Atlantic High

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Would be willing to make considerable sacrifices in geographical distance in exchange for propulsion: that sort of thing. In any event, we left with four pieces of paper that suggested the going would be easy for the four foreseeable days in the future, which indeed it was.

  I say we left, but not quite without incident. At the reception area, maintained by a young sailor whose dress and all-American features might have been crafted by Norman Rockwell, and whose posture behind the reception desk was disconcerting only because he’d have looked more natural coming in from the sea, towing a rescued grandmother, I espied a clock. A most tantalizing clock. Exact-time nuts are clock-conscious, and there is nothing more challenging to our machismo than a clock that asseverates its own correctness. This particular clock was the more provocative because it asserted not its correctness to the second, but to the three seconds. It is easier to ignore the magazine cover that promises to display the most beautiful woman in the world (routine hyperbole) than to dismiss the cover that promises to display the woman than whom no one has discovered two more beautiful women.

  I looked at my watch, the pride of my life (when it works, this being one such moment, or at least was, as of that morning when I checked it against our radio). I paused, and addressed the young man.

  “Excuse me, but are you saying that the time on the clock there is in fact correct within three seconds, plus or minus, for Greenwich Mean Time?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well,” I said, studying my wristwatch carefully, “in fact, you are twenty-five seconds off.”

  “No sir. I think you will find that you are twenty-five seconds off.”

  What to do? Should I go to Sealestial, five miles away at St. George’s, bring in my $36 Radio Shack WWV time-tic, and ram it down Jack Armstrong’s throat? That, I thought, would be to commit the sin of pride; so I motioned to Van that we should be off. But I brooded on the subject. Twenty-five seconds. Four seconds equal one mile. So that our naval base was giving out the time, misleading people, to the extent their navigation depended on it, by six mues. I tried to crank up a sense of civic obligation, but I was too hungry, and so we simply went on to St. George’s, told the taxi driver that no, the dark-gray World War II submarine that squatted on the water like a dozing lamprey eel wasn’t our sailboat—the next boat, with the two masts, all the sails, and the people, was our sailboat; boarded; asked Danny—to check on myself—to check my watch time; and it was right. If our ICBMs land six miles north of Red Square, I’ve got a scoop.

  That night, the first night on the leg to the Azores, I took star sights with the usual frustrating results. But I felt that I was on the verge of Discovery, and lo, this was correct, as I have revealed, forever liberating the legions who have suffered over the ages from the problem of bringing in the stars. The next morning was Sunday, and on this occasion Danny and I did meet to pray together. We sat in the stateroom looking at “suggested passages” in the index of the Bible, and Danny nominated “Separation from Worldliness,” which certainly suggested our condition, twenty-four hours out from Bermuda with a destination two thousand miles away.

  “Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all the filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God…. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the egos, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but of the world.” How true this was—is—and how wonderfully apposite, in its current inapplicability. At that moment Danny lusted most awfully for the flesh and the spirit of his beloved Gloria. And I was most fearfully grateful to the Lord for things of the earth, the sea and the skies, and a tight hull, the sails above me, and my companions who made them function, and proud of this spirited company. But the purpose of prayer, surely, is to stress the great divisions between the material and the supernatural condition, not to gloss over them.

  The second night out I shared the watch with Christopher, and we got around to talking about the book we were committed to produce about our journey. I had decided on Atlantic High as its title, having spent some time looking for a word—like airborne—that was intentionally ambiguous. Mark Dichter told us he had heard that Roy Disney (nephew) had poured a prodigious sum of money into the production of a feature film based on the Ensenada race, a California staple. Roy Disney is a committed yachtsman who (a coincidence) bought the broadcasting company I had served (there is a difference of opinion on how well) as board chairman. At least six times a year, in my travels, I run into people who say to me, “I saw Roy Disney the other day and told him I’d be seeing you and he said to say hello.” After a considerable accumulation of these greetings I suddenly found myself wondering why Roy did not bother to convey his own greeting. But then, why haven’t I? So: “Hello, Roy! I liked the title of your feature film—which one day I hope to see—so very much that I leaned on your title (Pacific High) for my own book. Hope you enjoy it.”

  Christopher asked if I had a subtitle in mind; I told him I didn’t, but hoped to come up with one. Airborne’s subtitle was a preemptive strike. It was: “A Sentimental Journey.” There is sentiment in that book, and I didn’t want the reviewers to say it first. It worked. Van came into the cockpit. Our pace was absolutely steady, the moon and stars were out, and we were going very nearly at hull speed, propelled by a wind suddenly turned warmer than what we had experienced, inducing me to slide my sweater off while I balanced the wheel on my knee. Van overheard the last part of our conversation and said why didn’t I use as a subtitle, “How to Survive at Sea with Only $650,000 Worth of Equipment”? He proceeded to pollute the water, mutter good night, and go back to his cabin. He was still reading when, a few minutes later, at watch change, I myself went to bed in the bunk directly below his. He was chuckling, a copy of Encounter on his stomach. “Here,” he said, “is a quote from a sign in an Istanbul hotel: ‘To call room service, please to open the door and call room service.’ “

  Christopher had said after Van went below that he, Christopher, was greatly struck by the congeniality of the crew, and I reflected on the philosophical proposition: If A likes B, C, D, E, and F, and they like A, does it follow that B will like C, D, E, and F? …etc. Van had never met Tony or Christopher; Tony didn’t know Van or Christopher; Christopher didn’t know Reg, Van, Tony, Danny; Danny didn’t know Tony or Christopher. A metaphor survived in the memory from the column I had written the previous morning—namely, the dialectic between intimacy and loneliness. It was so at the South Pole. I was there for only five days in midsummer (January), but beginning in April the sun would disappear, to rise again only in October. Six months of darkness, isolation: no traffic whatever with the rest of the world; a community reduced from its summer-size complement to about one hundred people. How did they get on? I am not ready to generalize on the subject, but it is objectively true that on our voyage no one was getting on the nerves of anyone else; and so it would be, on through the trip. Whether they will remain friends doesn’t, really, matter.

  The centrifugal forces that lead people away from each other—the hectic anonymity of New York; different professions; different extra-marine interests—all these argue for separation. But in the loneliness of the sea there is a bond. It is highly attenuated, by comparison with the bond that binds men in combat, but it is there, as the element of combat is there.

  12

  Dick is of course correct that you cannot easily leave shore or, having done so, leave your concerns entirely behind. I belong to a club in California whose motto is “Weaving spiders, come not here.” Indeed the (quite extraordinary) Bohemian Encampment begins with a rococo ritual in which the members witness a pageant wherein worldly concerns are first corporealized, and then eliminated. It is called the “Cremation of Care,” and came to us right from the golden age of Victorian optimism. Bah humbug; it was at the Bohemian Grove that I first saw Ro
nald Reagan and George Bush pawing the ground as they greeted each other; two years later they plighted their troth so happily. And so forth.

  Danny, as we know, was absorbed in thoughts of his girl. Poor Reggie was struggling to adjust to a divorce and a (temporarily) wrecked professional life. Van worried (to the extent Van can do so, buoyed as he so regularly is by the piquancies of life, and ricocheting surefootedly off its bizarre juxtapositions) because his spirited wife’s unhappiness at leaving London was something much greater than merely not wanting to leave A to return to B because she had got used to A; her resistance was truly organic, ana Van worried about it. Christopher can probably be said to have brought his professional worries on board quite intentionally, and his discharge of those duties was as industrious as anything I have ever beheld—it would not have surprised any of us if, sometime after midnight, Christopher had thrown himself overboard, so as to be able to photograph the rescue party. Tony—one never quite knew whether the expression on his face was that of Hamlet facing life’s tortured ambiguities, or merely reflected an internal biological dialectic on whether he could have a second helping of chile con carne without becoming queasy. I had my concerns, but as a most practical matter, I had my unanswered mail.

  I have found over the years that unanswered mail is no problem at all for some very nice people, for instance Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, and John Leonard—a prophet, a philosopher, a critic—who somewhere along the line decided, with significant exceptions, not to acknowledge correspondence. Chambers wrought architectural masterpieces, to those to whom he elected to respond, and probably sent out ten times as many words via the post office as ever he sent to his publishers, whether at New Masses, Time Inc., Random House, or National Review. James Burnham courted anonymity, notwithstanding the grand and justifiable claims he made on the attention of those who cared about what he (chronologically, the first to do so) called The Struggle for the World. Leonard—who came to National Review at age twenty, freshly kicked out of Harvard for the kind of endearing delinquencies that, in John’s case, will surely, a century or so hence, cause a half-holiday to be declared at Harvard on the anniversary of Kicking John Leonard Out—developed a personal eccentricity not readily fathomable, particularly when old friends write him letters that, in circumstances commonly accepted as civilized, “require” a reply and are greeted by silence, unaffecting his cheery voice when he answers the telephone.

  In any event, I have always felt a compulsion of sorts to answer mail. Let me begin by affecting no distortion. My mail does not come in (I assume) at anything like the volume of Mick Jagger’s or—at an entirely serious level—Walter Cronkite’s. But it comes in in awesome volume. I answer the mail in part because I desire to do so, in part because, as editor of a journal of opinion of ambitious political-intellectual reach, I feel I should do so; in part because my journal, and to a degree my ideology, are mendicant in their posture toward the various tribunals that judge us and the readers that sustain us. I write now not long after a man who long ago publicly declared that his favorite magazine is the magazine I edit has been elected President of the United States. Not bad. I do not regret answering his letters over the years. But, mostly, the letters aren’t from people who have in mind the presidency. They are an infinitely interesting breed, and their motivations are diverse.

  Some people write letters compulsively—a lady I knew (R.I.P.) wrote me about ten pages every week for a period of about twelve years, until I wounded her by coming out for the decriminalization of pot, after which she reduced the flow by about one half. There are, as I say, those who simply will not write letters (I am married to one, more’s the pity: because those few letters she has forced herself to write are memorable). In between, where most people are found, there are the Utilitarians (they write only to accomplish a finite purpose); the Supplicants (they write to get something from or out of you); the Professionals (they write out of a sense of duty, and in order to effect something or set something right); the Critics (they write to tell you what’s wrong—and, occasionally, what’s right—about you and your world); and there are the miscellaneously motivated.

  Since the volume of mail received by editors is very great we need to develop a style of our own. The key is brevity—there is no way to indulge the dilative impulse and get on with the business at hand, not unless you are prepared to be severely discriminatory—i.e., send Jones a very long letter, and ignore the next twenty. But there are different ways of being brief, and a decent respect for the feelings of mankind argues for the development of non-peremptory brevity. “Dear Mr. Jones: I return your manuscript, which is unusable,” is a world away from “Dear Mr. Jones: The answer is a most reluctant No,” though the word count is exactly the same. Granted, my rejection formula does not achieve the oriental plenitude of the Peking publication whose editor returned a manuscript to a British economist with the note, “We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper it would be impossible for us to publish any work of a lower standard. And, as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity.”

  I settled down in the huge armchair in the owner’s stateroom, and raised my foot to the vertical bar to provide balance from the ship’s pitch. On the floor, to the right, the growing mound of letters answered. On the left, in the large canvas case, the pile on which I would whittle away. I had breakfasted, talked with the duty watch about sails and strategy, calculated a Dead Reckoning (DR) position, checked to see what time the sun would cross the meridian so as to have ample notice before taking the indispensable noon sight. I brought in the battery-operated cassette player, and inserted a tape….

  Among the pending requests is one from a young editor of madcap inclinations. “Would it be convenient to get together for a chat or drinks during that period [when he would be in New York]? Would it be convenient to tape you on the Corporation Song during that period? This is of course an important matter, for I have always seen myself as a defender of high culture.” This particular writer, founder and editor of the American Spectator, has the habit of catapulting himself into higher forms of inanity from paragraph to paragraph. He did not let me down this time: “As a defender of high culture, I enclose a copy of one of the latest songs we have added to our repertoire. It is so beautiful that on the first night Kapellmeister Von Kannon led us in it we were all moved to uncontrollable sobbing. It indeed qualifies somewhere between the sublime and the beautiful, probably the ridiculous.” Answers to such letters are necessarily genial, and it is prudent not to attempt to reply in kind.

  A doctor in Montana, a devotee of classical music and the traditional Roman liturgy, is shocked by a recent experience. “I attended the First Communion of the first-born of a friend whom I had delivered into the world and as the child walked solemnly down the aisle the organ played ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.’” Could I, he asked, tell him how to get in touch with the orthodox liturgists in America? This was not difficult to do, there being only about three of them left.

  A regular correspondent who does not let a week go by without sending along a rainbow or two he has happened upon in his discursive reading, or else trapped from the stream of his reminiscences, complains that he cannot find the word “negritude” (used by me in a recent column) in a dictionary. I reply, “negritude is the French word for blackness, and has attached to it the same kind of thing that attaches, in an entirely different context, to the word machismo.” That query was harder to handle than that of another correspondent of the week who demanded to know the meaning of the word “querencia,” which he said he could not find in any dictionary. This greatly worried me and before leaving New York I actually put in a call to Barnaby Conrad, who taught me the word in one of his books on bullfighting a million years ago. As I waited for the long-distance operator to track him down, I thumbed through
Webster’s Third: and there it is, big as life “querencia:…” My answer, I think understandably, had a touch of the drill sergeant’s: “See Webster’s III.” I didn’t even furnish the page number, though I probably would have done so if the letter writer’s tone had been a little less peremptory.

  A reporter, calling attention to a book diligently unreviewed by the press, wrote: “I’m sending you a copy with hopes you might be motivated to read it and if so moved to comment.” Book writers, including the author of this book, are incapable of learning that the one thing an editor can least afford to do is promise to read any given book (time required, depending on the book and on the reading speed of the reader, 6-16 hours). The reply is necessarily evasive.

  Every editor begins life by resolving never ever to agree to read book manuscripts. No one succeeds completely. In this case however, it is a protégé who wrote first at age fourteen to ask exactly what was meant by the right-wing shibboleth against “immanent-izing the eschaton.” Finally I found the time to read one hundred pages. Courage! (He is young and very sensitive.) “It needs total overhauling. If ever you are in the mood for it, come see me and I’ll spend an hour and a half with you and show you the kind of thing that needs to be done just to the first three or four pages in order to electrify them. I hardly consider myself a master—but in one respect my advice is extremely good: I am the most easily bored man in the universe, and under the circumstances a good litmus test on the question whether the attention is conscripted. You must command the reader’s interest and attention—much faster than you now do.”