By DAVID BULLA
WordSmith Advisor
William F. Buckley Jr. has been writing about American culture, especially politics and economics, since he was an undergraduate at Yale in the 1940s. Buckley has been one of the keenest observers of American life in the latter half of the 20th century. And Buckley's entertaining prose demonstrates the same keenness as his estimable eye for nuance in the body politic.
Buckley flashes a prose style that is perhaps the most idiosyncratic of any non-postmodern writer. His prose ebbs and flows, oscillating between vituperation and elegance. Anybody who has every read one of his diatribes against the excesses of statism or one of his eulogies on a recently deceased friend know that Buckley is a wordsmith of the first order. No popular writer has done more for broadening the scope of American discourse than Buckley -- a rather ironic accomplishment for the man who re-energized the word conservative in a century that has generally belonged to the other side in the American political arena.
We are fortunate that Buckley's long-time editor, Samuel S. Vaughan, has put together snippets of Buckley's prose in a new book titled, Buckley: The Right Word. This is a book by one of the century's best writers on his craft. In it we learn the the father of modern conservatism is so fluent in English precisely because it is not his first language. His father, Bill Sr., raised his family in Mexico and Bill's first language is Spanish. Buckley, who only began to speak English when he was 5-years-old, struggled with English from the start. This grappling seems to have caused an overcompensation in Buckley's command of English. Indeed, for many contemporary Americans, Buckley's use of the Queen's tongue might well sound like someone speaking a foreign langague. This overcompensation from childhood explains in part his super-literacy, his facility with words and his fascination with the way words are put together to form longer units of text -- the very subject of this volume.
There are all sorts of interesting topics here: style, vocabulary, vulgarity, profanity, foreign language, column writing, letter writing, journalism, among many others. The high school student would do well to examine the appendix titled "A Buckley Lexicon." In it are words found on both the SAT and GRE, as well as many other obtuse and exotic words.
Buckley gave the best defense of his often iconoclastic choice of words when he made an analogy to the unique tones created by the late jazz pianist Thelonious Monk: "He struck some really, sure-enough bizarre chords, but, you know, it never would have occurred to me to walk over and say, 'Thelonius, I am not familiar with that chord you just played, so cut it out please.' "
Perhaps none of Buckley's writing shines more than his eulogies. The one he wrote in 1988 after the death of South African writer Alan Paton stands out. Buckley tells a little aside about the book publishing industry that helps to demonstrate Paton's prominence in the world of literature:
Twenty years ago Bennett Cerf, the founder and publisher of Random House, told me that he kept two young women busy reading fiction books sent to Random House over the transom. "In thirty years, we've only published two titles that came in that way." Why don't you cancel the operation? I asked. "Because one of those books was Cry, the Beloved Country."
When Buckley passes on to the next state of being, one thing will certainly be true about this often controversial man: he was a man whose words gave us pause to ponder. He never wrote a novel half as good as Paton's, though his Blackford Oats' spy novels are not inconsequential. His prose challenged us as much as his politics. We students of composition were fortunate to have him in our midst.
Such reading perseverance as Cerf's two editors showed will not be necessary in order to appreciate Buckley and Vaughan's fine book on writing.
Buckley: The Right Word by William F. Buckley Jr., edited by Samuel S. Vaughan. Random House. New York. 1996.
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