The lucid force of his prose, duly noted by Weiss, compensated for the unexamined ideas.
#DULY NOTED IN SPANISH FREE#
In his "preface" to a three-part paper on "various aspects of Christianity," Buckley warned his philosophy professor, Paul Weiss, that he was "vastly unread" in the subjects under consideration and would "strive to make no references whatsoever to other works or thoughts of other men." After fumbling for 34 pages through free will, teleological design, and good and evil, among other immensities, Buckley at last conceded he had no idea what he was talking about: "I yearn to understand, to make intelligible the great confusion of our world and to accommodate every phenomenon into the God-created, God-supervised world which I have been taught to believe in and which, after reflection and torment, I choose to continue to believe in." Just what he meant by "torment" he did not say, though it did not send him to Aquinas, Hume, Kant, or any of the other giants who had illuminated the very subjects of his essay. In some classes, he got by on wit rather than learning. On the contrary, Buckley was a painfully slow reader, who found even routine assignments hard to complete and compensated by listening closely to lectures and taking careful notes (helped by his mastery of speed-writing). None of this meant he was a natural scholar. His command of the language was so great that, owing to the faculty shortage amid the massive influx of veterans, Buckley was hired as an instructor in Yale's Spanish department-a salaried position he held during his entire time on campus. He'd learned Spanish in childhood, from Mexican house servants. While many freshmen spent long nights in Sterling Library, struggling to adjust to the demands of the Yale curriculum, Buckley coasted until exam time and then, drawing on his bottomless reserves of disciplined energy, sped to the tape: 90 in English (close reading of prose and poetry) 90 in Classical Civilization (the Greeks in translation) 85 in Sociology (study of comparative cultures), and a prodigious 96 in fourth-year Spanish. His abilities were apparent from the start. Classmates I interviewed half a century later were dumbfounded to learn that his four-year average in those pre-grade-inflation years was 85. More remarkable still, he succeeded in the classroom. But Buckley was often on the premises no more than three hours a day and seldom more than five, and this included the time he spent writing his daily editorials. Some News colleagues put in ten hours a day at the paper - "gave up our education," as Guinzburg, the managing editor, later said.
were read by everyone, and it was impossible to be neutral about them."īuckley's extracurricular hyperactivity was possible because he accomplished so much with mystifying ease. The 1950 Class Book declared, "Perhaps the 1950 board will be remembered longest for its chairman's stormy and positive editorial policy.
1950 Class Book Buckley at the News building.
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