Both were disgusted by the tepid consensus of American liberalism; they feared not that the center couldn’t hold but that it would. Illustration by Barry Blitt

Forty years ago, for a brief stretch of my long, non-affluent slog through graduate school, I lived at 30 Francis Avenue, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the house of Professor and Mrs. John Kenneth Galbraith. In exchange for a small room (no board), I walked the family dog three times a day and did household chores that included vacuuming the basement, which was decorated with some whimsical art work by Jacqueline Kennedy.

My general misery was alleviated by what felt like a measure of Victorian beneficence: I had the run of the house’s library. Still, I was so preoccupied with studying for my oral exams (English, not economics) that I rarely made it past the inscribed title pages of those volumes by the living and the famous which I plucked from the Galbraiths’ shelves. I recall one greeting that appeared at the front of a collection of essays by William F. Buckley, Jr.: “To Ken and Kitty, Once a day, for dizziness. Love, Dr. Bill.” The civilized improbability of the Buckley-Galbraith comradeship, sustained across an intellectual divide and upon the ski slopes of Gstaad, made each into the other’s best-known unlikely friend.

A half-dozen years after departing Professor Galbraith’s house, I began writing frequently for National Review, the journal of his conservative foil, even though most of my own literary lodestars were on the left. (I once managed to praise, within the magazine’s pages, the wit of Gore Vidal, an object of fury and litigation for its editor.) Few writers glowed more brightly for me than Norman Mailer, whose reportorial astonishments and overreachings had lit with meaning anything of the nineteen-sixties that I had managed to glimpse through my freshman dorm window or on my black-and-white portable TV. There was, and remains, a daring and a bigness to Mailer, derived from his preference for being knocked off balance instead of dug in. Among American writers of his day, he was alone in thinking that a trip to the moon, even one funded by the military-industrial complex of the country that he sometimes called Cancer Gulch, might be worth a book.

Buckley held Mailer in high, wary regard. Fairly early in his busy career, Buckley had given up on writing his own “big” book; later, he conceded of Mailer, “He’s a genius and I’m not.” Upon Mailer’s death, in 2007, only months before his own, Buckley repeated his belief that the novelist had “created the most beautiful metaphors in the language.” By that point, it scarcely mattered that Mailer, when operating on more literal levels, had advanced a view of the world that Buckley found in large part preposterous.

In “Buckley and Mailer” (Norton), whose overstated subtitle is “The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties,” Kevin M. Schultz, a historian at the University of Illinois-Chicago, sets out to reconstruct an association that in fact had less warp and woof to it than Buckley’s friendship with Galbraith. John B. Judis’s biography of Buckley says that he was “friendly with” but never “very close” to Mailer. Still, Buckley’s durable cordiality toward Mailer is more remarkable than his being amigos with Galbraith or belligerents with Vidal, and it seems pardonable for Schultz to extend what ought to have been a magazine article into a book-length safari in search of something significant. Here and there he even finds it.

Show biz, for which both men had plenty of aptitude, first connected the two: John Golden, a young Chicago promoter, arranged to put Buckley and Mailer together in a public debate, on September 22, 1962, which quickly sold out.

Mailer was several months away from turning forty. Having largely flamed out in fiction after the success of “The Naked and the Dead,” and lucky to have escaped a prison sentence for stabbing his second wife, he was still in the early, shaky stages of a comeback second only in that era to Frank Sinatra’s. It had begun with the self-referential miscellany “Advertisements for Myself” (1959) and was continuing with his Esquire pieces on the Kennedy candidacy (“Superman Comes to the Supermarket”) and Presidency. Another half decade would bring him to greatness with “The Armies of the Night,” which won a Pulitzer, and “Miami and the Siege of Chicago.”

Buckley, only thirty-six, was the standout son of a large, rich, conservative Catholic family. (Vidal called them “the sick Kennedys.”) He had attracted notice for his own books (“God and Man at Yale,” “Up from Liberalism”) and for National Review, whose rearguard crusades appeared to have even fewer prospects of success than those being waged on the far-left side of the political greensward.

Posters for Buckley and Mailer’s Chicago bout promised “the Debate of the Year” between the “forceful philosopher of THE NEW CONSERVATISM” and “ ‘America’s angry young man’ and Leading Radical.” Abbie Hoffman was in the audience; folksingers provided entertainment during intermission; and Playboy held the rights to publish a transcript. As Schultz notes, Buckley had less to lose than Mailer, whom he had called, two years earlier, in National Review, a “moral pervert.” In the event, he came away from the auditorium impressed, telling readers of his next column that Mailer “doesn’t know what it is he wants to say, but his desperate anxiety to say it, fired by his incandescent moral energy, makes him very much worth watching.” There may have been, along with the grudging admiration, a tinge of envy. As Schultz notes, Mailer was a bold, quicksilver “philosopher,” whereas the far less introspective Buckley always tended to see himself as a mere “salesman” for certainties he was duty-bound to make obvious to others.

Mailer protested the subtitle that Playboy printed with the text of his speech: “A Liberal’s View.” Schultz’s account of the evening supports the objection, as did Buckley’s new awareness of Mailer’s bold, unfixed positions. Mailer characterized himself as a “libertarian socialist”—a label that Mary McCarthy, another left-leaning writer Buckley admired, had also applied to herself, demonstrating what Buckley called “her gift for oxymoron.” But there was something more elemental than synthetic in Mailer’s attempt to have things both ways. In speaking to the Chicago audience, he put as much emphasis on self-realization as upon society, acknowledged his belief in both God and the Devil, and at one point, hamstrung by the tit-for-tat quality of debate, cried, “I’m trying to talk about the nature of man!” Buckley discerned that, show biz aside, this wasn’t an act. He also must have realized the truth of the thesis that Schultz works hard but usefully: the common ground on which he and Mailer stood was not inconsiderable. Both were disgusted with the insipid aspects of American liberalism—a tepid consensus, corporate and bipartisan, that left each fearing not that the center couldn’t hold but that it would. “Buckley and I had been attacking this Center from our opposite flanks,” Mailer insisted. Even so, both were repelled by the violence with which it unexpectedly collapsed, and they were left cold by what Schultz calls the “rights-based model” of society, the beginnings of the identity politics that in the nineteen-seventies started replacing the liberal establishment.

In the meantime, each man gaudily challenged that establishment by running for mayor of New York City—Buckley in 1965, Mailer four years later. Both got beaten by John V. Lindsay, but only after stealing the show with campaigns of quixotic provocation. Mailer told one audience that he was running because “I want to see where my own ideas lead.” He proposed that New York become the fifty-first state and give its neighborhoods a degree of local autonomy undreamed of by even such a small-government advocate as Buckley. Under his plan, Mailer explained, a geriatric patch of the city “might wish to purchase massive police protection,” while a younger, hipper one would be free to legalize LSD.

Buckley’s campaign is remembered chiefly for what he said his first action would be if he won (“Demand a recount”) and for his proposal to ease traffic and trim flab with an elevated bike path, a then quirky idea that now sounds almost blandly Bloombergian. Schultz confuses what he calls Buckley’s “hatred” of John Lindsay with what was actually contempt; while discussing Buckley’s “special animus” toward his liberal Republican opponent, he quotes his remark that Lindsay “belongs in the Democratic Party.” Six years later, Lindsay joined it, and, a few years after that, Buckley’s old campaign argument that New York’s politicians were “approaching Washington as supplicants, begging it to return to the City some of the income it has taken from it,” seemed worth a second listen.

Throughout Schultz’s book, Buckley tends to be held to stricter standards of morality and logic than Mailer, whose moments of inspiration are more often indulged as yearning or lyrical. Schultz properly condemns Buckley for National Review’s opposition to the civil-rights movement, which Buckley himself eventually recanted, only to note his having “harped on” the Cold War, as if the consideration of political enslavement and possible nuclear apocalypse might have been keeping his audience from something serious. Mailer’s more grotesque moments—haranguing students with his own psychoanalysis of Lyndon Johnson; his uncertainty whether the children of those legal-LSD neighborhoods would end up “creating castles” or being “two-thirds dead of liver disease”—are pretty much allowed to stand as instances of Norman being Norman. Evenhandedness is not necessarily to be prized, but Schultz is operating within what is so much a rote political discourse that he probably doesn’t even know when he’s being less than fair. During Buckley’s run for mayor, we’re told, “the white working class did not sound like reactionaries when Buckley was their mouthpiece.” It’s a coarse, nasty characterization. Try reversing Schultz’s polarity so that a Yale-educated tribune of the black poor—say, Lindsay—is called their “mouthpiece.” That’s not a sentence that’s going to get written.