William F. Buckley - Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography

Copyright 2004 by William F. Buckley Jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Buckley, William F. (William Frank), 1925

Miles gone by: a literary autobiography / William F. Buckley Jr.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-59698-324-3 (ebook)

1. Buckley, William F. (William Frank), 1925 2. Novelists, American20th centuryBiography. 3. JournalistsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

PS3552.U344Z465 2004

818'.5409dc22

2004007170

First paperback edition published in 2005

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Table of Contents

FOR PATRICIA TAYLOR BUCKLEY

WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE

Contents

Where summer seemed gloriously endless

Learning about music, as a boy

Going off to school in England, 1938

Introducing my son, the speaker, 1986

A legacy of learned pleasure

The challenge of collecting affordable wines

A word about my father

And a word about my mother

A controversy revisited

Remarks at a fortieth reunion

A self-interview for a fiftieth-reunion yearbook

At Officer Candidate School in Fort Benning, Georgia

The resolve that led to a passage, MiamiBermudaAzoresGibraltar

A folksy cruise, aboard my schooner, Cyrano

A navigators thoughts, preoccupations, alarums

Misadventures on a charter sail

Coming upon a mystery boat at sea, in a storm

The prospect of a single run down the Videmanette in Rougemont, Switzerland

And how we learned about short skis

A bright undergraduate idea: buy an airplane!

An adventure in New Brunswick, featuring the only unpleasant person in the province

From Honolulu to New Guineaan account written for Life magazine

An inquiry: Why, after a lifetime at sea, give it all up?

On crossing paths with David Niven, Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Clare Boothe Luce, Tom Wolfe, Vladimir Horowitz, Roger Moore, Alistair Cooke, Princess Grace, and John Kenneth Galbraith

On working as colleagues with editors Willi Schlamm, Willmoore Kendall, Frank Meyer, James Burnham, and Priscilla Buckley...

... and with William A. Rusher, publisher

These are portraitsof people, primarily, but also of institutional presences in my life. One such is the protagonist of ten of my novels, Blackford Oakes. Another is National Review, the magazine I founded and edited for thirty-five years. And the third is my television program, Firing Line.

Underneath the gloom was tenderness and, even, a kind of gaiety

A friend to anyone who was down, even Roy Cohn

When book publishing was fun

The hour is late, and the printers messenger is already waiting...

First of all, I needed a protagonist

His geniality was a matter of decorum

Debating with Ronald Reagan over the Panama Canal

An auxiliary use of the computer, wonderful

Should discouraging the use of unusual words be a national mandate?

If Trollope had had a word processor, would he have written five times as much?

A lifetime, traveling from Peking to Moscow

There is never a convenient time for a vacation

Does this thing really work?

As seen under full sail

Did I really promise to do that?

Fifty years on the lecture circuit

A nine-hour dive, round trip

Sailing, with others at the helm, to Pitcairn and Easter Islands

My adventure in politics at the seedling level

Sort of

Recall that historian Harold Nicolson said uninteresting people are... interesting

Are they a refuge? How to defend them?

The end of the line, without complaint

T he design of this book is to bring together material I have written over fifty years, with an autobiography in mind.

I have published eight collections, most recently Happy Days Were Here Again, in 1993. In these, I reproduced material from articles, books, and newspaper columns. About one-half of what appeared in those volumes originated as columns, in which the first person is not used (or used only irregularly). And the articles and essays were, for the most part, nonpersonal in address. This time around, probably the final time around, I bring together only scenes and essays in which I figure directly. What I have attempted is in the nature of a narrative survey of my life, at work and play. There are personal experiences, challenges and sorties, professional inquiries, and memories beginning in childhood. Everything in this book puts me in play, sometimes actively, sometimes only in a passive way, but always there.

There would be no point in contriving an autobiography from scratch. Why? I have already written about the events and the people that have shaped my life; any new account would simply paraphrase these. I hope that this volume achieves the purpose, and that it will give pleasure.

In 1923, after years spent abroad in Mexico and in Europe, my father bought a house, called Great Elm, in Sharon, Connecticut, and moved his family there. I was born in 1925, the sixth child.

O utdoors it was very very still, and from our bedroom we could hear the crickets and see the fireflies. I opined to my sister Trish, age twelve, that when the wind dies and silence ensues, fireflies acquire a voice, and it is then that they chirp out their joys for the benefit of the nightly company, visible and invisible.

Why do they care if its quiet outside?

I informed her solemnly that it was well known to adults that fireflies do not like the wind, as it interferes with their movements. Inasmuch as I was thirteen and omniscient, my explanation was accepted.

I just hope they bite all of them, she said. Her reference was to our five older siblings, whose shouts and yells we could hear through the chorus of crickets. They were still out there at the swimming pool playing games, one whole hour past bedtime for the four of us under fourteen. I consoled her. I reminded her that I had invited