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Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir

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I found this memoir by Christopher Buckley quite unlike any other book I have read. It recounts some of the life and a great deal about the deaths of his parents, William F. Buckley, Jr. and Patricia Taylor Buckley, which occurred within 11 months of each other during 2007-2008. It is at times hilarious; moving; and cuttingly sad. But mostly it celebrates their lives and his life with both of them. In the process it gives us some really inside views of Bill Buckley and his famous wife, and adds to our understanding of the human dimensions of this "Godfather" of the right. I think also anyone who has parents still living, or has gone through the experience of bidding "Adieu" to one's parents (as I have), will find much to learn from and identify with in this short book (251 pages). The book certainly sparked my interest in Buckley (not exactly an ideological compatriot of mine) and I look forward with great interest to the forthcoming biography by Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of a fine book on Whittaker Chambers.

Christopher Buckley celebrates the lives of his parents, but also shares his mourning with us. He recounts with total frankness his disagreements and prickly relationships with both parents. Anyone who has buried their parents will recognize the combination of mourning, regret at not having straightened everything out (aka as "the talk"), and just the sense of being truly alone (not to mention, as the author points out, you become next in line in this endless procession of death). Buckley calls himself "an orphan" and I think we all fall into that designation. There certainly are very sad moments--I for one never imagined I would ever shed a tear for Bill Buckley but came close a couple of times. Yet the author, a "humorist" by trade, has mixed in scenes of exquisite comedy that make the sadness extremely tolerable. Bill Buckley's refusal to update his various computers from 1985 Wordstar struck a responsive chord with this adherent to WordPerfect 5.2. There are some wonderful private and public photographs included.

I disagree with those who say that one need only read the New York Times Magazine excerpt (April 26, 2009) to get the essence of the book. In fact, the book places everything into a meaningful framework and enhances our understanding of Bill Buckley far more effectively than the article, though it is a fine piece standing alone. One interesting facet is that the author includes throughout what might be termed "tips for burying your parents," which are only partially in jest. To bury a parent is to enter into a strange and sometimes irritating world of bureaucratic demands. A book that at once is funny, sad, and informative is a combination hard to beat.

I usually cringe when I see that an author has decided to read his book. Writing is such a solitary task, and while research and other ancillary endeavors involved in writing are interesting, most authors cannot, for any length of time, read their own books well. This isn't always true, you have ones like Jean Sheppard or John Le Carre doing such a great job, others try. With Christopher Buckley, you get a good reader, who, because of his slight tongue-in-cheek manner sometimes, one wonders where I got that from, makes the book more humorous than the subject, losing ones parents, would normally be.

For me, LOSING MUM AND PUP: A MEMOIR stands as a testament to his parents, William F. and Patricia Buckley, and as such it is also a testament of himself: his parents were grand people standing on the grand stage of life, and while he has a certain amount of notoriety in the publishing world, he lives in shadows of them somewhat, especially his father.

With LOSING MUM AND PUP: A MEMOIR, their only son, Christopher, has given us, in this case the listener or reader, an excellent account of what he went through when he lost both of his parents within a year. This account, while perhaps too personal for some, is nonetheless honest and forthright. It speaks of the flaws of the author as much, if not more, than the subjects of his writing, his parents. And, what I find so remarkable was how his loss was so much more expressive when the words sometime came out of his mouth somewhat reluctantly, often skating to the edge of quivering (in the audio version), but never quite doing so, at certain points, such as reading his father's letter to others after his mother's passing.

I only knew William F. Buckley through his writings, his guest appearances on the talk shows and his interview show "Firing Line." In everything he did, he tackled serious subjects with tenacity and wit, and just when it looked as if the person he was talking to or interviewing was going to get a valid point-in, Mr. Buckley would open his mouth, touch the tip of his tongue to his top lip and say something, usually very economically, that would shoot down the other's point as if it was a clay pigeon hit by both shots of a double-barreled shotgun...>BAM< Got you!

As for Patricia Taylor Buckley, she was just as remarkable. She had to be because Bill and she were married for 57 dull-free years, and while this book deals with her passing, too, it is with the loss of William F. that we learn as much about the son as we do the father.

For Christopher dealt and interacted with his father as his health declined, like many caught in this situation, you witness a week-to-week, sometimes day-to-day, deterioration in what they can do, what they can remember, and in how they treat you. You learn as much about Christopher as you do his father, as William F. Buckley goes through the whole Elizabeth Kubler-Ross stages of death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and experience his exasperation, at times.

In closing, let me say there are some who may feel that Christopher has done a "hatchet" job on his parents, or he did a disservice to them by telling us as much as he did. I disagree with those readers. In my eyes, he has given us a glimpse into the wonderful lives of his parents, and a understanding of what a person, in this case an only son, goes through when he becomes an "orphan" within a year. How he deals with his dad is similar to what many children have had to deal with when a parent, especially a parent who pretty much got their own way before, is dying. Only, in this case, instead of ones sister or a cousin calling you to hear how ones parent is doing, you have Henry Kissinger calling to say, "I miss your reports (on your father's health)." With that message, you realize even further that William F. Buckley was no normal man with normal friends).

If you can, buy the audio version, but if you cannot, or do not have the time or facilities to listen to the audio version, buy the book. If you have enjoyed William F. Buckley in the past, you will enjoy hearing or reading about him through the eyes of his son. And, if you haven't read anything else my Christopher Buckley, this book will, like it did for me, encourage you to read this other works (I am on my second, of what I hope are many more).

Christopher Buckley's "Losing Mum and Pup" joins Philip Roth's "Patrimony," Geoffrey Wolff's "Duke of Deception," and Alexander Waugh's "Fathers and Sons" (there are a number of other examples) as a masterpiece of the contemporary parent genre. Is there a happier way to grieve than to write a book?

His loving memoir of two difficult parents, the account at times hilariously funny, at times outrageously irreverential, draws his outsize father and mother, Bill and Pat Buckley with the eye of a portraitist uniquely in a position to know.

Both parents were at times difficult for Christopher Buckley. As his mother comatose lay dying, he said, "I forgive you." Much as Geoffrey Wolff lovingly said, "Thank God," when informed of his father's death.

What is so interesting is that the very style of his parents is reflected in the style of the portrait. The account is breezy but incisive reminiscent of his mother. One can almost hear her saying, "Pul-eeze, excuse me while I go out and buy a Stradivarius" in parrying some filial jeremiad. The outside-the-box thinking is vintage Bill Buckley. I paraphrase: "I wanted to tell each eulogist at my mother's memorial service at the Temple of Dendur that I had snipers hidden in the Temple with orders to shoot if any exceeded four minutes." Who, but a Buckley, thinks like that? It's what makes them so exasperatingly delightful. You can almost see the arched eyebrows. The ideation is of a piece with the father's famous quip during the 1965 New York City Mayoral election. "What will you do if you win, Mr. Buckley?" "Demand a recount."

The book particularly resonanted with me since, like Christopher Buckley, I am an only child who in his fifties lost both parents (mother first) within a year of each other. The author, like me, accepts the profound sense of loss in being orphaned in such a short time.

So I was moved to tears as he writes something like, "In my dreams they are still looking after me, and I am orphaned no more." Or as Fitzgerald put it, "So we beat on, boats against the current...." It is all about memory, isn't it? Christopher Buckley has forced himself to remember and write about it. In this there is catharsis, hope and the expression of deep and abiding love.

A must read!

For all right thinking persons in America, William F. Buckley was an icon. He was a gifted, eloquent writer whose political and philosophical analytical skills were unsurpassed in the 20th century. His death last year was a huge loss that was recognized by public figures from across the political spectrum.

After all, when the leftist octogenarian George McGovern makes an immense physical effort to fly across the country to attend the conservative Buckley's memorial service (in Saint Patrick's Cathedral of course), it says something about the esteem that the arch conservative had gathered from the political elite of his time - whatever their philosophical point of view.

Now Buckley's only son, Christopher Buckley, has come forth with a memoir of both his father and his mother in a book that clearly carries the Buckley stamp: LOSING MUM AND PUP: A MEMOIR is stylish, insightful and the prose comes across like some sad but lyrical adagio.

There is, however, good and bad news about this book

The good news: LOSING MUM AND PUP is at once an amusing and a very, very well written book, something one would expect from the son of the erudite William F. Buckley. For Christopher, Bill Buckley was the dominant influence in his life. Even though they had their difficulties, the elder Buckley was clearly a mentor to "Christo" (his father'snickname for his son) and when the young Buckley set off on his own in the real, grown-up world, he became a writer, just like his father.

The bad news: This book probably tells a lot more than his parents might have wished. Young Buckley (figuratively speaking -- after all, as he was 56 years of age on publication of this book) takes on both his mother and his father in a manner where no holds are barred. The son writes that his father was not only a brilliant writer, he was a dominating father whose weaknesses (impatience, a domineering manner and an unfortunate reliance on alcohol and pills) had an adverse impact on their relationship.

The two were close but not totally harmonious. The young Buckley describes any number of instances when his Dad causes him both pain and disappointment. The disappointments have been so many that at the end of the elder Buckley's life, when Christo cancels family plans to stay with his failing Dad, the father tells the son he would have done the same for him if their roles were reversed. As an aside, the younger Buckley tells his readers the elder Buckley would never have changed his plans in similar circumstances.

"I smiled and thought, 'Oh no, you wouldn't'," Christo writes. "A year or two ago, I might have said it out loud, initiating one of our antler clashes. But watching him suffer had made my lingering resentments seem trivial and beside the point."

The sections of this book about Bill Buckley are probably the most interesting, because of his public notoriety. But the remembrances of young Buckley's mother, Patricia Buckley, are more sensitive. Indeed on completing the book, one has to wonder whether the young Buckley was more his mother's son than his father's.

The cover of the book features a portrait of the author and his parents. It is a handsome family, to be sure, but on studying the photograph, one has to conclude that Christo has the same penetrating, curious look of his Mother, rather than the aloof, superior countenance of his father.

Yet one cannot imagine a more dashing, daring family than the Buckleys, and young Buckley leaves no question that his family established itself as one of the most prominent American families in the 20th century (in the book, Christo drops names like his parents dropped pills).

Pat Buckley was stylish and became the doyenne of Manhattan society. She had her foibles, of course, as reported by her son. She was a consummate liar who on a whim made up stories out of whole cloth. Like Bill, she drank too much and she popped pills like candy. Her behavior was at times so outrageous that on occasion her son would write her letters scolding her:

"Dear Mum," he wrote in a letter that he found, unopened, after her death. "That really was an appalling scene at dinner last night...." Christopher discovered after her death that she left many of his letters unopened, apparently fearing more criticism from her son.

Indeed, when her time finally came, when she was unconscious on her deathbed, the young Buckley stroked his mother's hair and whispered:

"I forgive you." Later, in his memoir, Christopher recalled:

"It sounded - even to me at the time - like a terribly presumptuous statement, but it needed to be said."

The bottom line on this book: one could argue that a family memoir should uphold the family legacy, and if that is true, all the dirty laundry in this book tarnishes the Buckley aura. On the other hand, one has to concede that if, in the end, every genuine legacy has to be founded on honesty, then Christopher Buckley has polished, to the good, the memory of his parents.

Would the family patriarch agree? In his book, Christo tells how his father once he sent him an email upon publication of one of the son's books:

"This one didn't work for me. Sorry. xxB."

Would WFB have a similar reaction if he could come back to life and read his son's book on Mum and Pup?

My guess is that he would, grudgingly, approve (in spite of the younger Buckley's endorsement of Barack Obama). But then we'll never know, will we?

My Jewish family physician "Dr. Marvin" recently took my blood pressure and deadpanned: "It hasn't been that good since your Bar Mitzvah!" (He knows I'm Catholic). Dr. Marvin's favorite commandment, he told me, at my last visit to his office, is "the fifth" (in the Talmud, the 4th in our Catholic Bible) "Honor your father and mother that your days may be long . . ."

Christopher Buckley, only child of William F. and Patricia T. Buckley, upholds that sacred trust in his beautiful (if bittersweet) remembrance.

Buckley brings a prize-winning novelist's acerbic wit and endearing economy-of-style to his book, which "I'd more or less resolved not to write about my parents . . . but I'm a writer, and when the universe hands you material like this, NOT writing about it amounts either to waste, or a conscious act of evasion."

-----

Chris Buckley's "Mum & Pup" died within about a year of each other. Until I picked up this book today, I had assumed that "my own favorite Catholic in American public life" (as I always referred to William F. Buckley) had managed to convert his own wife and son. He had not.

Chris almost never in his life spoke with his mother about religion: "Mum was nominally Anglican, attended church on Easter and Christmas" [and] "I don't think I ever once heard her utter a religious or spiritual sentiment: a considerable feat, considering she was married for 57 years to one of the most prominent Catholics in the country!"

"I am agnostic," Chris confides, but he brought to his mother's hospital deathbed "my pocket copy of the book of Ecclesiastes - the line in Moby Dick having lodged itself long ago in my mind:

`The truest of all men, is the Man of Sorrows; the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine-hammered steel of woe'."

Buckley read "that ancient text aloud to my mother" as she lay, in a coma, an hour or so before her death. The next day "when Pup was going to Mass, I said I'd come" [as] I reckoned this day was not a day to skip church [and] Pup wept throughout the Mass."

[This reviewer, who converted, in part because of the influence of William F. Buckley's book NEARER MY GOD, found delight in reading what comes next (Chapter 3, page 37).]

"Pup and I had engaged in our own Hundred Years' War over the matter of faith. Finally exhausted, I had put on a `Potemkin' façade of being back in the fold. My agnosticism, once defiant, had gone underground. I no longer had the desire to nail my theses to his church door."

"I remember Pup telling me, in 1981, as we trudged up a snowy lawn after scattering the ashes of his beloved friend and column syndicator, Harry Elmark: `Ojala que hubiera sido Catolico' (`If only he had been a Catholic'). Harry was a Jew and about the furthest thing one could be from a Catholic - though, come to think of it, he had been happily married to one for all his life!

"I remember being stunned at that [statement] that the gates of Heaven were shut against non-believers.

But then, our shared joy as Chris Buckley recalls his father's delighted "discovery of a `loophole' - called the `doctrine of invincible ignorance'" [namely that] "normal rules with respect to admission to heaven are suspended if you are incapable -- intellectually or culturally -- of accepting that the Catholic church is the `one true Church' and the only means of redemption. How Pup smiled with relief as he explained it across the lunch table that summer day!"

"Perhaps," writes Chris Buckley, his Dad's "own heart was the largest of the loopholes: In 1996, speaking at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue memorial service for his great friend Dick Clurman, he ended his eulogy with a line I can quote today from memory.

`It occurs to me that all my life I have unconsciously been on the lookout for the perfect Christian . . . and when I found him, he turned out to be a non-observant Jew'."

-----

In the closing words of this tribute to his "complex" and "truly larger-than-life" parents, Chris Buckley recalls "the Greek myth that Pup loved to tell of Philemon and Baucis [a] devoted old couple who provided hospitality to Jupiter & Mercury - traveling incognito. And after [punishing] everyone who hadn't shown them hospitality, the gods rewarded the old couple by turning their hut into a gorgeous temple" [and] granting them a wish - "anything they wanted."

"Philemon & Baucis replied that they wanted to be together for all eternity."

Buckley, as an only child, would like to believe that his parents "buried together in each other's arms," were no less intensely devoted" to each other and "I hope this book, for all its complexities, is a testament to that devotion."

I wasn't sure what to make of this oddly-titled little book at first. For a fifty-five year old man, the loss of one's parents should be a time of poignancy but hardly a unique experience or the stuff of tragedy. So why write a book about it? Christopher Buckley addresses this question in his introduction, where he explains without any trace of self-importance that his parents were no ordinary mom and dad. For his father was William F. Buckley Jr., the redoubtable WFB as he is known to readers of the National Review, the conservative journal he established in the 1950's. Buckley went on to become one of the founding fathers of the modern conservative political movement in America. The book focuses largely on the period leading up to Buckley's 2008 death during which his body was failing and his mind was addled with medication. The bouts of depression and mania, irrational demands, confusion and so forth all will sound familiar to anyone who has helped nurse a family member through the final stage of life. The great William F. Buckley Jr. through much of this account could be anyone's dying father. But Christopher interweaves around all this an array of anecdotes from his own childhood and from his father's active life. WFB published enough commentary and literature to fill a library, and his roster of personal friends reads like the top rung of America's Who's Who. Clearly this was not just anybody's father. The juxtaposition of world-class glamour and the gritty pathos of dying is the crux of what the book is about. Christopher's mother gets shorter shrift. Patricia Buckley was brilliant socialite in her own right and an iron-willed fixture at her husband's side for sixty years. Christopher loved and respected her too, but the relationship was apparently strained much of the time, and his account leaves much to the imagination. She died ten months before her husband, and thus Christopher's life for over a year revolved around hospitals, doctors, drugs, tubes, monitors, grim news and tough decisions. All this too will sound familiar to people who have experienced it. His weariness is evident throughout the book, but he still manages to infuse the story with respectful humor and gentle irony. For me, the book's main strength was it's honesty. Christopher doesn't shy away from much, and he reveals certain things about both his parents that might well disappoint their admirers. He handles these issues without any apparent embarrassment or attempt to rationalize. The book also benefits from a highly accessible style. Christopher, like his father, is a writer by trade, and he exhibits both a crisp efficiency with words and an engaging voice. The downside of the book is that there is nothing particularly deep about it, for readers who might be expecting more. Christopher has lived a privileged life, and he has clearly never escaped the gravitational pull of his famous family. He seems to have inherited his father's literary talent, but not his free-ranging intellect or philosophical fire in the belly. At the same time, he doesn't pretend to any of this, and the book stands well on its own terms.

In this unsparing yet respectful farewell to his parents, Christopher Buckley does not confuse love with sentimentality, dependence or absence of conflict-- this is one of the book's main strengths.

"Losing Mum and Pup" captures with frankness and humor the ambivalence children often feel toward their parents, and vice versa. Anyone who has cared for aging parents with strong personalities but failing minds and bodies will find much that is familiar. Not every detail is pleasant, but this book would not be true without facing the end with open eyes. In this life, things fade, friends and loved ones depart, and all symphonies remain unfinished.

In some quarters, much is made of the elder Buckleys' wealth-- modest by Hollywood or rock-star standards. However, far too little attention is given to their capacity for enduring friendship with people across political, cultural, national and generational lines. The subject of friendship was one of the most interesting, heartwarming, and underdeveloped aspects of the book-- the bright background against which the darker moments are seen in proper perspective. If Christopher Buckley writes just one more book about his parents-- and I hope he does-- this should be it.

Let me start by saying that I've been looking for the key to unlock myself for too many years to mention, and this book finally did it for me. It's a humorous, engaging, insightful complex relationship (dis)closure. Must read, if only for it's slant on religion, indoctrination and living w/ people who must control everything around them, especially their children. I was a huge fan of William F Buckley, but this book made me realize that I wasn't the only one with impossible, albeit charming parents.

Christopher Buckley is a fine writer who gives a very intimate look at what it was like growing up with his "larger-than-life" parents. There are many stories in it that will make fans of his famous father William F. Buckley Jr. smile. At the same time, the author pulls no punches describing in, at times, excruciating detail the decline of each parent in their last year. So, while it's very sad to see the "great man" and his also famous wife become enfeebled, the book is impossible to put down and a very fast read.

Having lost my own father last year and having been a fan of Christopher's father since my college years, I wondered how much our experiences would be similar. It turned out that we didn't have a lot in common. Christopher had a real emotional distance from his parents that I wouldn't have predicted and he spends a good deal of the book taking subtle jabs at them.

I can appreciate such honesty in a memoir but it comes off a little harsh in what is labeled a book about losing parents. He does tell some fun sailing stories involving his father and he does seem to miss both of them somewhat, but the book is more about their foibles than an emotional connection.

It would be hard to have an iconic father especially if you followed him into the same field. He says more than once that his father didn't always like his work which might have been a hard thing for Christopher to put in print. I don't think I could have done it. I've read countless stories of Bill's generosity through the years and that man does not emerge from this telling. Is this Christopher's way of saying they were emotionally estranged or is this normal for a northeastern patrician family? I'm not sure.

When Bill Buckley died, Rush said that he once told Buckley that being with him was like having his own father back and Rush said that Bill became teary. It's a shame if Bill and his own son had a rougher time of it, and maybe that's why he did become weepy with Rush's words. Not all fathers and sons see eye-to-eye and the book made me happy that I was close to my own father for the short time he had on this earth.

It's a well-written and honest account, but not the one I expected.