If you followed William F. Buckley, Jr.’s eight days of “Overdrive” in The New Yorker, you probably thought it was about Spiro Agnew, Louis Auchincloss, Hilaire Belloc, Pat Boone, Frank Borman, Herb Caen, Dick Cavett, Roy Cohn, Alistair Cooke, Phil Donahue, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Arthur Gelb, Charlton Heston, E. Howard Hunt, Alfred Kahn, Hugh Kenner, Henry Kissinger, Norman Lear, Timothy Leary, Gordon Liddy, Norman Mailer, John Mitchell, Pat Moynihan, Arthur Murray, Ralph Nader, Victor Navasky, A. M. Rosenthal, Nelson Rockefeller, Gene Shalit, Wilfrid Sheed, John Simon, Frank Stanton, Stansfield Turner, Barbara Walters, Evelyn Waugh, Sidney Zion, and Elmo Zumwalt.

To be sure, these names were dropped in Buckley’s articles, although not so often as that of J. S. Bach.

And you just might have been, contemplating those half-bottles of Cote Rotie and that peanut butter, consumed with envy. When Buckley goes to the theater, the theater he goes to is Nicholas Nickleby. When he leaves the ballet, it is to confer with Ahmet Ertegun, who either “owns the Rolling Stones or they own him.” When he must change a seating plan for lunch, he can substitute our ambassador to the United Nations for the Vice President of the United States. When he is about to tape a television program with the governor of Kentucky, the telephone call that interrupts him is from Ronald Reagan.

One is reminded of a remark Murray Kempton once made about Andre Malraux and his memoirs. That the great man of French letters should have holed up in a cave during his resistance to the Nazis is plausible, but did the cave really have to be Lascaux? Most of the time, life is less thrilling.

All right: we are less thrilling than Buckley. He is more charming than we are. But weren’t you, just reading about him and Bach, exhausted as well as charmed? And you didn’t have to carry his skis or his harpsichord. This is life in the fast (right) lane.

If, though, you jump to a conclusion, you will miss my point. Listen to Buckley’s brooding about his magazine, National Review: “For a while, I thought we were running a finishing school for apostates (Garry Wills, John Leonard, Arlene Croce).... ”

The New Yorker is actually an envelope; inside “Overdrive” is a letter from Buckley to me.

“I don’t suppose you are at all conservative?”

“Not very,” I hedged.

“One hundred dollars a week.”

I was being paid, in 1958, $49.50 a week to write captions at night for United Press, with a Tuesday-Wednesday weekend. “I’ll have to consult with my fiancee.”

“Where is she?”

“At Radcliffe.”

“Tell her it’s The New Republic.”

Almost twenty-five years ago I spent a season working for Buckley at National Review. He taught me to use big words. He also introduced me to Whittaker Chambers, the translator of Bambi, who explained at lunch one day that Allen Ginsberg was the only Beat with real talent. And he sent me to Cuba to see about Castro’s revolution. In Havana I was a black thumb. Everybody I talked to was immediately arrested. They were shooting people at the Sports Stadium. I hid in the bar of the Hilton hotel. This was my first failure of character, after which, naturally, I got married and left town.

Ever since, Buckley has been monitoring my failures of character and writing me letters about them. You would think he had more important things to worry over, like Bulgaria. But no: his eye is on the sparrow. Wherever in the world I lapse, at Nathan’s or in Reykjavik, he seems to be watching. Whatever I happen to think or feel— lust in the heart, nostalgia for theKennedys, enjoyment of the Beatles—he somehow overhears. He must say to himself, “There goes Leonard again, apostatizing.” And from the command module of his customized-in-Texarkana Cadillac, on his way between spy novels to snow-dappled Gstaad, he issues a missal by Dictaphone, which is typed up by his secretary.

Himself, of course, Buckley sends each winter to Gstaad, there to traverse with Galbraiths and sideslip with Nivens. Me, he sends to places like Havana—and many years and many missals later, to Moscow, the capital of head colds— there to experience the discrepancies. I have asked my cook and my chauffeur to write him a letter protesting this unfairness, but even if I had a cook and a chauffeur, and I could get them off the sloop or out of the Jacuzzi I also don’t have, they wouldn’t be able to communicate in Liberal Guilt. Since Buckley, Liberal Guilt is my only lingo, a grammar of extenuation.

When I fail to reply to one of his letters, as I always have, he writes another reproaching me for sloth. Why, then, do I read him in The New Yorker? Or in the New York Post, where he said I wasn’t as funny as Tom Wolfe ? Or in the New York Daily News, where he said I was about “as warlike as lemon meringue pie”? Or in any other envelope? Why, after so many summonses and reproofs, do I show up at his parties for a new book, a National Review anniversary, or the birth of Christ?

And I am not alone among Guilty Liberals. Kempton and Sheed are there. Allard Lowenstein used to be, leaving early to flag a plane. Norman Cousins showed up for National Review’s twentieth, and Buckley’s fiftieth, birthday. So did Fred Friendly and David Frye. Talk about apostates: Theodore Sturgeon and Joan Didion both have their doubts about El Salvador, and both wrote for Buckley when all of us were young and our characters hadn’t failed. He forgives us. Why do we need it?

HE writes to us like a mother. Home is something we somehow don’t have to deserve. We are winked at by his blue eye. And he reads us like a mother: how dare you? Once I criticized a novel in which his hero ransacked the refrigerator: “There was chicken, ham, cheese, white wine. He put together a plate with slabs of each....” I suggested that this sounded to me like a wet plate. He wrote a letter instead of an apology. On the occasion of another novel, I cited certain anachronisms. He wrote, first, in defense of the anachronistic, and, subsequently, to plead innocent of particular citations on advice of dubious counsel. Only mothers are permitted to forgive themselves.

Years ago, in Palo Alto, while I was working for a radio station that a committee of the United States Senate believed to be a Communist front, in a car containing the only two women I would ever marry, Buckley explained the Bay of Pigs. He had a source in the CIA. Years later, when I fell on my face in front of the wife of the publisher of the New York Times while asking Buckley why he didn’t deplore Watergate, he didn’t explain but he did have the same source: Howard Hunt. Buckley’s letters to me on these subjects are understandably circumspect. Mothers have secrets.

I have tried to discourage him. In 1963 I explained to the readers of Victor Navasky’s Monocle magazine how I could ever have worked for a Buckley. My explanation was in the form of a letter to my children, as Whittaker Chambers in Witness had explained to his children his lapse into Communism. In 1966 I published a novel that satirized in part a magazine that might have been National Review were I not an artist. How did Buckley respond?

About the novel, he wrote me that he chose not to review it. I was to consider this decision “an act of philanthropy. ” About Monocle he was silent until, in 1967, the New York Times thought of hiring me, and his opinion was solicited, and he made favorable noises, which noises he followed up with a copy of the Monocle article just to prove to the Times that I wasn’t, in his words, “right-bitten.” He worried I might be guilty of associating with him, even though the Times plucked me straight out of a movement against a war in Vietnam, a war that he approved and for which he baton twirled.

At the party in 1975 I sat next to Sheed and across from Norman Podhoretz. Since Sheed had savaged Podhoretz’s Making It, and I had written an introduction to an anthology of Sheed’s including that savagery, the seating plan was electric chairs. (Podhoretz, one admits, was the only gentleman at the table. Allard Lowenstein, as usual, left early to save the world.) Later on, I joshed Buckley about our embarrassment, and he wrote a dozen letters of apology.

At another of his parties, just after the 1980 elections, a “talent scout” for the nascent Reagan administration asked me, as a weary joke, for which appointment in my heart I lusted. El Salvador, I said. Why not, he asked, Afghanistan, where we grapple with the Red Menace? El Salvador, I said, is where you are likely to eliminate my son with extreme prejudice. We were interrupted by Buckley and Clare Boothe Luce, about whom Sheed, who would later buy me a drink, has written his one less than compelling book. I don’t know how many letters Buckley had to write. Sheed and I agreed that these parties were more problematical now that the bad guys had been voted ownership of the government.

At a third party, in 1981, I didn’t see either Sheed or Kempton, and I had to knife my way between Walter Cronkite and Henry Kissinger. They wondered whether I was important. Of course not. Nevertheless—my own weary joke—I introduced Cronkite to Kissinger. They’d met. Then I went home to reread Bambi. National Review, which used to be a boutique, is now a multinational corporation. Why do we open Buckley’s mail and accept his invitations?

It can’t be just because he returns a kindness for every intellectual delinquency. Nor can it be simply that simpletons on the literary left see in him, and are snake-charmed by, a character right out of a Fitzgerald novel, a Gatsby or Dick Diver whose desire to displease has been the opposite of fatal. Friendship is not an excuse: read what we do to our friends in our books. Style, of course, compels—he makes a splendid Whig—but style would never entirely subvert our powers of discrimination, our coiffed qualms. He may be ubiquitous, but why is he necessary?

Because he is not a dilettante. He isn’t tired of anything. I open his letters, go to his parties, appear on his television program, follow him (preposterously) to Russia, criticize his books and write these words because Buckley is busily serious. He is not, he admits in “Overdrive,” introspective, but introspection is often an escape from engagement. There are many reasons to stay home. The weather has been bad this century. He hasn’t stayed home, not even for a humanizing hour of pro football or Hill Street Blues. He breathes politics. Citizenship for most of us is a hobby; for him it is a calling. There are only a few important matters on which the two of us agree: that his sister Priscilla and his composer Bach are unexcelled in God’s scheme, and that Herzen was right when he said to Bakunin, “One must open men’s eyes, not tear them out.” The rest is argument. But the argument is civilized, and if there were no argument, if the argument didn’t matter, if no occasion warranted a letter and every silence belonged to stupidity, then all of us would be trivial.

I am saying he keeps me honest. That he enjoys himself too much doing so is my problem.