Palm Sunday (15 page)

I would give a million dollars to look like that.

I wonder, too, when I see Buckley: Would he have known that it was possible to be genuinely funny and conservative at the same time, if it had not been for the pioneering work of H. L. Mencken? Probably so. That face of his, when coupled with his fine mind and high social position, would have made him sound like a spiritual son of Mencken’s, even if he had never heard of the Sage of Baltimore.

How serious is he about conservatism? Well—serious enough to devote his life to it, surely, but beyond that? The ideals he defends, conventional Republicanisms, really, were logically his from birth. He was rich and brilliant with congenial and enterprising relatives before he wore his first diaper—and he had the rare gift of being happy a lot, as I say. And nothing changed much except, perhaps, that life kept getting better and better.

Most important: there has never been anything to be ashamed of. It is a quite unusual experience in America to have never been ashamed. Buckley’s intellectual voyage has
been one of confirmations rather than discoveries. So there is the chance that he is more playful about conservatism than many who have come to it the hard Way—than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, say. Buckley has not come to conservatism through rage and pain.

Solzhenitsyn could never say at the beginning of a book, and neither could Mencken, for that matter, what Buckley says at the beginning of this one, that he must subtitle it as being controversial for this reason: “… for almost everything that is said here, there is an opposite, if intellectually unequal, reaction set down somewhere. This is of course a pity, but on the other hand I have not expected to bring around the world by acclamation.”

These are, I submit, the nearly weightless words of an undefeatable debater rather than of a passionate advocate—a debater who, because he is so good at debating, is about to make ninnies of the opposition yet again, knowing that nobody is going to be particularly burned up afterward. He continues to do what he did as a Yale undergraduate, which was to engage in badinage with registered Democrats, and always genially. He tells us that “… one of the reasons I was so happy at Yale was that geniality is … as natural to Yale as laughter is to Dublin, song to Milan, or angst to
The New York Review of Books.”

I, for one, am grateful that Buckley, serious or not, has volunteered to be as consistent in his responses to outside stimuli as a pinball machine, a machine designed to teach conservative ideals—5,000 points for the electric chair, 10,000 for right-to-work laws, 50,000 for more sympathy with the CIA, a cool million for individual excellence and daring, and so on. If we did not have such an intelligent and genial man (as compared with General Goldwater, for instance) to argue in favor of social Darwinism, some of us might be too appalled and confused to listen, to learn for our own good how uncharitable we had better be.

• • •

William F. Buckley, Jr., is a friend of mine. Ours is a New York friendship. A New York friendship is a friendship with a person you have met at least once. If you have met a person only once, and you are a New Yorker, you are entitled to say, whenever that person’s name comes up in conversation, “Yes—so-and-so is a friend of mine.”

I have met Mr. Buckley, or Bill, as his friends call him, maybe thrice, for a grand total of sixty seconds. I am intimidated by his cultural and athletic accomplishments, and by his social rank—but especially by his skills as a debater. I have no idea how to win an argument, or even to hold my own in one.

If I am to say what I believe, I must do so without opposition, or I am mute. I have been on the Irv Kupcinet Show, a talk show originating in Chicago, four times. I have never said a word. I ran into Mr. Kupcinet recently, and he said he would certainly like to have me on again. Why not?

•   •   •

I spoke one time at the Library of Congress, in 1972, or so. A man stood up in the middle of the audience, when I was about halfway through, and he said, “What right have you, as a leader of America’s young people, to make those people so cynical and pessimistic?’”

I had no good answer, so I left the stage.

Talk about profiles in courage!

•   •   •

The beliefs I have to defend are so soft and complicated, actually, and, when vivisected, turn into bowls of undifferentiated mush. I am a pacifist, I am an anarchist, I am a planetary citizen, and so on.

But the subject of this chapter is friendship, and, thanks
to a routine miracle of this age of computers, I am able to submit an alphabetized list of writers who are or, in the case of the dead, were friends of mine. My wife, Jill Krementz, you see, has over the years photographed hundreds of writers, and has given their names and negative numbers to a computer, in order that she may deliver a picture of any one of them in a twinkling or two.

So I simply go down her list with my index finger, stopping at the name of each person I have met at least once, and, hey presto, my friends are Chinua Achebe, Richard Adams, Renata Adler, Ghingiz Aitmatov, Edward Albee, Nelson Algren, Lisa Alther, Robert Anderson, Maya Angelou, Hannah Arendt, Michael Arlen, John Ashbery, Isaac Asimov, Richard Bach, Russell Baker, James Baldwin, Marvin Barrett, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Jacques Barzun, Steve Becker, Saul Bellow, Ingrid Benjis, Robert Benton, Tom Berger, Charles Berlitz, Carl Bernstein, Michael Bessie, Ann Birstein, William Blatty, Heinrich Boll, Vance Bourjaily, Ray Bradbury, John Malcolm Brinnin, Jimmy Breslin, Harold Brodkey, C.D.B. Bryan, Art Buchwald, and, yes, William F. Buckley, Jr., William Burroughs, Lynn Caine, Erskine Cald-well, Hortense Calisher, Vincent Canby, Truman Capote, Schuyler Chapin, John Cheever, Marchette Chute, John Ciardi, Eleanor Clark, Ramsey Clark, Author C. Clarke, James Clavell, Arthur Cohen, William Cole, Dr. Alex Comfort, Richard Condon, Evan Connell, Frank Conroy, Malcolm Cowley, Harvey Cox, Robert Creighton, Michael Crichton, Judith Crist, John Crosby, Charlotte Curtis, Gwen Davis, Peter Davison, Peter de Vries, Borden Deal, Midge Decter, Lester Del Rey, Barbaralee Diamonstein, Monica Dickens, James Dickey, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, Betty Dodson, J. P. Donleavy, José Donoso, Rosalyn Drexler, John Dunne, Richard Eberhart, Leon Edel, Margareta Ekstrôm, Stanley Elkin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Elman, Amos Elon, Gloria Emerson, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Nora Ephron,
Edward Epstein, Jason Epstein, Willard Espy, Fred Exley, Oriana Fallaci, James T. Farrell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Frances Fitzgerald, Joe Flaherty, Janet Flanner, Thomas Fleming, Peter Forbath, William Price Fox, Gerald Frank, Michael Frayne, Eliot Fremont-Smith, Betty Friedan, Bruce Jay Friedman, Otto Friedrich, Max Frisch, Erich Fromm, Carlos Fuentes, William Gaddis, Nicholas Gage, Charles Gaines, John Kenneth Galbraith, Mavis Gallant, John Gardner, William Gass, Barbara Gelb, Dan Gerber, Brendan Gill, Penelope Gilliatt, Allen Ginsberg, Nikki Giovanni, Gail Godwin, William Goldman, Nadine Gordimer, Edward Gorey, Lois Gould, Gunter Grass, Francine du Plessix Gray, Adolph Green, Gael Greene, Germaine Gréer, Winston Groom, Alex Haley, Daniel Halpern, Pete Hamill, Elizabeth Hard-Wick, Curtis Harnack, Michael Harper, Jim Harrison, Molly Haskell, John Hawkes, Joseph Heller, Lillian Hellman, Nat Hentoff, John Hersey, Rust Hills, Warren Hinkle, Sandra Hochman, Townsend Hoopes, A. E. Hotchner, Barbara Howar, Jane Howard, William Inge, Clifford Irving, John Irving, Christopher Isherwood, Roman Jakobson, Jill Johnston, James Jones, Erica Jong, Pauline Kael, E. J. Kahn, Garson Kanin, Justin Kaplan, Sue Kaufman, Elia Kazan, Alfred Kazin, Murray Kempton, Galway Kinnell, Judy Klemesrud, John Knowles, Hans Koning, Jerzy Kosinski, Robert Kotlowitz, Joe Kraft, Paul Krassner, Stanley Kunitz, Lewis Lapham, Jack Leggett, Siegfried Lenz, John Leonard, Max Lerner, Doris Lessing, Ira Levin, Meyer Levin, Robert Jay Lifton, Jakov Lind, Loyd Little, Anita Loos, Anthony Lukas, Alison Lurie, Leonard Lyons, Peter Maas, Dwight MacDonald, John D. MacDonald, Ross Macdonald, Archibald Mac-Leish, Eugene McCarthy, Mary McCarthy, Tom McGuane, Marshall McLuhan, Larry McMurtry, Terrance McNally, John McPhee, James McPherson, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Marya Mannes, Peter Matthiessen, Armistead Maupín, Rollo May, Margaret Mead, William Meredith,
James Merrill, Arthur Miller, Jonathan Miller, Merle Miller, Kate Millett, James Mills, Jessica Mitford, Honor Moore, Eisa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Hans Morgenthau, Willie Morris, Wright Morris, Toni Morrison, Penelope Mortimer, Ray Mungo, Albert Murray, William Murray, V. S. Naipaul, Victor Navasky, Edwin Newman, Leslie Newman, Anais Nin, William A. Nolen, Marsha Norman, Edna O’Brien, Joyce Carol Oates, Sidney Offit (best friend!), Iris Owens, Amos Oz, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Gordon Parks, Jonathan Penner, S. J. Perelman, Eleanor Perry, Frank Perry, Jayne Anne Phillips, George Plimpton, Robert Pisig, Peter Prescott, V. S. Pritchett, Dotson Rader, Ishmael Reed, Rex Reed, Richard Reeves, James Reston, Jr., Adrienne Rich, Jill Robinson, Betty Rollins, Judith Rossner, Philip Roth, Mike Royko, Muriel Rukeyser, John Sack, William Safire, Carl Sagan, Harrison Salisbury, William Saroyan, Andrew Sarris, Nora Sayre, Dick Schaap, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Steve Schlesinger, Bud Schulberg, Ellen Schwamm, Barbara Seaman, Erich Segal, Anne Sexton, Ntozake Shange, Harvey Shapiro, Adam Shaw, Irwin Shaw, Wilfrid Sheed, Neil Sheehan, Susan Sheehan, Lynn Sherr, Alix Kates Shulman, Andre Simenov, John Simon, Isaac B. Singer, Hedrick Smith, W. D. Snodgrass, C. P. Snow, Barbara Probst Soloman, Susan Sontag, Terry Southern, Wole Soyinka, Stephen Spender, Benjamin Spock, Jean Stafford, Gloria Steinem, Shane Stevens, I. F. Stone, Irving Stone, Robert Stone, Dorothea Straus, Rose Styron, William Styron, Jacqueline Susann, Gay Tálese, James Tate, Peter Taylor, Studs Terkel, Hunter S. Thompson, Lionel Tiger, Hannah Tillich, Alvin Toffler, Lazlo Toth, Michael Tournier, Willard Trask, Calvin Trillin, Diana Trilling, Barbara Tuch-man, Kenneth Tynan, Amy Vanderbilt, Gore Vidal, Esther Vilar, Roman Vishniac, Mark Vonnegut, Andrei Voznesen-sky, Alice Walker, Joseph Wambaugh, Wayne Warga, Robert Penn Warren, Per Wästberg, Peter Weiss, Eudora Welty,
Glenway Wescott, Morris West, E. B. White, Theodore White, William Whitworth, Tom Wicker, Elie Wiesel, Richard Wilbur, Paul Wilkes, Joy Williams, Tennessee Williams, Garry Wills, Larry Woiwode, Tom Wolfe, Geoffrey Wolff, Herman Wouk, Christopher Wren, Charles Wright, James Wright, Lois Wyse, and Richard Yates.

Would you like an introduction?

•   •   •

What stories I must have to tell in Indianapolis about all these celebrities! Not really. Most writers are not quickwitted when they talk. Novelists in particular, as I have said before, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears. The good ones do.

Some people say that my friend Gore Vidal, who once suggested in an interview that I was the worst writer in the United States, is witty. I myself think he wants an awfiil lot of credit for wearing a three-piece suit.

•   •   •

After meeting all these people, I have only a single shapely anecdote to tell. It took place at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where I taught in the famed Writers’ Workshop in 1965 and 1966. My most famous colleagues were the novelists Vance Bourjaily, Nelson Algren, and Richard Yates, and the Chilean José Donoso, and the poets George Starbuck, James Tate, Marvin Bell, Donald Justice—and the poet-founder of the Workshop, of course, who is Paul Engle.

Among those students of ours who would really amount to something as writers by and by, incidentally, were Jane Barnes and John Casey and Bruce Dobler and Andre Dubus and Gail Godwin and John Irving and Jonathan Penner.

So Algren and Donoso and I were new arrivals, and we
went together to the first autumn meeting of the English department, against whose treasury our paychecks were drawn. We thought we should be there. Nobody had told us that lecturers in the Writers’ Workshop traditionally ignored all such bureaucratic, sesquipedalian sniveling and obfuscation.

So Algren and Donoso and I were going down a staircase afterward. Algren had come late, and so had sat separate from Donoso and me. He and Donoso had never met before, so I introduced them on the staircase, explaining to Algren that Donoso was from Chile, but a graduate of Princeton University.

Algren shook Donoso’s hand, but said nothing to him until we reached the bottom. He at last thought of something to say to a Chilean novelist: “It must be nice,” he said, “to come from a country that long and narrow.”

•   •   •

Are many novelists schizophrenic—at least marginally so? Do they hallucinate, seeing and hearing things that healthy people cannot sense? Do they turn disordered perceptions into gold in the literary marketplace? If writers are usefully crazy, what is the medical name for their disease? Or, if writers themselves aren’t lunatics, perhaps a lot of their ancestors were.

The psychiatric department of the University of Iowa’s hospital, it turns out, has wondered some about these questions, which have their roots in folklore. It has taken advantage of the large numbers of reputable writers who come to Iowa City, usually down on their luck, to teach at the Writers’ Workshop. So they have questioned us about our mental health and about that of our ancestors and siblings, too.

It is apparent to them, I am told, that we are not hallucinators, nor are many of us descended from those who saw
or heard things which weren’t really there. Overwhelmingly, we are depressed, and are descended from those who, psychologically speaking, spent more time than anyone in his or her right mind would want to spend in gloom.

•   •   •

I would add that novelists are not only unusually depressed, by/and large, but have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetics consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

•   •   •

I heard a Frenchman in a Madison Avenue bookstore say in English the other day that nobody in America had produced a book in forty years or more. I knew what he meant. He was talking about planetary literary treasures on the order of
Moby Dick
or
Huckleberry Finn
or
Leaves of Grass
or
Walden
, say. I had to agree with him. No book from this country during my lifetime (1922-?) has been in scale with
Ulysses
or
Remembrance of Things Past
or
The Tin Drum
or
One Hundred Years of Solitude
or
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch
.