Scoundrel Time:

When Scoundrel Time (Little, Brown, $7.95) was first published, in the spring of 1976, only the cooing of reviewers was heard. Up front, in the most prominent seats, they applauded so resolutely, so methodically, the overtone of the metronome teased the ear. Solzhenitsyn, in the first Gulag book, writes about how, during one of the terrors, Stalin’s agents would fan out from Moscow to give speeches to the satellite brass, hastily convened in crowded theaters in the outlying cities to receive the details of Stalin’s hectic afflatus. After the speaker was done, the subjects would break into applause, and the clapping would go on and on, because no one dared be the first to sit down, lest he be thought insufficiently servile. Indeed, rather than wait for the speaker finally to beckon the whole assembly back to its seats, on one occasion someone did it—stopped clapping, though only after a boisterous while. That man was spotted, given ten years, and shipped off to a prison camp—where, perhaps, he was given to read from the collected anti-fascist opera of Lillian Heilman. . . . It seemed for a while the reviewers would be that way all around the town—the New York Times, the Washington Post, Commonweal, America, the Chicago Tribune. Then . . . then, in The New York Review of Books, Murray Kempton interrupted his own paean to Miss Heilman to make a comment or two which, however gentle, quite ruptured the trance. It was as if, in Paris during the occupation, an anonymous arranger had, by fugitive notation, insinuated the motif of the “Marseillaise” into a great Speer-like orchestration of “Über Alles.” Others, after that, came rushing in. It would never be quite the same again for Miss Lillian.

Even so, one has to hand it to her. Though the book is slender, the design is grandly staged, in self-esteem as in presumption. To begin with, here is someone described in the introduction to her own book as the greatest woman playwright in American history. Now this is probably true. But a) Isn’t that on the order of celebrating the tallest building in Wichita, Kansas? and b) Doesn’t an introduction to oneself in such terms, in one’s own book, by one’s own chosen introducer, interfere with the desired perception of oneself as a hardworking artist ignorant, indeed disdainful, of the outside world of power-plays and flackery? and c) Aren’t the auspices the most alien for making sexual distinctions? I mean, Garry Wills, the Last Kid, talking about the Greatest Woman Playwright as one would talk about the downhill champion on the one-legged ski team?

About the Author

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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When Scoundrel Time (Little, Brown, $7.95) was first published, in the spring of 1976, only the cooing of reviewers was heard. Up front, in the most prominent seats, they applauded so resolutely, so methodically, the overtone of the metronome teased the ear. Solzhenitsyn, in the first Gulag book, writes about how, during one of the terrors, Stalin’s agents would fan out from Moscow to give speeches to the satellite brass, hastily convened in crowded theaters in the outlying cities to receive the details of Stalin’s hectic afflatus. After the speaker was done, the subjects would break into applause, and the clapping would go on and on, because no one dared be the first to sit down, lest he be thought insufficiently servile. Indeed, rather than wait for the speaker finally to beckon the whole assembly back to its seats, on one occasion someone did it—stopped clapping, though only after a boisterous while. That man was spotted, given ten years, and shipped off to a prison camp—where, perhaps, he was given to read from the collected anti-fascist opera of Lillian Heilman. . . . It seemed for a while the reviewers would be that way all around the town—the New York Times, the Washington Post, Commonweal, America, the Chicago Tribune. Then . . . then, in The New York Review of Books, Murray Kempton interrupted his own paean to Miss Heilman to make a comment or two which, however gentle, quite ruptured the trance. It was as if, in Paris during the occupation, an anonymous arranger had, by fugitive notation, insinuated the motif of the “Marseillaise” into a great Speer-like orchestration of “Über Alles.” Others, after that, came rushing in. It would never be quite the same again for Miss Lillian.

Even so, one has to hand it to her. Though the book is slender, the design is grandly staged, in self-esteem as in presumption. To begin with, here is someone described in the introduction to her own book as the greatest woman playwright in American history. Now this is probably true. But a) Isn’t that on the order of celebrating the tallest building in Wichita, Kansas? and b) Doesn’t an introduction to oneself in such terms, in one’s own book, by one’s own chosen introducer, interfere with the desired perception of oneself as a hardworking artist ignorant, indeed disdainful, of the outside world of power-plays and flackery? and c) Aren’t the auspices the most alien for making sexual distinctions? I mean, Garry Wills, the Last Kid, talking about the Greatest Woman Playwright as one would talk about the downhill champion on the one-legged ski team?