Cruising Speed

by Cruising Speed- A Documentary (epub)

  It is late. We walk out into Truman’s car, Lally and Joe get off first. We pick up the Sunday papers; Truman is chatting, entertaining us, the constant host, and he drops us at 73rd. We say good night and unlock the door, and Pat puts on the leashes and we walk Rowley, and Pepper, and Foo, and then go, silently, to bed.

  Sunday. The idea of a week’s journal has survived a long sleep’s decompression, and in the quiet of a Sunday morning, when the telephone never rings, I give the project a little, a very little, hard attention, because I cannot think as the crow flies for very long, unless I am wrestling with somebody, or something, more viscous than my own runny thoughts. The ground rules. I like the idea of including only the activities of a single week. I remember being asked to do a profile of Murray Kempton for Monocle magazine’s first (and very nearly last) issue. How to do a piece which even attempts to survey Murray Kempton’s work? I hit on the device of writing “A Fortnight with Murray Kempton.” I took eight consecutive columns by Murray, the eight that were published immediately before I embarked on the project. The essay was successful, I thought, because its limitations were at once explicit, and modest. I allowed myself to meander as I thought it useful. I shall apply the same rules, permitting myself to think back, when it seems useful, and even forward, as necessary. But I will attempt to be disciplined (as distinguished from inflexible) in restricting the focus to people, problems, events, experiences, that have occupied me during this single week, which will end tomorrow.

  A few little things. I am, in public situations, disposed to formality. On Firing Line, even if I have tutoyed them for decades, I always refer to my guests as Mr. or Mrs. or Miss So-So (indeed, a projected program with Kate Millett foundered on that psychological reef, because I told the producer that I could not agree to refer to her as “Kate”). I shan’t do so here. “Mrs. Luce” will be Clare, that being how I address her. Then the name-dropping. I shall not affect unfamiliarity with those important people I happen to know, nor familiarity with those I do not happen to know.

  Most difficult of all: how to handle the hyperbolic expressions of faith, or appreciation, or gratitude that are addressed to every public figure (and indeed to most private persons). Oh, yes, I am a public figure, there is no point in quibbling about that one. For one thing it is res adjudicata: the courts have so ruled. That is an amusing burden they imposed upon themselves quite recently, in New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court decision (1964) that says that if you are a public official you may not sue anybody for libel or slander unless you are prepared to establish that that person moved against you with “actual malice,” which is defined as the saying about you of something which is in sharp contradiction of the known fact. A few years ago Linus Pauling sued National Review for calling him a fellow traveler. Our lawyers persuaded the judge that the reasoning of the Supreme Court in New York Times applied equally to public figures; and the higher courts sustained us. And, subsequently, hoist by my own petard, I have seen libelers try to excuse their scurrilities (what a wonderful word!) against me by pleading that I am a public figure, which the courts have acknowledged, leaving open the question (I have a case in mind) whether what was said about me was said with actual malice. Anyway, it would be a mistake at any level to suppress the hyperboles that cross my desk. That is the way they come in, in the mail, and, in such matters, a journal should be documentary, even as in the handling of the animadversions that come one’s way.

  Another thing. I determine, again for the documentary effect, to reproduce, rather than paraphrase, whole paragraphs as they crop up in letters to me, or in letters by me to my correspondents; or, in one or two cases, entire columns as I wrote them during this week or, in exceptional circumstances, as they crowd into the journal’s narrative—rather than do the editorially more satisfactory paraphrase. Shall I always put them in quotation marks? Let the editor decide.

  Again, is there anything at all to be done to leaven the self-centeredness of the enterprise? I fear not. It is launched, after all, as a most colossal effrontery: a public journal devoted to one’s own thoughts and deeds over a single week. It must end as such, rather than attempt to squiggle into a demure extroversion.

  And finally, is it possible in these circumstances to husband a little privacy? Yes—a precious little. My oblations to the muse I court are measured. I will make no effort to reveal everything about myself and my habits that might be of conceivable interest to the artist, to the prurient, or to the pathologist. And I shall not undertake to so much as mention, as I would feel required to do in writing an autobiography, such persons or events as have had made major emotional or intellectual impressions upon me. My father and my mother probably will not figure here, and my son is away. And so on. I shall try to execute the project during my Christmas vacation, in the Dominican Republic. I shan’t succeed, of course, but I’ll try.

  So much for that. An hour or two, now, at my desk. The mail . . . An unpleasant clip from the Yale Daily News. After reading it I know that there isn’t any point in trying to go on with my work, not until after I have composed an answer to it. That is Self-Knowledge. I know, also, that once I have answered it, I will feel as carefree as on leaving the confessional box, and though the memory will continue to be unpleasant, it will no longer nag me.

  The story is headlined braying the buckley blues, the by-line is Hank Levine, who is introduced in boldface type at the top of his story:

  (Mr. Levine, a columnist for the News, is also chairman of the party of the Left of the Political Union. As such, he was seated next to Mr. Buckley during dinner at the latter’s appearance before the PU [Political Union] last Monday.)

  [And the story:] Beyond any reasonable doubt, there can be no experience more shattering to the nerves of a self-proclaimed young radic-lib than a confrontation with William F. Buckley, Jr. And when the duel occurs at Mory’s—closest thing to a Home Field that the editor of National Review could hope for at Yale—you early get the sinking feeling that any extended verbal battle with Bill is at best an orderly retreat in the face of overwhelming wit, and at worst a rout at the hands of the grand master of the devastating comeback.

  I just went through the experience, and come away happy to report to fellow leftists that Buckley is not all he’s cracked up to be. It is painful to lose an idol (we all worship the form, if not the content), and it is equally painful to gain a pompous bore, of which genre we have already a large surplus (especially on the News, Mr. Buckley would no doubt maintain).

  I submit the following for Buckley admirers and critics everywhere.

  • Mr. Buckley is charming. This is true—he has an easy grin, and though his manners leave much to be desired—he drank his soup straight from the bowl, without benefit of a spoon, and his elbows rarely left the table—he is altogether likable.

  • Buckley’s major form of comeback is a kind of silent leer-wince; both eyes shut tightly as thin lips twist into a semblance of a grin. Professor Rollin Osterweis, the archetype Old Blue, at one point early in the evening observed that all should shine in the dazzling glow of Buckley’s reflected brilliance. The receipt of this paean modestly agreed that there was “plenty for everyone.” At this point, I remarked through a fog of rising nausea that the large stock indicated an excess of supply over demand.

  Wince ... leer... silence.

  Somehow, Buckley’s silences always emerge as dramatic pauses—his oppositions’ as pregnant gaps.

  • Left to himself, Buckley could, in the immortal words of J. Breslin, “yell fire in a theater and put everyone to sleep.” With a target to rebut, the man comes alive—if only long enough to leer and wince. Without one, he resorts to pontification and references to various dead people, all monotonic and delivered to his notes. Buckley spoke to the Political Union from Battell Chapel’s pulpit, with an enthusiasm that would make Alfred Hitchcock look like a frenetic demon, by comparison.

  • Politicians always evade questions. Buckley claims, with his favorite line “If it were t
rue I’d tell you,” that he is not a politician, but he evades questions anyway. “Mr. Buckley, how did you come to call John Lindsay a loser and talk of Conservative trends in 1969 when he got 42 per cent of the vote, but then call your brother a winner and discuss more Conservative trends when he got 39 per cent in 1970?” Grin . . . leer . . . “That’s not exactly the way I phrased it..

  For all his finely tuned brains, Buckley at times has great difficulty reasoning his way through a paper flag. The speech I was privileged to walk out on was long and dull and deserted by a significant portion of the audience (rude, Buckley will claim ... intelligent, we will answer). It consisted of several propositions each developed at length, but boiled down to a defense of the right of a Democratic state to use “repression” or violent means against those who seek to do it harm.

  Well and good and old as the hills. The chief example of this privilege of the state’s was unfortunate —a defense of the Chicago 7 prosecutions. The defense was buttressed by quotations from the founding fathers, most notably that old monarchist, Alex Hamilton, who would doubtless be in prison for treason were he alive today.

  Now, as most lawyers (including those employed by the Justice Dept.) read the law, you do not have to meet or act to be a conspiracy; you merely have to think disruptive thoughts—preferably the same as others are thinking—and intend to do something about them. Mr. Buckley claims liberals are muddying the Constitutional waters by interpreting certain sections (like the fifth amendment) too broadly, and ignoring others. He would do well to note that nowhere does the Document give Congress authority to regulate thought; that accordingly all thought (except for telepathic messages which cross state lines) is under state jurisdiction, and that therefore a true strict constitutionalist would fast slap down the Conspiracy law as a dangerous breach of law and precedent. I shan’t (big Buckley word—shan’t) even mention (perish the thought, especially if it is illegal) the idea that any Democratic state which seeks to violently restrict its citizens’ thoughts is no longer Democratic and loses the “moral” rights to compel obedience with which it may have been endowed by that adjective.

  Buckley tends to subjugate consistency to ideology. As a member of the advisory board of the U.S. Information Agency, he spent considerable time regaling us with his version of its aims. Uppermost in his mind was a desire that it be more independent from the State Department. State, to Buckley, is mealymouthed and overly conciliatory; he would prefer to see the USIA hit out a little harder at the Reds, not lying but selecting facts to publicize our better side and their worse side with a bit more fervor. Of course, independence is intrinsically good in any case. “Mr. Buckley, would you still favor that kind of policy independence if State were to start taking a ‘hard line?’ ” Wince . . . leer . . . silence. As it was Mr. Buckley’s birthday, we wished him many happy returns ... to whence he came.

  Letters-to-the-editor need to be brief, and no brief letter could possibly handle Levine’s omnibus indictment. The instinctive thing to do is polemically probably the right thing to do. Smash him. (There is no time to treat him as Newman treated Kingsley.) Jules Feiffer, introducing a volume of hate-Johnson cartoons during the last months of LBJ’s Presidency, made what I take now to be an artistic point. The “secret ingredient” of truly successful cartooning, he said, is “hate. Not personal hate, but professional hate: the intensity of conviction that comes to a craftsman’s work when he has made the decision to kill.” Now a lethal cartoon at the expense of LBJ may require the fodder of hatred. The put-down of an undergraduate—notwithstanding that you are here dealing with a dangerous enemy whose brawler’s spirit has triumphed over his technical callowness—cannot be fueled by hatred, however platonic. Even so, the Feiffer Rule is artistically useful. One must have the young man’s head...

  Where is his principal weakness? Not the constitutional or the theoretical arguments which, precisely because they are travesties, are unanswerable in a single paragraph. On the other hand they cannot be totally ignored; some assertion as to the quality of your argument must be there, somehow, lest you leave the impression that you are indifferent save to the personal insults. Point two: You can’t defend yourself against subjective characterization: That man is boring. That man is ugly. That man’s mannerisms are distracting. Hauteur is very, very useful; but careful, careful, it must not incline to pomposity, especially important when dealing with the kids. Citation of Authority can be useful, but you cannot lean on it. “Horowitz thinks I play the piano brilliantly” is dangerous, never mind whether you are gambling on the reader’s forgetting that Helen Traubel once said that Margaret Truman sang brilliantly. It cannot be stated that directly, because the structure can collapse under a formulation so martial, even as they warned us, in the infantry, always to break step when crossing a bridge. “There are those who, after hearing me play, will perhaps side with Horowitz, rather than Levine, on the matter of my qualifications as an interpreter of Chopin” is more like it: leave out Horowitz’s categorical encomium. So . . .

  Dear Sirs: I have just seen the account by Mr. Hank [“Mr. Hank.” I profit from the oxymoron] Levine of my visit to Yale a couple [be carefree] of weeks ago, and am constrained [you are exerting yourself towards benevolence] to comment on one or two of the things he said, and didn’t say [important: This accounts for what you do not now accost].

  1. When Mr. Levine approached me at the reception given by the Political Union, he announced himself as the Chairman of the Party of the Left. I replied that I admired such professions of humility. [Dans l’esprit d’escalier. On the other hand, no more had he said what he wrote he had said; or I what he wrote that I had replied.] He thereupon ventured something sycophantic [true: but I make it sound worse than it was], and I turned away the compliment with characteristic grace [I find it useful, here, to play the monseigneural role Levine assigns me], and resumed my conversation with Professor Rollin Osterweis, who happens to be an old friend. Apparently I greatly offended Mr. Levine, which it was certainly not my intention to do, because I have a very full schedule, and a very long waiting list. [Neat. The notion that to give offense is itself an act of recognition.]

  2. I say apparently I did, because the next thing I read, after a strange distortion of my conversation with Mr. Osterweis (wherein a jollity we exchanged was treated with the solemnity of the Japanese surrender), was the criticism Mr. Levine made of my table manners. They “leave much to be desired.” Indeed, “he drank his soup straight from the bowl, without benefit of a spoon.” I suggest that the Party of the Left has finally found itself a Program: the redistribution of table manners. [The ideologization of his personal criticisms. And the sly imputation of snobbery to the socialists’ program.] Why should some people be allowed to have bad table manners, and not other people? Workers of the world unite to keep at least one elbow on the dining room table! [On this one, Mr. Levine is on the ropes.]

  3. Concerning my address, those who are curious to know whether it could have been quite as jejune as Mr. Levine suggests may want to look at it. It is available in The Great Ideas Today, 1970, published by the editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, who apparently found it interesting [Horowitz is satisfied], which is not to say that it qualifies to interest those whose concerns are with . . . but with that aposiopesis [an artistic coup de grace, I think, for someone who has accused me of making my points by grimaces] I take leave of you,

  With most cordial regards,

  Wm. F. Buckley Jr.

  There now, and not a leer or a wince to sustain it. But a precaution. “Dear Doug [to the editor of the Yale Daily News]: It was pleasant to visit with you. Here is a letter. I’d appreciate it greatly if you would have someone you greatly trust copyread it. Nothing’s worse than a little mistake in a tightly written thing. Newspapers, Hugh Kenner never tires of reminding me, are ‘low definitional media’ and therefore—as he puts it—it is unsafe to arrange your thoughts in such a way that the communication of them depends on the correct placement of a comma.
But we can try, right? Right. Would appreciate your sending me a clip. By the way, Who put the fox in Hank Levine’s bosom? If you like that, you may have it, free gratis, as the title for my letter on the Letters Page.” Another clip concerning the same speech. A New Haven newspaper (speaking of Kenner’s Law) has managed a distortion of quite extraordinary magnitude. “Buckley stressed, ‘Such self-proclaimed revolutionaries as Hoffman, Rubin, Dellinger and Seale do not appear to understand the theoretical, let alone the practical, tactics of the counter-revolutionary.’ ” I said rights. “Claiming that the American Revolution of 1776 is the ‘touchstone’ of the new revolutionaries, Buckley added, ‘It is instructional to remember that the British were entitled to resent it.’ ” I said oppose it. “He said the Hoffmans and Dellingers should be reasoned, laughed, and disdained into ignorance.’ ” I said impotence. A letter to the paper? God no.

  That evening in New Haven had been, I thought, rather listless, beginning with the press conference at the Yale Daily News, in the Board Room where the picture of Britten Hadden hangs. He was chairman the year that Henry Luce was the managing editor. I was chairman in 1950. (A year or two ago, under the impulse of participatory democracy, the kids decided that the old set-up, based on an omnipotent chairman, should no longer be countenanced, so they formed a triumvirate: a business manager, a managing editor, and an editorial page director. Two years after triumvirization, there is dissatisfaction, and talk of reverting to the traditional arrangement.)

  ... I remember when we crowded into that Board Room for elections, in the early spring of 1948. I had asked Jim, who was in Law School, and who had served the News as an editor before the war, whether there was a tradition on the matter of voting for yourself for a particular office: i.e., was it gentlemanly for me to vote for myself (the ballots are secret) for chairman? He advised me—and on such matters Jim’s advice is absolutely final —that he thought it okay under the circumstances, the circumstances being that at Yale the tradition used to be emphatically, indeed disqualifyingly, against any electioneering for any elected position whatsoever: you simply didn’t do it. So, on that feverish afternoon, I had scribbled my own name on the ballot, and ten minutes later Sam Walker, the chairman of the preceding board charged ex officio with administering the election, came in from the antechamber with his assistants, to announce that I had been elected chairman. Pause. And he turned to me and winked: “Unanimously.”