Cruising Speed

by Cruising Speed- A Documentary (epub)

  “A very long time ago, you may recall, [a Harvard colleague] and I wrote a footnote in which we made some silly psychological point about people on the right, and referred to you. Some time later, Frank Meyer brought me around to meet you at the offices of National Review, and I was truly embarrassed. I gave up psychological explanations then and have never used them since. Even in talking of students and the New Left, tempting as it is, I now argue only with their ideas.

  “This is really only a letter to tell you that an old liberal appreciates almost everything you write, and finds it expresses generally the best sense to be found in the Boston Globe (which, like so much else these days, seems to be half in the hands of the New Left). But I am suddenly reminded I have just published a book on my writings on students in recent years, recording my movement from a somewhat liberal to a somewhat conservative position, and since you may find it of interest, I am sending you a copy under separate cover.” I thank him, inadequately.

  The Young Americans for Freedom want to meet with me—either before or after the speech—next week, when I lecture at the University of Pennsylvania. “Should budgetary reasons necessitate it, please do not hesitate to call collect. Thank you.” ... A newspaper reporter who covered my own campaign in 1965 writes warmly, “I am looking forward to a party Jim is hosting tomorrow for the reporters who covered him during the campaign. It is typically thoughtful of him. I thought he got great press coverage, even from those who were hostile to his candidacy. I remember one Tim.es reporter telling me one day, early in the campaign: ‘I think it would be a disaster for America if this guy won . . . but he’s one of the greatest guys I ever met.’ I watched that reporter’s stories carefully, and not once did he slam Jim. I expect Jim will continue to get a good press, because of his intelligence, honesty, and superior character. By the way, having interviewed your mother, I now know how you Buckleys came by your [good qualities]. Have a nice winter in Switzerland. Enjoy your skiing, and, as Mario Procaccino might say, don’t fall down and break your ass.” . . . And from a very old friend, in the Foreign Service: “I was in the U.S. on a special assignment and managed to hang on up there until after [Jim’s] victory celebration in which I was accompanied by an amazing number of colleagues. The joint is a hotbed of conservative subversion. The hard noses will get harder as we find political support. By the way, on my last assignment I was able, indirectly, to take the measure of RN’s guts. He has got them. Thanks again for dinner and why don’t you come down on a lecture tour to this lost continent. Chile is dead as I noted over dinner at your home some months ago. Several other countries down here are comatose. There is really no hope for South America and some benevolent neglect, spiked with a bilateral agreement with the USSR that there will be no missiles emplaced in South America, would seem to be a prudent policy.” I write him that I plan to go to Latin America in January ... A memorandum from Jim to his brothers and sisters addressed, as is his custom, and for the sake of economy, simply: “Siblings—I fear that recent events may result in periodic telephone calls to one and all by various members of the press, magazine writers, etc. Insofar as any such inquiries might have anything to do with me (or be attributed to me), I would like to suggest the following procedure. You may act on the assumption that no article or program has been authorized unless the fact is confirmed to you in advance by me or my press secretary, Mr. Leonard Saffir ... I can only speak, of course, about stories which involve me or were triggered by my election. As a matter of policy, we would like to cool it at this time. Somehow or other, Life slipped through our defenses [a cover story on the family] but we hope others will not. In any event, you now have the excuse of having to refer to Len Saffir.” ... A friend sends me the masthead, clipped out of New York’s premier pornographic weekly, screw. “I don’t know what can be done about this,” he says in a covering card, “but wanted you to know.” “This” turns out to be the listing of screw’s publisher, as “Senator-elect Jim Buckley,” which is apparently screw’s favorite joke, it being the coincidence that the publisher is indeed someone called Jim Buckley . . . Mrs. John Dos Passos, whom I saw six weeks ago at her husband’s funeral, writes on an early Christmas card, “Many thanks for your kindness and eloquence,” the reference being, I imagine, to the obituary I wrote . . . The editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin desires me to meet the press before I speak at U of Penn, and to join him for dinner later with a few friends and his wife, a warm and amusing woman of apodictic opinions as regards the Use and Pronunciation of the English language. We will find that night to quarrel about the correct pronunciation of paradigm, which she says is pronounced paradim, and I say paradime, and it turns out we are both right, ho hum . . . From Minneapolis, a young man recently graduated from the University, who had been present in the audience when I addressed the freshman class four years ago, and heard my speech a fortnight ago. I had sent him my book on American conservative thought, Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? He thanks me for it. “About that speech, by the way, as usual, it took me 10 minutes to get on your wavelength. Unfortunately, from some comments I heard after the speech, it was obvious that quite a few people never even made the attempt, and yet these were the same who, predictably, were most vociferous in their criticisms. I myself was fascinated by the case you wove, particularly your use of the Founding Fathers’ thoughts. To a person who listened carefully, and tried to grasp the distinctions you made (some of them minutely subtle), it was a most rewarding evening. Although perhaps to some it appeared obvious, I was impressed by your analysis of the frustrations which much of Middle America feels, i.e., answering, or attempting to answer, the radicals’ generalizations with data and other specifics.” The letter would prove particularly heartening the next morning, when I turned to a review of the same speech delivered at Yale. But it is time to dress, and go out for dinner.

  We arrive at La Seine more or less expecting that we will be dining alone with Truman Capote, but two other guests are there as we approach the table, a man and a girl, both of them tall and handsome. I recognize him, an anxiety crystallizing, as I recall our other encounter, a year ago. He and Pat had disagreed over Agnew, and Pat managed to scale her most objectionable heights, whence she takes to addressing her adversaries, “My good man,” which is not the most endearing means of approaching Joe Fox, author and editor (of Truman Capote, among others)—causing, indeed, a certain tension. Well, here we are, and everybody kisses, or shakes hands with, everybody, and I do not catch, as so often happens, the name of the girl, who is young, slender, beautiful, and we sit down and order drinks. I find her a little formal; shy-type, I reason; but things move, as they tend to do with Truman, who is maybe a little bit officiously hospitable, acknowledging with his keen social intelligence that there is if not a melange de genres—which he knows better than to contrive, unless he is feeling wicked, and this is not the night for that sort of thing—at least some impacted static there, which he intends to dissipate, and succeeds in doing so, little by little. However Truman is not altogether himself, declining, for instance—though several times urged to do so—to dilate, as under normal circumstances he would do with vivacity and passion, on his recent highly publicized ordeal. Because he had followed—or because, I forget, he hadn’t followed—his lawyer’s instructions, he suddenly found himself on California’s Most Wanted List for contempt of court. He had not appeared in court to give testimony on what it was that he knew, or didn’t know, about a condemned prisoner whom he had interviewed in the course of producing a television special on capital punishment. Anyway, he has just come from spending ten or twelve hours in jail—a nasty resolution of judicial rectitude and executive agony, because the Reagans and Truman had become very good friends in the course of Truman’s explorations into capital punishment. But it would have been unseemly for law-and-order Reagan to commute a celebrity-friend’s five-day sentence. The strain of the experience is palpable, and although from time to time Truman rises buoyantly to describe this or that aspect of his tribulati
on, he doesn’t want to recount what Joe especially wants him to tell us, and I sense that it pains him; so we let it go.

  Along the way, the ladies go out to the powder room, and Truman tells me that the girl, who is called Lally, is the daughter of the late Philip Graham and of Mrs. Graham, now the publisher of the Washington Post, etc. —and that she was a bit hesitant about sharing an evening with me because she harbored a resentment over what I had published when her father died.

  That column. Time Mag, when it did the cover on me, mentioned it. “In one breathtaking column, he managed to equate Henry Ford’s divorce with the suicides of publisher Philip Graham and Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler’s keeper. All were men, wrote Buckley, ‘wanting in the stuff of spiritual survival.’ Ford yanked its [projected] advertising from [National Review].” I tried to think back on what it was I had said, on whether I should be edgy about having said it; and I summon it up (while the ladies are out, in the fashion of John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman). I remember writing it. It was mid-morning, drizzling, foggy, we were on my yawl, having left our anchorage at Campobello, just after dawn, in order to slide under the bridge at low tide, heading towards St. Andrews. I had to write a column and phone it in, so I turned on the radio to hear the morning’s news ...

  A single radio broadcast (I wrote) brings the news of two suicides and a divorce, and reminds us that, when all is said and done, it is the individual around whom the world spins. That all our talk of empires rising and falling, of worlds torn in two, of glacial currents and galactic swoops, can seem trivial when contrasted with the fall of a titan. The radio broadcaster relegated to the end the humdrum news of atom bombs, civil rights convulsions, earthquakes in Yugoslavia, tremors in the chancelleries. His mind and the listeners’ were on the divorce of Henry Ford, the suicide of Stephen Ward, and the disintegration and death of Philip Graham.

  Allthree were men of affairs in every sense of the word. All three men of rank. All three titans in their own worlds. Ford, the scion of a great fortune, perhaps the single most conspicuous figure in modern American industry. His forthcoming divorce, particularly under the circumstances of his voluntary and explicit commitment to a religion which holds that the marriage bond is unbreakable, involves a submission to an emotional impulse which proved overwhelming notwithstanding that the eyes of the world, which sustain many famous men in time of personal tribulation, were on him. Because, as the head of his fabulous empire, Ford was, like Rockefeller, not merely a scion of wealth and power, but a scion of manners, and manners in the deepest sense reflect the stability of civilization.

  Stephen Ward, a successful physician, a talented artist, a gay and vivacious courtier, was dragged down to humiliation and despair and death by the whiplash of convention; and convention, let it be said in its favor, is in the profoundest sense the underpinning of civilization.

  And poor Philip Graham, the most influential publisher in the most influential city in the world, lusting after the goods of mankind according to a defective vision which conceived of macrocosmic happiness following upon the rise of Big and Benevolent Government, couldn’t, in the end, find his own happiness within his own circumstances, and suffered a nervous breakdown, departing despairingly from the world he had so fastidiously mothered by living and breathing the welfare state and international big-think. For himself, his own resources were overpowered; and it is on one’s own resources, and God’s, that each individual must finally depend, or else he and his civilization will disintegrate.

  In two cases there was a woman. In the third, there was Woman. Over and over again there is the re-enactment of Genesis, and the re-enactment of the causes of the downfall of so many of the illustrious gods of Greek and Roman mythology, for whom woman is merely the symbol, not so much of man’s weakness before the cunning and wiles of the seductress, but of man profoundly and primarily in love with himself. Andre Malraux wrote a great novel about a man of affairs, brilliant, worldly, apparently omnipotent, who sought women because through them he found the ultimate means of making love to himself: when he embraced women he was actually embracing himself. The Protestant theologian Dean Fitch reminds us in his stunning book Odyssey of the Self-Centered Self that civilization has moved through several stages, and that we have recently entered upon the most acutely degenerate of them: The Age of Love of Self. For a period we loved God; then we loved rationalism; then we loved humanity; then science; now we love ourselves, and in that concupiscent love all else has ceased to exist. We are become what the philosophers called solipsists—men who recognize reality only in themselves. And when this happens, our own private little worlds, sustained only by our self-love, are easily shattered, and as they shatter we advance the destruction of our entire civilization, and race towards the Apocalypse ever so much faster than thermonuclear bombs will take us there.

  The Greek dramatists knew that at the center of the weakness of the world is the weakness of the individual. How much we have forgotten in the 2,500 years from Aeschylus to Arthur Miller. The great heresies of recent times revolved around the repudiation of a plain truth. Marx instructed us that the fault lies not in ourselves but in history, that we are underlings, buffeted about by great elemental social forces which we do not dominate. Freud taught us that we should not blame ourselves for our failings, that other factors over most of which we had no control, traumatized and weakened us and made us impotent as superintendents of our own fate. The development of the philosophy of total welfarism is the political translation of the abandonment of the central idea of Christian civilization: that we are each one of us, however, crippled by burdens material and psychological, capable by the grace of God of working out satisfactory lives.

  There was no misery or neglect in the development of the lives of Ford, Ward, and Graham; but they turned out to be the most miserable of men, men most seriously wanting in the stuff of spiritual survival; and because of their considerable names, they delivered considerable blows to the tattered wall of truth that stands between civilization and total relapse ...

  So. I think again of Wilfrid Sheed’s comment “Well, that is an ice-breaker”; and I fantasize myself rising from my chair, when the girls come back, and solemnly recanting my column in atonement; and I recognize the singular cruelty to which such as Lally are subject, and wonder whether, under reversed circumstances, I would have difficulty in fraternizing with someone who had written thus about my father; and conclude that I would not:

  I realize about myself that I am, for all my passions, implacably, I think almost unfailingly fair: objective, just. This is not vanity, it is rigorous introspection. I could not conceive, for instance, of disparaging another man’s talents simply because I disapprove the ends to which they are harnessed. Nor has this ever caused me any strain at all; indeed if it had done so, I’d be able to take such satisfaction as is due only to those who have to struggle in order to be fair. The ideologization of objectivity was brilliantly mocked by Randall Jarrell in his novel. “If [Flo] had been told that Benton College, and [her husband] Jerrold, and [her son] John, and [her daughter] Fern, and their furniture had been burned to ashes by the head of the American Federation of Labor, who had then sown salt over the ashes, she would have sobbed and said, at last—she could do no other—‘I think that we ought to hear his side of the case before we make up our minds.’ ” That is the kind of objectivity that Kingman Brewster and the Yale students showed last spring, when they appeared to be taking the position that no murder should be investigated if there is the possibility that it was committed by a Black Panther. Not the same thing I am talking about.

  And now, complacently, I cannot imagine that, reading them today, Lally, the daughter of a journalist and publisher, would find those heavy paragraphs polemically, or ideologically, horny. Still, I know that what is personally framed is more often than not personally received. A process that one once would have dared to call the feminization of criticism.

  The coffee is waiting, and we drink it quickly, b
ecause Truman desires that we all should go to a place called The Sanctuary, way over on the West Side—a converted church, now a modish, super-hopped-up discotheque, psychedelic lights, blaring music, the dance floor crowded with homosexuals and lesbians and heteros, in ratio about 25-25-50, who dance with detached expression: I conjure up a vision of the Archduke Otto and his Duchess, unsmiling, frugging there, calmly, serenely, doing as the Romans do—Imperial Breeding. For all the clamor, the participants are marvelously restrained; no one accosts Truman for an autograph, or begs him to read a manuscript. We are very nearly alone in ordering our whiskeys-and-sodas: everyone else seems to be drinking Cokes, or nothing at all. I suppose that they are also smoking pot, though I am not good at detecting the smell of it. Conversation is impossible, but Truman sits there, or dances with Pat or Lally, and he seems relaxed. I find the rock working through to me, not so much overcoming the resistance that is the conservative’s presumptive protection against its licentious imperative as overcoming a different order of resistance: the resistance that collapses when one is cut off, almost absolutely, from any alternative to listening to it, or better, experiencing it. You can close your eyes at The Sanctuary and spare yourself conscription by the crazy-lights that focus, distort, slither, bump, propel, reject; but the music—the sound —is sovereign, and you do not talk; you dance or sit; and there is Truman sitting, his glasses occasionally refracting the light, his expression resigned, his face reposed, while the bodies, many of them black and beautiful, writhe, the faces always silent, resisting the inordinate, orgiastic demands of the sound: a total break with the tradition of audiences of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. I think back on the night before, Rosalyn Tureck playing the saraband, the excitement that she caused, the strain with which one listens, concentrates to hear the little, noiseless, appoggiaturas, and the idea comes to me to write this journal of a week’s activity, and I wonder whether, tomorrow morning I will remember; whether anything will come of it if I do; whether anything worth the effort will come of it if I do.