Sleepwalk, Christopher Buckley, Eastern Washington University
Press, 2006, paper, $16.95
A
good many poets, including this reviewer, have written poetic memoirs in which
we hanker for the first memories of childhood, when we were introduced to
religion that confused us, when we faced sucker punches on the playground
school yards, when we were crippled by arguing parents and, still later, when
hormones kicked in, believed that we were the only ones who experienced teenage
angst. Christopher Buckley’s Sleepwalk
is such a book—or at least parts of it are.
Buckley is Santa Barbara, California, born and raised. His time of wonderment is the 1950s, his
teenage years right smack in the 1960s, and his nostalgia for Santa Barbara
built as soon as he hit drinking age—or at least the legal drinking age.
In “Sleep,” the first essay, Buckley’s in a large
cushioned seat at the State Theatre watching “The Wizard of Oz.” There, in the cavernous dark, he gets his
first dose of Technicolor—the colors, younger readers, were overblown: the pinks were more than pink and the purples
so artificial that they may have inspired Jim Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” There, in the theatre, the five-year-old
Buckley begins to assemble symbols—the ugly witch is bad, the pretty witch is
good. While “Sleep” is partly about
first movies, it is also about Buckley’s first serious grievances—the afternoon
nap in school and the nuns who resembled the ugly witch.
These
days fathers often don’t go along for the ride—families break apart, just as
Buckley’s did somewhere in the mid-sixties.
But his father was present long enough for Buckley to assess what went
wrong. In “Starry Ambition,” we see a
father whose ambition is large and his talent is large (a fine, if not great,
big band singer and a slick but not overly oiled salesman). His father rubs elbows with the rich of
Santa Barbara and, in fact, is head of a household nestled in a one-acre
property of Montecito—just the name itself suggess a separation from the lower
classes in the flatlands. He says of
his father: “[his] design was vague, but grand, and flowed like the sun over
the vast Pacific.” His father comes
close to the higher plateaus of financial success, but rolls back to the lower
shores because… well, that’s uncertain though we can see his mistakes. He sold their house, for instance, to
invest in a business that belly flopped.
But hadn’t Buckley’s father been destined for riches? After all, it was his father, who, in
a 1940s night club, had Judy Garland descend from the stage, saunter down the
aisle, and sit in his lap. Wasn’t he
chosen? Garland sang a few bars
directly to Buckley’s father, and who would not think that this was a blessing
from the muse. Surely, his life was
supposed to be good.
But
it’s not. He becomes sidetracked and
his golden touch fails. Buckley
artfully disentangles the history of his father and has to wonder why his
father couldn’t succeed while other families climbed that social ladder—here,
it would not be inappropriate to conjure up a waspish John Cheever story in
which the family portends an easy life, but underneath there is failure and
sadness.
Buckley
longs not only for the 1950s and 1960s, a time when things were easy—at least
it was if you were not a minority, at least for one group of citizens. He finds himself also nostalgic for his
father and mother’s generation, so his reminiscence includes big bands, the
themes of movies, the clothes, the wingtip brogues, the Pontiacs and Buicks
that were all metal, and the agreeable scent of Old Spice, along with surf
music, surfers, black converse sneakers, high school dances to such one-hit
wonders as “The Bristol Stomp,” and finally a mindful growth. Buckley is an admirer of natural settings—he
spent enough time in the higher altitudes of exclusive Montecito, bucolic with
sun filtered through oaks, manzanita, and the swaying limbs of eucalyptus. His longing provides a dreamlike quality to
his prose—his poetry also offers this rare gift. How can the reader not appreciate such an observation as “I
wanted to hold onto my life, and, subliminally at least, I knew growing old was
trouble. I climbed up the acacia trees
to the sun and felt something in me daily translated into light.”
The
fine brilliance of these two sentences, indeed, may be at the heart of what Sleepwalk
evokes. We grow old, and don’t like it
one bit. What do we do about it? If you’re intelligent and sensitive to your
time on earth, then you move toward what warms you, both literally and
figuratively.
I
have suggested that Sleepwalk is a somber collection which you might
read while listening to Mahler, but actually it brims with mirth and
self-effacing moments. It rollicks, it
makes fun of itself. There is a
wonderful essay about the other Christopher Buckley, the one of
east-coast fame, who could easily find himself on television or invited to a
Republican White House shindig. The other
Christopher Buckley, known for his essays and his occasional status as speech
writer for George Bush, has been tricky business for this Christopher
Buckley, a poet and Democrat if ever there was one. Large presses will call him up and ask for blurbs, assuming, of
course, that he’s the other Christopher Buckley, the famous Christopher
Buckley. Or he may receive
congratulatory letters for an essay in The New Yorker, and he’ll have to
stumble through apologies as he writes back, “Sorry, but it’s the other
fellow.” Or the mother of all
confusions: the poet Christopher Buckley was called by the Today Show to
chew the fat about the forthcoming debate between George Bush and Bill
Clinton. Of course, he explains,
“You’re looking for the other guy.” The
Today Show rep insists that he’s shrugging her off, and it’s not until
Buckley begins to rake over Bush about Irangate (does anyone remember this?)
that she realizes that maybe she does have the wrong Buckley after all. The piece is called “Fame or Fortune; Or,
I’m Not Christopher Buckley.”
Sleepwalk is collection of fifteen essays. The book is $16.95. That averages about a dollar ten for each
blissful essay.