Christopher Buckley, toward whose writing I feel an ungenerous ambivalence -it is too flip for its subject, often, but will then wreck its humor with a dark and arresting turn of phrase- describing his father’s decline and death.
It will come as no surprise that I am not particularly interested in the politics of the Buckleys; so far as I am concerned, the virulence with which William F. Buckley’s death was greeted in some quarters was quite unjustifiable given that he was a writer and thinker who had the right to his opinions and their assertion. He harmed no one, or if he did we must be prepared to say that expressing certain ideas is harmful or immoral, a concept I reject.
What interests me about this piece is not the minimal political content but the flat honestly of the son’s writing, an honesty which seems alternately brave or foolish. Buckley is either courageous for admitting into evidence the pettiness we can feel in the midst of grief or he is unaware of how hard it is for people to accept that such feelings are common, how likely they are to judge him unfairly for putting them to paper.
Throughout, he refers to scenes from within his family that have the chill of truth to them: the strange, un-diagnosable pathologies of mendacity and aloofness in his parents, the sanctimonious and cruel letters from the son, the ordinary, simple, overwhelming feelings beneath all this cruft: the family’s bleeding heart beneath its machinery.
And of course there is the irreducible problem of death, which has appeared in the lives of my friends this week even as my own father emerges from the hospital. I have not called him or seen him; we didn’t discuss his surgery in advance; I didn’t know until it was over; and I wonder if we are close, or not close, or fine. Buckley’s father wrote of his last novel, “This one didn’t work for me. Sorry.” Sometimes I get similarly short messages from my father suggesting that I not write what I do, or that I write in another manner he prefers. Is this honesty the right of the aging, who don’t want to waste words lying as time shortens? Are hurt feelings something they cannot remember, or do they see that something more important than feelings is at stake?
Many years ago, I was advised to remember when considering ‘collateral damage’ in war that every human has a mother, which is to say that everyone we might consider a statistically acceptable, materially expendable unit of the species is, for someone, the most important person in the entire world. It’s as well to think of children and their parents, I think, and to remember that the interiority of every family is virtually impenetrable, immune to meaningful analysis except by particularly good writing. Recalling such things can stay our reductive judgement, our tendency to dismiss, deride, or despise others struggling through the same life we lead.
(Tolstoy’s line that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is well-illustrated -as if illustration beyond our experience were needed- by the contrast between the Buckleys and the Baldwins, the latter described in strange detail and with questionable conclusions in an occasionally funny article by Caitlynn Flanagan at The Atlantic).
