With the publication of Sam Tanenhaus’s long-awaited and disappointing doorstop bio of William F. Buckley, Jr., this is the season of Buckley. Not so much because of the bio itself as because of the reflections on the book by such friends and colleagues of Buckley as Charles Kesler, Neal Freeman, James Piereson, and Daniel Oliver.
By contrast, in its September 25 issue, the New York Review of Books has now published not one but two reviews of the Tanenhaus bio expressing the predictable leftist hostility to Buckley — the first by Mark Lilla and the second by Osita Nwanevu (to borrow John Updike’s mock New York Daily News headline referring to Henry Bech, “WHODAT???”).
Both reviews are behind the NYRB paywall. Last week the magazine notified readers of the two reviews by a September 2 email message that included links to six articles and two letters from its archive about the man whom Lilla calls “a counterintellectual, a protozoan ancestor of Stephen Miller and Christopher Rufo. A real stinker.” Here’s backatcha, Professor Lilla.
Buckley helped launch the careers of several talented writers who moved on from National Review professionally and politically. Among them are Garry Wills, the late John Leonard, and Joan Didion. Didion married the late John Gregory Dunne. Dunne reviewed Buckley’s Overdrive in “Happy Days Are Here Again” (NYRB, October 13, 1983). Last week’s September 2 NYRB email includes a link to Buckley’s letter to the editor responding to Dunne’s review. Didion’s marriage to Dunne becomes significant in a part of Buckley’s letter to the editor that is omitted below.
In Overdrive Buckley recounts a funny anecdote in which one of his columns inadvertently and erroneously shamed Pat Boone. It’s at pages 50-52 of the book. Buckley concludes the anecdote with a quote from the great literary critic Hugh Kenner (a friend of Buckley). “As Hugh Kenner tells me,” Buckley writes, “and as I never tire of repeating, ‘Newspapers are low-definitional instruments….” In part, Buckley’s letter to the editor proves Dunne’s review to be illustrative of Kenner’s proposition.
Something about Overdrive set left-wing reviewers off. Could it have been envy? In the paperback edition of the book Buckley included a new 30-page introduction in which “the author takes note of his tailgating critics,” as the cover put it. One such was Dunne, whose review Buckley refers to a few times and quotes briefly. In the introduction Dunne emerges as just another clown emerging from the clown car, but Buckley’s letter to the editor responding to Dunne is a masterpiece of wit, erudition, and derision. I wish Buckley had included it in one of the several compilations of his columns.
Dunne’s 1983 review of Overdrive is one of the six reviews noted and Buckley’s letter to the editor is one of the two letters linked by the magazine in last week’s email. Buckley’s letter is accessible along with Dunne’s brief response in “‘Overdrive’: An exchange.” Buckley notes in his introduction to the paperback edition of Overdrive that NYRB editor Robert Silvers had invited Buckley to respond to Dunne’s review. Silvers seems to have published Buckley’s response in its entirety. Here are the opening paragraphs.
* * * * *
To the Editors:
In his review of my book Overdrive [NYR, October 13] John Gregory Dunne says any number of interesting things but perhaps (space here is the dominant consideration) focus is most readily achieved by analyzing his summary of a single episode as extensively as necessary.
Here is what he wrote:
Mr. [Martin] Nolan and Mr. Buckley…engaged in a spirited correspondence (recorded in Overdrive) after the former took over as editor of the [Boston] Globe’s editorial and Op-Ed pages. Mr. Buckley did not think the Globe was running his column often enough (the result, he contends, of Mr. Nolan’s personal antagonism toward him) and Mr. Nolan did not think the columns were good enough, or as good as George Will’s. Mr. Buckley sharply complained and Mr. Nolan canceled his column…. Mr. Nolan asked the paper’s circulation manager if there had been any loss of circulation after Mr. Buckley’s departure to the Boston Herald American and the circulation manager said no. There the matter was dropped.
That which the above poses as having summarized reveals, I think, more about the reviewer than about the incident, let alone the author’s purposes in recounting it.
My letter to the editor-in-chief of the Boston Globe, reproduced in Overdrive, complained of the infrequency with which my column was being used in the Globe before the arrival of Mr. Nolan. It petitioned for a release from the contract my syndicate had with the Globe, stressing the improbability that the appointment of Mr. Nolan as editorial page director would favorably affect the column’s scheduling fortunes given that, in 1977, Mr. Nolan had told a reporter for The Washingtonian that he (who discovered George some time after I had appointed him Washington editor to National Review) thought the world of George Will—“he’s not a cheap-jack careerist like Buckley, who spent so much time trying to justify the Nixon administration.” I pointed out in my letter to the editor a half dozen public stands I had taken in opposition to Mr. Nixon, including my resignation from a commission to which he had appointed me; the organization of a group of dissenters from Nixon’s policies, which organization’s manifesto was published on the front page of The New York Times; my endorsement in the New Hampshire primary of President Nixon’s primary opponent; and a public call on Mr. Nixon to resign his office. “To suggest that I was a Nixon careerist under the circumstances would seem to reveal more about Mr. Nolan’s familiarity with the writers he speaks about, than about my record with respect to Mr. Nixon.”
What then happened was that I received a letter from Mr. Nolan in which he made no reference whatever to his published, four-year-old, comprehensive denunciation of my character. Instead he took the novel tack—novel in that none of the 300 other editors who publish my column had taken it—that I was simply writing too often to maintain my beautiful pristine standards and should consider reducing my volume to two columns per week.
Now in Overdrive, I examined a masochistic inner compulsion I occasionally yield to, and have once or twice led the protagonist of my novels also to succumb to: Namely the response to which the reaction is predictably lethal. So I wrote to Mr. Nolan: “I have not approached you with a request that you appraise my work. If you wish to evaluate it, I suggest you put in to review the seventh volume of my collected columns which Doubleday will bring out next year.”
This resulted (over the protests of the editor-in-chief, who however declined, as explained in my book, to exercise a veto) in my dismissal—as I knew it would do. Even so, I found the episode voluptuously satisfying, autobiographically revealing, and journalistically interesting. Mr. Dunne’s coda—that the circulation of the Globe did not dip on my removal—will strike anyone with professional knowledge of journalism as laughable. The circulation of the Globe would not dip with the removal of Doonesbury; though probably it would dip if William Shakespeare were to write for it, even if only twice a week.
My principal point here is that where I attempted to be revealing in my book, Mr. Dunne simply rewrote me into a drab…genteel…humdrum…conventionalism for which he then proceeded to take me to task….
There is much more leading to the hilarious conclusion of Buckley’s letter. As I say, it is a masterpiece. Read the whole thing along with John Gregory Dunne’s brief reply here.
