"Call Me Bill"

NATIONAL REVIEW

November 23, 2013

 

"Call Me Bill"

by James Panero

A winter spent skiing with Buckley in Switzerland, and being his assistant and protégé.

The winter after my senior year in college, Bill Buckley invited me to Gstaad, Switzerland, to help him on a novel called Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton. Our program there followed much of what he had been doing each year. For a little over a month, he and his wife Pat and a small staff took over a chalet in the ski area, in a village called Rougemont. Somewhere in Switzerland, Bill had stored a crate of old dictionaries, videocassettes of Brideshead Revisited, abstract paintings, and leopard-print throws. In the days before his arrival, the staff used these items to convert the chalet into another Buckley office and home. And each year, Bill brought along a young college graduate to be his writing assistant. He put us up in an inn just down the hill.

I first got to know Bill, a bit, as the undergraduate editor of The Dartmouth Review. Jeffrey Hart showed him a piece I had written — I think it was a review of the movie Kids — and Bill wrote back approvingly. That translated into an internship at NR, then an editorial job. But I had really met him only a handful of times when he called me into his office and asked me if I liked to ski. I said, “Yes, Mr. Buckley, I do.” He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Call me Bill.” The invitation to Switzerland came the next day.

“There is never a good time for a busy man to take a vacation,” Bill once said. “And since there is never a good time, he might as well take it whenever we wants.” But Bill never vacationed, even on vacation. He never took weekends off, most likely because his greatest fear was boredom.

So Bill gave himself the assignment of writing a book each year during his stay in Gstaad. The winter I was there, it wasn’t one of his Blackford Oakes novels, but it was a Cold War thriller. The book was a fictionalized first-person story as told by James Angleton, the real life head of U.S. counterintelligence. Angleton’s archenemy, in our book as in real life, was Kim Philby, the famous double agent from the British secret service. Philby had been recruited by the Communists as one of the Cambridge Five and defected in 1963 to the Soviet Union, where he was awarded the Order of Lenin. For Angleton, Philby was the spy who got away, and our novel hinted that it drove Angleton insane.

So in Gstaad, while everyone else went on holiday, we made a novel. Bill woke up at 4:30 every morning. I drove up to the chalet, overlooking the mountain face of the Videmanette, at 7:30. Bill always lent out his four-wheel-drive Peugeot to his young assistants. He handed me the keys our first day at the top of the hill and gave me a quiz about the route to get his morning newspaper. I didn’t want to admit I couldn’t drive stick. So I learned on the road from my hotel to the chalet, and promptly burned out the clutch.

We worked for several hours together every morning, our desks catty-corner to each other. The Goldberg Variations — the Glenn Gould recordings — played in the background as Bill typed. If Bill wanted to set a scene in Beirut in the 1960s, he’d ask me to come up with the detail. Then we went to lunch in one of the hamlets dotting the resort, or in the private restaurant atop the Wasserngrat called the Eagle Club. Here we’d discuss what should happen next in the plot. How about we hide a gun in the camera? Let’s kill off so-and-so. He had very little sense of where his book would go. Then we would ski for a few hours. Then we would return for the afternoon session.

Buckley had it in him to write 1,500 words a day — after a month, you have a novel. But those 1,500 words needed a second pair of eyes, and that’s where I came in. In his first drafts, character names changed. Dates were all wrong. I helped fix those in the afternoon sessions. Then at 7 p.m., Julian, his cook, brought in a kir — white wine with a drop of crème de cassis — for each of us. We’d pull out the Dutch cigars and discuss the day’s progress.

Things moved quickly into evening. The Buckleys almost always included me in their entertaining, which was Pat’s full-time job in Gstaad (she didn’t ski): Where should we sit the princess of Denmark, the actor Roger Moore, the pretender to the throne of Greece, the would-be czar of Russia, and Julian, do we have enough fois de canard for everyone? “James,” Bill would say, “you sit here next to me.” As every young person learned around Bill, he always wanted to hear your opinion, even if you didn’t have one. To close out the night, he would have me sing standards while he accompanied me on a piano. This promptly cleared out the house. He liked to be in bed by 10. We repeated it all the next day.

The time I had with him was a fairy tale, of course, but it was also an intense experience. I imagine it was something similar for all the young people he brought in over the years, a list that runs from Neal B. Freeman and Linda Bridges and Paul Gigot to Peter Robinson and Lawrence Perelman and Danilo Petranovich — and to more than one or two apostates. Being so close to Bill could be like staring at the center of the sun. It certainly caused me to reevaluate the writer I wanted to be. After Gstaad, I ended up enrolling in an art-history graduate program before moving on to my current job at The New Criterion. Bill and I kept up with overnight sails across Long Island Sound. He also asked me to write to him often and was encouraging in whatever turn my life was taking.

In Miles Gone By, his most personal collection of essays, Bill devotes more than one chapter to his childhood music instruction. In addition to weekly piano tutorials, the Buckley children were exposed to an hour of phonograph listening four times a week by a tutor named Penelope Oyen. Buckley tells us that “Miss Oyen loved music with a passion. The use of that word here is not platitudinous. Because Penelope Oyen would weep when listening to music. Not always; not for every composer; but almost always for J. S. Bach. . . . I believed her when she said that music is very serious business. As poetry is very serious business. As art of any sort is very, very serious business: that which is sublime can’t be anything less.” Certainly, this sense for the sublime connected with his faith in God. His greatest regret, he said late in life, was that he wasn’t better at prayer.

This passage reminded me of what it felt like to be there in Gstaad. Bill was never a master at the piano, but he was a great virtuoso. In Switzerland, like a sort of music appreciation, Bill was giving out Buckley appreciation.

Bill found music in words. He played them into his writing, channeled Bach through the computer keyboard. He was probably second only to Shakespeare in bringing words into circulation. “Why do you want to be a party to diminishing the choices that you have, when you’re dealing with a language which you worship for its beauty?” he once said. This virtuosity combined with his great vocal presence. Willmoore Kendall once said that Buckley could do as much with his voice as Laurence Olivier.

I am still amazed how much he shared these gifts with someone who was an entry-level editor, and how much he believed in my help. Even when we were together in Gstaad, and emphysema was starting to take its toll on him, his talents were dazzling. “A sort of personal ebulliency sustains me,” he once said in an interview.

David Brooks said that “for all of Buckley’s contributions to conservative ideas, his most striking contribution is to the conservative personality. He made being conservative attractive and even glamorous.”

Bill Buckley’s unabashed life performance was his answer to the fallen century he had been born into, which he was determined to stand athwart. At the heart of this conservatism was this great generosity, to convey his brilliance through example, to reach across generations, and to have us close enough to listen in.

—This piece is based on a speech delivered at Yale’s William F. Buckley Jr. Program earlier this fall.

Joan Thorne's Musical Paintings

Joan Thorne, Anada, 2013; oil on canvas, 59 x 50"

James writes:

One of abstract painting’s earliest interests was the depiction of sound. Now at Sideshow through Sunday, Joan Thorne explores this legacy with a finely tuned suite of work.

Like the recent sculptures of Frank Stella, which visualized Scarlatti, Thorne’s abstractions have an ear for form and color. Her paintings are composed of jagged percussions, swirling strings, and radiating winds. She then lays down a melody line in the squiggles and shapes that whirl above these forms. It seems only appropriate that, some three decades ago, one of Thorne's paintings became a print and poster for a musical series at Lincoln Center. 

Joan Thorne, Orchia, 2013; oil on canvas, 55 x 63"

Thorne’s handling of the brush can be like a baton of color. She is a product of the Soho studio scene of the 1970s, and it shows in her layered approach to these canvases. This latest show is also a tribute to Richard Timperio, the owner of Sideshow, for reminding us of both the historical and contemporary achievements of this group of painters who continue to produce important work.

If there is a complaint in this latest series, however, it that some of the arrangements can seem flat. The squiggles and jags can move from formula to formulaic. Several of the paintings here, such as Ananda and Orchia, are symphonic. Other variations, such as Bagan and Naga, are easy listening.

Coming off the successes of this latest show, Thorne should turn up the volume. Her paintings are ready to sing.

Additional images from Structure and Imagery-

“Joan Thorne: Recent Paintings” opened at Sideshow, Brooklyn, on October 12 and remains on view through November 10, 2013.

Taking It Beyond the Street

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 5, 2013

Taking It Beyond the Street
by James Panero

When the U.K.-based graffiti artist known as Banksy began a month-long "residency on the streets of New York" at the start of October, I was less than enthusiastic. New York has a long history with graffiti, after all, and the memories are not altogether pleasant. In the 1970s and '80s, as gangs competed to vandalize every square inch of streetscape and subway line with "tags," graffiti became the symbol of a dying metropolis. "A neighborhood that has succumbed to graffiti," the urban critic Heather Mac Donald recently wrote in City Journal, "telegraphs to the world that social and parental control there has broken down."

Similarly, New York's newly scrubbed appearance over the past two decades reflects its urban renaissance. So the prospect of welcoming an out-of-town graffiti artist, even the one behind "Exit Through the Gift Shop," the Oscar-nominated graffiti documentary, irked those who see street art as a form of vandalism. "Nobody's a bigger supporter of the arts than I am," said New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, at a press conference when asked about the celebrity visitor. "You running up to somebody's property or public property and defacing it is not my definition of art."

But throughout the past month, Banksy hatred proved to be even more elusive than the artist himself, who despite repeated efforts could neither be tracked down nor caught in the act of creation. With each passing day, as he deployed a new wall stencil or performance piece somewhere in the five boroughs, it became harder not to see his residency as a New York love-bombing run. With his exploits spread through every form of mass and social media, he dominated the news—even during a busy election season—to become a topic of discussion, an object of fascination and a cause célèbre.

Certainly Banksy's residency, which he called "Better Out Than In," will be studied for the brilliance of its marketing strategy, with a guerrilla campaign that was well-attuned to the new economy. As each work became authenticated through his own website and Instagram account, which announced their general locations, his creations turned into an urban scavenger hunt. Crowds attracted even more crowds, cameraphones in hand. Sometimes the assemblies became so dense that all you could see was a cascade of selfies around an otherwise neglected brick wall.

And even as he managed to remain unseen, Banksy revealed himself to be an artist with a particularly effective voice. With the cleverness of Marcel Duchamp, the humor of Henny Youngman and the precision of Walter White, he transcended his medium, elevating the genre of street art while at the same time questioning the scourge of tags.

Banksy's first order of business was to confront the notion that street art must blight other people's property. Unlike those taggers who derive their significance from repetition—being "all city" was the goal of the graffiti artists in the 1983 documentary "Style Wars"—Banksy's work was minimally invasive. Taggers want to be everywhere. Banksy was almost nowhere. While traditional graffiti sets out to be unavoidable, Banksy would have been unlocatable—a couple inches of paint on the base of a wall in Bedford-Stuyvesant—were it not for his online clues.

He also created work that property owners largely embraced. Rather than call the cops, most saw the art as a gift on their doorstep, either protecting it with fences, guards, ropes or plexiglass, or removing it and bringing it inside, as the Hustler Club did for the portrait of a lonely-hearted man painted on its roller gate. Banksy turned the graffiti aesthetic on its head while throwing into relief the commodification of art. He transformed a $50 thrift-store landscape into a $615,000 canvas by inserting a satirical Nazi figure, which he returned as a donation to Housing Works.

In an email interview published in the Village Voice last month, Banksy distanced himself from "vandalism made by part-timers and trust-fund kids." In addition to the mayor, graffiti taggers came to be Banksy's most ardent detractors, angling to deface his work as soon as it went up. "I used to think other graffiti writers hated me because I used stencils," Banksy wrote, "but they just hate me."

Rather than cover the city in paint, Banksy's imaginative choice of locations and use of negative space brought out the wonders of the urban landscape. On the Upper West Side, the silhouette of a boy with a mallet converted a red standpipe and fire bell into a carnival amusement. In Williamsburg, two stenciled figures re-envisioned a bricked-over archway as the moon bridge of a Japanese tea garden. In East New York, a broken signpost became the work of a busy beaver.

Thirty works in 30 days is a tall order for any artist, especially an undercover one without apparent institutional support. The performance pieces that he arranged—a meat truck of squeaking stuffed animals or a Grim Reaper riding a bumper car—generally lacked the restrained simplicity of his stencil work.

Nevertheless, Banksy succeeded in elevating the discussion of street art through his New York run. It was an outcome that was far from accidental for a methodical technician well-versed in art history. As an artist whose website begins with a quote from Cézanne—"all pictures painted inside, in the studio, will never be as good as those done outside"—Banksy sees himself as an extension of a larger modernist tradition. The self-deprecating "audio guide" he created for his website put his work in a museum context even as he mocked its institutional trappings, all the time quoting from John Keats, John Steinbeck and the English poet William Ernest Henley (whom the announcer describes as "the great poet Wikipedia").

"Outside is where art should live, amongst us," Banksy asserted in the final day's audio guide. "Don't we want to live in a world made of art, not just decorated by it?" With free art that proved to be as resonant as a museum blockbuster, he made it hard for me to say no.