But Enough About You: Essays (29 page)

If in the end
Gulag
is too much for Western eyes and one looks up from its stark pages, wondering if there’s something a bit less bleak on TV, pause and think on that “many-throated groan, the dying whisper of millions” and reflect not only on our blessings but on the nobility of the man who came through hellfire to tell the story.

—
National Review
, September 2008

My father, the late William F. Buckley, Jr., had a bit of history with the now-late Gore Vidal. In what might be the quintessential unscripted TV exchange, Vidal called him a “crypto-Nazi.” WFB returned the compliment by calling him a “queer” and threatening to sock him. This amid the tear gas and rioting of the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention.

Harold Hayes, the legendary editor of
Esquire
, asked both gents to write about the episode. Their articles are included in the anthology
Smiling Through the Apocalypse
and are worth reading. Hayes transgressed on the arrangement whereby each had mutual right of veto over items in the other’s essay, resulting in a long lawsuit by WFB against
Esquire
, and an ultimately victorious out-of-court settlement. When WFB died in 2008, I found in his study—more cluttered than King Tut’s tomb—a file cabinet bursting to the seams labeled “Vidal Legal.” I heaved it into the Dumpster and felt lighter.

WFB’s body was still warm (I exaggerate only slightly) when Vidal rendered his public obsequies: “RIP WFB—in hell.” What a thorny wreath indeed he laid on Pup’s grave. He called him “a world-class liar” and “a hysterical queen.” I got the hell and liar bits but am still scratching my head over “hysterical queen.” But as my college-age son would say, Whatever.

Vidal also took pains in that valedictory to call me personally “creepy” and “brain-dead.” Who am I to disagree?
De gustibus, non disputandum est.
But it was piquant to remember that the first line of Vidal’s most recent memoir was “As I move—I hope gracefully—toward the door marked Exit.” Ahem.

I was left to ponder what it was within him that animated such hatred after so much time, and at such a late stage of life. I suspected that it might have to do with envy at the outpouring of respect and admiration for WFB, from almost every corner of the ideological map.

WFB had long since ceased even to mention his old adversary, even privately. I was present on a dozen occasions when he was asked for comment, and each time he demurred. Once, on someone else’s TV show, he was trapped into having to watch the clip of the famous 1968 encounter. He smiled and shrugged and said, “Gore Vidal always brings out the best in me.” The only time he ever mentioned Vidal was to quote, with delighted amusement, Vidal’s reply to the American Academy of Arts and Letters on being offered membership: “Thanks, but I already have Diners Club.” Pup thought that was about the wittiest thing he’d ever heard.

Charles McGrath’s eulogy in the
Times
today quotes Vidal on the subject of Vidal’s favorite topic, namely, Vidal: “I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.” And so the water remained, to the end.

My late friend Christopher Hitchens had some history with Vidal. Christopher’s collection of essays,
Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
, bears a single endorsement on the back cover: “I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a
dauphin
or
delfino
. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.—Gore Vidal.”

This was truly a blurb from on high.
Dauphin!
The Sun King astride his throne, extending a silk-gloved hand to be kissed by the brightest blade in the court. I teased Christopher without mercy: “How’s the
dauphin
today?” But I acknowledged then—and do still—that this was a condign
vernissage
. I’ve often thought of Christopher as my generation’s Gore Vidal, and thought it a compliment. Vidal’s mastery of the essay was supreme in his time, just as Christopher’s was in mine.

Their once close relationship did not last, largely owing to 9/11. For Christopher, this was the hinge moment when Islamofascism (his coinage, I believe) revealed itself as the principal enemy of civilization. For Vidal, it was—yawn—just a chickens-coming-home-to-roost moment, well-deserved blowback against the Evil American Empire.

This languorous
what else could we expect?
of Vidal’s was a bit too much for Christopher. He wrote about his former patron in
Vanity Fair
: “If it’s true . . . that we were all changed by September 11, 2001, it’s probably truer of Vidal that it made him more the way he already was, and accentuated a crackpot strain that gradually asserted itself as dominant.”

The crackpot strain included Vidal’s persistent—and rather tiresome—charge that FDR had incited the Japanese to start a war and concealed intelligence warning of the attack on Pearl Harbor. More vile in my view was Vidal’s championing of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. Vidal described him as “a noble boy.” Remember that phrase next time you see the photograph of the fireman cradling the dying body of the infant Baylee Almon. But allow Vidal this: he wasn’t kidding when he said that under the ice was cold water.

So despite all the gorgeous essays that he left us—I have all of them on my shelves—I’m having a hard time mustering a valedictory along the lines of “Now cracks a noble heart.” The tragedy of Gore Vidal is that he never opened the window to let out his demons. He takes them with him to his grave.

Footnote: If you look closely at the footage of the 1968 contretemps, you’ll see WFB wince, trying to rise out of his chair at the
moment of maximum heat. He seems to be physically straining, but something is holding him back. A few days before, while sailing, a Coast Guard cutter sped by too close to his boat and knocked him to the deck, breaking his collarbone. During the Chicago debates, WFB was wearing a clavicle brace. It’s possible that it prevented the moment from being truly iconic.

—
The New Republic
, August 2012

We were friends for more than thirty years, which is a long time but now that he is gone seems not nearly long enough.

I was nervous when I first met him, one night in London in 1977, along with his friend Martin Amis. I’d read his journalism and was in something like awe of his brilliance and wit and couldn’t think what on earth I could bring to his table. I don’t know if he sensed diffidence on my part—no, of course he did; he never missed anything—but he set me instantly at ease, and so began one of the great friendships and benisons of my life. It occurs to me that
benison
is a word I first learned from Christopher Hitchens, along with so much else.

A few years later, we found ourselves living in the same city, Washington. I had come to work in an administration; he had come to undo it. Thirty years later, I was voting for Obama and Christopher had become one of the most forceful and persuasive advocates for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. How did
that
happen?

In those days, Christopher was a roaring, if not raving, Balliol Bolshevik. Oh dear, the things he said about Reagan. The things—
come to think of it—he said about my father. How
did
we become such friends?

I stopped speaking to him only once, because of a throwaway half sentence about my father-in-law in one of his
Harper’s
essays. I missed his company during that six-month
froideur
(another Christopher
mot
). It was about this time that he discovered that he was Jewish, which somewhat complicated his usually fierce anti-Israel bias. When we embraced, at the bar mitzvah of Sidney Blumenthal’s son, the word
Shalom
sprang naturally from my lips.

A few days ago, when I was visiting him at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, for what I knew would be the last time, his wife, Carol, mentioned that Sidney had recently written to Christopher. I was surprised but pleased to hear this. Christopher had caused his once very close friend Sidney enormous legal and financial grief during the Götterdämmerung of the Clinton impeachment. But now Sidney, a cancer experiencer himself, was reaching out with words of tenderness and comfort and implicit forgiveness. This was the act of a mensch. But Christopher had that effect, even on Sidney. It was hard to stay mad at him; though I rather doubt Henry Kissinger or Bill Clinton or any member of the British Royal Family will be among the eulogists at his memorial service.

I first saw his
J’accuse
in
The Nation
against—oh,
Christopher!
—Mother Teresa when my father mailed me a photocopy of it. He scrawled a note across the top, an instruction to the producer of his TV show
Firing Line
: “I never want to lay eyes on this guy again.” WFB had provided Christopher with his first appearances on U.S. television. The rest is history. The time would soon arrive when you couldn’t turn on a television
without
seeing Christopher, either railing against Kissinger, Mother T., Princess Diana, or Jerry Falwell.

But in the end even WFB, who tolerated pretty much anything except attacks on his beloved Catholic Church, couldn’t help but forgive. “Did you see the piece on Chirac by your friend Hitchens in the
Journal
today?” he said one day, with a smile and an admiring sideways shake of the head. “Absolutely
devastating
!”

When we gathered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral a few years later to see WFB off to the celestial choir, Christopher was there, having
flown in from a speech in the American hinterland. (Alert: If you are reading this, Richard Dawkins, you may want to skip ahead to the next paragraph.) There he was in the pew, belting out Bunyan’s “He Who Would Valiant Be.” Christopher recused himself when Henry Kissinger took the lectern to give his eulogy, and went out onto rain-swept Fifth Avenue to smoke one of his ultimately fatal cigarettes.

“It’s the fags that’ll get me in the end, I know it,” he said at one of our lunches, tossing his pack of Rothmans onto the table with an air of contempt. This was back when you could smoke in restaurants. As the Nanny State and Mayor Bloomberg extended their ruler-bearing, knuckle-rapping hand across the landscape, Christopher’s smoking became an act of guerrilla warfare. Much as I wish he had never inhaled, it made for great spectator sport.

David Bradley, the owner of
The Atlantic
Monthly
, to which Christopher contributed so many sparkling essays, once took him to lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown. It was—I think—February and the smoking ban had gone into effect. Christopher suggested that they eat outside on the terrace. David Bradley is a game soul, but even he expressed trepidation about dining al fresco in 40-degree weather. Christopher merrily countered, “Why not? It will be bracing.”

Lunch—dinner, drinks, any occasion—with Christopher always was. One of our lunches at Café Milano, the Rick’s Café of Washington, began at 1:00 p.m., and ended at 11:30 p.m. At about nine o’clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, “Should we order more
food
?” I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for weeks, packed in ice on a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit.

When we made a date for a meal over the phone, he would say, “It will be a feast of reason and a flow of soul.” I never doubted that this rococo phraseology was an original coinage, until I chanced on it, one day, in the pages of P. G. Wodehouse,
^I
the writer Christopher perhaps esteemed above all others. Wodehouse was “The Master.”
When we met for another lunch, one that lasted a mere five hours, he was all abeam with pride as he handed me a newly minted paperback reissue of Wodehouse with an “Introduction by Christopher Hitchens.” He said, “It doesn’t get much better than that,” and who could disagree?

The other author he and I seemed to spend most time discussing was Oscar Wilde. I remember Christopher’s thrill at having adduced a key connection between Wilde and Wodehouse. It struck me as a breakthrough insight: that the first two lines of
The Importance of Being Earnest
contain within them the entire universe of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.

Algernon is playing the piano while his butler arranges flowers. Algy asks, “Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?” Lane replies, “I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.” And there you have it.

Christopher remained perplexed at the lack of any reference to Wilde in the Wodehousian oeuvre until years later when in his
Vanity Fair
column he extolled the discovery by one of his graduate students at the New School of a mention of
The Importance
somewhere in the Master’s ninety-odd books.

During the last hour I spent with Christopher, in the Critical Care Unit at M. D. Anderson, he was struggling to read a new book of P. G. Wodehouse’s letters. He scribbled some notes on a blank page in spidery handwriting. He wrote “Pelham Grenville.” He asked me in a faint, raspy voice, “Name. What was the
name
?” I didn’t quite understand at first, but recalling P.G.’s nickname, suggested “Plum?” Christopher nodded
yes
.

I took comfort that during our last time together I was able at least to provide him with that much. Intellectually speaking, ours was a teacher-student relationship, and let me tell you—Christopher was one tough grader. No matter how much he loved you, he did not shy from giving it to you with the bark off if you had disappointed him.

I once joined him on a panel at the Folger Theatre on the subject of
Henry V
. The other panelists were Dame Judi Dench, Arianna Huffington, Chris Matthews, Ken Adelman, and David Brooks. Our moderator was Walter Isaacson. Having no original insight into
Henry V
, or for that matter any Shakespeare play, I prepared
a comic riff on a notional Henry the Fifteenth. Get it? Okay maybe you had to be there, but it sort of brought down the house. But when Christopher and I met up for lunch a few days later, he gave me a sour wince and tsk-tsk-y stare, chiding me for “indulging in crowd-pleasing nonsense.”