Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir
By Christopher Buckley
(Twelve, 251 pages, $24.99)
Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr.
and the Conservative Movement
By Richard Brookhiser
(Basic Books, 243 pages, $27.50)
As long as I’ve known of him, Christopher Buckley has struck me
as an odd piece of work. In early 1981, shortly after I joined this
magazine, Bob Tyrrell received a letter from him. Christopher was
very upset. Much as he had liked The American Spectator,
he would no longer be able to recommend it to friends or purchase
gift subscriptions. Bob’s sin? He’d apparently made light of former
Beatle John Lennon’s death (“historic expiration” were, I believe,
the offending words).
Some time later I came across Buckley’s first (and most
memorable) book, Steaming to Bamboola, about the
post-college year he spent working on a tramp freighter. (Imagine
if Somali pirates had tried to kidnap him!) It was during this
adventure that he had had “FUCK YOU” tattooed onto his saluting
hand. It wasn’t intended for Gore Vidal, and as such it greatly
irritated Christopher’s father, who begged and begged him to have
it removed. It would be years before he grudgingly did so.
In early 2001 he served as a master of ceremonies at the Media
Research Center’s farewell to the Clinton era. He gave a command
performance: suave, eloquent, and bitingly funny and even partisan.
It was a rare occasion that Christopher ever displayed his
conservative bona fides. Indeed, the open suspicion was that he’d
made his literary career by mocking his own side—including someone
he’d worked for, Vice President Bush—for liberal consumption. His
coming out for Barack Obama last fall was simply a return to form.
Now, with the highly publicized release of Losing Mum and
Pup, his memoir of his famous and glamorous parents’ deaths
and life, the controversy and mischief he has enjoyed engendering
reach new heights.
Who knows why individuals act the way they do. By all accounts,
Christopher Buckley is as wonderfully— regally—polite, kind,
generous, and warm as those Buckleys I have met over the years, not
just his father, Bill, but also his uncle Reid and aunts Priscilla
and Trish. Yet he seems insecure enough in his princeliness to
blurt out, about his parents, “They had—how to put it?—class.” But
having class means never having to talk about it. Sadly, there is
much in this memoir that isn’t classy at all.
For most of the book, Buckley plays up having been orphaned, a
conceit planted in his mind by his “old pal” Leon Wieseltier. But
an orphan is a child that loses its parents, not a 55-year-old
adult. Late in the game Buckley suddenly concedes his “prattling”
on this score has been “pathetic,” compared to the “sense of
orphaning” that the young children who lost parents on 9/11 must
feel. This is characteristic of Buckley’s having it both ways.
As he gets set to describe what reviewers are calling his
parents’ “flaws,” “warts and all,” he lets on, “my sins are
manifold and blushful,” though he hopes “callousness and arrogance”
aren’t among them. (Not to worry, they are.) Or in recalling
another of his countless contretemps with his father, he begins,
“But being a devious little shit, I…” So that’s all the cover he
needs? But the topper comes when he informs us that in bidding
farewell to his comatose mother, he whispered to her, “I forgive
you.” It reminded me of a recent CBS interview with Patti Davis in
which she was asked if she had “forgiven” her mother, Nancy Reagan.
It wasn’t clear for what, though one can imagine. Being raised by
the mother who married her no-goodnik father must have been
endlessly traumatic. But that can’t be Buckley’s excuse.
Having introduced his own mother to readers on her deathbed, at
her most defenseless, he subsequently explains her monstrous side.
She told whoppers. She embarrassed Buckley’s daughter and
humiliated her best friend, a Kennedy (yes, of those
Kennedys). He remembered a huge lie from when he only six years old
(“my introduction to a lifetime of mendacity”). She never finished
college. She didn’t read books. A third of the time she wasn’t on
speaking terms with her husband. Some of the time she and son
weren’t speaking either. Once you know all that, Buckley for all
intents will say, Never mind! Or in his words: “Thinking back on it
now, I’m filled with a sort of perverse pride in her.” A good many
purring anecdotes ensue.
Besides, he has a bigger fish to fry. That would be Pup. Why
such lingering grievances? Religion and maybe sex, for starters.
Pup simply could not accept that Christopher was agnostic (“his
inner Savonarola was released at the merest hint of…impiety”) and
non-practicing. When Christopher was in boarding school, in
response to one of his pranks, Pup asked the headmaster to inquire
whether Christopher was involved in “an amorous dalliance” with
another boy. But a larger cause seems to have been nothing more
than a precocious Boomer’s resentment of a father who supposedly
hadn’t offered him enough time and affection during those critical
formative years. Amid his account of his father’s difficult,
illness-racked final year, he observes, “It is contra
naturam (to use a WFB term) to say no to someone who has
raised you, clothed you, fed you from day one—well, even if, in
Pup’s case, these duties were elaborately subcontracted.” You’d
think he was turned over to gypsies to be raised.
To his everlasting credit, Buckley did spend a great deal of the
10 months that separated his parents’ deaths caring for his father.
And though he provides more grisly detail than decency requires—
and not once expresses gratitude to his parents for anything, or
asks their forgiveness for, say, bringing an out-of-wedlock child
into the world (not that readers are told about the boy either, a
strange omission in “an honest book,” as he has called it)—by
mid-book he is calling off the dogs and displaying a filial
affection toward his father that can only be described as genuine
and moving. This allows him to grapple with the real source of his
permanent frustrations: his father’s greatness, brilliance, and
individuality, with which he never could quite compete, as if
anyone else could. But as the only son of a giant, he might have
been too close to the man to understand that, however much he also
wanted to distance himself from him.
If the reader will carry one lasting good feeling from the
book—and whatever else might be said about it, the writing is
splendid—it is when Christopher recounts moments he now treasures,
usually involving just him and his father together, at sea, in
Mexico, over a meal. And he doesn’t even complain there were too
few of them. But in the end, how could there not be?
ONE WILL NOTICE THAT in the New York Times
Magazine’s splashy excerpt from Losing Mum
and Pup, the words “National Review” do not appear. They
hardly appear in the book itself. Clearly, as some of Christopher’s
friends might put it, the flagship magazine of the conservative
movement has never been where his head is at.
That can’t be said about Richard Brookhiser, a longtime
National Review editor and writer once assumed to be heir
apparent to William F. Buckley at the magazine. Then for some
reason, by the early 1990s, although he continued to write for
NR, he drifted away to become an independent (and
respected ) author and contributor to mainstream publications.
One assumed the decision was his. But we learn it wasn’t. In a
sense, Rick (he used to write for us a lot) is another Buckley son
taking advantage of Bill’s death to settle a long-standing score
with him. Yet despite everything, his heart was and remains forever
National Review’s. How can that be? As he
recounts in Right Time, Right Place, Rick was
NR’s famous prodigy—prominently published by the magazine
while still in high school and brought on full-time after his
graduation from Yale.
When he was 23, Bill Buckley made him a secret offer he couldn’t
refuse. He would be Bill’s successor as editor in chief; in the
meantime, he’d become senior editor and eventually managing editor.
Eight years later, Buckley withdrew the offer, coldly, in a letter
left on Rick’s desk in an envelope marked “confidential,” while
Buckley himself was out of the country. He praised Rick’s writing
but said he lacked “executive flair.” Nothing in this memoir
suggests Buckley’s assessment was unfair. The mistake was extending
the offer to Rick in the first place, whether to keep him from
going on to Yale Law School, where he’d been accepted, or to treat
him as a surrogate for Christopher, who clearly was not disposed
ever to succeed his father at the helm of National
Review.
If any good came from this devastating blow it was Rick’s being
reminded of the decency and goodness of his own father, who, in
case he wanted to pursue them now, offered to pay for his law
school studies. “[H]e was a better man than the idol I had put in
his place,” Rick notes. Throughout the rest of his book, though
friendly enough toward Buckley (Rick is never that outwardly
friendly to begin with, as he’d be the first to admit, calling
himself “consumed with snobbery” and a “know-it-all”), he persists
in taking snipes at him, or at bringing him down a peg if he can,
and taking great satisfaction when in later years Bill did ask him
for editorial help only he could provide.
He provides memorable portraits of various NR writers,
not all of them (D. Keith Mano) my cup of tea, or figures he
properly appreciates (John Simon), though surely he is on target
recalling the wondrous Joe Sobran:
He loved the great actors, and was an excellent mimic. He could
begin some soliloquy—“Now is the winter of our discontent”—as
Olivier; I would call out Gielgud, Burton, and he
would change voices like gears.
Less defensible are the friendly words he has for figures who on
Buckley’s death criticized or even savaged him in print. He is kind
toward Bob Tyrrell and our magazine, though he does give a hint as
to why he stopped writing for us in the mid-1990s: he found the
jokey shots taken at the newly elected Clintons at our 25th
anniversary dinner unbecoming and had absolutely no use for any of
the subsequent political wars, finding the 1990s “high pitched and
frantic.” He does spare a best friend, however, praising him as
someone who made his mark in those years publishing “hard-hitting”
books. What he doesn’t tell you is that they were anti-Clinton
books. It could also be, regarding The American Spectator,
that the National Review-firster in Rick didn’t
like the higher profile we acquired at the time. I don’t take it
personally. You should see how dismissive he is of the
Weekly Standard—even though by book’s end his
expression of support for the Iraq War could have been dictated by
Bill Kristol.
Years ago, at a dinner honoring Buckley not long after he’d
stepped down as NR editor, Rick offered a toast to Bill.
Buckley liked it so much he asked for a copy. But Rick hadn’t
spoken from prepared text, and never did follow up, in part because
there still were “wounds…too fresh to be bandaged over.” He now
reproduces those words at the close of his book, too late for
Buckley to read them. Call it another Pyrrhic victory for a
surviving son.
