Atlantic High

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  [And even the Forbidden Thought:] “I thought a great deal about Diana, but asked also what my motivation had been to get me on a boat going across the Atlantic in the first place.”

  Tony touched, too, on some of the practical difficulties of life in an active sea, like eating: “…we clustered around the saloon table below. The table opens up but its surface is polished stainless steel and it has no fiddles (or ‘faddles’ as Dick calls them).1 Using gaffer tape and a roll of charts, one of our many on-board technicians put together a fiddle on the lee side. Bill, Van and I were directly adjacent to it. Since everyone had his bowl in his lap, its only function was to keep the wineglasses from spilling. But every few minutes, over one went, sending red wine all over the three of us, loosening up the gaffer tape and destroying the structural rigidity of the roll of charts. Eventually Van and I had to sit with our toes up against the charts, holding them in.”

  But what the hell, there is also the (acknowledged) excitement. The rain notwithstanding, one is, if awake, usually better off in the cockpit, eye-to-eye with the elements. “Van and Dan”—Dan wrote in the log—“chilled to the bone, will wake Chris and Tony shortly. Log 401.5 wind 25 seas 7-12 feet at least, but very comfortable, exciting….”

  Storms eventually abate. But there are always all those other dislocations. We were made conscious by our wives and publishers that we were sailing in the Bermuda Triangle, but Dick Clurman, in his journal, had a better explanation for the mechanical breakdowns:

  “I’ve become fully convinced that Bill Buckley, who radiates such cheer and optimism, has his life blighted by one extraordinary downer. Above his head, invisibly circling, there must surely be the rarest bird of all: an albatross, loaded with electronic sensors, which jams, malfunctions, destroys and wipes out every battery-operated piece of his equipment on the boat surrounding him (on his own beloved Cyrano, it was characteristic that the following equipment was not working at the same time: the autopilot, air conditioning, high-seas radio, radar, generator, not to say the galley refrigerator and toaster).

  “Well, Buckley’s electronic albatross arrived the second day aboard the perfectly functioning Sealestial. First the radio—and hence all two-way communication—went out. Then, in order, the weather-mapping printer wouldn’t work, along with, worst of all, Buckley’s navigational Plath computer marvel, his Olympic electric stopwatch, and the newly installed digital log. And a warning from Diane [our stewardess]—we would run out of ice before we got to Bermuda. That, the worst news of all, since both Buckley and I are ice junkies and just assume that any boat we travel on carries enough ice for a Dartmouth Carnival at sea.”

  In a single entry in his log, Van was systematic on the matters at hand:

  “Marinefax [also, Weathermax]— Captain tried for one hour. We read the manual jointly, and finally concluded that the printout mechanism was kaput. [Beard-McKie, under Errata—“On page 103, the steps for lighting an alcohol stove were printed out of order. The correct order is 4-2-1-8-3-5-6-7.”]

  “Portable Radio—Works to a degree, after a lot of listening, but doesn’t pick up the designated weather reports as found in Radio Signals Volume 3.

  “Panasonic—Worked for a while and to a degree but finally could get no voice on any frequency. Captain tried, Dick tried and I read the manual and tried. I think something is wrong with the antenna.”

  Clurman: “In the middle of the night the engine bell goes off. Allen and our mate, David, established that the engine brake is gone and the heavy seas are turning over the flywheel…. Allen awakens me again to tell me the stuffing box is leaking. I say to him, ‘How come? We’ve been aboard the Sealestial three times and nothing ever went wrong?’ ‘I was saving it,’ he replied. Someone remarked to Captain Allen that there must be an easier way to travel. ‘Try American Airlines,’ he cheerfully shot back.”

  A pleasure very nearly unique to life at sea is the transformation when the weather finally does settle down. It is as though the universe had grudgingly agreed to compose itself, the coy mistress to shed her coyness. Dan’s entry in the log read: “Moon fully out at 0340, clear skies, perfect sail. I’m rested and as relaxed as could be. Perfect morning.”

  There is time now for routine preoccupations, concerns, crotchets. Dick wrote, “We have all brought our shore-bound interests to the boat and certainly, starting out, they prevail. We have our electronic toys, our timekeeping gadgets, our esoteric radios for various interests (time, news, weather, etc.), our books, our political disagreements and our land-based eccentricities.”

  Among the eccentricities was epicureanism. Poor Judy tried very hard, but we had exacting eaters on board. It is necessary to keep one’s eye on discontents that have any likelihood of festering. Dick wrote, “Even more at sea than on land, Bill refuses to allow around him, not only by noncontribution, but by his very attitude, unpleasantness among his friends. Monday night, we had an inedible dinner of pork chops and mashed potatoes and went sog-gily to bed.” I suggested, via the captain, a less hearty approach in the galley…. It’s getting back to normal. From Van: “I had a good late watch with Reg, straightened out a few macro problems; discussed his future work about which he seems more tranquilthan I would be; and looked dumbly at the trillion stars.” Van at this point ventured a generalization about the crew: “It is really a pretty good mixture of types and ages with each individual having some charm. Bill must consciously have anticipated the integration of the four old friends with the two new mates. It has worked out well and our social hour sparkles.”

  Danny, characterized by Dick as a man of action, not words, is intuitively shrewd as men of action need to be. I, for instance, had not at that point descried his own private drama, but he sensed that I had a private sorrow. He wrote in his journal:

  “Aside, 14th afternoon thought:

  “Bill, I’ve written a Sunday prayer and dated it with our latitude and longitude in my private journal, which, if you like—you may have.

  “I wonder if I’ve been distant these last few days, sheltered in thought. Probably so; I’ll explain later. Concern is what I feel—for you. Have you ever failed yourself? You seem to question the ability to prove daily.”

  At the end Dick Clurman—we all sensed—regretted that he would not be sailing with us. He took explicit pride, even, in the navigation that had brought us to Bermuda:

  “Not remarkable, you say? Well, consider this. All day before, Bill had been doing running sun-shots. Contrary to our compass, contrary to our radar readings, our RDF and every other navigational aid, Buckley asserted we were way off course by his handheld sextant reckoning.2 He was right. Had we continued on that course we would have missed Bermuda entirely.”

  6

  The documentary is, as I write, unconsummated, and it may all come to naught, though that disappointment I don’t expect. I dreaded the interference I knew would be caused by the presence, on a boat every bunk of which was already spoken for, of an additional set of people; but my curiosity in the matter was terminally engaged, and from the beginning I got on well both with the producer, Bob Halmi, and his splendid cinematographers Mark and David, described above. Bob Halmi’s name was given to me by Walter Cronkite after CBS turned down the documentary. Whether CBS did so out of sheer ennui at the very notion of a documentary on an Atlantic sail, or whether it was actually for the reasons Cronkite gave me isn’t absolutely ascertainable, because although Walter can be very direct, he will not hurt anyone’s feelings wantonly; and besides, he thought enough of the proposal to suggest on his own initiative that he turn it over to his documentary people for examination.

  In any event, the verdict was No—based on the rather surprising datum that CBS only does a half-dozen special documentaries per year. And since they do only six, Cronkite said, “they want them to be more socially oriented.” I found this reasoning perfectly acceptable on purely rational grounds. There aren’t many slums aboard the Sealestial, no bilingual education (though David the mate is studying Fr
ench, and we go through the motions of speaking to each other in French until we exhaust one another’s vocabulary, which happens after about fifteen minutes). Reggie and Tony were going through an Italian phrase book. I could, citing Dick Clurman’s skills as a sail handler, have argued that manifestly we practice affirmative action on board, but that, on reconsideration, was an oblique way to make a tenuous point. “No problem,” said Walter; “it’s a buyer’s market—you’ll get another network, or a syndicate, or cable.” He then gave me the telephone number of an old friend, Bob Halmi.

  Halmi was a Hungarian freedom fighter, and has become a successful television producer, juggling a dozen balls at any given time (when he met us in Bermuda he was greatly distracted because that morning he had fired Joan Fontaine, and could any of us think of a suitable replacement?). Halmi is direct, but courteous; a nice sense of humor; probably a tough hombre in the business, though I greatly like his informal, nonprehensile approach-probably the documents we have exchanged would not fill a printed page. He is also very sure of himself, and was nice enough to read my then current novel (Who’s On First) and tell me he liked it. I told him I was especially glad to learn this because Professor John Lukacs, himself a Hungarian, and a brilliant historian, had teased me for giving the name of Frieda to the principal Hungarian dame in the book, on the grounds that Frieda is an unknown name in Hungarian, to which Halmi remarked that Professor Lukacs was clearly too innocent to have known of, let alone patronized, the most famous prerevolutionary whorehouse in Budapest, which was called Frieda’s.

  I don’t know where it was—not likely at Frieda’s—that Bob Halmi acquired his big-think habits, but he was not only excited about the documentary I had in mind but about a second documentary, his own idea. He did a real L. B. Mayer “I-can-see-it-now!” bit, right in my office.

  Nothing to it. I would, on the final leg, bring on John Kenneth Galbraith and David Niven (combination #1), or (combination #2) Senator Barry Goldwater and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. While we sailed across the irenic great circle route to Gibraltar, we would converse about the Important Public Questions facing the American people. “My idea,” said Halmi as I stared at him dumbly, “would be to run the program as you sail into Gibraltar. I’ll do the editing on board, and the last ten minutes will be live”— he was very nearly feverish with excitement. I told him it was a wonderfully provocative idea, but that I thought he should get the sponsorship before I approached Team A or Team B about the idea, and he said of course. Four weeks later he called me in Switzerland, utterly dejected. He had got the sponsorship—the money, everything. But he couldn’t buy an hour of prime time. It was all spoken for, the hours being especially congested with political broadcasting on the eve of the two national conventions. I told him I was really sorry about this, and much later, as we plowed, for the most part underwater, from São Miguel to Gibraltar, I wondered what it would have been like to have had Galbraith and Niven on board talking about social security, SALT 2, and abortion. David is a splendid sailor and would have managed, if not to discuss the issues, to survive the passage. Ken hates boats, and by the time he reached Gibraltar would have insinuated into the Democratic platform a plank calling for the nationalization of all pleasure boats—though he’d have found it hard convincingly to designate Sealestial a pleasure boat after that particular passage.

  In any event, Halmi wasn’t himself present in St. Thomas for our departure, so I spent a little while with David and Mark talking about the documentary, and Mark confessed that it wasn’t clear to him exactly how the documentary would succeed in reaching a climax. “If you see first-rate tragedy,” he added helpfully, “you are looking at first-rate theater.”

  I told him we hoped most earnestly not to see first-rate tragedy and that in any event if we did, the probability of its being filmed was slight. Mark is a highly educated and experienced movie man and began talking about various techniques available, one of which is something called “pixillation.” I didn’t, of course, know what that was, and he said it was a technique first used by Charlie Chaplin, and requires jumping frames about to cause exotic effects, as in the illusion of hecticness in the assembly-line sequence in Modern Times. “It is a standard technique, but there might be a place for it in an ocean cruise.” I told him my Chaplin story. It was two months after the assassination of President Kennedy, the hosts were my wife’s old friend Vivi Crespi, and James Mason. We met the Chaplins in a private room at a little restaurant at Vevey and, beginning immediately, Chaplin was on stage, giving me a hard time on the assassination, doubting strenuously that JFK had been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald acting on his own: Probably it was the work of CIA types, or Texan Birchites.

  “I don’t trust the FBI. Do you, Mr. Buckley?”

  “No,” I said. “After all, they let you get out of the country without paying your income tax.” (At this point my wife was kicking me under the table, which went on for quite a while until, in the ladies’ room after dessert, Oona said to her, “Mrs. Buckley, you mustn’t mind. Don’t kick your husband. I’ve been kicking mine for thirty years, and it simply doesn’t work.”)

  Chaplin was elated by the exchange and did splendid imitations of J. Edgar Hoover, General Eisenhower, Allen Dulles, and Hitler. To everyone’s surprise he announced that he would join us at the boîte to which we were now headed—usually he went home before 11 P.M. Entering the little nightclub he was instantly spotted, and the orchestra switched directly to his theme song from Limelight. He felt the theatrical compulsion to requite the courtesy. He turned to me and said, “Have you ever seen a midget spotting a painting of a nude woman through the window of a gallery?” My answer was obvious: whereupon he turned, and diminished to one half his normal height.

  His walking stick disappeared, and also his neck. His back to the audience, he began to weave, in time with the musical beat, as though straining before a store window, the better to see the pictures in the gallery. Suddenly he stopped. He had spotted the nubile lady! And, the better to see all of her, suddenly he began to grow. Beginning at about four feet tall, he grew to five, six, seven, eight feet. By dextrous use of the walking stick behind his cape, he seemed simply to elongate under the motive power of his lust. At no point, even at his tallest, was any flesh visible. The crowd went wild. He shrank back to normal size and, pleased with himself, said to me, “I learned that one doing vaudeville at age seventeen.”

  Mark and David liked that, and said it is a part of the cinemato-graphical challenge to provide illusions pleasing to the eye and stimulating to the imagination. I threw a little cold water on it all, suggesting that a line had after all to be drawn—it was one thing to leave a dock three times, simulating a single departure; another to let someone fall overboard as though it had been accidental—and they both agreed. We reached no conclusions, other than that once under way, we would think about pixillation, Chaplinesque innovations, the whole bit. What happened after we got under way was that we were, for the most part, preoccupied with a) keeping the boat safe and on course, and b) relieving poor David of his awful seasickness.

  One reason for my excitement, when celestial navigation time came around, was that this would be the debut of the Hewlett-Packard 41C computer. In due course I shall tell about Plath’s marvelous Navicomp, which in its own way is preeminent. But one exciting feature of the new 41C, for which the designers had yet to issue a Navigational Package, was the alphanumeric feature of it. The word you have just read means that the computer will talk to you not only in digits, but in letters.

  I am so fortunate as to have, for a very close friend, Hugh Kenner. He is a genius who lives now with his second wife, Mary Anne (Mary Jo, R.I.P. 1964); the author of a dozen books, probably best known of which is The Pound Era. He has actually published a book on tetrahedrons, if I have correctly designated whatever it is that Buckminster Fuller invented, or was it geodesic domes? And, unsatisfied merely to be perhaps the foremost literary critic in North America (he is Canadian), he is as much at h
ome with computers as in Joyce’s Dublin. I told him that Ken Newcomer, the scientific whiz kid at H-P, would not be doing a Nav-Pac in time for my crossing—and so Hugh, not quite knowing, I now imagine, what he was getting into, volunteered himself to program a Nav-Pac for me. I was stunned. This meant that he would need to program the geographical position of the sun, the moon, the stars, and as many planets as he had time for, for every second of every day during the month of June. Gallantly he went about it, and weeks later he confessed that he had devoted 120 hours to the project. But the great night came for the demonstration. I had lectured in Baltimore, the three of us had dined, and we were now in his house. He brought forth the 41C, smiling.

  He handed it to me. “Let us take a problem involving the sun. Okay?” He brought out a copy of Airborne, in which, while illustrating the mechanics of celestial navigation, I give a hypothetical problem based on our crossing in 1975, but here I substitute from the Sealestial’s log.

  He depressed a button in the hand-sized computer, in the top right-hand corner. Across the display section I saw:

  “SUN”

  This was by way of reminding you that you had summoned that program, not a different one. The “SUN“ stayed lit for one second, whereupon it was replaced by:

  “GMT?”

  This may strike the layman as curt, even indecipherable. To anyone with any experience at all in celestial navigation its meaning is as self-evident as a red light to a motorist. It is saying to you: