May 30, 2015 05:10 PM
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/0...oks-mallon
[...] In “Buckley and Mailer”, whose overstated subtitle is “The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties,” Kevin M. Schultz, a historian at the University of Illinois-Chicago, sets out to reconstruct an association [...] John B. Judis’s biography of Buckley says that he was “friendly with” but never “very close” to Mailer. Still, Buckley’s durable cordiality toward Mailer is more remarkable than his being amigos with Galbraith or belligerents with Vidal [...]
Show biz, for which both men had plenty of aptitude, first connected the two: John Golden, a young Chicago promoter, arranged to put Buckley and Mailer together in a public debate, on September 22, 1962, which quickly sold out.
Mailer was several months away from turning forty. Having largely flamed out in fiction after the success of “The Naked and the Dead,” and lucky to have escaped a prison sentence for stabbing his second wife, he was still in the early, shaky stages of a comeback second only in that era to Frank Sinatra’s. It had begun with the self-referential miscellany “Advertisements for Myself” (1959) and was continuing with his Esquire pieces on the Kennedy candidacy (“Superman Comes to the Supermarket”) and Presidency. Another half decade would bring him to greatness with “The Armies of the Night,” which won a Pulitzer, and “Miami and the Siege of Chicago.”
Buckley, only thirty-six, was the standout son of a large, rich, conservative Catholic family. (Vidal called them “the sick Kennedys.”) He had attracted notice for his own books (“God and Man at Yale,” “Up from Liberalism”) and for National Review, whose rearguard crusades appeared to have even fewer prospects of success than those being waged on the far-left side of the political greensward.
Posters for Buckley and Mailer’s Chicago bout promised “the Debate of the Year” between the “forceful philosopher of THE NEW CONSERVATISM” and “ ‘America’s angry young man’ and Leading Radical.” Abbie Hoffman was in the audience; folksingers provided entertainment during intermission; and Playboy held the rights to publish a transcript. As Schultz notes, Buckley had less to lose than Mailer, whom he had called, two years earlier, in National Review, a “moral pervert.” In the event, he came away from the auditorium impressed, telling readers of his next column that Mailer “doesn’t know what it is he wants to say, but his desperate anxiety to say it, fired by his incandescent moral energy, makes him very much worth watching.” There may have been, along with the grudging admiration, a tinge of envy. As Schultz notes, Mailer was a bold, quicksilver “philosopher,” whereas the far less introspective Buckley always tended to see himself as a mere “salesman” for certainties he was duty-bound to make obvious to others.
[...] The Buckley-Mailer correspondence, not especially deep or voluminous, contains sprinklings of genial insult and even the record of a contribution Mailer made to the chronically empty coffers of National Review. Buckley’s fashionable wife, Pat, called Mailer Chooky Bah Lamb, an endearment she’d got from her Scottish nanny and which Mailer threw into his novel “An American Dream”; he called her Slugger. The Buckleys were occasionally, though not often, in the company of Mailer and whomever he was then married to, but the venues seem mostly to have been crowded ones, such as Truman Capote’s 1966 Black-and-White Ball, where Mailer got very drunk and had to be kept from assaulting President Johnson’s national-security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, over Vietnam.
The war was, for a time, a formidable obstacle to any deepening of fellow feeling between Buckley and Mailer. In 1965, Mailer demurred at the possibility of a personal get-together: “I think this is the wrong time for us to have dinner, because instead of having a nice calm quiet and lively conversation about the future of conservatism, my left conservatism and your right conservatism, there’d be too much pressure to have a screaming match.” In 1968, when both went to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, Buckley sided with the police as reluctantly as Mailer sided with the protesters. During that violent year, Buckley declined the chance to play a small role in Mailer’s film “Maidstone,” about political assassination; he was thus absent on the day that one of the actors, Rip Torn, struck the auteur with a hammer....
[...] In “Buckley and Mailer”, whose overstated subtitle is “The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties,” Kevin M. Schultz, a historian at the University of Illinois-Chicago, sets out to reconstruct an association [...] John B. Judis’s biography of Buckley says that he was “friendly with” but never “very close” to Mailer. Still, Buckley’s durable cordiality toward Mailer is more remarkable than his being amigos with Galbraith or belligerents with Vidal [...]
Show biz, for which both men had plenty of aptitude, first connected the two: John Golden, a young Chicago promoter, arranged to put Buckley and Mailer together in a public debate, on September 22, 1962, which quickly sold out.
Mailer was several months away from turning forty. Having largely flamed out in fiction after the success of “The Naked and the Dead,” and lucky to have escaped a prison sentence for stabbing his second wife, he was still in the early, shaky stages of a comeback second only in that era to Frank Sinatra’s. It had begun with the self-referential miscellany “Advertisements for Myself” (1959) and was continuing with his Esquire pieces on the Kennedy candidacy (“Superman Comes to the Supermarket”) and Presidency. Another half decade would bring him to greatness with “The Armies of the Night,” which won a Pulitzer, and “Miami and the Siege of Chicago.”
Buckley, only thirty-six, was the standout son of a large, rich, conservative Catholic family. (Vidal called them “the sick Kennedys.”) He had attracted notice for his own books (“God and Man at Yale,” “Up from Liberalism”) and for National Review, whose rearguard crusades appeared to have even fewer prospects of success than those being waged on the far-left side of the political greensward.
Posters for Buckley and Mailer’s Chicago bout promised “the Debate of the Year” between the “forceful philosopher of THE NEW CONSERVATISM” and “ ‘America’s angry young man’ and Leading Radical.” Abbie Hoffman was in the audience; folksingers provided entertainment during intermission; and Playboy held the rights to publish a transcript. As Schultz notes, Buckley had less to lose than Mailer, whom he had called, two years earlier, in National Review, a “moral pervert.” In the event, he came away from the auditorium impressed, telling readers of his next column that Mailer “doesn’t know what it is he wants to say, but his desperate anxiety to say it, fired by his incandescent moral energy, makes him very much worth watching.” There may have been, along with the grudging admiration, a tinge of envy. As Schultz notes, Mailer was a bold, quicksilver “philosopher,” whereas the far less introspective Buckley always tended to see himself as a mere “salesman” for certainties he was duty-bound to make obvious to others.
[...] The Buckley-Mailer correspondence, not especially deep or voluminous, contains sprinklings of genial insult and even the record of a contribution Mailer made to the chronically empty coffers of National Review. Buckley’s fashionable wife, Pat, called Mailer Chooky Bah Lamb, an endearment she’d got from her Scottish nanny and which Mailer threw into his novel “An American Dream”; he called her Slugger. The Buckleys were occasionally, though not often, in the company of Mailer and whomever he was then married to, but the venues seem mostly to have been crowded ones, such as Truman Capote’s 1966 Black-and-White Ball, where Mailer got very drunk and had to be kept from assaulting President Johnson’s national-security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, over Vietnam.
The war was, for a time, a formidable obstacle to any deepening of fellow feeling between Buckley and Mailer. In 1965, Mailer demurred at the possibility of a personal get-together: “I think this is the wrong time for us to have dinner, because instead of having a nice calm quiet and lively conversation about the future of conservatism, my left conservatism and your right conservatism, there’d be too much pressure to have a screaming match.” In 1968, when both went to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, Buckley sided with the police as reluctantly as Mailer sided with the protesters. During that violent year, Buckley declined the chance to play a small role in Mailer’s film “Maidstone,” about political assassination; he was thus absent on the day that one of the actors, Rip Torn, struck the auteur with a hammer....