{"id":172586,"date":"2026-01-08T10:00:48","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T15:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=172586"},"modified":"2026-01-08T10:19:34","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T15:19:34","slug":"bill-buckleys-art-of-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/01\/08\/bill-buckleys-art-of-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Buckley\u2019s \u201cArt of Fiction\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

William F. Buckley Jr., 1954. Los Angeles Daily News. CC BY 4.0<\/a>. via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

Of all the writers whose interviews have appeared in The Paris Review<\/em> since its founding in 1953, none may be quite so aberrant as William F. Buckley Jr., subject of The Art of Fiction No. 146<\/a>. Buckley\u2019s interview appeared in the Summer 1996 issue, alongside one with the poet A. R. Ammons and fiction by Jonathan Franzen and Carolyn Cooke. It was curious company for the preeminent political journalist of the American right\u2014the paterfamilias, even, of the whole postwar conservative movement.<\/p>\n

It is not Buckley\u2019s politics that makes his inclusion in the Writers at Work interview series surprising; right-wingers before him had made it into the magazine. The old Tory Evelyn Waugh, in his Art of Fiction interview<\/a>, even declared that \u201can artist must be a reactionary.\u201d No, what makes Buckley stand out in The Paris Review<\/em> is that he was being interviewed about the art of fiction<\/em>, not punditry.<\/p>\n

The eleven spy novels Buckley produced between 1976 and 2005 were, essentially, his side gig\u2014his Chablis money. He wrote them in the Swiss Alps while on vacation from editing the magazine he had started in 1955, National Review<\/em>. The books\u2019 hero is Blackford Oakes, a Bond-like agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. Small wonder: Buckley himself had briefly worked for the CIA in the late forties in Mexico, where his supervisor was the future Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt. Oakes\u2019s Cold War escapades are a fanciful version of the life his creator might have led had he stayed on in \u201cthe Company\u201d instead of becoming a high-flying magazine editor and television show host. (Hunt, incidentally, went on to write more than fifty spy thrillers and was never interviewed in The Paris Review<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

\u201cI found myself attracted to this idea of exploring historical data and visiting my own imagination on them,\u201d he told his interviewer, the publisher Sam Vaughan. \u201cThe very successful book on the death of Kennedy written by Don DeLillo, Libra<\/em>, does, of course, that \u2026\u201d The Blackford Oakes novels had their highbrow admirers\u2014Vladimir Nabokov raved<\/a> about the first one, Saving the Queen<\/em> (1976)\u2014but critical consensus held Buckley at some distance from John le Carr\u00e9 and Frederick Forsyth (his most immediate influence), never mind DeLillo. The problem with Blackford Oakes, wrote Ken Follett in the London Review of Books<\/em>, is that his inner life was kept so hidden from the reader. In Oakes \u201cthere is no sympathetic magic\u2014a problem not uncommon among journalists who turn to fiction.\u201d Still, Blackford Oakes became a fixture on the bestseller lists.<\/p>\n

It was in writing about his own life, though, that Buckley came closest to literary insight. Years before Blackford Oakes, he decided that the typical waking hours of William F. Buckley Jr. contained material enough for a work of intrigue. The most distinctive books he ever wrote are Cruising Speed <\/em>(1971) and Overdrive<\/em> (1983), diary-like experiments in what he called \u201cpersonal documentary.\u201d Sam Tanenhaus, whose thousand-page Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America<\/em><\/a> was published last summer, describes them as \u201cnonbooks.\u201d Buckley was a master of the nonbook, \u201cat once dashed off and padded out.\u201d His variations on it include assemblages of columns, press releases, and other editorial bits and bobs, like God and Man at Yale<\/em> (1951) and The Unmaking of a Mayor <\/em>(1966), while \u201cpersonal documentary\u201d was more like \u201ca pieced-together montage,\u201d Tanenhaus writes, \u201ccinema verit\u00e9<\/em> rather than a straightforward narrative, with Buckley holding the camera and pointing it at himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cruising Speed<\/em> and Overdrive<\/em> each chronicle a single week in Buckley\u2019s working life: writing columns, editing NR<\/em>, corresponding, lecturing, luncheoning, schmoozing. Buckley spent his days in seeming hyperactivity, advancing the conservative cause by any genteel means necessary while satisfying an abject need for social and intellectual stimulation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe car pulls in at ten,\u201d reads the first sentence of Cruising Speed<\/em>, on the morning of Monday, November 30, 1970,<\/p>\n

\n

and my wife, Pat, undertakes to supervise the loading of it. This is an operation, because it has been a long weekend, during which a lot of clutter accumulates that we\u2019ll need in New York, and there is the fruit and the cheese and the flowers that would spoil if we left them in Stamford until the weekend. Angela, the maid, will go with us \u2026 and three dogs \u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

One thinks of Woolf\u2019s Clarissa, resolved to \u201cbuy the flowers herself\u201d at the start of her own day of excitement, and of Lucy, Mrs. Dalloway\u2019s maid, who has \u201cher work cut out for her\u201d by the second sentence of that novel.<\/p>\n

So Buckley sets off floating on a cloud through the week\u2019s business. A million things happen, few of them significant. Glittering invitations are received and others sent, and \u201cnames are dropped with a gilded clatter,\u201d as Louis Menand put it recently<\/a> in The New Yorker<\/em>. There is a long passage in Overdrive<\/em> on the subject of peanut butter (\u201cMy addiction is lifelong, and total\u201d), and that is exactly what\u2019s on offer here: straight from the jar, rich, but not quite a meal. These are not books of ideas but of errands.<\/p>\n

When Buckley died in 2008, more than one of his obituarists noted that he never wrote the great political treatise\u2014the big book\u2014he might have. Such a book would have been about the ideology catalyzed by NR<\/em> that was called fusionism: the blend of libertarian economics, repressive social conservatism, and anticommunist foreign policy that triumphed in the Reagan-Bush years. Instead, in Cruising Speed<\/em> and Overdrive<\/em>, Buckley delineates another kind of fusion, this one between intellectual entrepreneurship and intellectual celebrity, business and pleasure fully entwined.<\/p>\n

For Buckley was also a brand. In addition to his work as an editor and columnist, he was a television personality<\/a>, a third-party candidate for mayor of New York City, a sailor<\/a>, a bon vivant, a character<\/a>. (His Paris Review<\/em> interview contains references to no fewer than three harpsichords in his possession.) This was not pure self-delusion. \u201cYou are<\/em> charming and you\u2019re very polite,\u201d Huey P. Newton conceded<\/a>, teasingly, during a 1973 taping of Firing Line<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Not everyone agreed with the Black Panther chairman, though. \u201cHe is so sublimely unself-conscious, so \u2018blasphemously happy\u2019 with his own life,\u201d John Gregory Dunne wrote a decade later about Overdrive<\/em>, \u201cthat he wishes to share with his readers what amounts to a 50,000-word advertisement for himself.\u201d And yet plenty of people bought it. The Blackford Oakes novels sold better, but Buckley\u2019s nonbooks proved to be his ticket to belletrist prestige. The editor William Shawn published excerpts of Cruising Speed<\/em> in The New Yorker<\/em> and even serialized Overdrive<\/em> in its entirety. These and other contributions to The New Yorker<\/em>, says Tanenhaus, were Buckley\u2019s \u201cproudest achievements as a writer.\u201d The approval of one corner of the liberal media, at least, counted for something.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

On the Saturday night of Cruising Speed<\/em>, Buckley and his wife, the divine Pat<\/a>, dine at a place called La Seine with Truman Capote, a friend, along with Capote\u2019s editor Joe Fox and Lally Weymouth, the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of Washington Post<\/em> publisher Katharine Graham.<\/p>\n

Afterward, Capote insists they all go to the Sanctuary, a disco in a converted church in Hell\u2019s Kitchen. This place has everything<\/em>, Buckley reports: \u201cpsychedelic lights, blaring music, the dance floor crowded with homosexuals and lesbians and heteros, in ratio about 25-25-50, who dance with detached expression.\u201d<\/p>\n

There, suspending his distaste for the counterculture, Buckley is more curious than hostile. In fact he almost digs it:<\/p>\n

\n

We are very nearly alone in ordering our whiskeys-and-sodas: everyone else seems to be drinking Cokes, or nothing at all. I suppose that they are also smoking pot, though I am not good at detecting the smell of it \u2026 I find the rock [music] working through to me \u2026 the music\u2014the sound\u2014is sovereign, and you do not talk; you dance or sit; and there is Truman sitting, his glasses occasionally refracting the light, his expression resigned, his face reposed, while the bodies, many of them of black and beautiful, writhe, the faces always silent, resisting the inordinate, orgiastic demands of the sound \u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A contact high? The recollection yields what was certainly an abnormal compliment to the beauty of blackness, to put it one way; a conspicuous amount of Buckley\u2019s intellectual \u201cwork\u201d in Cruising Speed<\/em> consists of debating and dismissing the political claims of Black Americans, a lifelong vocation. The Sanctuary, moreover, was a gay establishment. The frisson it inspired in him is notable, if not because of the lasting speculation<\/a> about his own sexuality, then for its salutary effect on his creativity.<\/p>\n

In his Paris Review <\/em>interview, Buckley recalls a conversation in Buenos Aires with Jorge Luis Borges, who was then blind. \u201cSometimes I think that beauty is not something rare,\u201d Borges told him.<\/p>\n

\n

I think beauty is happening all<\/em> the time. Art<\/em> is happening all the time. At some conversation a man may say a very fine thing, not being aware of it. I am hearing fine sentences all the time from the man in the street, for example. From anybody.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For all that he revered Borges (himself no bleeding heart<\/a>), Buckley was not a democratic listener in this way. So it is probably no coincidence that the polychromatic overload of the Sanctuary was the exact moment, he writes, when \u201cthe idea comes to me to write this journal of a week\u2019s activity.\u201d The result was of a piece with the New Journalism of people like Capote, Norman Mailer (author of Advertisements for Myself<\/em>), and Joan Didion, whose talent Buckley encouraged<\/a> early on.<\/p>\n

Much conversation around Buckley\u2019s legacy today revolves around his responsibility, or lack thereof, for the style of conservatism that gave us Donald Trump. The historian Jennifer Burns is right to identify<\/a> a related inheritance that is especially evident in Cruising Speed<\/em> and Overdrive<\/em>: Buckley the proto-influencer.<\/p>\n

Buckley wagered that if you were glamorous and interesting enough, there existed an audience of people for whom no detail of your daily life would be too trivial, no degree of disclosure so tedious as to outweigh the vicarious thrill of another person\u2019s routine. Blackford Oakes was a fantasy character, but so was Buckley, in the \u201ccurated\u201d manner of internet personalities today.<\/p>\n

It could be a testament to Buckley\u2019s influence, or at least to his prescience, that the breathless, rather bloodless style of these pages\u2014their attention to surfaces and the minutiae of the high life\u2014seems so familiar. But from where?<\/p>\n

Take this passage, from another night out in Manhattan:<\/p>\n

\n

Now the Shirelles are coming out of the speakers, \u201cDancing in the Street,\u201d and the sound system plus the acoustics, because of the restaurant\u2019s high ceiling, are so loud that we have to practically scream out our order to the hardbody waitress\u2014who is wearing a bicolored suit of wool grain with passementerie trim \u2026 The air conditioning in the restaurant is on full blast and I\u2019m beginning to feel bad that I\u2019m not wearing the new Versace pullover I bought last week at Bergdorf\u2019s.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of course this isn\u2019t Buckley\u2014it\u2019s Bateman, from Bret Easton Ellis\u2019s American Psycho<\/em>. But you can see how easily \u201cpersonal documentary\u201d lent itself to parody, and how unsettlingly its solipsism could read, if taken to the extreme.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Reading his Paris Review<\/em> interview, you sense that Buckley was more keen to discuss fiction than most people were to ask him about it. (It\u2019s probably telling that Vaughan, Buckley\u2019s interviewer, was his own publisher and personal friend.) Writing novels brought Buckley immense satisfaction, it\u2019s clear\u2014though probably writing 1,500 words a day of anything feels good if you\u2019re doing it at your place in Switzerland and a personal chef brings you a kir fifteen minutes before quitting time. Asked by Vaughan what his venture into fiction had meant to him, Buckley replied that novel-writing allowed him to locate \u201creserves of creative energy that I was simply unaware of.\u201d<\/p>\n

There could be no greater thrill to Buckley than discovering and exploiting such reserves. In secret, his craving for energy was pharmaceutical: Christopher Buckley has written sensitively and unguardedly<\/a> of his father\u2019s reliance on Ritalin, \u201cwhich he used as a stimulant,\u201d and Tanenhaus notes that Buckley\u2019s prescription for it began as early as 1958. It might be wrong to make too much of this, but once you know about the Ritalin, it\u2019s impossible to read Cruising Speed<\/em> and Overdrive<\/em>\u2014not even their titles\u2014in quite the same way. Perhaps they should be understood as pill books as much as nonbooks, to be shelved alongside Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas<\/em> and Junky<\/em> in the venerable American literature of drug-taking.<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing would drive me battier than to do just<\/em> a novel over the course of an entire month,\u201d Buckley told The Paris Review<\/em>. \u201cI have only x<\/em> ergs of purely creative energy, and when I\u2019m out of those, what in the hell do I do then?\u201d It was this restlessness that allowed him to sustain a satisfying subcareer as a fiction writer, and at the same time it was what kept him from writing the \u201cbig book\u201d of political philosophy that his acolytes expected of him.<\/p>\n

On the last page of Cruising Speed<\/em>, he muses that the idea of quitting NR<\/em> to join the academy and think deeper<\/em>\u2014about philosophy and theory\u2014would be to solve a problem he doesn\u2019t have. His real concern, he says, is to serve his readers while maintaining a constant rate of motion, and without getting bored: \u201cHow will I satisfy them, who listen to me today, tomorrow<\/em>? Hell, how will I satisfy myself<\/em> tomorrow, satisfying myself so imperfectly, which is not to say insufficiently, today; at cruising speed?\u201d<\/p>\n

More is revealed in these lines than in the entirety of Buckley\u2019s Paris Review<\/em> interview. There is anxiety beneath the amusing, protective convolutions of his syntax and the aftersound of the Sanctuary\u2019s dance floor. It\u2019s the anxiety of a writer at work, sure, but also of a man who worries what he might do if no one is watching.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Andrew Holter is the editor of<\/em> Going Around: Selected Journalism by Murray Kempton. His writing has appeared in<\/em> The Baffler, Rolling Stone, The Times Literary Supplement, and other publications.<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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