Overdrive by William F. Buckley

First published: 1983

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: Late autumn, 1981, with flashbacks

Locale: Primarily Connecticut and New York

Principal Personages:

• William F. Buckley, Jr., a journalist, the author
• Christopher Buckley, the author’s son
• William F. Buckley, Sr., the author’s father
• Edward Pulling, the headmaster of the Millbrook School in Connecticut
• Rosalyn Tureck, a musician
• Fernando Valenti, a musician
• David Niven, an actor
• Ronald Reagan, a personal friend of Buckley

Form and Content

William F. Buckley, Jr., paused to examine his life at a peak moment, choosing a single week in the late autumn of 1981. It was a week not dominated by major world events, so that the everyday life of this politically conscious figure, and his more purely human consciousness, comes to the fore. The form of a seven-day slice of life is more novelistic than memoiristic; the refusal to rearrange life dramatically, instead cherishing its mundane texture and spontaneous moments of reflection, suggests the film documentary more than a novel—hence the subtitle. ( Earlier, Buckley employed the same form in Cruising Speed: A Documentary, 1971.) Like a documentary, Overdrive leaves in all Buckley’s weaknesses and warts. It becomes an apologia only when reviewing verbal duels that have vexed the author in the past and continue to haunt him; thus, he gives his side of the acrimonious disputes with Gore Vidal and Franklin Littell. Another important aspect of the memoir as document is the self-explanatory role of the many letters he incorporates verbatim.

Buckley freely admits that he eschews introspection and that his life could be called unexamined. He explains the “commotion” of his life (the experiences of just one week require him to draw vignettes of some two hundred people) as arising from a counterpoint between the search for intellectual virtue and the fear of boredom:

The unexamined life may not be worth living, in which case I will concede that mine is not worth living. But excepting my own life, I do seek to examine, and certainly I dilate upon, public questions I deem insufficiently examined.

The narrator appears to be much like the public Buckley. He delights in the deadpan, outrageous statement. Thus, he begins his vignette of Howard Hunt with the words, “Howard was my boss during the nine months I spent in Mexico working for the CIA.” Nevertheless, the personality that emerges is more relaxed than that of the public Buckley.

There are hasty nods to almost every living soul Buckley encounters in eight days; such sketches do not rise above mere name-dropping, often of obscure people. When Buckley takes the time to describe in anecdotal detail, he can produce memorable portraits. Of the two politicians, Ronald Reagan and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who are extensively portrayed, Reagan is flat and wooden, but Moynihan is vibrant and believable. More inspired are sketches of people in the arts: for example, master harpsichordists Rosalyn Tureck and Fernando Valenti and actor David Niven.

The most vivid descriptions center on Buckley’s boyhood days at the Millbrook School, with portraits of his father, the headmaster, Edward Pulling, the other masters, his brothers, and schoolmates. The foibles of the masters are drawn with a true novelist’s eye; a fine contribution to the schooldays genre is Buckley’s mad naturalist (and sometime baby-sitter) who had a special fondness for snakes. The section on the Millbrook School was originally published as a separate piece titled “God and Boys at Millbrook.” It enters Buckley’s documentary in connection with a trip on the Orient Express that caused him to miss the school’s fiftieth anniversary. The Orient Express excursion (entering the memoir as he dashes off an article on it) in turn irresistibly reminds him of a hair-raising, week-long trip on a World War II troop train: “So to speak, the Upstairs and Downstairs of train travel. . . . It is terribly vexing that it isn’t obvious that the one was ultimately more pleasurable in memory than the other.”

Unlike the blase, pedantic, ideological, public Buckley, the inner Buckley views much with unblushing delight and appreciation: his family and familiars, his car, peanut butter, harpsichords, boats, the sea, a good play, and every solid, mundane thing that warms a life. The “hard-working snob” (a jibe he has gleefully taken over from one of his opponents) is surprisingly unspoiled. Neither ideology nor specific ideas are dear to Buckley the author of Overdrive; rather, the flow of ideas as part of living is important. In Buckley’s personal documentary, there is no idea without a life-form, or at least something concrete, attached.

Critical Context

Overdrive and the critical reaction to it helped to bring about a quasi canonization of Buckley as the “Patron Saint of the Conservatives” (as John B. Judis aptly, if sarcastically, subtitled his 1988 biography of him). Buckley’s first book, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom” (1951), indicated both his political and religious concerns. Nevertheless, the political side predominated in Buckley’s subsequent writing, particularly his newspaper column On the Right, and culminated in his unsuccessful run for the mayoralty of New York City in 1965. A closer association between religion and politics reemerged from the 1970’s onward.

An inadvertent support for Buckley’s “canonization” was provided in a review of Overdrive by John Gregory Dunne, who saw the chief flaw of the work as its failure to address life’s stigmata—that is, the “alcoholism, drug addiction, pederasty, pedophilia”—that infected Buckley’s cast of characters, yet “not a hint of which darkens Mr. Buckley’s journal.” The result, for Dunne, is “a truly alarming vision of a life without shadows.” The critic introduced a parodic bit of religious imagery, calling Buckley’s world “a city of God from which Mr. Buckley dispenses his patronage as if it were sanctifying grace.”

By contrast, Buckley’s partisan apologist, Forrest McDonald, raising a lone voice against the anti-Buckley journalistic uproar, pleaded the case for Buckley the writer based in part upon Buckley’s good deeds and personal virtues. Norman Podhoretz, finding the biting hostility that greeted Overdrive in the press to be an interesting phenomenon in itself, defended Buckley, only half jokingly, in terms of the Talmud. Podhoretz, however, can understand the resentment that many must feel toward “this ‘blasphemously happy’ man who is in love with the life he leads.” Like Dunne, Podhoretz faults Buckley for showing “all light and no shadow.”

Once launched, the new perception of Buckley, who heretofore was a primarily ideological figure, in moral and ethical terms became predominant and contributed in a subtle way to the climate of opinion about political figures generally. Buckley’s followers virtually abandoned ideology and began to press their challenge to nonconservative leaders in simple terms: Is he or she virtuous? With all that makes the anticrowd position of Buckley so precarious in a democracy, is he, nevertheless, “right” in a personal moral sense? This focus contradicts Buckley’s own reverence for eighteenth century American constitutional theory, which sought to make government work well and responsibly regardless of the rascals, or paragons, in charge.

Buckley’s patrician probity unexpectedly dovetailed with a popular movement back to reliance on the leader’s moral purity as the sole guarantee of good government (thereby ignoring the lessons of history). The frustration felt by those representing the broad spectrum of opinion to the left of Buckley’s position might, however, find a remedy in the same source, turning to the nonideological ideal of right reason that Buckley shows himself attempting to live by in Overdrive.

Bibliography

Burner, David. Column Right, 1988.

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

Ephron, Nora. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVIII (August 7, 1983), p. 7.

Judis, John B. William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives, 1988.

Koenig, Rhoda. “Dictated but Not Read,” in Harper’s Magazine. CCLXVII (October, 1983), p. 72.

Podhoretz, Norman. Review in Commentary. LXXVI (November, 1983), p. 66.

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