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In his own reckoning, William Frank Buckley, Jr., is not an introspective man. A few years back, I caught an episode of the Charley Rose Show in which the emotive host tried to get the writer to imagine something he would have done differently, given the chance. Buckley refused to bite, expressing a disinclination most fully articulated in Overdrive, a week-in-the-life "personal documentary" published when the Reagan administration was still young: "I do resist introspection though I can not claim to have 'guarded' against it, because even to say that would suppose that the temptation to do so was there, which it isn't." If it's true, he remarked elsewhere, that only the examined life is worth living, then his life has been misspent.
Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography by William F. Buckley Jr. Regnery Publishing, 2004 594 pp., $18.87 
The Fall of the Berlin Wall by William F. Buckley Jr. Wiley, 2004 212 pp., $13.57 |
Here, as so often, one envies Buckley's facility with languages; my designation of him as a big fat liar would sound so much more dignified in French or Spanish. His has been a spectacularly examined life, as Overdrive and its predecessor, Cruising Speed, attest. To conduct such sustained acts of public self-examination, all the while affecting absolute indifference to "introspection," is a triumph of the Buckley persona. From his playful intellectual jousting on Firing Line, the PBS show he hosted for 37 years, to his witty one-line replies in the "Notes & Asides" column of National Review, the political journal he founded, he has maintained an air of passionate nonchalance, suggesting that he was too busy speechifying, editing his fortnightly magazine, taping his talk show, dabbling in politics, dashing off three columns a week, sailing the globe, and churning out books while skiing in Switzerland to look inward.
But over the last 15 years, as he has gradually pulled back from public life, Buckley has allowed his readers to see past this genial fiction. At his retirement party from the editorship of National Review in 1990, Buckley disclosed, "one month from today, I will set out on a small sailboat from Lisbon, headed toward Barbados via Madeira, the Canaries, and Cape Verde, forty-four hundred miles of decompression at sea, the cradle of God." This is related in the introduction to Wind Fall: The End of the Affair. And the change was duly noted. Literary man about the globe P.J. O'Rourke wrote, "For the first time in my experience, Mr. Buckley's prose does not sound young. Not that it sounds old. Rather, his words are autumnal, even mellow." O'Rourke judged the book to be chock full of, yes, "introspection and sensitivity."
Buckley retired his hero Blackford Oakes after ten novels, the end of the USSR having narrowed the market for old CIA hands, but decided to keep at it as a novelist. For my money, the best of the post-Cold War pack was 1995's Brothers No More, a meditation on bravery sharply critical of U.S. actions in Vietnam that led up to the war. Other surprises include The Redhunter, the closest he will ever get to publicly acknowledging McCarthyism was a mistake, and Elvis in the Morning, a sweet set piece about the king and one of his fans. Other major projects included Nearer My God—a mixed bag but, basically, the written form of what would have been a series of Firing Line programs, as applied to the Catholic faith—and a collection of nearly 100 of his speeches.
On almost a one-to-one ratio, the releases of new major projects have coincided with Buckley's severing another longstanding obligation. The frequency of his syndicated column dropped from thrice to twice a week. He cut Firing Line back to half an hour and then folded in 1999 because he did not "want to die onstage." The collection of speeches marked the end of his regimen of public oratory. So it should have come as a shock to no one that Bill Buckley's two offerings in 2004 marked further adjustments. Still, these were doozies.
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