Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 5, Last Campaigns (1974-2008)

 1) Finishing this biography, I had the odd thought that it is a kind of inverse of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. When Boswell met Johnson in 1763, Johnson was already 53 and had already accomplished most of what he is famous for: the dictionary, above all, but also the Life of Savage, Rasselas, the Rambler essays, and “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” Yet most, maybe three-quarters, of Boswell’s biography is about the last twenty years of Johnson’s life--not Johnson's most productive years, but the years when Boswell often had him under close observation, writing everything down. 

Tanenhaus spent quite a bit time with his subject as well, something at least close to the twenty years Boswell knew Johnson. As far as I know, they did not travel together, as Johnson and Boswell did to the Hebrides, or belong to same famous club. Still, Tanenhaus spent a lot of time with Buckley, and he could have brought in a lot of anecdotes based on direct observation, á la Boswell, yet he seems to be deliberately refraining from doing so.

Part 5, the book’s concluding section, contains the whole of the time Tanenhaus was in contact with Buckley, yet it is the shortest, even though it covers the widest range of years.

Tanenhaus’s having long known his subject does nonetheless leave a kind of dusting on things, transmitting a familiarity with his subject that is felt by the reader in lots of hard-to-pin-down ways. Take his account in Chapter 49 of the celebration of the entrance into the priesthood of Brent Bozell, Buckley’s longtime friend, co-worker, and brother-in-law. Tanenhaus may not have been an eyewitness at this event, but his account of it all but puts Buckley right before us.

2) I don’t know that Tanenhaus explicitly says anywhere that the election of Ronald Reagan, possibly the culmination of the movement Buckley had been helming for three decades, actually represented an anti-climax for Buckley. He sure leaves this reader with that impression, though. 

Tanenhaus skillfully conveyed the excitement of Buckley and the National Review-ers in getting Goldwater nominated in 1964. In 1980, their man Reagan--a friend of Buckley and a subscriber to National Review--not only gets nominated, but wins. Victory! However, Buckley and Reagan disagree about the Panama Canal...Reagan declines to attend the NR 25th anniversary bash in December 1980...Buckley is not offered a Cabinet position...it's just not the way anyone might have imagined it.

Buckley pulls back a bit from the magazine, Firing Line starts winding down, Buckley seems more involved in his a-week-in-my-life memoirs, in his series of spy novels, in being host-with-the-most than he does in the revolution.

3) Tanenhaus does not explicitly address the question of whether Buckley bears some responsibility for the election of Trump eight years after Buckley died. Anyone attempting to answer that question would need to read Tanenhaus's book, certainly, but he leaves it alone (Trump references in the index = zero). 

Having read the book, I'm not sure how I would answer the question. It's hard to imagine Trump being elected without the modern conservative movement behind him, and without Buckley there might not even have been a modern conservative moment. On the other hand, Buckley was principled, Trump is not, and it's not clear that Trump is even "conservative" in any of the senses that Buckley was. It's hard to imagine Trump on Firing Line. I'm going to say Buckley has some responsibility for the election of Trump, but I don't think he would be much pleased about that.

Kathryn Neurnberger, _Rue_

 I POSTED ABOUT Nuernberger’s previous collection, The End of Pink, and that post is the second-most-visited post of my blog, a bit north of 1,200. Surprising, no? I mean, Nuernberger is accomplished and respected, but still. 

Given the date of the post—October 17, 2016—perhaps Russian bots were looking to latch onto anything that might help elect Trump, and perhaps the phrase “the end of pink” had promising overtones of anti-feminism and anti-socialism, just the thing for stopping Hilary. 

Eh, who knows. If the post got one person to read the book, mission accomplished. It’s a fine book, as is this one.

Rue is both a plant and an emotion, making it an apt choice of title for this collection, which pays a lot of attention to the landscape, especially its plants, and which does betray regret. In various poems, Nuernberger seems to regret or half-regret her job, her decision to live in the country, and her marriage (see the title poem). What I can find on the internet suggests that at some time after 2020, when this book was published, she found a new job and moved to Minneapolis. The internet does not seem to know how things went with the marriage.

Rue (the book) tends toward the conversational—that is, the poems often begin with observations about the speaker’s immediate surroundings, the sentence structure and diction are plain, the language mainly matter-of-fact—but never stays there. Just when the reader is lulled into a kind of passivity, out jumps a surprisingly candid revelation, or an unexpected new topic, or an audacious image. Rue makes a lot of bold moves.

The collection is worth reading just for those jumps, but we also get portraits of other women artists whose work is highly involved with plants, such as Maria Sibylla Merian and Anna Atkins, and if you, like Neurnberger, are interested in plants, you will also pick up some lore. 

Edmund De Waal, _The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss_

 COULD THIS BOOK, I wondered, actually be as great as so many people say it is? Turns out, yes.

De Waal’s book begins with a collection of netsuke (miniature Japanese carvings in wood and ivory) assembled by Charles Ephrussi in the 1880s and 1890s. The Ephrussis were a prominent European banking family with origins in Odessa; Charles was a connoisseur of the arts in Belle Époque Paris (being the third son, he had not that much to do for the family business). He is the figure in the top hat towards the back in Renoir’s famous painting Le Déjeuner des canotiers and may have been part of the inspiration for Proust’s Swann. De Waal does an extraordinary job of evoking the art world of that time and place and how it crashed into the anti-semitism of the Dreyfus Affair. (Charles’s grandfather is De Waal’s great-great-great-grandfather).

Charles gave the collection as a wedding gift to his cousin Viktor, who belonged to the part of the family running the Vienna branch of the bank. De Waal turns out to be as sure-handed and evocative in conjuring up Secession Vienna as he was with Belle Époque Paris. Here too, however, anti-semitism exerts pressure, thanks to the anti-semiotic mayor Karl Lueger.

The real, fatal pressure comes in 1938 with the Anschluss, when Austria is incorporated into Nazi Germany. The Ephrussis lose their business, their house, and their art collection to Nazi appropriation. The netsuke, however, being so tiny, are smuggled out by a house servant, and find their way to Viktor’s son, Ignace, who got out early to the USA and joined the army when America entered World War II.

After the war, Ignace moves to Tokyo—and once again De Waal skillfully represents a legendary milieu. De Waal, great-nephew of the gay and childless Ignace, becomes the next inheritor of the collection.

Besides being compulsively readable, De Waal strikes an extraordinary balance in presenting, on the one hand, the beauty of artistic objects and the sensibility of those who love and preserve them, and on the other, the cruelty and brutality of history (including not only the Holocaust but the bombing of Tokyo). The Hare with the Amber Eyes is a book that will continue to attract readers for generations, I will venture to say.

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 4: Controlling the Message (1966-1974)

 THE MAIN EVENT in the fourth part of Tanenhaus's life of Buckley is the coming of Firing Line, the long-running public affairs talk show in which Buckley interviewed a long and amazing list of newsmakers and opinion leaders. Among the ironies of the show’s run is that Buckley, who made no bones about providing a conservative perspective with his show, gave more airtime to radical leftists (Eldridge Cleaver, Jesse Jackson) than the mainstream media ever did. He was probably hoping to show how extreme and out-of-touch the radical left was, but in the process he produced a show that’s an invaluable archive, a better record of the actual politics of the era than any of its competitors.

Buckley decided to support Nixon rather than Reagan for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, disappointing or infuriating any number of hard-core movement conservatives. Buckley felt Nixon was conservative enough and had a better chance of winning, but there was much gnashing of conservative teeth after Nixon opened up relations with China. 

Part Four also provides close-ups of a couple of Buckley’s more embarrassing public moments: (1) his clash with Gore Vidal when the two were providing commentary on ABC of the 1968 nominating conventions, in which Vidal triggered an on-camera meltdown by Buckley, and (2) Buckley’s advocacy for the release of convicted murderer Edgar Smith, of whose innocence Buckley was convinced. It turned out Smith was actually guilty, and a few years after his release nearly killed someone else. 

The obvious analogue (which Tanenhaus points out) is Norman Mailer’s advocacy of Jack Abbott, which likewise ended badly. I also thought of Vidal’s sort-of defense of Timothy McVeigh (“The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh,” Vanity Fair, September 2001). 

Marjan Kamali, _The Lion Women of Tehran_

 I AM GUESSING that this novel is about Kamali's parents' generation. She was born in 1971, but the two main characters, Ellie and Homa, were born in 1943, and most of the novel is set during their childhood and young womanhood, in an era before Kamali was born. I wondered whether some of the characters and events were drawn from Kamali's own family history, but for all I know the whole story is imagined.

It's a novel about female friendship. Ellie and Homa become best friends during primary school, are separated for a few years, then again become best friends in high school and college, then are estranged when Ellie inadvertently tips off a government agent that Homa is behind the distribution of certain anti-government pamphlets. Homa is arrested, imprisoned, and tortured and raped in prison. Ellie emigrates to the United States with her husband and loses touch with Homa. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, however, Homa reaches out to her old friend to see whether she can help Homa's daughter (Homa was impregnated in being raped) to get to the U.S.A. She can and does, and the old friends are reconciled.

As a study of female friendship, I found the novel not quite as compelling as Elena Ferrante's famous Neapolitan quartet. I got a good idea of what Ellie found dazzling in Homa, but less idea what Homa saw in Ellie. Surprisingly, Homa is much more interesting in the chapters narrated by Ellie than she is in the chapters narrated by herself.

The chapters narrated by Homa seem to pay less attention to revealing her character than they do to filling readers in on what is happening in Iran after Ellie emigrates. In these chapters, we learn about the Shah's somewhat paradoxical modernizing-yet-repressive regime and about the advent of theocratic rule under the Ayatollah Khomeini, but Homa herself is not that strong a presence.

The novel has its share of memorable scenes, especially when Ellie and Homa are young and scooting around Tehran, and Ellie's mother is a memorable character in a Mrs. Bennet sort of way. The Lion Women of Tehran does have a kind of "book club" texture and aura, though. It's a brisk read, but I don't expect it will stay in my head the way Ferrante's novels did.

George Saunders, _Vigil_

 I DO NOT always appreciate Adam Mars-Jones's harsh reviews of recent novels in the London Review of Books--I sometimes wonder whether there are wicked giggles in the LRB office as the editors discuss whom he will eviscerate next--but I thought he had a reasonable complaint about Saunders's new novel. In Saunders's previous novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, the reader could gradually piece together how the afterlife in which the book is set worked: what its options were, what the better and worse choices were, what was at a stake. Vigil is also set in some liminal zone between our life and the afterlife, but as Mars-Jones noted in his review, it's harder to tell how things work.

The narrator, Jill "Doll" Blaine, has been operating in this liminal zone for about fifty years. Has she remained close to our world because she is still attached to it? Because she has unfinished business? Maybe--she died young when a bomb intended to kill her police officer husband killed her instead, and at the time of her death everything in her life was going extremely well, so she may feel not ready to leave.

Or is she still there (here) because she has been given work to do? She hovers near people who are on the point of death, offering comfort and consolation, helping reconcile them to  their new condition, a special class of angel, perhaps.

However, she is currently assigned to K. J. Boone, a dying oilman, more crucially an oilman who did much to undermine and discredit climate science in order to enhance the profitability of his business. Is Jill supposed to be helping Boone to see the damage he has done, so as to achieve contrition, opening a path to a better afterlife? At certain moments, she seems to be working more towards this end than that of comfort.

None of these questions, so far as I could judge, got a definite answer, and that was frustrating. 

Saunders still has that uncanny ability to conjure the internal voices of his characters, and he does an especially good job with Boone's, I think. Given how insightful and moving Lincoln in the Bardo was, though, Vigil was worth reading but mildly disappointing.

Paul Molinari, _Julian of Norwich: The Teaching of a 14th Century English Mystic_; Frances Beer, _Julian of Norwich_

I HAPPENED TO read these two books on Julian one after the other and was struck by the contrast between them. Both writers approach Julian with respect, insight, and reverence--even with a love that lifts right off the pages of their books. But they seem almost 180 degrees apart.

Molinari was a Jesuit, and his book from 1958 puts its greatest energies into showing how completely Julian’s experience and conclusions align with Roman Catholic tradition and doctrine. 

Beer’s 1998 book is mainly a translation of the shorter version of Julian’s Revelations, with the Jesus-as-Mother chapters from the longer version appended. She also provides an introduction and a concluding essay; in the latter, she sees Julian as “however inadvertently, something of a radical,” noting her “transcendence of misogyny” and her “rejection of hierarchy.” 

Beer’s view is closer to my own, certainly. Julian seems to be pushing back against the idea that the divine is totally male and against the exclusion of women from conversations about the divine. I also have the feeling that she doesn’t believe in damnation. But Molinari certainly makes a thorough, carefully documented case for her perfect orthodoxy. 

Duck or rabbit?