Buckley and Mailer, Right/Left Frenemies

By Published on May 28, 2015

Buckley held Mailer in high, wary regard. Fairly early in his busy career, Buckley had given up on writing his own “big” book; later, he conceded of Mailer, “He’s a genius and I’m not.” Upon Mailer’s death, in 2007, only months before his own, Buckley repeated his belief that the novelist had “created the most beautiful metaphors in the language.” By that point, it scarcely mattered that Mailer, when operating on more literal levels, had advanced a view of the world that Buckley found in large part preposterous.

In “Buckley and Mailer” (Norton), 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 that in fact had less warp and woof to it than Buckley’s friendship with Galbraith. 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, and it seems pardonable for Schultz to extend what ought to have been a magazine article into a book-length safari in search of something significant. Here and there he even finds it.

Both were disgusted with the insipid aspects of American liberalism—a tepid consensus, corporate and bipartisan, that left each fearing not that the center couldn’t hold but that it would. “Buckley and I had been attacking this Center from our opposite flanks,” Mailer insisted. Even so, both were repelled by the violence with which it unexpectedly collapsed, and they were left cold by what Schultz calls the “rights-based model” of society, the beginnings of the identity politics that in the nineteen-seventies started replacing the liberal establishment.

Read the article “Buckley and Mailer, Right/Left Frenemies” on newyorker.com.

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