The last word: My father, the icon

To the end, William F. Buckley was recklessly willful and effortlessly eloquent. During his final days, writes son Christopher Buckley, the performance was both maddening and inspiring.

Getting from the house to his garage study, a distance of about 50 yards, became difficult for Pup in the months following Mum’s death, in 2007. Despite my insistence to the staff at his house that he must not be allowed to get behind the wheel of a vehicle, he had gotten into his Pontiac minivan one day and driven to the study himself. Later, while returning, he had decided it was too irksome to execute a three-point turn and so had backed up the van to the house, slamming into an ancient apple tree, resulting in $3,000 damage. He emerged unscathed, luckily, inasmuch as he disdained seat belts, even on long drives. "Please, Pup," I would plead. "Among other things, it’s the law. I’ll get a ticket if we’re stopped." His answer, delivered with a dismissive snort: "We won’t get stopped."

Pup’s aloofness in the matter of seat belts and stop signs and speed limits and other nuisances had long puzzled me, in a bemused sort of way. As his driving came more to resemble Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland, my bemusement diminished. One day Aunt Carol—Pup’s youngest sister—and I were chatting. Being the 10th and last of my grandparents’ children, Carol has a wry and perceptive take on her siblings. "Oh," she said with her beguiling double-dimpled smile, "don’t you understand? The rules don’t apply to him." I chuckled and filed it away under “Pup, Mysteries of.” When he published his umpteenth book, Miles Gone By, a collection of autobiographical pieces, I came across something he had written that unlocked it for me, while in the process making me marvel that he had survived as long as he had.

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It was an article he’d written about owning an airplane when he was at Yale. It was called an Ercoupe. He and five classmates had bought it jointly. One day, one of Pup’s friends, a pilot veteran of World War II, bemoaned to him that he badly wanted to see his girlfriend in Boston but had no way of getting there. Pup, ever the gallant, said, “Never fear, I shall fly you to Boston!” He had at this point in his flying career exactly one and a half hours of cockpit time. He had never soloed. So he and his friend flew to Boston, the friend doing the flying, which left Pup at Boston Airport all alone and now having to get the plane back to New Haven. I was a licensed pilot in my youth, and I simply shudder to relate the rest of this story.

Pup revs up the Ercoupe for the return flight and takes off, at which point he notices that, gee, it’s getting kind of dark. He’s neglected to factor in last night’s switch from Daylight Savings to Eastern Standard Time. This being way before GPS, he navigates back toward New Haven in the gloaming by descending to 100 feet and following the train tracks. This somewhat basic mode of navigation begins to fail him when it turns pitch-black. The situation now seriously deteriorating, he makes out—thank God—the beacon of the New London airport. He manages to set the plane down there. He then hitchhikes back to New Haven and goes straight to the Fence Club bar to steady his nerves and share his exploits. Next day, his flight instructor, upon learning of the episode, goes completely ballistic.

I’d been unaware of this tale of—what should one call it?—derring-do until I read his piece. Its moral: A man who would think nothing of flying a plane solo from Boston to New Haven, having had a total of one and a half hours of—well, put it this way, this is not a man who is going to waste a lot of time in life on seat belts, stop signs, or worrying about going for a cocktail sail in a northeast gale. Yet his rear-on collision with the ancient apple tree turned out to be impactful—as it were—not only on the minivan but on him. After that, he consented to be chauffeured the 50 yards to and from his study.

One day, two weeks after his return from the hospital, still ailing badly but bored witless by inertia, he determined to make it to the study and recommence work on his memoir about Barry Goldwater. This was valiant. Here he could barely breathe, could barely stand up, could barely speak. Into the bargain, it was blowing a summer gale. We were both drenched to the skin by the time I got him situated in the cockpit of his study. I approached him with the nose oxygen tube. He made a face. We had had, oh, 50 discussions about this.

"Let’s put in your oxygen tube, okay?"

"What good would that do?"

"Well, it’s oxygen, you know, and since you’re having a hard time breathing—"

"I don’t see what good it does."

[Looping the tubes around his ears and inserting the end into his nostrils.] "Well, can’t be doing any harm, shouldn’t think ..."

He fired up his computer. He hunched unsteadily over his keyboard. I hovered behind, ready to catch him if he pitched forward.

"I’m going to have to dictate to you."

"I’m a little rusty at WordStar, Pup. It’s been a quarter-century." (Pup was probably the only human left on the planet who still used that word processing system.)

So he stood, holding on to the edge of his desk for support, and began to dictate the last chapter.

The years ahead were, by the standards of Barry Goldwater, unhurried. ...

I struggled to keep up. I’m a fairly fast touch typist, but WordStar, with its jillion complex key commands, made me feel as if I were at the controls of a steam locomotive.

What amazed me, and still does now, a year later, on reading the final pages in the published Goldwater book, was how fluent it was. I have beside me the just-published book, and rereading the final chapter, I find it remarkably little changed from what issued from Pup’s oxygen-deprived blue lips that rainy morning in July. It was as if his mind were a still brightly burning fire deep within the wreckage of his body. He made hardly any self-corrections as he spoke. The words came out punctuated and paragraphed. And quickly. My fingers scuttled across the keyboard like crabs. In less than 10 minutes, we were on the last paragraph of the last book he would write:

And that was that. No one else comes to mind who sustained for so long a comparable reputation for candor and courage. Over the years, if active in the political community, one comes across rejected aspirants for the presidency. But even in that rare company, Goldwater, whether initiating a call from the South Pole to my wife or puddle-jumping the Grand Canyon for his friends, was unique, and will forever remain so.

My eyes misted up, typing that. I said, “It’s beautiful, Pup.”

I searched the menu for the document save function. I somehow located the right sequence of keys and pressed them, then held my breath until I saw the chapter file name appear on the screen.

“Let’s print it,” Pup said. Here I was stymied. “I’ll do it.” He sat down at the keyboard and hit a few keys. “Oh, shee-it.” Pup had a way of intensifying the S-word, like one of his complex jazz piano chords.

“It’s not here,” he said.

My heart sank.

“It was there,” I said.

“Well, it’s not here now.”

We searched. He phoned Jaime, his computer factotum.

“We’ll have to start over,” Pup said to me, sighing.

After some brisk recrimination, a deal was struck. I would retake dictation on the lost coda on the condition that it be on my Mac laptop. I went to fetch it, grumblingly, in the wet.

Pup redictated the chapter, practically verbatim. When we went over it the next day, there was little it needed other than a comma here and a word there. I was, for the thousandth time in my life, in awe of him.

I remember, as a child, watching him in the car, with his portable blue Olivetti Lettera 32 propped on his knees, pounding out a deadline column. Between 1962 and 2008, he wrote some 5,600 of these. Assembled into book form, they would fill 45 volumes. Add that to his 50 published books and you have 95. This is, I reflect as a 55-year-old author of only 13 books, a humbling tally.

I was always amazed, to use that word again, at how quickly he wrote. He could dash off a 700-word column in five minutes, about the length of time it took to type that many words. I would brag to people about how quickly my old man could write one of his columns, until one day he gently admonished me: “People might get the impression I don’t give them enough thought, and I do,” he said. He loved to relate a self-deflating anecdote of how he once told Gene Shalit, the extravagantly mustachioed and witty NBC-TV personality, that he had written a particular column in under five minutes. Shalit replied, “Yeah, I read that one.”

When I was starting out as a professional writer myself, my awe of his speed began to mix with a certain amount of envy. For me, the words usually flowed at the speed of a glacier. Pup went every winter to Switzerland to write his books and would return six weeks later with a more or less complete manuscript. I won’t make the posthumous claim for him that all his books are destined for literary immortality, but among those 50 are some real jewels, written in one and a half months—of part-time writing days.

In Switzerland, his routine was to spend mornings on correspondence and National Review and column writing, then lunch with Ken Galbraith or David Niven or some exiled European king or czar, have a glass or two of Fendant or Dôle wine, ski a few runs, then be back at his desk by 4 and write his book until 7. It took me the better part of a year—of eight-, 10-, 14-hour days, with no time off for hobnobbing with the Gstaad gratin—to crank out my first book. While I was writing it, Pup and Mum embarked on a 14-day trip on a cruise ship from Rio to Panama. His plan was to start writing one of his sailing books on the voyage. One midnight, lone and dreary, while I rewrote, glum and weary, wondering if it was too late to apply to law school, my phone rang. It was the ship-to-shore operator, a call from Mr. Buckley. My pulse quickened. In those days, long-distance ship-to-shore calls were generally of a dire nature.

"Guess what I did today? I finished my book! How’s yours coming? Ho, ho, ho!" He had written his in 12 days.

From the book Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley. ©2009 by Christopher Taylor Buckley. Used by permission of Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, New York, N.Y. All rights reserved.