Losing Mum and Pup (26 page)

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Christopher Buckley is the author of fourteen books, including
Thank You for Smoking
and
Supreme Courtship.
He is editor at large of ForbesLife magazine and writes the “What Fresh Hell” blog for The Daily Beast. He has lectured in
sixty-eight cities, for reasons that elude him, but can be contacted via
greatertalent.com
.

*
I recall thinking, at the time, that April 14 was also the day the
Titanic
hit the iceberg. Clearly, some negative energy hangs over the date.

*
Someone once calculated that enough people claimed to have served aboard Lieutenant (JG) Kennedy’s boat to man an aircraft carrier.

*
TK is journalist shorthand for information “to come.”

†
On Election Day, when my father ran for mayor of New York.

*
H. L. Mencken, to whose writings Pup introduced me, was proudly atheist but wrote that “If I am wrong, I will square myself when confronted in afterlife by the apostles with the simple apology, ‘Gentlemen, I was wrong.’”

†
Campion,
performed at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, 1987.

††
God Is My Broker,
coauthored with my college pal John Tierney.

*
In the summer of 2008, while revising this book, my friend Rust Hills, the writer and editor, died in Belfast, Maine. I accompanied his widow to the funeral home there to make arrangements. Total cost of cremating Rust: $800. There was no list of “heavily regulated” itemizations. Amusing or… outrageous? Why should it cost almost ten times more to cremate someone in suburban Connecticut than it does in coastal Maine? I called my wife after and said, “When I start to fail, get me to Belfast.”

*
This fetish could be carried to sometimes hurtful extremes. On his seventy-fifth birthday, I presented him with a trophy case of wine. In front of everyone at the table, he grimaced and said: “How much was this?” I demurred, saying, “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.” Happy birthday!

*
My parents were wealthy by any standard, but not (as Mum used to put it) “rich-rich.” Pup had lost his entire patrimony in the stock market by the mid-1950s; every penny thereafter he earned the old-fashioned way, through ceaseless lectures, fifty-five books, TV, his syndicated column. Mum inherited a yearly income from her father’s estate in the mid-1960s, but it was not nearly sufficient to sustain their lifestyle.

*
Pitts was the only one of ten Buckley children not to marry and have children, yet I think in some ways she had more children than all her siblings put together.

*
It’s interesting, in retrospect, how many Republican and conservative operatives/figures were gay—Marvin, Terry Dolan, Arthur Finkelstein, Roy Cohn, Bob Bauman—almost all of them distinguished by an aggressive, one might even say combative, style.

*
An inspired eulogy, on the other hand, can be a transcendental experience. The “Funeral Blues” recitation in
Four Weddings and a Funeral
(“He was my North, my South, my East and West”) created a W. H. Auden revival and a spike in sales of the poet’s anthologies. Come to think of it, arguably the most famous soliloquy in all Shakespeare is a eulogy beginning “Friends, Romans, countrymen…”

*
John Simon, the theater critic and author.

*
I’ve cleaned up the typos once again and will do so with all of them, at least the ones I can decipher.

*
Spanish, as you’ve probably guessed, for kidneys.

*
His beloved peanut-butter-and-bacon sandwiches. They became very popular with the nursing staff.

*
WFB books (1971 and 1984), each about a single week in his life, in which he seemed to pack more than most people do in a lifetime. David Brooks’s savage parody of the latter book, in a University of Chicago student publication, led Pup to offer him his first job; the rest is history.

*
From Secretary of State Kissinger’s memo to President Ford: “Solzhenitsyn is a notable writer, but his political views are an embarrassment even to his fellow dissidents…. Not only would a meeting with the president offend the Soviets, but it would raise some controversy about Solzhenitsyn’s view of the United States and its allies.”

†
In the play and movie
Amadeus,
the Austro-Hungarian emperor says something similar when he’s confronted with an unpleasant fact: “Well, there it is.” He manages it with a wonderful, self-exculpatory shrug of the shoulders, intending to convey an ironic yet humble awareness of his powerlessness, despite—of course—being emperor of half of Europe.

*
Our nickname for Ritalin. Giving a drug a cute diminutive name somehow domesticates it, though I don’t know if that would be possible with, say, methamphetamine. Methy-weth? Driving down a road in rural Maine, my son, Conor, remarked to me that the neighborhood had become “kind of meth-labby.”

*
Twain was in many ways a doting father, but as his avatar Hal Holbrook observes, “I think the fun would have had to go
his
way.” Twain’s contemporary Herman Melville, on the other hand, did shrug and go with the flow, and what’s more, left us Bartleby, the Scrivener (“I would prefer not to”), the most famous recalcitrant in literature.

†
How very weird and ironic that the author of this excellent sentiment should have endured one of the worst accidents that could befall an author, as he did when John Stuart Mill’s absentminded parlor maid tossed volume 1 of his manuscript of
The French Revolution
into the fireplace after Carlyle dozed off in the parlor, awaiting his friend’s return.

*
Title gleefully stolen from the wonderful book by Daniel and David Hays, the first father-son team to sail around Cape Horn. (What
were
they thinking?) Pup reviewed the book for
The New York Times,
and it became a big best seller.

*
The book ends with an anecdote in which I, age twelve at the time, figure. Pup had gotten the details a bit wrong, and I had e-mailed him from Zermatt the correct version. He declined it, saying, “I like my version better.” I thought to say, “Pup, it’s not a question of liking your version better, but of using the accurate version,” but then thought,
Never mind.

*
He wrote, all in all, fifty-six books; half a dozen of those were collections of columns and magazine work.

†
Tom Wolfe once wrote a wonderful essay in
Esquire
in which he said that his favorite author, Balzac, wrote ninety novels; moreover, that Wolfe was convinced his idol was able to accomplish this feat because he lived before the advent of labor and time-saving devices.

*
Atlantic High.
[1982]

*
Actor and theatrical and film director. He directed, among many other movies,
Becket
.

†
I suspect he actually said, “Shithead.”

*
As Winston Churchill said, “Never ever, ever, ever give up.”

*
It sure beat the you-know-what out of the annual retreats I’d experienced at boarding school, where they would bring in army drill instructor–type priests who yelled at us that whacking off to
Playboy
centerfolds was a guarantee of going to hell and that for some of us, it might already be too late.

*
Pup’s mother’s maiden name was Steiner. Her grandfather, a boot maker, had immigrated to New Orleans from the canton of St. Gallen.

*
Ironic and sad to reflect that Wilde himself would die in Paris, in wretched circumstances, five years after writing that line.

†
Her headstone contains one of the loveliest inscriptions I know:
Elle est venue, elle a sourit, elle est parti.
(She came, she smiled, she left.)

*
U.S. senator from New York, 1971–1977; justice, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, 1985–1996.

*
I suppose these days she would be an MILF, but I am not going to go there.

*
Her father, Austin, a great bear of a man at six feet five and I don’t know how many pounds, had always been a sharp dresser. “One time,” she remembered, “the
Province
or the
Sun
ran a picture of Daddy on the front page and the caption underneath said, ‘Sartorial Gem.’ He was in such a rage that he went out to the farm and stayed there for three days.”

*
The Washington Monument is 555 feet high. That’s a lot of linear feet.

*
I’ll leave it to Sam Tanenhaus to give the full details, but suffice it here to say that Vidal and WFB had clashed since the 1950s. Then, as commentators for ABC News during the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, they
really
clashed, in an exchange that makes today’s shout-fests on cable TV sound like kindergarten hissy-fits over spilt milk. Cleaning out my father’s study after he died, I came across several long tons of files labeled “Vidal Legal.” Well, it’s a long story.

*
Pup was quite open about his lack of glorious military achievement. Under the category “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” he would tell, with vast amusement, of his greatest accomplishment: transporting one thousand Mexican-American recruits from San Antonio to San Luis Obispo. “My primary job was to keep them from getting venereal disease. And the only way to do it was, whenever the train stopped, to tell them that we would only be there for five minutes. That way they didn’t have time to find the nearest bordello and get gonorrhea.”

*
You leave it at Town Hall for tax purposes. Offspring of Greatest Generation, take note.

*
Private joke, but irresistible. I picked the readings.

*
Cathedral, New York City.

†
Monsignor Eugene Clark, a former rector of Saint Patrick’s, once quoted to me a line of Hillaire Belloc’s about the Church: “What can one say of an institution ruled by eight hundred Italian clergymen?”

*
At a certain point, one begins—despite one’s rational inclinations not to—to keep track of whom you hear from and whom you don’t. My Irish friend Monie Begley says, “You never remember who came to the funeral, but you never forget who didn’t.” McCain’s lack of any gesture at all did, I confess, smart a bit. It also left me to wonder about his organizational skills. At the most basic level, it was pretty poor staff work. But I may be oversensitive, having worked for George H. W. Bush, author of a hundred thousand handwritten notes, who routinely went out of his way to make the gracious gesture. When my mother died, I got a handwritten condolence letter from Al Gore, whom I’d met once, and only fleetingly, and who owed me absolutely nothing. Go figure.

*
Almost all the obituaries quoted his famous line:
Asked what he would do if he won, Buckley replied, “Demand a recount.”