fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Dreams From His Father

Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir, Christopher Buckley, Twelve, 272 pages

I have never met Christopher Buckley, nor, I think, his attractive socialite mother, Pat, but have a dim and distant memory of his father, William F. Buckley Jr., from when he came to visit my parents in England. It was a long time ago. I, a small angry boy, had lost my ping-pong ball and accused Buckley of concealing it inside his right cheek. Buckley was amused by this and told me that the anomalous lump on the side of his face had nothing to do with my lost ball. At breakfast he caused considerable mirth by turning down our “full English”—bacon, sausage, egg, tomato, and fried bread—in favor of novelty cashew butter that he had brought in a large plastic pot all the way from America.

William Buckley’s name has never been household in England because we couldn’t get National Review, his columns were not syndicated to British newspapers, and we never saw him on television. Only now, with the invention of Internet video, are we beginning to see the fun of a man who could threaten the likes of Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky with a smack in the “Goddam face” during political interviews on national television.


If Buckley had been known in England, he would not have been revered as an intellectual, but that is because the English do not go in for revering intellectuals. In fact we do our best not to be considered intellectual. In Britain, we think it odd that the Americans are prepared to devote acres of print to a seemingly trivial question like whether Christopher Hitchens has shifted an inch to the Right or the Left in his most recent statement on Iraq. This sort of thing means nothing to us, but it remains relevant to Americans who tend to view “Left” and “Right” not as hypostatic theoretical concepts but as measures of the exact position taken by prominent intellectuals on important issues of the day. It is this attitude that allows for the sort of statements that appear on William F. Buckley’s Wikipedia entry extolling him as “the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century” or “the first great ecumenical figure of American conservatism.” It is also this idea that allows his devoted son Christopher to get away with such bold statements as “If it hadn’t been for Buckley, there mightn’t have been Goldwater, and without Goldwater, there mightn’t have been Reagan.”

In 1960, my grandfather, Evelyn Waugh, was offered $5,000 a year by Buckley to contribute fortnightly articles to National Review. “That is higher pay by far than we have given before,” Buckley wrote to him, “higher than we have paid to Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, Whittaker Chambers…” Waugh believed Buckley’s magazine to be “a nest of Buchmanites” and accordingly declined: “Until you get much richer (which I hope will be soon) or I get much poorer (which I fear may be sooner) I am unable to accept it,” he wrote. Twenty-two years later, Buckley was hosting the TV series of Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited when a new book of Evelyn Waugh letters was published. It contained an epistle to a Labour politician called Tom Driberg in which Waugh asked for information on Buckley, who “has been showing me great and unsought attention lately. … Has he been supernally ‘guided’ to bore me? It would explain him.” This was picked up by Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle and other papers in Los Angeles and New York. Buckley did not take kindly to being teased and wrote furious letters to Caen, to Mark Amory (editor of Evelyn Waugh’s letters), and to my father.

I thought that might have marked the end of all civil relations between Buckleys and Waughs, so I was surprised, gratified, and flattered even to find my own book on the delicate relationships between the fathers and sons of the Waugh family used as a sort of leitmotif or relationship repair-kit in Christopher Buckley’s Losing Mum and Pup. On one of the last occasions that Christopher saw his father, the old man was clutching the copy of Fathers and Sons that his son had recently sent him—an emotional moment. I hope it didn’t kill him.


With wit, delicacy, warmth, and pride, Christopher draws a fascinating but not particularly intimate portrait of his father. Like many men with famous dads, he seems at times dwarfed by his father’s professional eminence. “Greatness of name in the father often times overwhelms the son,” Ben Jonson wrote. “They stand too near one another, the shadow kills the growth.” Christopher Buckley is prodigal of praise for William F. Buckley Jr., the eminent conservative, whom he describes many times as “great,” “a great man,” “a lion of the right,” “a conservative icon.” But what of his feelings for Buckley as a father? Where is “Pup” in all this? We don’t hear so much about that. Young Christopher is taken sailing, he sees his father pee against a cathedral, and he fails occasionally to delight his father with his books. There are expressions of love and pride but also a lingering resentment to which the reader is not given full access. We know the problem is there. While keeping vigil at his father’s bedside—this scene is always a comedy of vanities—Christopher wonders


[W]hether to bring up certain things and talk them out so that when the end came, nothing would be left unsaid between us. But each time I hovered on the brink I found myself shrugging and saying, Let it go. Perhaps it was another way of saying … I forgive you.


Forgive him for what? When my father, Auberon Waugh, published his autobiography in 1991 the story that grabbed the headlines was about his father greedily eating a whole plate-load of bananas in front of his starving son’s eyes and not giving so much as a teaspoon to his children. Evelyn was branded as a cruel father ever thereafter. I fear a similar fate for the paternal reputation of William Buckley, who will surely be remembered for a painful little story tucked into a footnote. When Christopher gave him a crate of expensive wine for his 75th birthday, Buckley asked, “How much was this?”


“It’s nice wine, Pup, Happy Birthday.”


“I asked you how much was it?”


“About seventy dollars a bottle.”


“Take it back. I wouldn’t enjoy it.”


Christopher’s relationship with his mother is cleaner cut. While he accepts that she was “universally acknowledged as one of the great ladies of New York,” “a beautiful delicate orchid,” “as bright as a diamond,” “one of the wittiest women I have ever known,” etc., we also learn that she was a compulsive liar, sometimes very drunk, capable (even on her deathbed) of behaving like the clawed monster from the movie “Alien,” and was generally as a mother pretty tiresome. There were occasions, Christopher admits, when he would “rather have supped with al-Qaeda in a guano-strewn cave” than with her.


It is all splendid stuff, and Christopher Buckley presents it with wit and sang-froid that are remarkable given the very short time between his parents’ deaths and the publication of this book. He is, of course, onto the richest of subjects, for all books written by authors about their parents seem to be good. It doesn’t matter if mothers and fathers receive glowing praise or damning judgment. The relationship between a child and his parents is never over until both parents and the child have died.

Christopher Buckley will discover in the years to come that his relationship with his deceased parents has changed, and his book will not seem right. My advice to him is to bask in the glow of this glittering little work and then to consider, quite seriously, writing another memoir of his parents in about 12 years time. 

__________________________________________

Alexander Waugh is the author of Fathers and Sons: the Autobiography of a Family and, more recently, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War.

The American Conservative welcomes letters to the editor.
Send letters to: letters@amconmag.com

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here