by Kevin M Schultz (WW Norton, £17.99)
One of the scourges of contemporary publishing is the genre of books that declare that this meeting or that chance encounter changed the course of history. More often than not, such claims turn out to be threadbare. Sometimes, though, the gambit pays off. Kevin M Schultz’s Buckley and Mailer is a case in point.
Schultz’s argument is that the unlikely friendship between the conservative intellectual William F Buckley and the novelist Norman Mailer “shaped the sixties,” as the book’s subtitle puts it. That may be overstating things a little, but he offers a more plausible version of the same claim: that Buckley and Mailer’s brand of “engaged public intellectualism” was a “bellwether” for the arguments about the nature of American democracy which made that decade so tempestuous.
Buckley and Mailer were leading lights of the “New Right” and “New Left” respectively, and both were engaged in prolonged acts of sabotage aimed at the US’s postwar settlement—“stale Cold War pieties,” on the one hand, and the “invidious presence of corporate capitalism,” on the other. Schultz suggests that both men were searching, albeit in dramatically different registers, for “liberation” from the complacencies of the Eisenhower years. And both, he concludes, got more than they bargained for.
By the end of the 1960s, Buckley and Mailer looked upon the forces they had fomented with horror. Mailer was revolted by the violence he witnessed during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, while Buckley became deeply alienated from the “movement” conservatism he’d helped to create. Schultz’s book is, among things, a very moving account of intellectual and political disappointment.
One of the scourges of contemporary publishing is the genre of books that declare that this meeting or that chance encounter changed the course of history. More often than not, such claims turn out to be threadbare. Sometimes, though, the gambit pays off. Kevin M Schultz’s Buckley and Mailer is a case in point.
Schultz’s argument is that the unlikely friendship between the conservative intellectual William F Buckley and the novelist Norman Mailer “shaped the sixties,” as the book’s subtitle puts it. That may be overstating things a little, but he offers a more plausible version of the same claim: that Buckley and Mailer’s brand of “engaged public intellectualism” was a “bellwether” for the arguments about the nature of American democracy which made that decade so tempestuous.
Buckley and Mailer were leading lights of the “New Right” and “New Left” respectively, and both were engaged in prolonged acts of sabotage aimed at the US’s postwar settlement—“stale Cold War pieties,” on the one hand, and the “invidious presence of corporate capitalism,” on the other. Schultz suggests that both men were searching, albeit in dramatically different registers, for “liberation” from the complacencies of the Eisenhower years. And both, he concludes, got more than they bargained for.
By the end of the 1960s, Buckley and Mailer looked upon the forces they had fomented with horror. Mailer was revolted by the violence he witnessed during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, while Buckley became deeply alienated from the “movement” conservatism he’d helped to create. Schultz’s book is, among things, a very moving account of intellectual and political disappointment.
