in its hold on her. No religious order ever held more tenacious sway over a postulant than the ballet did over Arlene who, pressed on the subject, once revealed that that particular year she had attended 260 ballets. The excitement of seeing it, I assumed at the time, kept her up into the morning, which made it difficult for her to get to work at noon, let alone at nine in the morning. That kind of hunger for the ballet I confess not to share; and indeed, a ballet in prospect, I find myself fugitively thinking about the exclusively musical event I might have gone to instead; so it is.

  As we sit down, I feel the end of a newspaper tickling my ear, look back and it is Arthur Gelb, deputy managing editor of the New York Times. I greet him warmly (we are old friends) and he hands me the Travel section of next Sunday's edition of the New York Times, which features our trip on the Orient Express. I thank Arthur, wave at his author-wife Barbara, and take a peek, showing it to Pat. I am dismayed that the picture on the cover page, of Pat and me dining in the railroad car, dressed in black tie, excludes Jack and Drue Heinz, our traveling companions, because I had told them that was the picture the Times was planning to use; and now I see they have been cropped.

  Arthur had called me a month or so ago to say that the Travel section of the Times was being re-geared, and would I do a sailing piece for the first issue? I told him that The New Yorker, at just about that same time, would be publishing a 25,000-word piece by me on sailing across the Atlantic and I doubted The New Yorker would be pleased if another piece on sailing appeared simultaneously; but that I had promised to ride on the Orient Express with the Heinzes, two weeks hence, whereupon Arthur (who is very decisive) said fine, four issues after the grand opening the Times would still be promoting its revised Travel section, but please I must write it as soon as possible after taking the trip. I told him we would leave Turkey on Saturday, spend the night in England, and return to New York on Sunday. "You'll have it Monday," I promised.

  The circumstances of that Sunday proved amusing. We had reservations on Pan Am business class, but as I reflected on my promise to Arthur, I thought I had better change that to first class, to permit me to retreat to the top section of the 747 to use my typewriter. Accordingly, at the airport, I asked the woman at the counter if there were two first-class seats available; she punched the computer and said, "No . . . Wait a minute! Yes! Somebody just canceled." While she made out the boarding pass, I was to go to the cashier, pay the differential, then come back to pick up the tickets. So I went to the cashier, who made the calculations and presented me with a bill for eight hundred and eighty odd dollars. I stared at her and said that surely she had made a mistake? She looked down and said no, first class is S440 more than business class. So I said, Thanks very much, but never mind. I put the original tickets back in the envelope, and walked back to the ticket counter.

  I try to make it a point not to say or even think anything unpleasant about Pan Am that insinuates extortion on its part, since poor Pan Am has lately been losing an awful lot of money; on the other hand, it isn't my personal responsibility to redress their budget balance. So I returned to the patient lady and said, "I'm terribly sorry, I've changed my mind. Can I have my two business-class seats back, please?" Again she pushed the computer. Goodness! she said. They're gone! Business class is sold out. Under the circumstances you'll have to take the first-class seats. "At the same cost as business class, of course." I thought that most awfully sporting of her, and wondered at the providence of getting $880 worth of extra space at no cost. Was this supply-side economics?

  But on arriving in first class and mounting the staircase, I discovered that the whole of an area once reserved for business and social use was now given over to regular first-class seats, for those who didn't particularly want to see the movie. All the seats were taken. So, descending to my own seat, I realized the article would not get written. It simply isn't socially possible to type while everyone around you is trying to see a movie, and I cannot compose in longhand.

  So it was that I arrived at JFK with Arthur's article unwritten. We drove to the country, had some dinner, and then I went to the garage to write the piece. It was after midnight, or 5 a.m. London time, when I came to the final paragraph: "The reconstituted Orient Express may end up in Disney World, chugging its way around Orlando, but I hope not. It is good to travel to the ancient capital of the world aboard a train built two years after Lenin died (and 54 years after one wishes he had died) and one year before Lindbergh flew the ocean, and know that it still works. It is also good to know that traveling through Europe by rail, in circumstances almost stagily comfortable, can still be done—up to a point. At the Bosporus, Asia begins, and many things end, among them the journey." And thank God, I thought, this article.

  I remember describing to Pat a complementary experience aboard another train, the longest journey I ever took. It was the early summer, 1945, pre-Hiroshima. I was a second lieutenant in the Infantry, stationed at Fort Gordon, Georgia, engaged in training recruits, when one of those Army dice-rolls spelled out my name, and I was handed orders to escort 160 enlisted men and noncommissioned officers, who had reenlisted in the regular Army, from Augusta, Georgia, to San Luis Obispo, California. I was nineteen years old and had been commissioned for about two and a half months. I was put in charge of veterans in their twenties and thirties who had seen combat in Europe, had returned home on furlough, and were now, as reenlistees, to be attached to a new outfit preparing for action in the Pacific.

  My commanding officer, given to verbal economy, told me only 1) that I had the authority, as commanding officer, to conduct summary courts-martial if required to maintain discipline; 2) that I would need personally to sign for the eleven-car train, and was therefore technically responsible for anything missing when it arrived in San Luis Obispo, whether a fork or a sleeping car; 3) that the train had a low priority, so that the trip might last as many as six or seven days, depending on how many times it was shunted aside to give precedence to other trains carrying hotter cargo; and 4) that the con
ductor would confide to me the probable length of time the train would remain at a siding or station, but when asked by the troops "How long?" I was always to answer, "Just a few minutes"— because, explained my major, if the troops discovered that the delay would be for an hour or more, they would leave the train, get drunk, and contract a venereal disease. My success in administering this assignment, he told me, would be based substantially on the number of soldiers who, arrived at San Luis Obispo, didn't have to report to the infirmary.

  It was endless. The soldiers rotated their sleeping arrangements. Lower berths were for two men who slept head to toe. The upper berth, one man. There was no air conditioning. The chow lines were boisterous. The clusters of poker players intense, indefatigable—some played around the clock. The beer and the booze seemed almost self-generating, as if a distiller were on board. One grizzled old soldier (probably he was twenty-five) had got uncontrollably rowdy near El Paso, and we had had to lock him into a bathroom where, sitting on the toilet, his hostility, along with the alcohol, gradually metabolized.

  So to speak, the Upstairs and Downstairs of train travel, over against the Orient Express. One hedonistic, the other spartan. It is terribly vexing that it isn't obvious that the one was ultimately more pleasurable in memory than the other.

  From the ballet we went to the home of Mica and Ahmet Ertegun. She is, simply stated, one of the most beautiful and interesting women in the world. Ahmet is many things, most conspicuously a rock music entrepreneur-tycoon. He either owns the Rolling Stones or else they own him, something of the sort; but the relationship is symbiotically profitable, and Ahmet is always going around the world in his Gulfstream jet to attend this or that rock recording enterprise, while Mica either accompanies him, or attends to her interior decorating business in New York. Ahmet has also been a trustee of St. John's College in Annapolis, with which Stringfellow Barr was associated for so many years, and which stresses the importance of the Great Books. Albert Jay Nock, the eccentric and dazzlingly erudite essayist, belletrist, and neoanarchist, incidentally a personal friend of my father's, spoke so highly of St. John's that my brothers and I all very nearly ended up being sent there. In any event, Ahmet talks to me about St. John's. He is still using a cane, having had a hip operation, concerning the post-surgical care of which he has received extensive lessons from Pat, who went through it two years earlier.

  To everyone's dismay (people don't quite like it if operations end by being hedonistic experiences), Ahmet enjoyed every moment of it, declaiming about the fine care the doctors and nurses took of him, the pleasure he took in receiving visits and best wishes from his friends. It was all really quite irregular, so that it came as enormous relief to his wife and friends when, having been brought home for the post-hospital part of his recuperation, Ahmet turned absolutely impossible, expressing his displeasure with everybody and everything, though not I think the Rolling Stones. From this other extreme, he has emerged in recent weeks as a man of dignity and fortitude, but then what else would one expect of a former trustee of St. John's, Annapolis?

  Back home, Pat and I chatted. Then I read, but my eyes soon wandered. For a moment I thought I might, as an exercise, apply Henry George economics to the problem of ballet deficits; but I decided to put it off and, come to think of it, I haven't yet undertaken that exercise.

  Three

  WEDNESDAY

  Wednesday is one of the three days a week in which I write a newspaper column, and of course the day generally begins with that special kind of newspaper reading during which your subconscious, and indeed your conscious, minds are scanning the news in search of a nubile subject to write about—because it is either this or a column about something that has been nagging you. Or, finally, there is the drawerful of articles, clippings, book excerpts that cry out for comment. Gene Shalit, a marvelously amiable and perceptive—personality, I suppose one calls him— with lethal verbal powers, did an interview with me two or three years ago on radio, the subject being my then-current novel, and as he wandered about hill and dale with amiable discursiveness, I gradually lost my guard, so that when he asked me, "How do you decide what you're going to write a column about?" I answered that after you have written a column for many years, you could, if your back were up against the wall, close your eyes, and let your index finger descend on any story on the front page of the New York Times—and proceed to write a column on that subject. "Oh yes," Gene said. "I remember reading that one."

  Fair enough, and a nice way to transform into braggadocio what wasn't meant as such. But one should not expect someone of Shalit's prehensile wit to let such an opening go.

  George Will once told me how deeply he loves to write. "I wake in the morning," he explained to me, "and I ask myself: 'Is this one of the days I have to write a column?' And if the answer is 'Yes,' I rise a happy man." I, on the other hand, wake neither particularly happy nor unhappy, but to the extent that my mood is affected by the question whether I need to write a column that morning, the impact of Monday-Wednesday-Friday is definitely negative. Because I do not like to write, for the simple reason that writing is extremely hard work, and I do not "like" extremely hard work.

  I work for other reasons, about which mostly dull people write, dully. (I have discerned that those who are given to the formulation, "I am one of those people who . . would generally be safest concluding the sentence, ". . . bore other people.") Is it some aspect of a sense of duty that I feel? Moral evangelism? A fear of uselessness? A fear that it is wrong to suppress useful, here defined extramorally as merchandisable, talent? I do resist introspection, though I cannot claim to have "guarded" against it, because even to say that would suppose that the temptation to do so was there, which it isn't. Indeed, these very words are prompted by an imperative handed to me by my friend and editor Sam Vaughan, the least imperious of men: but curiosity is, in such circumstances, his professional business. Why do I do so much? I expect that the promptings issue from a subtle dialectical counterpoint. Of what? Well, the call of recta ratio, and the fear of boredom. What is recta ratio? The appeal of generic Latin terms (habeas corpus, nihil obstat, malum prohibitum) derives in part because the language is indeed dead and therefore unmoved by idiomatic fashion. In part, however, it is owing to the complementary character of its tantalizing inscrutability. It is just faintly defenseless; so that one can, for instance, interpret a Latin term—use it metaphorically, even—without any decisive fear of plebiscitarian denial. We know that the term translates to "right (rightly) reason(ed)," and that the Scholastics used it to suggest the intellectual instrument by which men might reason progressively at least to the existence of God, at most to how, under His aegis, they should govern themselves in all major matters, avoiding the major vices, exercising discipline, seeking virtue. The search for virtue is probably best drowned out by commotion, and this my life is full of. It is easier to stay up late working for hours than to take one tenth the time to inquire into the question whether the work is worth performing.

  And then, as I say, that other, the fear of boredom. Thoreau is known for his compulsion, day by day, to discover more and more things he could be without. But I have enough of everything material, at least measured by ordinary standards. But not the reliance to do without distraction; so that I would not cross the street without a magazine or paperback, lest the traffic should immobilize me for more than ten seconds. The unexamined life may not be worth living, in which case I will concede that mine is not worth living. But excepting my own life, I do seek to examine, and certainly I dilate upon, public questions I deem insufficiently examined.

  I was saying that I do not enjoy writing. I envy those who do. John Chamberlain once told me that if he has not written during the day he will not sleep, and it is only when he wonders why he cannot fall asleep that he remembers that he has not written during that day; and so he rises, and writes. John Chamberlain is as incapable of affectation as Muhammad Ali of self-effacement. It is simply the case that some people like to sit down hou
r after hour and write, and with some of them the disease is so aggravated that it doesn't particularly matter whether what they write will be published.

  I elected to devote today's column to the fascination politicians are showing over the lapse of David Stockman in confiding to his friend Mr. Greider of the Washington Post-Atlantic Monthly his misgivings about Mr. Reagan's economic program. I set out to make the point that those who ask Stockman to resign because his offense is hypocrisy have not considered the genocide that would result from an impartial application of this rule. (How many congressmen who express opposition to inflationary spending vote against inflationary spending?) A second observation is that Stockman, during 1981, found political obstacles to the execution of practically everything he sought, and that, after all, he never did attempt to call for a decisive reduction in the marginal rate of taxation—say, to twenty-five percent. Reduced to that level, in the estimate of Milton Friedman (as stated in a most measured article in Newsweek), you would organically affect the deployment of dollars away from tax shelters, thereby adding to the taxable base more than enough revenue to make up the relatively light (thirteen percent) loss in general revenues. (Friedman argues that reducing the top marginal rate of taxation to twenty-five percent would increase tax revenues.)

  I have read the newspapers and breakfasted in the beautiful, cloistered, red-red library Pat has so ingeniously decorated and then, in my dressing gown, I climb up the stairs to my little study, which incidentally looks out, between 8 and 8:30, on the handsomest, gayest, most cheerful parade of children aged six to twelve, the youngest of them accompanied by nurses or governesses, all of them carrying sackfuls of books, bouncing off to the multifarious schools concentrated in the area. I dial my private office number (the switchboard is not yet open) and Frances Bronson, who is as usual there early (she attends early to most of her problems, and all of mine) gives me late messages from yesterday and asks where I wish to meet my sister Priscilla (the managing editor of National Review) and Joe Sobran (one of the senior editors) for lunch before the scheduled performance of Nicholas Nickleby. I suggest Paone's (my favorite restaurant, which is also near the office), whence we'll drive to the theater, meeting Pat there (she has another lunch date). Doria Reagan is arriving independently, and Ron not until dinner, as he could not escape a rehearsal suddenly scheduled for that afternoon by his ballet troupe, Joffrey II. I inform Frances that as soon as I write my column I'll telephone it in to Susan at the office (who will record and transcribe it, after which Frances will copy-edit it). In due course this is done. And I turn, again, to my correspondence.