Coriolanus as Gadfly

Flippant American circles in Oxford have recently been discussing an allegorical painting hanging in a Fleet Street office. The gaudy, just-dry Daliesque effort depicts an ascendant John Lindsay, complete with halo and surrounded by clouds, rising from a group of tiny, ratlike creatures (presumably the Republican Party) into a firmament full of skyscrapers. Below stands a vanquished William Buckley, immaculately togaed as Coriolanus, backed by various unsavory folk who seem to be treading with muddy feet on realistic renditions of ethnic types. A funny little man dressed as Harlequin and looking like Abraham Beame dances in the left-hand corner. Among the mutilated dead are Charles Buckley and Adam Clayton Powell. Hubert Humphrey and Robert Kennedy, curiously, welcome Lindsay to the stratosphere, in company with a seraphically smiling Newly-Liberated Negro Voter.

The painting does not, of course, exist, in spite of various calls to Fleet Street during the past week by the American embassy to find out why Lyndon Johnson isn’t in the picture. It does serve fairly well, however, for the tendency of the British press to confuse the election of John Lindsay as mayor with the Second Coming. One might find this tribute from the provincial journals of the fifty-first state merely a tailwagging and typical bow to the opinions of Walter Lippmann were it not for the almost-respectable treatment accorded the Buckley campaign.

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James Fletcher

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William F. Buckley Jr.

Flippant American circles in Oxford have recently been discussing an allegorical painting hanging in a Fleet Street office. The gaudy, just-dry Daliesque effort depicts an ascendant John Lindsay, complete with halo and surrounded by clouds, rising from a group of tiny, ratlike creatures (presumably the Republican Party) into a firmament full of skyscrapers. Below stands a vanquished William Buckley, immaculately togaed as Coriolanus, backed by various unsavory folk who seem to be treading with muddy feet on realistic renditions of ethnic types. A funny little man dressed as Harlequin and looking like Abraham Beame dances in the left-hand corner. Among the mutilated dead are Charles Buckley and Adam Clayton Powell. Hubert Humphrey and Robert Kennedy, curiously, welcome Lindsay to the stratosphere, in company with a seraphically smiling Newly-Liberated Negro Voter.

The painting does not, of course, exist, in spite of various calls to Fleet Street during the past week by the American embassy to find out why Lyndon Johnson isn’t in the picture. It does serve fairly well, however, for the tendency of the British press to confuse the election of John Lindsay as mayor with the Second Coming. One might find this tribute from the provincial journals of the fifty-first state merely a tailwagging and typical bow to the opinions of Walter Lippmann were it not for the almost-respectable treatment accorded the Buckley campaign.