Cruising Speed, by William F. Buckley Jr., New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971. 257 pp. $6.95.
The idea of this book, “a public journal devoted to one’s own thoughts and deeds over a single week,” came to the author, he tells us, while sitting in a church which had been converted into a “modish, superhopped-up discoteque, psychedelic lights, blaring music, the dance floor crowded with homosexuals, and lesbians and heteros.” This was following a small, elegant dinner party to which Buckley and his wife had been invited by Truman Capote; it was the Saturday night, as it turned out, of the week he chose to describe in the present book. The week begins with the loading of the car with dogs, bags, flowers, etc. preparatory to going back to New York from a weekend in the country, and ends the following Sunday evening flying to Washington in the CBS jet of Dr. Frank Stanton to take part, the next day, in the monthly meeting of the United States Advisory Commission on Information, of which Buckley is a member.
The reader soon discovers that a week in the life of William F. Buckley Jr., which he describes with a certain degree of amused detachment, is filled with almost frantic activity. Thcre are two debates, one with Ramsay Clark at the annual meeting of the Manufacturers Association and one with Dick Gregory at the University of Bridgeport; an hour of exercising and boxing at the Police Academy; the taping of his weekly television show, which involves not only putting it on, but introducing the three participants, the presidents of two Catholic colleges and the Assistant United States Attorney General; writing his newspaper column, which appears three times every week; dealing with an enormous correspondence-he receives some 600 letters a week and answers most of them, he tells us; editing his magazine, which included lunch, an editorial meeting, dinner and an evening with his editors afterward at the Fillmore East, a center for Rock music; a meeting of the directors of his chain r?f radio stations-to mention only some of the activities of a Buckley week. Besides all this there is a stream of callers which is reminiscent of nothing so much as the first act of Rosenkavalier, when the chamberlain comes into the boudoir of the Marschallin to announce the visitors and suppliants of the morning-the notary, the steward, the cook, a singer with a flutist, plus “das gewohnliche Bagagi,” consisting of a war widow with her three orphaned daughters, an Italian intrigant offering his services, a bird peddler, etc. A Buckley morning may include a visit from Archduke Otto of Habsburg, an unidentified Social-Democrat of “impeccable breeding and purpose,” his accountant, a former Hungarian who is “the most prolific book writer since Georges Simenon,” a Hippy student from the University of Pittsburgh who wishes to discuss the effects of marijuana, and, as it turned out, was “stoned” at the time of his visit, and so it goes.
There is more to Cruising Speed, however, than a somewhat frothy account of a week in the life of a colorful, highly successful public figure who has devoted himself to defending and popularizing a minority position, conservatism. It includes accounts of incidents from the past which the present week has brought to mind, letters to and from the author, and not a little introspection. A figure as prominent and conspicuous as Buckley who has expressed himself as emphatically and forthrightly as he has attracts a good deal of lightning, which makes the letters included in the book of the highest interest, since they reveal some of the forces and counterforces in present day society. The need to write a letter to the editor of the Yale News recalls the lecture, which is reprinted in full, given at Yale a week or two before, as well as other incidents associated with it, including the account in the Yale News which brought the whole episode into the book. A letter from a student asking Buckley to give a lecture reminds him of an earlier lecture at Princeton and of an incident while giving the Commencement Address at the University of California at Riverside. These reminiscences, told with Buckley’s honesty, eye for the telling detail and sense for the dramatic, plus the account of the debate at the University of Bridgeport with Dick Gregory, are not only amusing, but tell us more about the present state of the academy than a dozen formal reports.
A book devoted to the “thoughts and deeds” even of a single week reveals much about the writer himself, and this, perhaps, is the most interesting aspect of Cruising Speed, since Buckley is a complex, interesting man, and very much a product of our time and country. While he has identified himself completely with the opposition, his opposition is not to the spirit of the time, as was that of T. S. Eliot or Wyndham Lewis, but to its ruling orthodoxy, and that, one cannot help but feel, more in its political and social manifestations than in its fundamental position. Buckley would be the first to admit that he is not a philosopher, that he has not “dug deeper the foundations of American conservatism,’’ as he puts it, but he has made the conservative position far more effective than it would have been without him. He has served as a rallying point, particularly of the student generation (they are not all followers of Eugene McCarthy or Ted Kennedy), he has given the opposition confidence and style, and he has been particularly useful, with his wit and genius for the perfect phrase, in pin-pointing the more blatant absurdities and posturings of the liberals. In telling an amusing story about his family’s elderly Cuban cook, for example, and her need for a weapon, he remarks that “Eudosia armed with blank cartridges is more formidable than Eugene McCarthy with The Bomb,” and in describing the various “collective fancies” liberalism went through during the postwar period, he speaks of the “paunchy liberalism of the fihies, dressed up by the belletristic politics of Adlai Stevenson.” Who could put it better, or more succinctly?
Cruising Speed is an honest book, which makes no pretense to be more than it is, a week in the life of a man who, as he himself puts it, is “grooved in with the vibrations of modern life.” It gives us a picture of a man who has taken all that his time has to offer and enjoyed it to the full, without sham or apology, and who has won the acceptance and respect of the ruling liberal elite without in any way compromising his own position. One might wish that he would slow down a little and take the time to think more and to write more carefully -what possible meaning can one ascribe to such a Buckleyism as, for example, “the epistemological liberalism of John Stuart Mill”?-but Bill Buckley is a whole person, and we are glad to take him as he is, “big words” and all.