Cruising Speed by William F. Buckley

First published: 1971

Type of work: Diary

Time of work: November 30 to December 6, 1970

Locale: Stamford, Connecticut, New York City, and Washington, D.C.

Principal Personage:

• William F. Buckley, Jr., a writer, magazine editor, and political commentator

Form and Content

Cruising Speed is a diary or journal—whichever term is the more inclusive— recording the activities of one week (November 30 through December 6, 1970) in the life of William F. Buckley, Jr., author, editor, columnist, lecturer, television personality, conservative controversialist, and several more things besides.

It is helpful for the reader to recall the historical circumstances surrounding the book’s publication. Richard M. Nixon is completing the second year of his first term as President of the United States. The Watergate scandal and the president’s resignation in disgrace are some three years into the future. The United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War is entering roughly its tenth year, and Buckley strongly supports the prosecution of that war.

The genre of Cruising Speed is both a venerable and an appropriate one. The literature of self-examination goes back at least as far as Michel de Montaigne’s Essais (1580-1595; Essays). It could be argued, in fact, that the genre dates from Saint Augustine’s Confessiones (397; Confessions). Although he is a devout Roman Catholic, Buckley seldom adopts a confessional tone. The structure of Cruising Speed is more akin to that of John Evelyn’s Diary (1818) and of Samuel Pepys’s Diary (1825), those two invaluable and fascinating records of life in Restoration England. The differences are significant enough—Evelyn and Pepys wrote for themselves, not the public, and their diaries were not published until they had been dead for more than a century—but the similarities are striking too. Buckley, like the English diarists, is a man of affairs, who records the details of his daily life— although for only seven days—during a period of social and political turbulence.

Buckley states that he will not drop names in his book, that he will not pretend to a familiarity he does not have with the famous and powerful. On the other hand, he will not be constrained by a false modesty from mentioning letters he has received from the President of the United States or conversations he has had with eminent people whom he does, in fact, know.

The book begins on Monday, November 30, 1970, six days after the author’s forty-fifth birthday and a few days after the election of his brother James to the United States Senate from New York. It ends on the following Sunday evening. Its organization is loose, as it has no formal chapters. Breaks in the print set off the events of one day from those of the next. The treatment of each of the seven days, and of the constituent parts of each day, varies widely. Sometimes, several hours will be summed up in a single paragraph. At other times, the examination of an incident of a few minutes’ duration will require many pages.

The reader first meets Buckley in Stamford, Connecticut, as the author; his wife, Pat; their maid, Angela; their house guest, Peter Glenville; and three dogs set off for the Buckleys’ New York residence on Seventy-third Street. While Pat and Peter Glenville chatter and the dogs bound about, Buckley crams for the two television shows he will begin taping at half past two that afternoon. As the week progresses, he will write three columns for newspaper syndication; edit an issue of his magazine, National Review; engage in two debates; give several lectures; meet with his publisher, his lawyer, his accountant, and others; answer a mountain of correspondence; exercise and practice self-defense at a gymnasium; accompany Truman Capote to a West Side discotheque; attend mass; and fly to Washington, D.C., for a meeting. So goes a typical week in the life of America’s foremost multimedia conservative.

Cruising Speed is meant to be entertaining, and it is, because Buckley is a witty and graceful writer who lives an extraordinarily full and interesting life. Primarily, however, the content suits his purposes as a conservative dialectician. When he discusses and cites passages from the week’s columns, lectures, and correspondence, his ideas reach many who did not read or hear them during that week in November-December, 1970. In the case of a letter, he expands his audience from one reader to many thousands.

As the week ends, the reader might expect the author’s frenetic way of life to leave him drained, but Buckley purports still to be fit and feisty. Early in the book, he has made the astounding revelation that he suffers from chronic low blood pressure. Thus, the reader is left to fantasize about a William F. Buckley, Jr., with a full measure of energy.

Critical Context

William F. Buckley, Jr., burst upon the literary scene in 1951 with the publication of God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. Therefore, Cruising Speed furnishes an intimate picture of the conservative icon at roughly the midpoint in his career (although Buckley in his sixties has shown no sign of reducing speed). As with all autobiography, the degree of self-revelation is problematical. Buckley is not a man given to finding fault with himself, but his air of self-satisfaction may be in part a defense mechanism, the result of years of arguing the less popular side of the question. He states in the book that to some attacks he responds only with hauteur. He does admit to a few inoffensive imperfections: He cannot think without a pen in his hand, he reads slowly, and he has a poor memory. The first will not come as a surprise to any reader who has seen Buckley perform on television; the latter two are surprising.

His insouciance has proved maddening to more than one critic. The adverse comments on his work almost always center upon his ideology, his attitudes, his manner. Few deny that he is a brilliant prose stylist who maintains a consistently high quality of work despite the fact that he is usually writing occasional material under strict deadlines.

Buckley (who in later books would deal with the nautical enthusiasms at which his title also hints) wonders in conclusion if he can maintain his cruising speed. He was to repeat the form of a week’s diary in Overdrive: A Personal Documentary (1983) with less success, to judge by its critical reception. From the purely literary point of view, Buckley may be—like earlier Tory polemicists John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift—a writer whose political and literary enemies will be known to history only in the pages of his occasional pieces.

Bibliography

Dubois, Larry. “Cruising Speed,” in Harper’s Magazine. CCXLIII ( November, 1971), pp. 134-136.

Dunne, John Gregory. “Happy Days Are Here Again,” in The New York Review of Books. XXX (October 13, 1983), pp. 20, 28-30.

Mano, D. K. “Man in Motion,” in National Review. XXIII (October 8, 1971), p. 1121.

Nash, George H. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, 1976.

Ross, Mitchell S. The Literary Politicians, 1978.

Winchell, Mark Royden. William F. Buckley, Jr., 1984.