Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2004/11/24/book_review_wfbs_miles_gone_by.php
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
After their late father's stock of vintage wines had run dry, the Buckley children realized they would have to develop their own cellars. Characteristically, William F. Buckley Jr. began to acquire with exuberance. "I talked myself into thinking that what I would do is buy twice as much wine as I was likely to use in twenty years," he said. "Keep it for ten years, then sell one-half of it for enough to pay for the cost of the whole. That way, I explained cheerfully to my siblings and others who would listen, I would in fact be drinking wine free for the rest of my life."
The plan, however, hit the shoals when he discovered that he could not put a single bottle of spirits on market in the state of Connecticut without a liquor license, which in those days was hard to come by. "Accordingly, I was left with the excruciating fate of having more wine than I could drink, an oxymoron I have managed to adjust to."
Bill Buckley relates the anecdote in Miles Gone By, his latest book, which is sold somewhat inaccurately as a "literary autobiography." But so what if it's an anthology, really—a compilation of articles, columns, reminiscences, interviews, a vignette from a Blackford Oakes novel—it's something, like a surfeit of wine, to which one manages to adjust. This is a remarkable book that captures the trajectory of a jaunty life with uncommon charm, grace, and elegance; certainly, it's among the author's best.
William F. Buckley almost singlehandedly brought conservatism from the fringes of American intellectual life to its center, largely owing to his wit, vigor, self-confidence, deft argument, and good company. These last constitute the inimitable Buckley style, and that's what's on display in Miles Gone By. He obviously loves politics, and he obviously loves ideas; but what emerges is not so much a study of politics but a study of personality, not so much a story of ideas but a story of a man. "Only the man who makes the voyage can speak truly about it," he writes.
Buckley opens with vivid recollections of his childhood at Great Elm, the family estate, but gathers steam when he discusses his time at Yale. He had a brilliant tenure as Chairman of the Yale Daily News, or the OCD, as he called it, the Oldest College Daily. He says the finest compliment he ever received was that he had turned out "the most lively college paper in the country, past or present." (He is dismissive of those who followed him: they "no longer had to know how to write, merely to opine.")
Considerable space is devoted to the episode that made his name: the publication of God and Man at Yale. It was 1951, all of a year after his graduation, and the book had been written and edited in only three months. But the trim little volume brought about great hue and cry.
It was the central thesis of God and Man that the inner workings of Yale were increasingly hostile to conservative and religious perspectives, a state of affairs that amounted to "the detraditionalization" of a great university. "I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world," the book's most scandalous formulation put it. "I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level."
For this he was subjected to calumnies from every sort of pen-and-inkubus (Gore Vidal called him a pro-crypto Nazi), but his intentions were plain, and rather sensible: "that certain values should be encouraged, others discouraged," and so expose undergraduates to "cogent philosophical arguments." It's comical that the precise wording about individualism v. collectivism was not his own, but that of his editor; Buckley did not renounce it "because I was tickled by the audacity of the sally and not unamused by the sputtering outrage of its critics."
From that point out, high contention was typical of the Buckley style. It is his "curse," he has said, to speak provocatively. That fate was embodied in the first issue of his new periodical, the National Review (1955), especially in its famously grand self-conception: "It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." Buckley was Editor in Chief until 1990 and just relinquished his controlling shares in NR earlier this year. His farewell benediction, included in Miles, is masterful.
But one gets the impression he understands that the onward advance of anything is not in itself bad, if only because yelling Stop seems so out-of-character. He has always lived by perpetual striving, always set himself apart by an appetite for hard work over—especially when he could've had it so easily—a life of ease. His great enthusiasms have led to thousands of individual pieces of published writing: close to fifty books, over eight-hundred editorials for Nation Review, four-hundred articles in other publications, dozens and dozens of introductions and obituaries, more than four-thousand newspaper columns. His voluminous correspondence fills more than a hundred archival boxes at Yale's Sterling Memorial Library.
And this passion for language—his "etymological hunger"—is self-evident in Miles. Not only in the essays devoted to words ("The Dictionary, Ready at Hand") and not only in the words in the essays themselves (his near-pathology for turning a phrase), but in the qualities he has found significant. He remembers of a terrific professor, "Never a misplaced accent, qualifier, verb: sentence after sentence of preternatural beauty… Never pretentious, just plain beautiful." Here is a man who would assemble a book called The Right Word, and another, The Lexicon.
Yet he displays none of those unfortunate characteristics so common in those harboring an overinterest in words and phrases. Buckley is disgusted by timidity. He's impatient with those who waste time. He disdains things ordinary or commonplace. To put it another way, his vanities are never in vain. "The fear of boredom," he writes, "is a cognate aversion." When "you find yourself locked in with the great bore," these are among the worst moments in life. You can be great, or you can be awful, but just don't bother being dull.
The demand for intensity is on every leaf of Miles, though it's most lucid in Buckley's sweeping depictions of life under sail. For Buckley, any passage is a bracing test of fortitude and endurance, an exercise in "exhilaration and exhaustion." The whole idea is to relax in a violent fashion. He relishes the "studied effrontery" of danger. "You are prepared to smile, when they tell you you are a maniac, going to sea in a sailboat. You can't see the expression on your face, in the drowsy mists, but you know that the smile is a patronizing smile. Pity them, not us."
His evocations of the outspread sea are gorgeous. "The most beautiful part of the world is wherever you grew up," he explains, so "let me tell you about the most beautiful part of the world, which is the New England coastline."
You can take in a thousand inlets and little havens and major ports, cold and luminously green in the spring, challengingly hot in midsummer; and then, when the fall comes, the premonitory little pulsations of cold in the early morning… It wouldn't be fair, one starstruck old-timer said, to let New England's coastal season last any longer—nature has to give other people a little time of day.
This is drawn from a superb essay called "The Stupefaction of the New England Coastline."
And there is nothing bitter or sullen here. There are no grudges, regrets, or dark corners. On the contrary, Buckley includes lengthy, gracious portraits of his friends, famous and otherwise, whether they agree with him or not. What is important, he says, are "the bonds of companionship," "how wonderfully strong fraternity can be." To his classmates at a reunion: "Friendships that last forty years are something. Monuments, I call them. There are few better grounds for celebration. So let's toast to the Class of 1950, and to the university that brought us together."
Perhaps this is what is most arresting in Miles Gone By. Buckley, by constitution, will never curdle. His style is so amiable, that—even when he's wrong—its never caustic. "I have always held in high esteem the genial tradition," he says. This way of going about the business of politics is faded, sepia-tinged, and perhaps in need today, more than ever.
What's clear, though, is that William F. Buckley has always measured his time in the well-spending of it. This book is a celebration of those times. "My life, on the whole," he writes in the epilogue, "has been joyful." (The qualifier is almost shocking.) Miles Gone By is valuable for many things: its good faith, its good cheer, its good writing. But in the end, it is most valuable for the inevitable and startling realization it provokes—that there can never be another man quite like this one.