REMEMBERING
Programs for the memorials
for Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley Jr.
Every now and again, the jostling frenzy of intellectual life in New York City, with its relentless fixation on the newest, the hottest, the coolest, the ins and the outs, pauses for a moment and the speed slows to a stately, reflective pace.
A striking example of this occurred when, in the space of a week, two of the city’s cultural giants received tribute, each in one of Manhattan’s most hallowed venues. On April 4, a memorial mass was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for William F. Buckley Jr., who died in February at age 82. Five days later, last Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, homage was paid to Norman Mailer, who died in November at age 84.
One could easily imagine the two men, friendly combatants for nearly five decades, robustly arguing about who received the better send-off. Was it Mr. Buckley, whose A-list mourners included Henry Kissinger, George McGovern and Tom Wolfe? Or Mr. Mailer, who reeled in John Didion, Don DeLillo and Gay Talese? Best to call it a tie — not least since Charlie Rose and Tina Brown were on view at both events.
Not that these were exclusive affairs. Both were open to the public, and the public came. All 2,200 seats at St. Patrick’s were filled, and an estimated 2,000 filed into Carnegie Hall. It is these numbers, one suspects, that would have mattered most to Mr. Buckley and Mr. Mailer; both had a long history of playing to and against the crowd, sometimes in direct competition with each other, for instance in 1962, when the pair took the stage at the Medinah Temple in Chicago before a paying audience of 3,600 in what The New York Times reported was “a debate between a conservative and a hipster.” Their topic was a burning political issue of the time: “What Is the Real Nature of the Right Wing in America?” Each man, of course, claimed victory, though the article in The Times concluded it was a draw, an exercise in contrasting styles between “Mr. Buckley (a clever jabber with a tiptoe stance) and the novelist, Mr. Mailer (who hooked with his fists as he spoke).”
The boxing vocabulary was apt. For one thing the debate took place two days before the heavyweight championship bout in Chicago between Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson and attracted some of the same audience. For another, Mr. Buckley and Mr. Mailer were both intellectual heavyweights of a kind increasingly rare today.
The disappearance of the public intellectual has become a familiar, not to say wearisome, refrain in our declinist moment. But in fact, there is no shortage of contemporary writers all too willing to advance controversial opinions on big subjects, whether it is Nicholson Baker offering a pacifist reinterpretation of World War II in his new book “Human Smoke” or Martin Amis speculating about the libidinal hang-ups of radical Islamists in his current essay collection, “The Second Plane.”
But Mr. Buckley and Mr. Mailer represented something different. More than public intellectuals, they were citizen intellectuals, active participants in the great dramas of their time, and eager at times to pursue their ideas in democracy’s more bruising arenas.
In the 1960s, for example, the “crisis of the city,” as it was called — a catchall term for crime, rising drug use, rioting, “white flight” and skyrocketing budgets — was a subject taken up by many writers and thinkers. But Mr. Buckley and Mr. Mailer, out of a combination of egotism and civic concern, went further: Each declared himself a candidate for mayor of New York City, Mr. Buckley in 1965 and Mr. Mailer in 1969.
Of course neither stood a chance of winning, and neither did very well, though Mr. Buckley came out ahead, capturing about 340,000 votes (roughly 13 percent) on the ticket of the Conservative Party, which he helped create. Mr. Mailer received a paltry 41,000 votes (5 percent in the Democratic primary), fourth in a five-man field.
The two campaigns were initially dismissed as larks or stunts. In an early news conference, Mr. Buckley was asked what his first action would be if he were elected. “Demand a recount,” he replied. Eventually, however, he ventured from his spacious home in Stamford, Conn., to explain his conservative views on race to hostile audiences like One Hundred Men, an African-American business organization, some of whose members suspected him of racism.
Mr. Mailer, for his part, descended from the aerie in his Brooklyn Heights brownstone, with its dazzling view of the East River, to log 14-hour days courting voters in Harlem and the Bronx and delivered a serious talk on inner-city crime at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice, before an audience well acquainted with Mr. Mailer’s reputation as a self-acknowledged “cop hater.”
More remarkable still, both candidates offered ideas that were prescient — and curiously parallel. Mr. Buckley, a committed free-marketeer, favored tax incentives for black and Puerto Rican business owners who stayed in depressed areas, and urged Walt Disney to erect a “Disneyland East” on the site of the World’s Fair. Mr. Mailer, who called himself a “left-conservative,” advocated “a central-city farmers’ market offering ethnic foods of all varieties” and “the rebuilding of our dilapidated neighborhood waterfronts as waterfront housing.”
Both men poured these ideas into print — and might have left it at that. But by running for office — with all the attendant rigors — they elevated the tone of campaign rhetoric even as they immersed themselves in the gritty truths of electoral politics.
The point is not that Mr. Buckley and Mr. Mailer deigned to mingle with the common folk, but rather that they defied the conventional distinction between words and deeds and with it the boundaries that insulate so many intellectuals from the broader world.
This isn’t surprising, given the trajectories of their long careers. Both men began as outliers of a sort who stood at a proud remove from the intellectual establishment of their time. Mr. Mailer’s first novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” made him famous at the age of 25, but for many years his work, with its intensely sexual and scatological themes, was not to be found in the pages of prestigious publications like The New Yorker.
Something similar was true of Mr. Buckley, who founded National Review in 1955, partly because he could not place his work in the respectable journals of the day, so many of them edited by liberals repelled by this provocateur. His first book, “God and Man at Yale,” published when he was 25, accused the Yale faculty of being a hatchery of atheists and socialists, and his second, “McCarthy and His Enemies,” ardently defended the most notorious of Red-hunters.
Eventually, of course, both men became intellectual eminences wreathed in laurels of every description: Pulitzers and National Book Awards for Mr. Mailer, a Presidential Medal of Freedom for Mr. Buckley.
And a new generation would honor (like the eulogists at St. Patrick’s) the civility and wit that Mr. Buckley brought to ideological debate and (like the eulogists at Carnegie Hall) the unflagging belief Mr. Mailer had in the enduring power of the novelistic imagination.
But even as grizzled octogenarians, Mr. Buckley and Mr. Mailer remained in many respects enfants terribles who never forgot that their validation had come from outside the polite precincts of the intellectual establishment. Their connection to the public never died, which is why thousands filled the large venues where both men were remembered.
In the warm appreciation of Mr. Mailer that Mr. Buckley wrote in November, he recalled their spirited debate in Chicago 45 years before. It had been a great success — the two split a purse of $8,000 and sold their remarks to Playboy for another $5,000 — so Mr. Mailer proposed a series of debates throughout the country, starting in Carnegie Hall. It didn’t happen then, but there would be many friendly tussles in the years to come, capped by their final rematch, when each commanded the stage to himself, separated by a single subway stop.
