Table Of ContentOVERDRIVE
A PERSONAL DOCUMENTARY
William F. Buckley, Jr.
Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York 1983
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint their
copyrighted material: Excerpt from "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," from The
English Auden: Poems, Essays & Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, by W. H.
Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson, reprinted by kind permission of Random
House, Inc.
Excerpt from "God and Boys at Millbrook" by William F. Buckley from October
4, 1981, New York Times Magazine, copyright © 1981 by The New York Times
Company. Reprinted by permission.
Lyrics excerpt from "Hair," copyright © 1966, 1967, 1968 James Rado, Gerome
Ragni, Gald MacDermot, Nat Shapiro, United Artists Music Co., Inc. All rights
controlled and administered by UNITED ARTIST MUSIC. All rights reserved.
Used by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Buckley, William F.
(William Frank), 1925-Overdrive: a personal documentary.
1. Buckley, William F. ( William Frank), 1925— 2. Journalists
—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN4874.B796A36 1983 070'.92'4. [B]
ISBN 0-385-18269-4
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 82-45349
Copyright © 1981, 1983 by N. R. Resources, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FIRST EDITION
FOR Shirley kins
A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S
A portion of the book was first published in The New Yorker. The reminiscence
on Millbrook School was first published in the New York Times Sunday
Magazine. Kate Medina of Doubleday, with whom I had not previously worked,
helped me enormously with suggestions major and minor. So did Samuel
Vaughan, as ever with that distinctive touch, light and substantive. Anyone
inclined to blame them for the shortcomings of this book can have copies of their
criticism. Sophie Wilkins read the manuscript, and returned me a cornucopia of
wonderful suggestions. My brother Reid made comments extraordinarily useful,
as did my son Christopher, who in his marginal notes did not even fight back
about his mustache. I am grateful also to Charles Wallen, Thomas Wendel, and
Steve Umin. Dorothy McCartney, head of research for National Review, has, as
usual, made an honest man of me. I should add that David Green of The New
Yorker is the most thoroughgoing and resourceful researcher in history. I cannot
imagine why those who wonder what is the meaning of the Aztec calendar stone
don't simply ask Mr. Green? Susan Stark did the manuscript with the help of our
Z-89 word processor (using hdos's pie and text, as per the instructions of Hugh
Kenner). Frances Bronson did the general editorial supervision. Chaucy Bennetts
did a superb job of copy editing, among other things reminding me that
"irradiates" is a transitive verb. Inasmuch as I belong to Mr. Theodore
Bernstein's school, which favors dropping the accusative form of the pronoun
"who" (except after a preposition), the liberties I take in this matter are my own
responsibility. Joseph Isola did his fine job of proofreading. To them all, my
thanks.
overdrive n [over + drive]: an automotive transmission gear which transmits to
the propeller shaft a speed greater than engine speed.
One
MONDAY
Gloria brought in my lunch on a tray—two pieces of whole wheat toast each
with tuna fish covered with some cheese-something my wife Pat had read about
somewhere, a salad, a half bottle of Cote Rotie (I remember the wine's name
only because it's the one I have in half bottles) and coffee. I leaned back in the
big desk chair that reaches to my withers, tucked the napkin under my chin in
case bits of tuna oozed out, and looked out at the lawn as I ate. I was looking
through two huge windowed doors that had served as garage doors before we
bought the house in 1952, converting the number four garage into my own
office, and the number three into an office for a secretary. Pat had been prowling
about the area for seven or eight weeks, and one day telephoned to the office of
the American Mercury, where I was working, to tell me she had found just what
she was looking for, I must hurry out with her to see it, but I was to ignore the
furnishings when I did see it, as they might distract me.
We met at the Stamford railroad station, and the real estate agents, a couple in
their late sixties, drove us to the little headland, through the private gateway, turn
right, second driveway on the left. They explained to us chattily the
circumstances of the house's availability.
It had been constructed in 1907 by a doctor, who with his wife brought up their
children and, pursuing his passion for horticulture, lived in the house and tended
its lawns and gardens until the early forties when both the doctor and his wife
died. The house had then been picked up by a wealthy Stamford industrialist. He
had a mistress; in due course he decided to replace her with tenderer flesh, but
being a man of stout conscience he resolved to give the retiree a substantial
farewell gift, and so bought this house for her. Here she, with her rather
distracted husband, lived for a few years, but their economic fortunes had
waned. So, in order to save on that winter's heating bills, they had moved out of
the main dwelling into the top floor of the garage in one of whose converted
cubicles I now sat.
We were shown the house by the proprietress. In the living room alone I counted
twenty-two chairs—the room would have made an excellent workshop for those
social critics who remark every now and then America's obsession with chairs.
The walls were papered in a purple print, out of which every here and there
plastic flowers protruded. The other rooms were decorated congruently.
The following Sunday, Pat and I traveled back to the house to take a more exact
inventory of the rooms, and one of us (memory chivalrously forgets which)
forgot the key the owner had given us (she and her husband would be out of
town, but we must make the house our own—we had agreed to buy it). So I
broke a windowpane in the kitchen door to gain entry, wrote out an explanatory
note for eventual perusal by the returning owner, and we wandered about.
That was the very first conscious experience I had with the reality that books
don't necessarily figure in everyone's life. There wasn't a single volume in any of
the eleven rooms, though in the garage apartment there were four neatly standing
editions of Reader's Digest Condensed Books. (Do these count? I asked the
question seriously of Mortimer Smith, whom I came to know slightly, soon after
he had published And Madly Teach and The Diminished Mind and founded the
Council for Basic Education, devoting his life to the reclamation of phonics as
the basis for learning how to read. "Marginally," he answered.)
I remembered taking Whittaker Chambers to my office here one day in 1955,
with lighthearted trepidation. Not because of the mess (he wouldn't mind messy
offices—he'd mind people who minded messy offices), but because I had had
fixed windows installed in the top half of the garage doors, giving me a copious
view of the lawn and garden, though not the eastern view, into Long Island
Sound. (That had been the mandate to the real estate people. We desired a house
