Book Review: Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography, by William F. Buckley, Jr. (2004)

Cover of Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography, by William F. Buckley, Jr., 2004. Yes, that's my shelf reserved for books by William F. Buckley and his son Christopher Buckley. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

William F. Buckley, around the time Miles Gone By was published.

William F. Buckley, Jr. never wrote a conventional autobiography. The closest he came was his 2004 book Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography, in which he collects his favorite writings that are about him personally. Miles Gone By is a fantastic book, and it’s an essential read for anyone who is interested in learning more about Buckley’s life. Despite Buckley’s reputation as one of the main intellectuals behind the modern American conservative movement, politics do not play a large part in Miles Gone By. Miles Gone By is really about the man behind the politics, and partisans of either stripe can enjoy Buckley’s wit, joie de vivre, impressive vocabulary, and generous spirit, all of which are on full display. 

True to Buckley’s professed list of his joys in life, the section on sailing is the longest one in the book. Buckley’s passion for sailing comes through clearly on every page. It’s kind of amazing that this multi-hyphenate of a man was able to take the time to unwind and actually take a vacation.

Buckley was well known for being generous to his friends, and there are numerous examples of this throughout Miles Gone By, especially in a section entitled “Ten Friends” where Buckley describes briefly the first time he met ten famous friends. I think only William F. Buckley could name David Niven, Ronald Reagan, Tom Wolfe, Roger Moore, and John Kenneth Galbraith among his closest friends. Buckley was also well known for his finely penned obituaries, which he crafted for his magazine National Review, and there are some superb examples of those included in Miles Gone By as well.

Throughout Miles Gone By, I was struck by what a rich and full life William F. Buckley lived. He was truly a renaissance man. There’s an essay about Buckley playing a Bach concerto with a symphony orchestra. There’s an essay about Buckley descending down to the Titanic in the tiny French submarine Nautile, at a time when he was one of only about one hundred people in the world to have seen the wreck. There’s an excerpt from Buckley’s book The Unmaking of a Mayor, which chronicled his unsuccessful run for mayor of New York City in 1965. One of Buckley’s greatest quips was when someone asked him what he would do if he won the election. His response? “Demand a recount.” 

“My Own Secret Right-Wing Conspiracy” is a very entertaining essay about Buckley’s involvement in the John T. Gaty Trust. John T. Gaty was a wealthy Republican from Wichita, Kansas, who set up a trust fund to distribute part of his estate to organizations that were politically conservative. Gaty named some of the most prominent Republicans in the country as the trustees of his trust. That list included Buckley, Barry Goldwater, John Tower, Strom Thurmond, Edgar Eisenhower, Dwight’s more conservative brother, and J. Edgar Hoover. The trust began in 1967, and part of the stipulation of the trust was that the trustees would meet in person in Wichita to vote on how to allocate the funds. Amazingly enough, for seven years, everyone attended in person. (Hoover withdrew from the trust before the first meeting, as he made it a practice to not accept any trusteeships.) Buckley contends that the Gaty Trust played a key role in helping the conservative movement spread, as the trustees allocated a considerable amount of money to different organizations. 

My one criticism of Miles Gone By is that Buckley doesn’t always tell us where the pieces are from. Is this an article he wrote for a magazine? Does it come from a book of his essays? Is it something new he wrote just for the book? But that’s a small quibble for such a delightful book.

William F. Buckley was, first and foremost, a writer, and Miles Gone By proves that he was a damn good one. One of my favorite quotes from the book is this one: “Art of any sort is very, very serious business: that which is sublime can’t be anything less.” (p.16)

Book Review: Cruising Speed: A Documentary, by William F. Buckley (1971)

My well-worn paperback copy of Cruising Speed, by William F. Buckley, 1971. Yes, that's my shelf of books by William Buckley and his son Christopher. (Photo by Mark Taylor.)

William F. Buckley at his desk.

On December 5, 1970, while at a nightclub with Truman Capote, William F. Buckley decided to write a journal covering one week in his life. This experiment ultimately resulted in the highly entertaining book Cruising Speed: A Documentary, published in September, 1971. Buckley would later revisit this same formula in his excellent 1983 book Overdrive, which I previously reviewed here. 

Cruising Speed covers the week of November 30^th to December 6^th, 1970. This was an exciting time for Buckley, as the previous month his older brother James was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. Buckley was a uniquely busy man, as he was writing a nationally syndicated newspaper column three times a week, hosting Firing Line, a weekly television show about current events, and editing the bi-weekly magazine that he had founded, National Review.  

Buckley encounters many different people throughout the course of the week, from former heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney, who “has been a very old friend and supporter of NR,” (p.27) to Otto Von Hapsburg, heir to the thrones of Austria and Hungary, who asks Buckley “whether I would join a very small organization that meets two or three times a year, in Europe usually, but sometimes in America, to discuss deeply, and off the record, public policies affecting the future of the West.” (p.150) William F. Buckley led a remarkable life, and the nine page index at the end of Cruising Speed gives some idea of his varied pursuits and interests. Someone should really write annotated versions of Cruising Speed and Overdrive, so future readers will know who all of these people Buckley interacts with were, instead of having to constantly look them up on Wikipedia. 

One of the more interesting tidbits that came up in the course of Buckley’s week is a letter from Edgar Eisenhower, Dwight’s older brother, concerning the foundation of John T. Gaty. Gaty was a businessman from Wichita, Kansas, who bequeathed a significant part of his estate to a foundation that would support conservative organizations. The trustees that Gaty named to the foundation included Buckley, J. Edgar Hoover, Edgar Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, John Tower, and other prominent conservatives. Incredibly, all of these men met in Wichita once a year for ten years to distribute money from the foundation. (Hoover never attended, sending an alternate in his place.) Someone should really write a book about the Gaty trust, as a fascinating footnote to the nascent conservative movement. 

Buckley’s excellent sense of humor is on display throughout the book, and perhaps my favorite humorous anecdote from Cruising Speed is the story that Buckley tells about a friend of his who was entertaining guests from France. Buckley’s friend turned on Firing Line, as Buckley was interviewing Hugh Hefner. There was a problem with the sound on the TV, so everyone watched in silence. When the sound came on, the French visitors were shocked as they had concluded from the body language of the two men that Buckley was the libertine publisher of Playboy magazine, and Hugh Hefner was the conservative Republican writer. (p.53)

Throughout both Cruising Speed and Overdrive you see how much William F. Buckley enjoyed his life. At the very end of Cruising Speed Buckley writes that his friend John Kenneth Galbraith, the liberal economist, urged Buckley to give up his newspaper column, Firing Line, and National Review, to enter academia and write books. (p.229) Unsurprisingly, Buckley turns down Galbraith’s suggestion. It’s clear that Buckley loved all of the different things that he did, and if he had just focused on one thing, he probably wouldn’t have been happy. I suspect that Buckley enjoyed the challenge of keeping all of those balls up in the air. 

I wish that we saw more of how Buckley wrote, but he was able to write so quickly that maybe he didn’t have much to say about his writing process. On the Wednesday covered in Cruising Speed, Buckley is late delivering his column, so he has to go to the offices of his syndicate, which he only does when the column must be written immediately. He writes it in half an hour. There are many excellent passages throughout Cruising Speed, and one concerns dealing with writers and artists as editor of National Review, “…what it comes down to is this-that concerning certain things, everyone is inaccessible to reason, and the trick is to find out what those things are, and simply accept the given in the situation.” (p.6) That’s a great piece of advice, and not just for editors. 

After Cruising Speed was published an interviewer asked Buckley “Don’t you think it a bit much to write an entire book devoted to the events of a single week?” Buckley’s tongue in cheek response was “I don’t know. John Keats devoted an entire ode to a single Grecian urn.” (Quote from Overdrive, by William F. Buckley, p.154)I wish more people would write books like Cruising Speed, as I would be fascinated to read what a week in the life of other public figures is like. I suppose that now, in the never-ending news cycles of 2015, one might encounter more resistance to the idea, and get more flack for being so supremely solipsistic. The interesting thing about both Cruising Speed and Overdrive is that while they both look into Buckley’s life, they are not overly confessional. Although Buckley does catalog some personal faults, as he writes, "I do not know why my memory is so bad, or for that matter why I read so slowly." (p.57) I find it difficult to believe that William F. Buckley did anything slowly, but there you have it. Buckley tell us that book critic Isabel Paterson thinks these problems stem from him not learning to read until the age of 6 or 7, which is also when he began speaking English, his first language having been Spanish. 

 Cruising Speed humanizes Buckley. Even if you disagree with his politics you get to see his incredible work ethic and the humanity that animated his work. As Malcolm Muggeridge once said of Buckley “What Buckley has is a sort of sparkle and grace, equally in his speaking, writing, and television appearances. It is not just a question of agreeing with Buckley. Rather, it is that in our time free minds are desperately rare and precious, and in him I detect one.”

Book Review: Conversations with William F. Buckley, Jr. edited by William F. Meehan III (2009)

Conversations with William F. Buckley Jr., 2009.

William F. Buckley looking like a rock star riding his moped in New York City in the 1960's.

William F. Buckley at his desk.

I’ve written about William F. Buckley before on this blog, as I recently reviewed his novel Saving the Queen and I wrote a very long piece about his fascinating book Overdrive, which chronicled a week in his fast-moving life. My political sympathies run to the opposite end of the spectrum from the late Mr. Buckley, but that does not preclude my enjoyment of his writings and his personal style. I’m also an admirer of his son Christopher, who has written many very funny satirical novels. 

Having thus established my Buckley bona fides, I turn to the subject at hand: the 2009 book Conversations with William F. Buckley, Jr. It’s from the long-running “Literary Conversations Series” published by the University Press of Mississippi, and these volumes have proven to be endlessly fascinating for fans of the authors profiled. The University Press of Mississippi has done readers an immeasurable service through this series by rounding up these interviews and collecting them in one volume. The volume on William F. Buckley is shorter than those on other writers, as it runs just 186 pages. 

The earliest interview in the book is from Playboy magazine in 1970, and it’s arguably the most interesting, as Buckley holds court on all manner of topics. The Playboy interview is also by far the longest included, as it runs for more than 40 pages. One of Buckley’s funniest quips from that interview is when he says that too many people are voting, and the interviewer asks him who he would exclude from voting. Buckley’s response is: “A while ago, George Gallup discovered that 25 percent or so of the American people had never heard of the United Nations. I think if we could find that 25 percent, they’d be reasonable candidates for temporary disenfranchisement.” (p.24) Buckley’s quote reminds me of Gore Vidal’s witty remark: “Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never vote for President. One hopes it is the same half.” 

Most of the later interviews in the book discuss Buckley’s novel writing, so there is some repetition as Buckley describes his working methods again and again. The interviews that delve into politics the most are the Playboy interview and an interesting 1978 interview with The American Civil Liberties Review. The focus on Buckley’s novels makes sense given the interests of William F. Meehan III, the editor of the book, as he wrote a dissertation on Buckley’s fiction.

Conversations with William F. Buckley sheds more light on the fascinating personality of one of the 20^th century’s most prolific public intellectuals. Surprisingly enough, Buckley claimed that he didn’t enjoy writing, as he says in a 1978 interview, “I get pleasure out of having written. I like to paint. I don’t like writing, but there is a net satisfaction when it’s done.” (p.75) In another interview from 1978, Buckley shared the success of his famous productivity: “Deadlines. I have deadlines for everything. I find them liberating.” (p.69) Buckley expounded a little more in a 1983 interview: “I had three deadlines this weekend. And because they simply had to be done, they were done. And if you know that you’ve got to phone in six columns, they get phoned in. The people I pity are not the people who have deadlines, they’re the people who don’t have deadlines.” (p.84) That sounds easy enough, right? Just set some deadlines for yourself and you’ll soon be as productive as William F. Buckley. I think it helped that Buckley had a tremendous work ethic.

Throughout the book, Buckley comes across as smart, witty, funny, and someone who must have been a lot of fun to hang out with. I’d recommend Conversations with William F. Buckley to anyone with an interest in this fascinating, entertaining, sesquipedalian writer and thinker.