We Won’t Cancel Your SubscriptionBy A.S. Erikson | Saturday, October 4, 2008 Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription For nearly forty years, National Review, the conservative fortnightly founded and edited by William F. Buckley Jr., shared its most peculiar and its most outrageous letters in a column called “Notes & Asides.” Buckley, a notorious wit, responded to a variety of questions, observations, and polemics not easily catalogued. But catalogued they are. Shortly before his death last winter, Buckley assembled and printed a compilation of the most memorable letters and ripostes from Notes & Asides in a book entitled Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription. The title is taken from a response to one of the letters within:
The book has no defining narrative other than the humor with which Buckley infuses his replies. The better parts of the book involve several back-and-forths between certain prominent individuals and Buckley. There’s the sour puss Eric Altermann who whines when his letter is published; there’s the perplexing correspondence between the author and Art Buchwald—inside jokes abound—and then there’s Evelyn Waugh, whose notoriously sharp tongue doesn’t disappoint. After Buckley sent him copies of his books and asked him to contribute to National Review, Waugh sent a letter to Tom Driberg, in which he asked, “Did you in your researches come across the name of Wm. F. Buckley Jr., editor of a New York, new-McCarthy magazine named National Review? He has been showing me great & unsought attention lately & your article made me curious. Has he been supernaturally ‘guided’ to bore me? It would explain him.” And in a follow-up letter he called Buckley’s Up from Liberalism “unreadable.” Waugh eventually thawed—probably on learning that Buckley was a fellow “Papist” and because of the money Buckley was willing to pay him for his occasional articles—and was on good terms with Buckley upon his death. Perhaps the best parts of the book, though, are the replies to the average Joes. That brings me to the best letter in the collection: April 11, 1975 For readers, like myself, far too young to remember his television show Firing Line, this book serves as the perfect introduction to what Buckley represented in the public’s imagination. Buckley was not, as some of his obits had it, a conservative intellectual. He was first and foremost a wit, most in his element when he could deliver a delicious one-liner in riposte. He wasn’t a deep thinker; that fell to others at the magazine like James Burnham or Wilmore Kendall—deep thinking apparently fell completely out of fashion at the rag as Buckley relinquished control of it. Buckley may have fashioned himself as an intellectual and planned for many years to write an intellectual sort of book—one to rival Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind or perhaps even Edmund Burke’s Reflections. But he never completed such a tome; it seems he was just too impatient. After graduating from Yale, his father wanted young Buckley to study political philosophy as a graduate student under Kendall, but Buckley didn’t want to waste time making his mark. In lieu of further study, he started a new magazine: National Review. Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription is the perfect written introduction to the Buckley of the public consciousness. He won’t be remembered by posterity for any original doctrines, but rather as the conservative Oscar Wilde of the late twentieth century: a prodigious writer always ready with a quip. |
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