An only child who had to oversee the passage of his parents through their final “vale of tears,” Christopher Buckley also bore the role of keeper of their legacies.
Many of us who struggle with the task of finding ways to give heat to ideas can usually point to favorites: cases where a writer has put the perfect image together to make his or her point. These passages are moments of rhetorical grace, sometimes represented by economy of style or an evocative image. Writers read partly to experience these moments. They add more fuel for the long slog of putting words on the page.
One personal favorite is from an unlikely source on an unlikely subject. Christopher Buckley’s 2009 memoir of the last year of his celebrity parents is funny and wise on the demands of coping with the inevitable. In Losing Mum and Pup we see the conservative gadfly William F. Buckley Jr. and his socialite wife struggle to the end. An only child who had to oversee their passage through what his father often described as “this vale of tears,” Christopher also bore the role of keeper of the flame for their outsized legacies.
That the book could be characterized as a pleasure to read is a credit to his dry wit and effective storytelling. Humor and melancholy merge seamlessly. Among other things, his dad’s ability to cope with the death of his mother produces the kinds of serio comic episodes that any caregiver with a sense of humor would recognize.
This is not just a memoir about wheelchairs and vacant faces. The younger Buckley has the good sense to understand the end of his parents lives mostly in terms of the consequential work done in their most productive years: Bill in publishing and politics; Pat, in the upper stratosphere of New York museums and philanthropies.
“Great men have too much canvas up.”
Here’s a favorite passage seemingly about his father’s love of sailing, but also much more. It contains a wonderful image.
Pup was an avid sailor. He had learned to sail as a child in upstate Connecticut, on a not very large lake. Now we live on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound and kept a thirty-eight-foot wooden sloop. It was named Panic, a name my mother found all too apt. . . I now get that Pup’s greatness was of a piece with the way he conducted himself at sea. Great men always have too much canvas up. Great men take great risks. It’s the timorous soul—souls like myself—who err on the side of caution; who take in sail when they see a storm approaching and look for a snug harbor. Not my old man. Or as Mum used to put it, “Bill why are you trying to kill us?”Great men are also impatient. This particular aspect showed up most vividly in my father’s manner of docking his boats. Most people, when guiding, say a ten or twenty ton vessel toward a dock, approach slowly. Not my old man. His technique was to go straight at it, full speed. Why waste time? This made for memorable episodes.1
“Great men have too much canvas up.” It’s an apt image that seems completely faithful to the person who published the National Review. Anyone who had observed Buckley on his Firing Line broadcasts or his work as a conservative essayist could also see the literal extended to the behavioral. Fearless sailing was typical of who the father was, even when he was heading in the wrong direction.
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1Christopher Buckley, Losing Mum and Pup, Emblem Books, 2010., pp. 121-22.
Good studies of human communication force us to rethink assumptions that are sometimes more comfortable than accurate. They give new life to the familiar and routine.
This very selective sample of books about communication is wide-ranging, mixing history and media theory with some far-ranging discussions of what is possible in human communication. Some of these studies are recent and helpful in understanding how digital media have altered social relationships. Others were published years ago, but will be thought-provoking for anyone interested in exposing the inner layers of communication. They are listed in approximate order of their accessibility to a general reader.
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance(William Morrow, 1974). This multi-million-seller which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary is many things: a narrative of a troubled life, a road-trip saga, an account of different modes of thinking, and an evocative introduction to Plato’s concerns about the corruptions of communication. Pirsig weaves all of these threads into a coherent personal narrative focused on his friends and his son. He’s especially intrigued that his chosen field of study, rhetoric, was borne under the dark cloud of intellectual illegitimacy. Plato argued this negative theme in various ways over the course of his life. It’s a claim that Pirsig wants to explore, sometimes while sitting on the saddle of an aging Henderson as he travels through America’s northern plains. Along the way the main event of the narrative is his active mind, considering everything from intellectual black holes to the nature of insanity.
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Anchor Books, 1959). Goffman was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, conducting
Erving Goffman
research that had a global reach. His methodology of deep observation of everyday events provides all kinds of insights about the intricacies of even simple interactions. The book remains a stalwart for anyone interested in the sociology and communication, and for good reason. His observations of everyday settings–restaurants especially fascinated him–is the perfect antidote to the bland survey research that now dominates so much of the social sciences. And because he helps us see the familiar in new ways, he’s fun to read.
Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood(Anchor, 1998). Gabler’s study of the first film entrepreneurs is a wonderful piece of social history that is especially timely in the current climate of narrow nativist sentiment. Gabler documents our debt to a select group of Eastern European Jews who gave us the Hollywood film factories. These men were driven to turn out reliable middle-class visions of the American dream, even though they were the victims of virulent anti-Semitism. The ironic result is that they were sometimes kept out of key institutions in the very town they created. The book also confirms how vital film and its modern forms remain to understanding the American experience.
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains(Norton, 2011). Carr’s popular book makes the case that the pacing and fragmentation of internet content is undermining our abilities to be critical thinkers. Though this study has produced a number of doubters, he is mostly convincing in describing how heavy doses of screen time have altered our abilities to concentrate and focus. We may be schooling ourselves out of the kind of rigorous concentration that has contributed mightily to human progress. His observations raise questions that everyone who is part of the wired planet should consider.
Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age(Penguin, 2015). In this useful and eminently readable study, the M.I.T. researcher explains why conversation as the default model for communication is threatened. Using this benchmark, she offers extensive interviews with children and young adults that suggest a drift toward preferences for connecting that weaken links to full and vital face to face exchanges. Her concern is how to maintain the natural social natures of our children, who now fear the unpredictability of direct contact with others. As she notes in her conclusion, “We want more from technology and less from each other. What once would have seemed like ‘friendly service’” from a sales clerk has “now become an inconvenience that keeps us from our phones.”
Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place(Oxford, 1986). Although written a number of years ago and in advance of widespread use of the internet, Meyrowitz still makes what I believe is the single best case that newer forms of human communication have undermined the psychological security that came with living only in real space and time. The book is revelatory in its assessment of how visual media work as irresistible magnets for our attention, and how visual media often weaken connections that truly matter. Given his use of seminal thinkers like Goffman and Susanne Langer, Meyrowitz’s framework for assessing communication processes is unsurpassed. By the end of the book he’s offered a haunting intellectual case for how electronic media have undermined the sources of personal identity.
John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air (University of Chicago, 1999). Peters is a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa and a frequent critic of the common but mistaken assumptions we have for communication. The Introduction to this book is alone worth a look. It takes apart most of the cherished myths we hold, among them: that communication is the best pathway for settling long-standing differences, and the idea that disagreement is just a matter of misunderstanding. From his very first sentence that “Communication is a registry of modern longings” a reader can sense a study that will offer challenging arguments and interesting insights. The references in the book are sometimes obscure. But every chapter has interesting observations, most of which come by quoting writers and thinkers who were experiencing the powers of telegraphy and the telephone for the first time. Peters also has surprising things to say about communicating with machines, animals and perhaps other sentient beings “out there” in the universe.
