(Originally posted on Roger's Rules)
This morning, I got the very sad news that my friend William F. Buckley Jr. died earlier today. He was 82. I cannot say that the news was entirely unexpected—Bill had been seriously ill for months—but it was nevertheless shocking. I am one of a host of Bill’s friends who contributed a few words about him to NRO. I’d like also to share some portions of the review I wrote of his “literary autobiography,” Miles Gone By, partly because it allows me to speak about him in the present tense:
“My God, he does everything,” my friend said. “Skis, plays the harpsichord, sails across the Pacific, writes novels …” I was chatting with one of the foremost jurists of our age, a man who is himself hardly innocent of superlative achievement. But when William F. Buckley, Jr.’s, new omnibus came up in conversation, my friend declared himself disgusted at the spectacle of so much energy and accomplishment.
By “disgusted” he of course meant “awed,” and I knew what he meant. The skiing, the harpsichord, the sailing, etc., are mere avocations. The main events are National Review, Firing Line, a syndicated column, and four-plus decades on the lecture circuit (seventy engagements a year: ponder that). How does he do it?
Miles Gone By is subtitled “A Literary Autobiography.” It isn’t really an autobiography, if for no other reason than that Mr. Buckley is much too interested in the world around him to dwell on himself. In an amusing piece about managing the tedium of social life (itself worth the price of the volume), he recalls the French political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenal telling him that “every subject in the whole world is more interesting than oneself.” This was, Mr. Buckley winks, “some years before writing his autobiography.”
Miles Gone By is as near as Mr. Buckley will ever come writing an autobiography. He plays some part in all of the dozens of pieces he has collected here, but usually as a foil for the exhibition of another personality, event, or idea. In this sense, Miles Gone By is less autobiography than heterobiography: the gaze is cast firmly outwards, not inward. The model is not Augustine or even Montaigne; it certainly is not (thank God) Rousseau. What we have here is a chronicle of things done, not passions suffered, of people met, not feelings scrutinized, of issues debated, not emotions spent. That is doubtless one reason the book is such fun to read: it has the velocity and freshness of piqued curiosity—I almost said of a well-made martini.
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