Did you know that the late Pat Buckley was a mean, lying bitch, and that after her son pulled the plug on her respirator, he told her, "I forgive you"? Well, read this lengthy excerpt from her son Christopher's forthcoming memoir of his parents for all the colorful details.
The friend who passed that link along to me says he hopes Pat's ghost haunts Chris forever. My reaction to the piece is complicated. What are a writer's responsibilities? To be more specific, what does a writer do when telling the truth about his loved ones and honoring them (or their memories) conflict?
Plainly the Buckleys had an unusual relationship to their only child. He seems to have felt neglected by his famous folks, and to have found his mother to be a nightmare. And yet reading the piece, I don't sense any attempt at revenge, at least not consciously. The only thing I ever wrote that I am truly ashamed of is a travel piece back in the mid-1990s, about taking my mom and dad abroad. I adore my mother, but she and I are a lot alike, and I'm short-tempered with her at times. This trip was one of those times. The account I wrote of Travels With Mama was meant to be semi-comic, and I thought that's what it would read like. But many read it as me making fun of my mother. I was shocked by the accusation, and upon re-reading the piece in that light, made to realize that it was a fair characterization of my essay -- and, in turn, that I had likely concealed my own motive from myself.
I will never do anything like that again. I apologized to my mom, but it grieves me to this day that I held her up for any kind of public ridicule. But as I've observed here before, writers tend to have a poor sense of propriety in these matters. For us, getting the story tends to be the main thing. A friend of mine wrote a memoir of her early life, and deliberately left out material that would reflect poorly on her parents' behavior. She and I talked about this, and I told her it would have made for a more interesting book -- and not in the gossipy sense, but rather in giving a fuller picture of the things she had to deal with as a young person, and how her parents' foibles decisively shaped her character. She understood that, but said had she told the complete truth, it would have been a betrayal of them. Because she loved them, she couldn't see her way clear to doing that. I understand today more clearly where she was coming from. I couldn't do that either.
Christopher Buckley is in an impossible position, though.
If he wrote what amounted to a love letter to his late parents, it would have been a lie -- at least insofar as his mother's case was concerned, to judge from what he's presented here. Yet assuming (as we must) that he has written the truth as best he understands it, what he's done will strike many people as a betrayal -- a betrayal not only because in their view, a son shouldn't say such things about his parents, but also because he will have destroyed, or at least badly damaged, the comforting, airbrushed view they will have had about the Buckleys.
But nobody else could have written the book that he's written. What would have been lost to history, and to our understanding of Bill and Pat Buckley, and their marriage, had it not been written?
I barely knew Bill Buckley, for whom I worked for a year, only met Pat Buckley three times, and have never met Chris Buckley. I have no reason to believe that this book he's written is an act of revenge, a la "Mommie Dearest" (though I'd wager many, many people will see it that way). My guess is that Christopher is doing what writers, especially journalists, do, and nothing more. I struggle in my own life with the morality of that instinct, and find it impossible to judge whether or not Buckley fils did the right thing. I only know that I couldn't do it -- but I don't know whether that is a strength or a weakness. I couldn't do it for the same reason that, when standing on the Brooklyn Bridge on 9/11, and having to make a snap decision before the police closed the bridge after the south tower fell, whether to run forward toward the greatest story of my professional life, or to go back home and look after my wife and son, I chose to go home. To this day I cannot tell you whether I did the right thing or not. But I chose what I chose.
One more thing: Janet Malcolm famously wrote: ""Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." She meant that we take people into our confidence and betray them, even if we never tell a lie.
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Your Name at 12:42 is me
John E.- one's take on this really has nothing to do with what one thought of them personally. I was a fan of WFB, but not of his wife. I had met them both. I think this revelation of the faults of both of them is in poor taste and immoral. The argument here is about the morality of revealing someone's faults, espeically one's parents, not whether or not one particularly liked William or Pat Buckley.
"The argument here is about the morality of revealing someone's faults, espeically one's parents, not whether or not one particularly liked William or Pat Buckley."
I agree that this is the stated argument - however I cannot help noting that there seems to be a correlation between ones affection for the late Buckley's and ones distaste at CB's actions.
Not unlike ones distaste for activist Judges depending on the issue being ruled upon.
Would you feel as much distaste for M. M. O'Hair's son discussing her admittedly numerous faults? For that matter, does it make a difference if the person has a gentlemanly persona vs. one who is generally viewed as an unpleasant harridan?
Whew. Congratulations, BG. You managed to pack more bitterness and uncharity into one post than Christopher Buckley put into quite a few pages of finely honed prose.
sigaliris,
Please.
A twit is "a silly or foolish person."
A cad is "a man who behaves dishonorably."
An ingrate is "an ungrateful person."
Is is really all that "bitter" to describe C. B. in these ways?
Aren't these instead fairly *charitable* ways to describe him, in light of what he's done?
You'll note that I refrained from any profanity or scatalogy -- which was cutting C. B. *a lot* of slack, considering the circumstance.
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