When I was in high school, Kurt Vonnegut was my favorite living novelist, and in college, William F. Buckley became my favorite living conservative. Although at odds in style and politics, the two writers shared intelligence, a love of words and an essential ebullience. They lived life large in their own different ways. And professionally, their paths did cross. Buckley's magazine, the National Review, published one of Vonnegut's short stories.
Recently, people who knew them well have published a pair of memoirs. Love As Always, Kurt: Vonnegut As IKnew Him (Da Capo) is the account of a longtime friend and long-ago lover, Loree Rackstraw. Losing Mum andPup: A Memoir (Twelve) is the work of Buckley's son, Christopher.
Rackstraw, professor emeritus at the University of Northern Iowa, met Vonnegut as a student in1965 when the soon-to-famous author taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Vonnegut was a humorous, straightforward lecturer, shocking his more pie-in-the-sky pupils by stating that there was no reason to write a story except to sell it. The "tell-all" aspects of Love As Always are handled with a dignity and old-fashioned discretion lacking in the Buckley memoir.
Rackstraw's reminiscences of her friendship with Vonnegut from the '60s through his death in 2007 supports what his readers already knew. Mark Twain's satire and his own wartime experience shaped Vonnegut. As a POW he survived the American bombing of Dresden, a German city of no military value. After witnessing state-sanctioned arson on the largest scale, Vonnegut became skeptical of all the rationalizations and big systems spun-out by nations and individuals alike. But he never lost his compassion for people.
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As a satirist, Christopher Buckley's sense of the absurd is closer to Vonnegut's writings than to his father's mandarin prose. By his own account, he faced the usual measure-up problems of the son of a famous dad. Although Losing Mum and Pup focuses on his parents' final years-his mother died in 2007 and his father, bereft, his health deteriorating rapidly, followed a year later-a picture emerges of the old man in his prime.
Despite his fiercely argued opinions, Bill Buckley enjoyed friendships with a surprising array of luminaries from across the spectrum, including George McGovern, Norman Mailer and John Kenneth Galbraith. His drug use rivaled Hunter S. Thompson. At times funny and sad as he considers his fraught relationship with his parents, Christopher Buckley has written a book whose interest is wider than the circle of his father's admirers. Finding humor in funerals and pathos in the decline of once vital people, Buckley has written an inspirational book for anyone dealing with the decline and death of their own parents.
