‘Pup was once asked in a published interview if he were aware that roughly 10 percent of the U.S. male population is homosexual.
“If that’s the case then I’ve met them all.”’
That’s perhaps the sweetest meat from Christopher’s memoir Losing Mum and Pup, which recounts the death of his parents William F. and Patricia T. Buckley. Mr. Buckley (“Pup”) was referring to his fashion-plate wife’s predilection for men who knew from watered silk and chiffon.
The book is an often entertaining, often sad, perhaps not quite worth the $24 asking price description of what it is like to be the only child of two strenuously larger than life parents. I knew plenty about Bill, though I learned quite a bit more, but knew nothing about Pat, who appears to have been a standard-issue (not in her own eyes, of course) grande dame with a never-resisted compulsion to tell everyone she met exactly what was wrong with them. “And they never said ‘thank you’!”
There’s no question but that William F. Buckley had a brilliant career, but I never much cared for him. Way back in the Fifties, his fledgling National Review was a sinkhole of hysterical anti-communism and “refined” racism:
“The central question that emerges…is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”—William F. Buckley, National Review, August 24, 1957
Buckley and the rest of the right wing yowled like cats when the Civil Rights movement began its civil disobedience tactics, but happily granted southern whites the right to “take such measures as are necessary” to deny blacks the most basic prerequisites of citizenship. It wasn’t until the Sixties, when racism became seriously unchic on his beloved Upper East Side, that Buckley stopped rooting for the Bull Connors of the world. Even into the Nineties, his magazine continued to publish pieces by southern troglodytes asserting that Lincoln was not only the first Nazi, but the worst Nazi.
Buckley truly detested communism, but when he realized that the monster was actually going to die, he was terrified. Sure, the commies were terrible, but they did bring in the votes! Buckley wrote wild, desperate columns during those times, accusing the Joint Chiefs of Staff of treason because they would not stand up to the Soviets—that is, because they recognized that America’s fabled enemy was falling to pieces before our very eyes.
Buckley was “only” 65 when the Cold War ended, but he seemed much older. Thanks to both liberal exhaustion and the political mastery of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the Right won victories beyond their wildest dreams in the Eighties, but they also suffered unimaginable defeats. Starting out in the Fifties, Buckley surely could not have believed that, forty years later, both communism and Catholicism would disappear in Europe. Armageddon had come, and gone, not with a bang but a whimper, and afterwards nothing quite seemed the same.
Buckley was most serious, and least appealing, to me in his favored role of Catholic apologist. The best I can say of him was that he was less prissy than Cardinal Newman and less fatuous than G.K. Chesterton, which is damn faint praise indeed.
As his son Christopher tells, Buckley drove himself hard physically. He was an avid, even compulsive sailor. The weather could never be bad enough to keep him on shore. Playing it safe was so middle-class. A gentleman, given the choice between death and embourgeoisement, always chooses death, and Buckley surely risked both his own life and that of others on a number of occasions.
Like many important men, Buckley relied heavily on drugs to maintain his “natural” ebullience as he aged, self-medicating with abandon, cranking himself up with nicotine, caffeine, and Ritalin and pulling himself down with alcohol and Stilnox. Both he and his wife suffered cruelly from emphysema before their deaths, she from 65 years of chain-smoking and he from a lifetime of inhaling cigars. After Pat’s death, a bitter, helpless Buckley could only wish that tobacco had been banned from America.
It’s intriguing to learn that the elegant Mr. Buckley relied entirely on his wife to dress him. According to his son, Buckley simply had no interest in clothes and would have padded around in shapeless blue suits without Pat to keep an eye on him.
Despite Christopher’s unstinting praise, I didn’t like Pat at all, though it must be said her life wasn’t always fun. The son of a rich man, Buckley managed to lose all of his money in the stock market by the mid-Fifties, when it was awfully hard to lose money in the stock market, and the glamorous Pat did a lot more women’s work than she might have expected. On the Buckley yacht, for example, she might end up below decks doing women’s work—scrubbing out the head—while the men were topside doing men’s work—enjoying cocktails. In their early years, the Buckleys’ had a fabulous ski chalet in Switzerland, but the whole thing burned down, taking a lot of Pat’s jewelry with it. Later, she broke her leg skiing so severely that she was on crutches for two years.
Unsurprisingly, Christopher doesn’t ask himself why his Catholic father, one of ten children, had only one. There are all sorts of reasons, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Pat intended to end up like Jackie Kennedy rather than Rose. Did they rely on birth control? Abstinence? I guess those are questions meant not to be asked.
Afterwords
A healthy chunk of Losing Mum and Pup may be found here.
