Charles Wallen, RIP

National Review, Jan 26, 1998 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

MOST of our friends aren't listed in directories that record eminence. When the loss is of a public figure, public attention is expected, and obituaries are published and read. But of course the pain is no less when the death is that of a personal and private friend. Then there is no catharsis, no public or semi-public mourning, no public tributes. The consolation, in this corner of NATIONAL REVIEW, is the accessibility of this page. I have treated it, over the years, most exploitatively -- as something akin to personal property; yet always aware that its longevity depends entirely on its capacity to engage your interest. From time to time I use my half-acre of space to recall a friendship purely personal, as I do now, on learning of the death of Charles Wallen Jr.

Three days after he died I had a letter from Bill Gillen, of Novato, California, whom I've never met. He wrote of his own grief and added, "I am writing to you because I know you were his best friend, and I know that because he told me so in his last letter."

It was so, I am honored to reflect. Charles died at 77 in San Mateo, just out from San Francisco; silver-haired, slightly stooped, quick to laugh and smile, engrossed in whatever book he was reading. When did we meet?

I was thinking this morning about one of your trips to San Francisco in 1971 . . . 26 years ago. I had joined you in your suite at the St. Francis Hotel and you had been engaged to speak before a meeting of Bank of America employees and there were several hundred of them there. . . . Then we went on to Trader Vic's and had a happy lunch. Memories -- memories -- you have provided me with so many happy memories over the years.

Charles Wallen was a purebred American whose interests were books, letters, and friends. He spent the great body of his time reading and rereading his books, which he stored in the huge cellar in his house in Millbrae, overlooking the airport at San Francisco and the surrounding hills and mountains. He was born in Tennessee, wandered about the country, and settled down for most of his professional life in San Francisco as a minor executive in a trucking company. His friends never knew what exactly he did for the DiSalvo Company, and we assumed, I'd guess correctly, that DiSalvo was not much more for him than the office where he worked to provide for his wife and three sons and to gain the leisure time to read his books and write his letters to his friends.

He wrote tenaciously, but I have to suppose that he wrote most often to me, as the laws of time & space make it unlikely that there are others who received two or three letters from Charles Wallen every week for 27 years. And this on top of the memoirs he began a few years ago. "The narrative goes on now way beyond the 1,214,000 words I mentioned to you last month . . ." That would be about three times the length of Gone with the Wind.

Who did he write to? Everyone who interested him or caught his attention.

I have just bought a copy of Father Patrick Samway's (S.J.) biography of Walker Percy. He mentions you on pages 302 and 303. I watched that Firing Line with Walker and Eudora Welty. I started writing to Walker in 1980 and we corresponded till his death in 1990. Once he sent me his privately published little book Bourbon, which is hilarious. What a blow he dealt to the 1960s with Love in the Ruins.

The Walker Percys of this world (as if they were a breed) don't maintain correspondence with listless minds or boring writers. It was so with others, some of whom I had introduced Charles to.

Got a note from Tom Wolfe last week. He said he was doing OK. Also am rereading David Niven's two autobiographical works and enjoying them. We corresponded from 1972 when I met him with you until his death. He called me on his last trip to SF . . .

[Again:] I carried on some correspondence with [Malcolm] Muggeridge in the '70s and '80s & I think I have all his books . . .

[A week or two later:] . . . Got a note from Tom Wolfe last week. He said he was doing OK.

He sometimes circulated answers elicited by his letter-writing, even when one such left him bloody. He was well and truly zonked by the fearful Hugh Kenner's reply to his complaint about my use of a word:

I looked in your Right Word book for solipsism first & found it on page 427. In April 1973 Hugh Kenner wrote me about this word. You had written me that if I could find a substitute you would stop using it. Part of Hugh's letter:

"Dear Charles:

". . . But Bill's point is precisely that there is no substitute for 'solipsism.' If what pains you about it is simply the fact that you seldom hear it, then the fault is not in the man who grinds it against your ears, but in the millions of part-time and largely inadvertent solipsists who are so convinced the universe emanates from them that they feel no need of a word to designate such a condition. Fish, on the same principle, know nothing of water, and for aqueous terminology you should not apply to a fish."

Hugh Kenner, having gone this far, did not stop, and Charles, though presumably chastened, did not mute the full thunder of the closing lines: