Shortly before announcing his candidacy for Mayor of New York, an esteemed American author proposed a plan for the city: he would give tax breaks to “neighborhoods that developed self-financed patrols”; legalize drugs and gambling; and abolish all commercial vehicle loading between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Once declared, he advocated charging fees on drivers from out of town, building a “Disneyland East” on Queens’ old World’s Fair grounds, and “cutting down traffic by building a huge aerial bike lane, twenty feet above the ground and twenty feet wide, above Second Avenue from First Street all the way to One Hundred Twenty-Fifth.”
Four years later, another esteemed American author — one who had, out of passion for urban design, built a model city out of Lego blocks so large he couldn’t get it out the front door of his Brooklyn apartment — threw his own hat in the same ring. He ran on a platform of local control — that is, he wanted New York City to secede from the State — and like his predecessor played with ideas from all over the map, from “compulsory free love in those neighborhoods which vote for it, [to] compulsory church attendance on Sunday for those neighborhoods who vote for that…” Also, his brain trust kicked out ideas like “Make Coney Island ‘Las Vegas East.’”
Thus described by Kevin M. Schultz in his new book
Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties, neither the 1965 candidate William F. Buckley nor the 1969 candidate Norman Mailer sounds serious. Neither worked the hustings or brokered with interest groups: both won space in the news by being famous and saying outrageous things. In the present political scene they are most closely resembled by Donald Trump, a famous crackpot on whom only the most disaffected voters could project their disgust.
But in the Sixties there was plenty of disaffection and disgust to go around. Also, each of the two men was serious about something. For all Buckley’s playfulness in this particular endeavor (best evinced by his famous quip that, should the polls return in his favor, he would “demand a recount”), he was, Schultz suggests, building political capital. As editor of conservative flagship
National Review, he had not only elevated but also lightened the tone of American conservatism, replacing Bircher brooding with a confident why-not attitude. This made conservatism attractive, even fun, and in this race he vaunted his whimsically reactionary politics in the media capital of the country as a contrast to the seriousness of local social planners whose efforts were visibly failing. During his 1965 campaign, as he shook hands with working-class New Yorkers who were abandoning the major parties to support him, “Buckley,” says Schultz, “saw the future of the Republican Party.” He got 13.4% of the vote on the fringe Conservative Party ticket and may have thrown the election from Abe Beame to John Lindsay. Strengthened by Buckley’s run, the state Conservative Party got his brother Jim elected Senator six years later. Ronald Reagan, or at least his handlers, took notice.
Mailer too was serious, but not about politics as such. True, he’d covered political events in
Miami and the Siege of Chicago and
The Armies of the Night, and given his qualified support to the anti-war movement. But he had no sensible prescription for change and in his own campaign approached governance as an existential experiment: “I want to see where my own ideas lead,” he told followers. Having successfully changed his literary stock in trade from straight fiction to social criticism, he now took a flyer on retail politics. But though he enlisted blue-collar writers Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin to add proletarian appeal to his egghead campaign, Mailer proved less talented than Buckley at outreach, or more likely just less interested. Asked what he’d have done as Mayor about a recent snowstorm, Mailer said he’d have “pissed all over it,” and his campaign effectively ended in a speech at the Village Gate where he figuratively pissed all over his followers (“he greeted their suggestions with an angry ‘fuck you,’” reports Schultz). His 5% showing in the Democratic primary may have cost Herman Badillo the nomination, but otherwise it had no discernible further impact on city politics, and seemed to begin Mailer’s drift from political subjects in general.
Schultz’ conceit, which is intriguing if not convincing, is that mismatched as they might seem, Buckley and Mailer had something in common besides talent and mayoral campaigns. It’s not so much the subtitular “Friendship,” which mainly consists of a few social meetings and letters full of writerly banter. Their bond, per Schultz, is that they “shared a common complaint about America,” born of a “joint disgust at the central assumptions that dominated postwar America” — that is, the technocratic, welfare-statist, progressive-up-to-a-point consensus that assumed the Goldwater debacle was the end of conservatism, waded America into Vietnam, and didn’t even see the SDS coming. Mailer himself seemed to endorse this reading in his first public debate with Buckley in 1962 — befitting the calculating chutzpah of both men, a heavily-publicized affair at Chicago’s Medinah Temple promoted like a prizefight, and on which oddsmakers and intelligentsia made book — where, Schultz reports, “Mailer insisted he hated the Liberal Establishment just as much as Buckley did.”
But even then, before the heterodoxies of New Right and New Left had calcified, the two men had staked out divergent territories. At that debate Buckley denounced what he perceived as liberalism’s capitulation to communism and pleaded for submission to the guidance of “Presidents Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” That gave no wiggle room for the Left, and one gets the sense that was just how Buckley wanted it: heightening the contradictions was a big part of his act. Mailer, conversely, laid against liberalism a litany of complaints that, if they were technically as cosmic as Buckley’s, appeared to extend into a different cosmos entirely: Modern liberalism, he said, had led to “the deteriorated quality of labor, the insubstantiality of money, the ravishment of nature, the impoverishment of food, the manipulation of emotion, the emptiness of faith, the displacement of sex…” One can imagine Buckley’s supporters starting to follow this but drifting away as the vision exceeded traditional politics, not to mention propriety.
To the extent that the two men may be said to have had, even by proxy, a conversation, Mailer’s arguments were so much more capacious — if also necessarily more diffuse — than Buckley’s that nothing except their mutually glorious verbal skills really seems to unite them. On the Medinah Temple stage, for example, while Buckley was making coy references to Mailer’s personal excesses — which became his nasty habit in debates with and reference to his alleged buddy — Mailer said in apparent exasperation, “I’m trying to talk about the nature of man.” In a
Firing Line session six years later, Mailer described to Buckley “greed, bigotry, insensitivity, and general stupidity” as “the disease of the Right,” and “excessive propriety in family life, excessive obedience to all the small laws of daily life, such as crossing at corners” as that of the Left. Schultz describes Buckley as dubious at this, which is understandable; Buckley and his movement saw (or at least were accustomed to profit by portraying) the Left as the home of rioting unwashed youth and blacks, whereas Mailer sincerely sought to diagnose the Left as if it were a character.
Parallels there may be, but there’s no getting around the fact that Mailer was first and last (with detours in the middle) an artist, whereas for all his authorial virtuosity Buckley was a propagandist. When Buckley dabbled in spy fiction, Schultz says, he was “rattling his saber in the most subtle of forms,” a polite way of saying that Buckley was more interested in investing his remarkable energy in a profitable line extension for his brand than in, as Mailer put it, the condition of man. For some reason Schultz seeks to portray late Buckley as a nearly spent force; after the Sixties he, like Mailer, “removed himself from the pitch of battle,” says Schultz. But that isn’t really so; though new jacks like George Will may have started to outsell him, Buckley hung in as the godfather of the scene -- even casual newspaper readers would know who he was and what he represented -- and churned out columns that served the cause. Take this bit from the start of the First Gulf War, 1991:
The anti-war people never really found a doctrine after the argument ran dry that we should continue with the sanctions. Some still hang in there with the cry, “We won’t die for oil!” but that moral-geopolitical analysis is also tending to run dry as the perception widens that “oil” is simply the convenient symbol of the kind of worldwide aggression that Saddam Hussein had in mind where he overran Kuwait and dealt with it in ways that remind old-timers of the Rape of Nanking (we hanged the Japanese general who supervised that operation).
Once a hippie-puncher, always a hippie-puncher. As for Mailer, his return to fiction and its hybrids was a return to form; his energy was as great as Buckley’s, but his skill visibly sharpened and his capacity for empathy remained and deepened and stood well
his cause -- that is, his talent and literature. Along with some duds he had great artistic successes, most notably
The Excecutioner’s Song. Schultz acknowledges that book’s power but, perhaps to brace up the parallel lives structure, insists that the book "was not, as Alfred Kazin had described Mailer's work a decade earlier, a mirror to the nation." Really? The story of a criminal famous for insisting on and getting the death penalty was no kind of national mirror? It might be argued that the best thing about
The Excecutioner’s Song was Mailer’s evocation of the hard country that birthed and shaped Gary Gilmore and Nicole Baker.
There are other instances of Schultz trying to nudge his subjects onto convenient tracks. For example, we can see how Buckley's mischievousness fits with the rowdy Sixties, but Schultz goes so far as to insist, “he loved the constant rebukes to the status quo perpetrated by the counterculture.” Really? Like Pigasus, the Yippies’ candidate for President? “He could understand their anger and frustration,” continues Schultz, “and he, most at home as a provocateur, had never been one to toe the party line… he grew his already wavy hair even longer and could be seen darting around New York City on a Honda motorcycle, often with a passenger in tow.” This may have constituted letting one’s freak flag fly in Sharon, Connecticut, but there is nothing in Buckley’s corpus to suggest such an affinity for the Armies of the Night, or if there is Schultz does not include it.
But lily-gilding aside, Schultz does give us a fresh way to look at the two men, and if they interest you this book will, too. There are many anecdotes I hadn’t heard before — I had heard that Mailer challenged McGeorge Bundy to a fistfight, for example, but not that he was called off by Lillian Hellman, nor that Mailer was sore about it (“when the chips were down she’d always go for the guy who had the most clout”) and wouldn’t speak to her for two years. I will add that
Buckley and Mailer makes very vivid a time in American letters when literary feuds were perhaps no less picayune than now but a good deal more interesting, perhaps owing to the relative quality of talents involved (I mean, who’d you rather hear bitch — Truman Capote or Jonathan Franzen?).
