Overdrive (16 page)

 I wrote to Caen:

Dear Herbert: The item on
Brideshead
, Waugh, and me was understandable fun. Though perhaps a little skepticism would have been in order, even as I'd have shown skepticism toward any writer who pronounced that "Herb Caen is a bore." We are other things. The letter you quoted, Waugh-to-Driberg, was an inside joke. Waugh had just finished reading a book by me the last chapter of which is an attack on Driberg. Following the letter you quoted were several not listed by the anthologist Mr. Amory, for reasons unknown. Mr. Waugh also submitted a piece to
National Review
and wrote a book review for us. His last letter to me, I quote:

Combe Florey House

Combe Florey

Nr. Taunton

2nd April 63

 Dear Mr. Buckley:

Very many thanks for
Rumbles
. [
Rumbles Left and Right
by WFB, New York: Putnam's 1962.]

Some of the essays were familiar to me from
National Review
. I reread them with the same zest as those which were new. You have the very rare gift of captivating the reader's attention in controversies in which he has no direct concern. I congratulate you on the collection. At your best you remind me of Belloc; at your second best of Randolph Churchill.

. . . Please accept my greetings for Easter (which I shall be spending in Rome).

Yours sincerely,

Evelyn Waugh

Herb, I thought the world of Evelyn Waugh, but sometimes when I think of what he wrote about me, I blush.

Yours cordially,

Bill

 Herb Caen is not in the business of collecting personal jokes at his expense, so the best he got around to publishing in his column was:

OKAY, fair's fair: The late Evelyn Waugh, author of
Brideshead Revisited
, did once refer to William F. Buckley Jr. as a bore (Buckley is "host" of the Ch. 9 series based on the book), but later, they became dear friends, as befits two hard-working snobs. As for the series itself, IT is a bore—just too excruciatingly dated for words, my dear, and dreadfully close to self-satire. The clothes are nice, though ... (I speak as a Waugh fan.
A Handful of Dust
is his classic, whereas
Brideshead
is Waugh at his worship-the-rich worst) ...

Herb does not mind communicating with snobs, provided they are hardworking, and accordingly wrote me a letter so pleasant it would have ruined his reputation if it had appeared in his column. ("I envy you your equable temperament. Perhaps that accounts for your good looks, flawless diction and full head of hair. . . .") He enclosed yet another comment on
Brideshead
, this from a nineteen-year-old college student who looked at ten minutes of one segment, then left the room, remarking, "What is this, a kind of preppy
Roots?'"

Time, now, to focus on the speech, part of an all-day affair at the Waldorf sponsored by Yankelovich, Skelly and White, the well-known pollsters, the afternoon half of which was to be devoted to Business and the Media, with my twenty minutes the opening remarks.

I'll make several points, beginning with the failure of the press to live up to its own critical criteria. This I'll illustrate primarily by examples taken from television. We published recently an account of the infrequency with which the television media mentioned deficit financing and non-productivity-related wage demands as factors contributing to high prices. CBS mentioned monetary policies only six percent of all the times it discussed inflation—Tom Bethell actually counted. During two years of television news, 1978-79, only five references were made to budget deficits (this would be in interesting contrast to the frequency of the media's stated concern after Reagan's program was inaugurated). I would discuss some of the planted axioms of liberal economics—for example, the unexamined philosophical premises of the graduated income tax. I would examine, also, the impact that that which is visualizable tends to have on the television news. It is much easier to convey the image of a single child or mother blasted to eternity as the result of the bombing in Vietnam than successfully to communicate the quality of life of Ivan Denisovich, multiplied by a factor of ten to fifteen million, in a camp to which CBS cameras have no access.

I completed my notes, and ate the perfect chicken sandwich Gloria brought me, with a glass of cool white wine. Pat came in, en route to her lunch, and we discussed the weekend plans, and she told me
now don't -forget
that my black tie and cummerbund were in the pocket of my tux, and I promised I'd remember, and walked down the stairs with her, saw her out, and dangled for a minute over the harpsichord.

There aren't many running points of tension in my household, but one of them is that Pat persists in perching a half-dozen photographs on the harpsichord. The mere effort of removing these discourages thoroughly impromptu, three-or four-minute sessions on an instrument that, unlike the piano, really requires that it be opened up in order to do any justice to the subtlety of its tone. The instrument here in the hallway in New York belongs to the great Fernando Valenti, a Challis presented to him by his friends and students in the mid-fifties. It was proclaimed by him to be the finest Challis ever made, by that shy little harpsichord maker with Parkinson's disease who twice, before dying in 1974, came to tune and voice the instrument, both times before Fernando's occasional recitals here. Valenti recorded over
eighty
long-playing records on this instrument, and gave it up only after fashion, with its iron foot (yes, it is so also in music), ruled that harpsichords shouldn't have a sixteen-foot register, which register permits the player to sound a note an octave below the note he is depressing. I stay out of the argument among the professionals and the theorists. All I say is that used correctly (as by Fernando), the sixteen-foot can achieve simply wonderful musical effects, and I do not doubt that J. S. Bach and Scarlatti, if they had heard the sixteen-foot (and it is not absolutely established that they did not), would have welcomed its discreet use, and perhaps even have specified its use, here and there. Recitalists at my apartment regularly use it.

Anyway, I must run. I go back upstairs, change, Jerry gets the bag. Soon I wend my way through the Waldorf to the indicated meeting room, which is empty because the audience is listening to the luncheon speaker. It is ten minutes to two, and I am scheduled to begin at two. A hospitable woman with Yankelovich comes and keeps me company, and soon the audience of several hundred files in.

They were to have heard Senator Bill Bradley at lunch, but he couldn't make it, and instead they listened to Richard Blumenthal, an attractive young Democrat, formerly U.S. Attorney in Connecticut. I am sorry I didn't hear him, or an earlier speaker, Michael Novak, a friend and contributor to
National Review
. I chat with Mark Green, who will speak after me. Fie is a liberal activist, ten years with Ralph Nader (if you can bear it). Fie apparently bore it well because he is young, fresh, enthusiastic, and resourceful. That is the reason I use him with such frequency on "Firing Line," in the role of examiner. He is to follow me, I learn; and after him, Don Hewitt, executive producer of CBS's "60 Minutes." But in accepting the engagement my office warned my hosts that I would need to fly out of New York right after speaking (indeed, in a private plane) to meet a prior commitment in Toledo. Everyone seems in a good humor about this; I am introduced, get up, and perform, my eyes carefully on the clock.

I think this very important when there are other scheduled speakers. Once, in Philadelphia many years ago, Louis Auchincloss, Ralph Nader, and I were scheduled to speak between eleven and twelve, twenty minutes each, to the annual booksellers' convention. We were begged to keep our remarks to the specified time, as any failure to show up at noon in the dining room would cause three thousand soufflés to collapse, or whatever. Nader began. And spoke for forty minutes. Auchincloss and I looked at each other. I was scheduled as the third speaker, so I raised all ten fingers, and he understood that each of us would cut our prepared remarks in half. Not easy to do.

At the Waldorf the questioning was lively, and when I left I had the feeling (I get this about half the time) that 1 had given the audience meaty propositions, and had upheld their plausibility during the question period.

Back in the car, I spoke on the phone with Frances most of the way to LaGuardia. Little things, but they needed attention. Mark Dichter, the cinematographer who last summer sailed with us as far as Bermuda (from St. Thomas) on the boat I chartered, needs a date to do joint work on the documentary we have planned (OK to set up, I tell Frances). It is a coincidence that that is exactly what Allen Stanley needs, who is producing a documentary on the earlier trip in 1975, about which I wrote in my book
Airborne
(OK). Frank Mankiewicz wants me to go to a luncheon for National Public Radio (there is a conflict, but I could make it for the pre-lunch reception). John Fox, who is working on a book about Whittaker Chambers, needs some time (OK), and Molly Ingram of Holiday Yachts wants to find out what we want in the way of food during Christmas when we cruise aboard the
Sealestial
(answer: ask Pat).

The airplane, dispatched for me by a friend of the Friends of the University of Toledo Libraries, is a little Grumman, and the pilots are anxious to go, because there are heavy head winds, and I am supposed to be at a cocktail party before the dinner. The two pilots lift the ship into the air, and during the next two hours my seat belt is never off. Reading is extremely difficult, and I am working on the research folder for the guest on one of two "Firing Line" programs that we are taping tomorrow, namely John Brown, Governor of Kentucky. I don't get motion sickness (though I am careful never to say that I never will get it—I have seen too many virgins suddenly, inexplicably, collapse at sea), so the movement didn't upset me, it just made things difficult. Which is nothing to what I did to my hosts, two of whom were waiting at the airport most anxiously when we came in, almost an hour late.

They zoomed me to the Inverness Club, and I learned the background of the association that sponsors this annual dinner, devoted to maintaining interest in free library service under the patronage of the University of Toledo. My hosts (Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Sheridan) were wonderfully pleasant and good-humored, and, arriving too late for the cocktail party, I was taken to my seat, and wine was served. The dinner was very long.

I have often reflected on this. A secret ballot, I am quite certain, would reveal that ninety percent of those who attend large, festive hotel or club dinners, which are to be followed by speeches, would be infinitely grateful if the first and third courses were decorously pre-situated at their places, leaving to the waiters only the burden of bringing the main course. When I was not yet thirty, I spoke to the largest seated dinner audience I have ever addressed: sixty-five hundred Philadelphians who had attended retreats at St. Joseph's in the Hills during the preceding year. It was held at Convention Hall, the lobster salad was there when we arrived, and behind the bread plates, a raspberry tart, with a slice of cheese alongside. It remained only for the waiters to bring piping hot filet mignon, baked potato, and beans. Red' wine was on the table in carafes. The speaking began forty-five minutes after we filed into the room, everyone satisfied. At least by the food.

The introduction took me by surprise. Most introductions are contractions of your Who's Who and/or the kind of thing one would expect if being nominated for President, in which, to use Mencken's metaphor, you are compared to the rising sun, the full moon, and the aurora borealis. In the professional fraternity of public figures I doubt there are many who are influenced in the least by such ritual sycophancy. It serves a purpose, of course, with the audience, particularly if it is an audience partly conscripted by the philanthropic nature of the event. It is pleasing for them to know they have come to listen to Shakespeare, or Abraham Lincoln. One does come upon, every five years or so, an introduction inherently interesting to the speaker, either because of the felicity of the composition, or the resourcefulness of the research. A historian at the University of Texas once introduced me to an audience of students by saying that he had done research into my family. I knew that my grandfather had been sheriff of Duval County. I knew that he had been a Democrat, knew that he had been a law-and-order sheriff. "But I am not certain that Mr. Buckley knows that his grandfather's allegiance to the Democratic Party surpassed his allegiance to law and order, because although Sheriff Buckley died in 1904, he voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1948." That was fun. Tonight the vice-president for academic affairs, English scholar William Free, began by quoting those nice lines of Pope: "Yes, I am proud: I must be proud to see/Men not afraid of God, afraid of me:/Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne,/Yet touch'd and shamed by ridicule alone." It transpires that as an undergraduate at Yale Mr. Free had, along with a classmate, challenged me in a public letter. "The letter is long forgotten, but not the response. Whatever the merits of our arguments, the skill with which his were put taught us a lesson in humility that made a lasting impression." Free quoted Auden, and by now convinced me that his generous amiability concealed a continuing distaste for my views: "Time . . . Worships language and forgives/Every-one by whom it lives; . . ./Time that with this strange excuse/Pardoned Kipling and his views,/And will pardon Paul Claudel,/Pardons him for writing well." I'd need instruction in what exactly it is we're supposed to pardon Kipling for.