But Enough About You: Essays

by Christopher Buckley

  My two assets my pen and my voice—and it had to be the esophagus. All along, while burning the candle at both ends, I’d been “straying into the arena of the unwell” and now “a vulgar little tumor” was evident. This alien can’t want anything; if it kills me it dies but it seems very single-minded and set in its purpose. No real irony here, though. Must take absolute care not to be self-pitying or self-centered.

  The alien was burrowing into me even as I wrote the jaunty words about my own prematurely announced death.

  If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

  Ordinary expressions like “expiration date” . . . will I outlive my Amex? My driver’s license? People say—I’m in town on Friday: will you be around? WHAT A QUESTION!

  Fans of the movie Withnail and I will recognize “arena of the unwell” and “vulgar little tumor.” Readers of his 2007 atheist classic, God Is Not Great, will get the frisky “convert” bit; more than a few of the pages in Mortality are devoted—as it were—to a final, defiant and well-reasoned defense of his non-God-fearingness.

  As for the “jaunty words,” those are of course from Chapter 1 of the memoir whose promotional tour was so dramatically interrupted by the tap-tap-tap of the Reaper. Self-pity? Those of his friends (I was one) who witnessed his pluck and steel throughout his ghastly ordeal will attest that he never succumbed to any of that.

  “To the dumb question ‘Why me?,’ ” he writes, “the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?” He was valiant to the end, a paragon of British phlegm. He became an American citizen in 2007, but the background music was always H.M.S. Pinafore: “He remains an Englishman.”

  Mortality comes with a fine foreword by his longtime Vanity Fair editor and friend Graydon Carter, who writes of Christopher’s “saucy fearlessness,” “great turbine of a mind,” and “his sociable but unpredictable brand of anarchy that seriously touched kids in their 20s and early 30s in much the same way that Hunter S. Thompson had a generation before. . . . He did not mind landing outside the cozy cocoon of conventional liberal wisdom.”

  Christopher’s wife, Carol Blue, contributes a—I’ve already used up my “heart-wrenching” quota—deeply moving afterword, in which she recalls the “eight-hour dinners” they hosted at their apartment in Washington, when after consuming enough booze to render the entire population of the nation’s capital insensible, Christopher would rise and deliver flawless twenty-minute recitals of poetry, polemics, and jokes, capping it off saying, “How good it is to be us.” The truth of that declaration was evident to all who had the good fortune to be present at those dazzling recreations. Bliss it was in those wee hours to be alive and in his company, though the next mornings were usually less blissful.

  “For me,” he writes in Mortality, “to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.” In support of this, he adduces several staves of William Cory’s translation of the poem by Callimachus about his beloved friend Heraclitus:

  They told me, Heraclitus; they told me you were dead.

  They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.

  I wept when I remembered how often you and I

  Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.

  He was a man of abundant gifts, Christopher: erudition, wit, argument, prose style, to say nothing of a titanium constitution that, until it betrayed him in the end, allowed him to write word-perfect essays while the rest of us were groaning from epic hangovers and reaching for the ibuprofen. But his greatest gift of all may have been the gift of friendship. At his memorial service in New York City, thirty-one people, virtually all of them boldface names, rose to speak in his memory. One selection was from the introduction Christopher wrote for the paperback reissue of Hitch-22 while gravely ill:

  Another element of my memoir—the stupendous importance of love, friendship and solidarity—has been made immensely more vivid to me by recent experience. I can’t hope to convey the full effect of the embraces and avowals, but I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not on any account postpone the writing or the making of it. The difference made will almost certainly be more than you have calculated.

  One of the “fragmentary jottings” in the last chapter of Mortality is a brushstroke on Philip Larkin’s chilling death poem “Aubade”:

  “Larkin good on fear in ‘Aubade,’ with implied reproof to Hume and Lucretius for their stoicism. Fair enough in one way: atheists ought not to be offering consolation either.”

  For a fuller version of that terminal pensée, turn to his essay on Larkin in his collection Arguably: “Without that synthesis of gloom and angst we could never have had his ‘Aubade,’ a waking meditation on extinction that unstrenuously contrives a tense, brilliant counterpoise between the stoic philosophy of Lucretius and David Hume, and his own frank terror of oblivion.” The essay ends with two lines from another Larkin poem that could serve as Christopher’s own epitaph:

  Our almost-instinct almost true:

  What will survive of us is love.

  What discrepant parts were in him: the fierce tongue, the tender heart.

  There is no “frank terror of oblivion” in Mortality, but there is keen and great regret at having to leave the party early. But even as he stared into the abyss, his mordant wit did not desert him:

  The novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off. The thing begins to pall, even to become banal. One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping for the chance to have a word. And I don’t so much object to his holding my coat in that marked manner, as if mutely reminding me that it’s time to be on my way. No, it’s the snickering that gets me down.

  In his first collection of essays, Prepared for the Worst (1988), he quoted Nadine Gordimer to the effect that “a serious person should try to write posthumously. By that I took her to mean that one should compose as if the usual constraints—of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and perhaps especially intellectual opinion—did not operate.”

  He refers back to that in Arguably, the introduction to which he wrote in June 2011, deep in the heart of Tumorville. He was still going at it mano a mano with the Footman, but by then he was at least realistic about the odds and knew that the words he was writing might very well be published posthumously. As it turned out, he lived just long enough to see Arguably hailed for what it is—inarguably, stunning. What a coda. What a life.

  He noted there that some of the essays had been written in “the full consciousness that they might be my very last. Sobering in one way and exhilarating in another, this practice can obviously never become perfected.”

  Being in Christopher’s company was rarely sobering but always exhilarating. It is, however, sobering and grief-inducing to read this brave and harrowing account of his “year of living dyingly” in the grip of the alien that succeeded where none of his debate opponents had in bringing him down.

  In her afterword, Carol relates an anecdote about their daughter, then two years old, one day coming across a dead bumblebee on the ground. She frantically begged her parents to “make it start.” On reaching the end of her father’s valedictory feuilleton, the reader is likely to be acutely conscious of Antonia’s terrible feeling of loss.

  —The New York Times, August 2012

  La Belle France

  * * *

  How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?

  —DE GAULLE

  A REUSABLE FEAST

  When you are in love, you go to Paris, and then you are really in love.

  I am trying not to write like Hemingway, but this is not an easy thing to do, because I have spent the last four days in Paris with Peac
hes reading A Moveable Feast aloud to her in cafés and in the hotel room where Oscar Wilde died. It is a very fine book, which Papa wrote forty years after he lived in the Paris of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford and James Joyce. It was published after he died and created a sensation not just because it was so good but because of the scene where Scott confides to Hemingway that he is worried about the size of his manhood. The restaurant where this alarming scene took place was Michaud’s, at the corner of the rue Jacob and the rue des Saints-Pères. As for Peaches, this is not her real name but it seems a good name for her since she is from the American South and is very wild. Zelda would also be a good name for her, except that was the name of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife and she was crazy technically, the kind where they come and take you away. Peaches is not crazy in that way but she is from the South and is exuberant in the way Southerners have of never wanting the day to end.

  At Taillevent, which is a very great restaurant not far from where Scott and Zelda lived in those days, Peaches was so exuberant after the meal of wild boar and foie gras de canard with the caramelized figs and tangerines, as well as after the bottle of Nuits-St-Georges, the glasses of Maury, the sweet red wine from the southwest, and the four glasses of 1975 Armagnac, that she wanted to make love under the table. I said absolutely no because I want to come back to Taillevent and I am certain that they do not like it when patrons make love under the table, even after the other diners have gone and though the tablecloths are very long. Still she kept insisting, and finally I had to say, “All right, we’re going.” It was four thirty anyway, a time when decent people have finished lunch.

  We walked the few blocks in the cold rain to 14 rue de Tilsitt, where Scott and Zelda lived. There is no plaque like the one outside 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, where Hemingway and Hadley lived in those years. That did not seem right, since Scott moved there the same month he published a very good book called The Great Gatsby. But we did not care about that or the cold, being very happy from the meal and the quantities of wine and Armagnac.

  We walked in the rain down the Avenue de Friedland, and I stopped into a tabac opposite the statue of Balzac to buy a cigar, and when I came out not two minutes later, a Frenchman had stopped his car and was asking Peaches if she would like to go home with him. In the restaurant she had flirted with three elegant French businessmen in the next booth when I went to the toilette. They had been looking at her the whole meal, and I could not blame them, since Peaches is wonderful to look at. I was also feeling sorry for the French because George W. Bush had just won reelection, so I smiled at them when I came back and took my seat, and they smiled at me as if to say, “You are very lucky, Monsieur.” In fact, the maître d’ had said that exact same thing, and not just because he was angling for a big pourboire.

  But now when I came out of the tabac and saw the Frenchman scurrying off in his car and Peaches grinning at me, her blond hair shining like gold leaf against the wet and the dusk of the boulevard, and her green eyes bright and her cheeks dimpling in that way they do, I took her arm and resolved not to leave her out on any French boulevards untended.

  This was how it was for us during our four-day stay in Paris. We were not very young and not very poor, but we were very happy. You can be happy in Paris if you are poor, but it is as Dickens says a far, far better thing to have euros in your pockets, even thick wads of euros, because then you can eat at Taillevent and Caviar Kaspia in the Place de la Madeleine and stay in the Oscar Wilde suite at L’Hôtel on the rue des Beaux-Arts and order champagne at all hours which to judge from the bill we did. Looking over the bill and feeling the hardness in my liver and the taste of cigars in my mouth, which I cannot get rid of even after brushing my teeth dozens of times with the strong American toothpaste, I am surprised that I remember anything of our stay in Paris, but I remember being very happy.

  You do not have to eat at expensive restaurants in Paris. For most lunches we had jambon-beurre sandwiches and drank house red wine and tap beer. We would sit outside under the mushroom-shaped propane heater and eat and drink, utterly content and thinking that the meal, which cost perhaps 20 euros, was the best that could be had in Paris. After, we walked to the Cluny Museum and looked at the tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn that were woven about the time Columbus landed in the New World. In one tapestry the Lady is stroking the Unicorn’s horn in a way that must have caused giggling, or even a serious stir at court, for you had to be careful in the fifteenth century. They were very strict about things.

  From there we walked up the steep hill toward the Panthéon, past a group of drunk men who were nice about our being American despite the recent victory by Bush, until we came to the Place de la Contrescarpe, at the foot of the rue Mouffetard. Hemingway and Hadley and their baby son, Mr. Bumby, lived a few yards from here. We celebrated finding it by having a drink at the little café, and I read Peaches one of the most beautiful paragraphs in the book:

  As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

  It made us want to have white wine and oysters, but that would have to wait, because now we had to find 27 rue de Fleurus, where Gertrude Stein lived with Alice B. Toklas. I did not want to do this too precisely, because one of the pleasures of Paris is getting lost. We ended up on the street where Madame Curie worked.

  “Remind me,” I said, “what she did that was so wonderful.”

  “Radium,” Peaches said. “And I can’t believe you asked me that.” Peaches is an M.D. and is getting her Ph.D. in public health, so she was unimpressed by my ignorance of the wonderful thing Madame Curie did, but by the time we came to the Jardin du Luxembourg, she had forgotten about it. There was a vendor of hot chestnuts by the gate, and I wanted to buy some until he blew his nose into his hand so we walked on. Hemingway wrote that he would come to the gardens to trap pigeons for dinner. Perhaps this is true, though I have read that he was not quite so poor as he said he was in those days, since Hadley, whom he would shortly dump for Pauline, had a comfortable inheritance. But it made a better story to write about how hungry and poor they were, so I tried not to dwell on this. I decided instead to dwell on the Palais du Luxembourg, where Thomas Paine was imprisoned during the Revolution and escaped beheading because the jailer didn’t see the X on the door indicating that he should have his head chopped off. I also dwelt on the fact that Isadora Duncan used to come here to dance early in the morning before she was strangled by her own scarf in the wheel of her car, which could not have been fun. Before we knew it, Peaches and I had crossed the tranquil park and were standing in front of 27 rue de Fleurus, residence of Gertrude Stein and her strange but sympathique companion, Alice B. Toklas, who had a mustache and would sit with the wives while Miss Stein lectured young writers on what was wrong with their work. I sensed from the Stein chapters that Hemingway thought she was grouchy and full of merde but that is only my opinion. I once tried to read Gertrude Stein and gave up after several hours, not having understood a single word other than rose, but I may be wrong. At the university I attended you could study her but I did not.

  We walked up the rue d’Assas past a heartbreaking plaque noting that a Jewish family had been taken from here and sent to Buchenwald. There are a depressing number of these in Paris. In 1962, de Gaulle unveiled the moving Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation at the eastern tip of the Íle de la Cité near Notre-Dame, the monument to the 200,000 people, many of them Jews, and 30,000 of them Parisians, who were deported by the Nazis and the Vichy government. We went there the next day, and when you enter the cryptlike enclosure and see the 200,000 quartz pebbles embedded in the wall, it is hard not to be overcome. As you exit, you see above you the words Pardonne. N’oublie pas. Pardon. Do not forget.<
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  We were looking for 113 rue de Notre-Dame-des-Champs, where Hemingway lived over a sawmill, but all traces of it are long gone. Ezra Pound, who ended up in the same asylum where John Hinckley now lives, lived at number 70. He and Hemingway used to box for exercise, but Hemingway could never teach him how to throw a left hook.

  That night we went to the Madeleine to hear Mozart’s Requiem. It is a humbling space, the more so because Saint-Saëns used to play the organ here and Chopin’s Marche Funèbre, the anthem of death familiar to any five-year-old, debuted here. Josephine Baker’s funeral mass was held here in 1975. The second-grandest funeral in Paris ever accorded an American was that of Myron T. Herrick, the American ambassador to France at the time of World War I, and from the photographs it resembled the funeral of a king. The French do turn out for a funeral. In 1885, Victor Hugo’s cortege passed in front of two million Parisians. But what is truly impressive about the Madeleine is that it is named for a prostitute. Peaches, who is a churchgoing Episcopalian, did not appreciate this insight of mine and hit me. But then the music started and she forgot to be cross with me. After the concert we walked across the street to Caviar Kaspia and sat in the room upstairs with the oil painting of the Russian boyar coursing through the snow in his horse sleigh and ate caviar on blinis and drank iced vodka and afterward felt very poor but very happy.