The New Leader | May/August 2009 | Volume XCI

Transcrição

Between Issues: Daniel Bell’s ‘Two Footnotes Forward, One Footnote Back’
Daniel Schorr: ‘Don’t Get Sick in America’
Abraham Rabinovich: Israel’s Summer of Content
Allen C. Lynch: Obama and Russia
The
New
Leader
Double Issue: May/June-July/August 2009
A Bimonthly of News Analysis and Opinion
86th Year of Publication
SummerBooks
Essays:
Stefan Kanfer: Why Libraries Still Matter
Christopher Clausen: Ironies of the Civil War
Brooke Allen: A Matter of Inheritance
Phoebe Pettingell: Verse as the Supreme Fiction
Marvin Kitman: How Reality Works
Reviews:
Robert Belknap on Vladislav Zubok’s Zhivago’s Children
Rosellen Brown on Ward Just’s Exiles in the Garden
Henry Graff on James MacGregor Burns’ Packing the Court
Philip Graham on Benjamin Moser’s Why This World
Clyde Haberman on David Freeland’s Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville
Jacob Heilbrunn on Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot
Mark Kamine on Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice
Sanford Lakoff on T.R. Reid’s The Healing of America
Donald Shanor on Richard Bissel’s Germany 1945
BetweenIssues
The New Leader May/June-July/August, 2009
from Gorbachev that said, “Dear Daniel: No, I did not know
Lenin played that trick on his old friend Martov. But, that is
Lenin.” So our story ends with the last Secretary of the Communist Party indicating his feelings about the first Secretary—
another footnote to history.
Speaking of footnotes, last year Bell and Inozemtsev collaborated on a book published in Russia, The Age of Disjunction: A Set of Conversations, which will be published here by
Routledge at the end of this year.
New
Leader
The
A FOOTNOTE STORY: Several months ago we received a short
manuscript from Daniel Bell (who in 1940 at age 22 became
managing editor of the then weekly NL, three years later went on
to an impressive stint at Fortune magazine, and while there also
launched an academic career at Columbia that would ultimately take him to Harvard, where he is now the Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus). Evoking Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin’s famous essay, “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: On
Revolutionary Tactics,” Bell titled his brief piece “Two Footnotes Forward, One Footnote Back.” It read as follows:
“At the 1903 founding conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the main protagonists were Lenin and Julius
Martov. Each presented a program. In the subsequent balloting,
the party divided and Lenin prevailed by one vote. The victors
were named ‘Bolsheviks’ (from the Russian word ‘greater than’),
the losers ‘Mensheviks’ (from the Russian word ‘lesser’)—
designations that persisted throughout the Communist era.
“Lenin’s program was called Chto D’lat, or ‘What is to be
Done?’ The title had a curious history. It belonged to a novel by
Nikolai Chernyshevsky that aroused considerable controversy
in the 1850s because its leading characters were a female—
probably the first in Russian literature—and an iron-willed
man capable of sleeping on a bed of nails. The novel was a favorite of Lenin’s brother, Aleksandr, who was hanged by the
Tsar for revolutionary activities. Vladimir (the family name was
Ulanov) had not been interested in such activities until his brother’s death. But in going through Aleksandr’s possessions he
found Chernyshevsky’s novel and it became his favorite as well.
“Lenin’s eponymous program emphasized two major principles. The first was the central and controlling role of the party;
the second was the distinction between a trade union mentality
focused on improving the day-to-day conditions of workers,
and Socialist objectives created and instilled by intellectuals.
Because Lenin was relatively unknown at the time, he apparently felt he could not claim sole credit for the latter. He therefore attributed it to an article in Neue Zeit by Karl Kautsky, the
foremost exegete of Marx. During an academic year that I spent
at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford, I went back and
looked at Kautsky’s article. I found to my astonishment that he
was not the source of Lenin’s second principle. Rather, Kautsky cited as his source for the idea an article by Yuli Zederbaum
in the Wiener Courier.
“Since Lenin had read and used Kautsky’s article, he clearly
knew that. He didn’t want to credit Zederbaum with the important idea, however, because he also knew this was the original
family name of his opponent Martov. On the other hand, he
didn’t want some future prober to accuse him of ignoring Martov. Consequently, in a footnote related to a minor program
issue Zederbaum shows up. So when doing archival reading,
always look two footnotes forward, one footnote back.”
Although impressed by Bell’s sleuthing, our initial response
was that its lesson seemed better suited to an academic journal.
Undeterred, he asked a colleague in Moscow, Vladislav Inozemtsev, to translate the piece and show it to Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Shortly afterward, Bell received a handwritten note
Double Issue
May/June-July/August, 2009
Volume XCI, Numbers 3&4
‘Don’t Get Sick in America’/DANIEL SCHORR .....................3
Israel’s Summer of Content/ABRAHAM RABINOVICH ...........6
Obama and Russia/ALLEN C. LYNCH .................................9
Why Libraries Still Matter/STEFAN KANFER .....................11
Summer Books
Ironies of the Civil War/CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN ................14
End of the Romantic Revolutionary/ROBERT BELKNAP .......17
A Lucky Choice of Enemies/DONALD R. SHANOR ..............18
Revisiting ‘Daniel Deronda’/JACOB HEILBRUNN ...............19
Searching for the Right Prescription/SANFORD LAKOFF ......21
Our Third Legislative Branch/HENRY F. GRAFF ..................23
Gotham’s Good Time Landmarks/CLYDE HABERMAN ........24
A Matter of Inheritance/BROOKE ALLEN ..........................26
The Fuel of Art and Life/PHILIP GRAHAM .........................28
Pynchon Up Close/MARK KAMINE ..................................29
Action vs. Reverie/ROSELLEN BROWN ..............................30
Verse as the Supreme Fiction/PHOEBE PETTINGELL ............32
On Television/MARVIN KITMAN ......................................35
Executive Editor: MYRON KOLATCH
Executive Assistant: LISA PEET
Business Manager: BARBARA SHAPIRO
Art Director: Alan Peckolick. Regular Critics—Books: Brooke
Allen. Poetry: Phoebe Pettingell. Music: John Simon. Theater:
Stefan Kanfer. Film: Raphael Shargel. Regular Contributors—
Daniel Bell, Ruth Ellen Gruber. Regular Columnists—
Christopher Clausen, Daniel Schorr.
Signed contributions do not necessarily represent the views of The
New Leader. We welcome a variety of opinions consistent with our
democratic policy. Unsolicited manuscripts cannot be returned
unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope.
THE NEW LEADER: Published bimonthly by the American Labor Conference on International Affairs,
Inc. Editorial and executive offices: 535 West 114th Street, N.Y., N.Y. 10027. Telephone (212) 854-1640.
Fax (212) 854-9099. E-mail: [email protected]. Copyright ©2009 by the American Labor Conference on International Affairs, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written
permission prohibited.
2
Washington
Notebook
By Daniel Schorr
‘Don’t
Get Sick
in America’
MY BOOK on health care, Don’t Get
Sick in America, says that with medical
expenditures at $63 billion a year and
headed toward an eye-popping $100 billion, this has to be the year for national
health insurance. A Foreword by Senator
Edward M. Kennedy (D.-Mass.) emphasizes that it must not be simply an updated insurance program, but a revolution
in health care.
Did I forget to mention that my book
was published in 1970, and since then expenditures have risen past $2.2 trillion?
Almost 40 years later, America is still
wrestling with a health industry that is
deathly sick.
The House and Senate have gone
home. Left behind are elements of several health care bills in committees. And
now the rhetorical guns of August are resounding throughout the land as constituents vent their anger at the mess.
Senator Arlen Specter (D.-Pa.) and
Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius were
cheered, but also heckled and booed, in
Philadelphia. In Austin, Texas, Democratic Representative Lloyd Doggett faced
protesters carrying signs saying, “No Socialized Health Care.”
The Administration says no, not socialized—government. No, not government—public option. Some Senators say
no, not public option—co-op. It is a war
of slogans—sound and fury signifying
little.
Meanwhile, if you listen closely to
President Barack Obama, you will note
that he no longer talks of health care reform, but of health insurance reform, a
limited goal that Senator Kennedy said
almost 40 years ago would not suffice.
Where has the Obama Administration
gone wrong? Early on it decided that it
would avoid the Hillarycare mistake of
the 1990s: confronting Congress with a
massive plan, all worked out. This time,
the Administration would let Congress
design a plan the President could then
sign. As it turned out, that has led to chaos
by committee.
The Most
Trusted Voice
in the Country
I IMAGINE no one would have been
more astonished and more delighted than
Walter Cronkite at the vast amount of ink
WALTER CRONKITE
and airtime occasioned by his death on
July 17 at age 92. Yet that he shared a global stage with the 40th moon landing anniversary seemed only the natural order
of things.
Three decades after he reluctantly vacated the anchor seat at CBS News, no
one has come to fill his place in American hearts and minds as the prototype
newsman, the most trusted voice in the
country. Once asked to run for office,
he said, smilingly, that he could not step
down.
He was viewed as the purveyor of
facts without bias or opinion. Actually,
some of his most dramatic moments involved a departure from objectivity: the
spontaneous “Oh, boy” as he watched the
moon landing; the catch in his throat
3
when he had to announce that President
John F. Kennedy had died; the eruption,
“I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here,”
from the anchor booth at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago when he saw
Dan Rather being roughed up by security guards; and, famously, his 1968 visit
to Vietnam and on-camera pronouncement that the war was unwinnable and
should be ended.
President Lyndon B. Johnson told his
aide Bill Moyers: “If I’ve lost Cronkite,
I’ve lost Middle America.”
Cronkite also drew on his reservoir of
trust when it came to reporting the Watergate scandal. In October 1972, about a
month before the election, he noted to me,
a designated Watergate correspondent,
that CBS was not giving enough attention to the deepening investigation. “This
has been mainly a newspaper story,” he
said. “It’s time to make it a television story.” So we put together two lengthy packages summarizing all that was known
about the scandal. Ben Bradlee, editor of
the Washington Post, later said Cronkite
and CBS had turned a newspaper story
into a national story.
No one commanded more confidence
than this plainspoken newsman from the
Midwest. Given the current trend toward
tabloid journalism, we are not likely soon
to see another Uncle Walter.
Too Sensitive
for Congress
to Know
NOW WE KNOW. The CIA program
that was so sensitive it could not be revealed to Congress concerned plans to
capture or kill Al Qaeda leaders on a list
compiled in the wake of the 9/11 massacres. It was apparently never fully activated and has been canceled by the new
CIA Director Leon Panetta. Thus the conclusion of the latest sorry chapter in the
history of the Presidential license to kill,
usually invoked behind an elaborate cloak
of denial because murder goes against
the American grain.
In 1975, after I reported on CBS that
the CIA had been involved in assassination conspiracies, Idaho Democratic
Senator Frank Church’s investigating
committee documented plans in various
states of consideration to murder foreign
leaders—including Patrice Lumumba of
Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican
Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, Chilean Army Commander in Chief
General René Schneider, Sukarno of Indonesia, and Fidel Castro of Cuba.
Some of them were in fact killed,
though the Church Committee was not
able to establish direct U.S. involvement.
Castro, in particular, was the target of
several plots during the administrations
of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F.
Kennedy. One was in progress when Kennedy was assassinated.
Under public pressure, President Gerald R. Ford issued a sweeping executive
order banning participation by American
employees in assassination plots. That
did not deter President Ronald Reagan
from ordering an attack on Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s desert compound in
Libya. And President George H.W. Bush
at least considered bombing Manuel Noriega’s Palace as part of the invasion of
Panama.
President George W. Bush’s White
House took the position that it is not assassination if it’s part of a military operation. That helps to explain why the second
Bush Administration liked to talk of a war
on terror.
One can understand the temptation of
a President to use his enormous powers
against a dangerous hidden adversary.
CIA Director Panetta has suggested this
is not the policy of the Obama Administration. This White House seems to recognize that Americans are made uneasy
by the hidden uses of the President’s authority against foes.
Iran’s
Twitter
Revolution
FOR DEMONSTRATORS in Tehran the
immediate flashpoint seemed to be a presidential election they regard as stolen. In
a larger sense, however, we may be witnessing a stage in the decline of the theocratic state.
It is 30 years since the charismatic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from
exile to lead a revolution that toppled the
CIA-backed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, whom President Jimmy Carter had
called an “island of stability.” In those
heady days, young zealots invaded the
U.S. Embassy, declared it a nest of spies,
and held the staff hostage until Carter left
office.
But holding mighty America at bay
was only part of the Khomeini revolution. Its principal thrust was aimed at
sweeping away the despised police state
monarchy of the Shah and establishing
the Islamic Republic of Iran. It put in
place a government based on the Islamic
religion, with a rigid dress code for wom-
AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI
en and an Islamic legal system enforced
by the mullahs.
Thirty years later, a new generation of
Iranians no longer seems content with the
rule of the mullahs. The protesters in Tehran chant slogans of freedom and carry
signs—in English—expressing the hope
that Iran will no longer be a pariah state
subject to United Nations sanctions.
The nascent freedom movement seems
to have chosen as its symbol a Westerndressed young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, a philosophy student, lying in a pool
of blood from a sniper bullet. Her dying,
viewed countless times on a YouTube
video, is the subject of a million text and
Twitter messages.
The government may succeed in quelling the current wave of protest, but the
day of mullah rule may be nearing its end.
Some call it the “Twitter Revolution,” for
in Iran tyranny has run afoul of technology in the form of the Internet.
4
It is not the first time in history that
the impulse for freedom has scaled borders by electronic means. I remember the
Soviet Union during the Cold War, where
the government made a heavy investment
in jamming equipment to try shutting
out the Voice of America. I remember
East Germany, where a Stalinist regime
threatened to jail those who pointed TV
antennas toward West Germany. And I
remember Czechoslovakia in the 1960s,
when courageous television crews in
Prague defied orders not to show antiCommunist demonstrations.
In China, the government has withdrawn a decree that all personal computers must have software that filters out
“unhealthy information.” But it has a list
of officially banned Web sites.
Iran has now become the latest arena
of the struggle for control in cyberspace.
The Internet has effectively defeated the
regime’s efforts to isolate marchers from
each other and from the outside world.
The Internet has become a veritable
underground social network. A dedicated Twitter account for supporters of Mir
Hussein Moussavi, the opposition candidate many believe to be the actual winner of the election, claims to have more
than 29,000 followers. The Twitter company in San Francisco expresses pride
that it is playing an important role in Iran
as a communications tool.
Perhaps one should not exaggerate the
effects of the cyberspace battle in Iran.
The beleaguered regime still has the instruments of repression, the guns and the
truncheons. Nevertheless, the exhilaration among the protesting students as
they marched with cell phone and Twitter has struck a blow against a closed society.
The Limits
of Obama’s
Transparency
PRESIDENT OBAMA has often proclaimed his dedication to transparency
in government. But in several key cases
he has come down on the side of maintaining secrecy.
One case involves 65 CIA documents
describing videotaped interrogations of
detainees. The American Civil Liberties
Union has sued for their release. CIA Director Panetta has advised the U.S. District Court that issuing them would aid
terrorist recruiting and damage national
security.
Earlier, the President withheld interrogation photos that he said would give
the U.S. a bad name abroad. The Administration persuaded the Senate to add
a measure to the war supplemental bill
blocking the release of the pictures for
three years. In the House, Speaker Nancy
Pelosi (D.-Calif.), under pressure from
liberals, has delayed acting.
There has been other evidence of the
Bush-era secrecy stamp still at work. The
Administration is reportedly considering a change in the military tribunal law
that would let terrorist suspects facing
the death penalty make guilty pleas. Why?
Five Guantánamo detainees asked last
year to plead guilty—to achieve martyrdom. There was no provision for dealing with that. But allowing a guilty plea
might avoid the disclosure of sensitive
information.
And former CIA officer Philip Mudd,
nominated to be Intelligence Chief for
the Department of Homeland Security,
withdrew his name rather than face Senatorial questioning about his role in the
interrogation of Guantánamo detainees.
The Administration has also supported retroactive immunity for companies
that cooperated with the National Security Agency in wiretapping American
citizens. Here the objective is to keep the
lid on the antiterrorist surveillance program.
For all of this Obama makes no apology. In a speech at the National Archives
on May 21, he said he has never held that
“national security matters should simply
be an open book.”
Now the President has ordered an inhouse review of whether the government
is keeping too much information secret.
He says he remains committed to an “unprecedented level of openness.” But he
continues to wield the “state secrets”
privilege as his predecessor did, on the
grounds that the President has a right to
decide what is national security and what
is national embarrassment.
A Modest
Guantánamo
Proposal
GUANTÁNAMO is the name of a Caribbean inlet in southeastern Cuba that provides one of the biggest and best-sheltered
bays in the world—perfect for a U.S. naval base. Today it is the name as well of a
major Presidential headache. The prison
there houses some 240 “detainees,” and
Obama has promised to shut it down, but
has so far not found many countries willing to accept the detainees—least of all
this country, whose local leaders say almost in chorus, “not in my backyard.”
How did the United States come to
have this piece of Cuba in the first place?
In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a deal with a liberated Cuba to
lease the 45-square-mile area. The price
was 2,000 gold coins a year. The lease was
later renegotiated to stipulate that it could
only be canceled by U.S. abandonment
or by mutual agreement. And the U.S. still
sends checks for some $4,000 annually.
When Fidel Castro came to power in
1959 he indicated he would not abrogate
the agreement, but he quickly changed
his mind. In 1961, President Eisenhower
broke off diplomatic relations—and by
1964 Castro was trying to cut off the water supply to Guantánamo. The U.S. started bringing in water by ship.
Periodically, the Havana government
has demanded the return of the land and
stopped cashing the rent checks. But
since Guantánamo is separated from the
rest of Cuba by a well-patrolled fence,
the base took on a life of its own. Most
recently it was made the site of a prison
complex for terror suspects.
The Administration has been reviewing U.S. relations (or the lack of them) with
Cuba. So here is a modest proposal: President Obama should announce he is ending our century-old presence in the Cuban
bay. The evacuation would be immediate
and the installation would be left as it is.
That would leave the Castro brothers to
figure out what to do about the detainees.
But the Castro regime is pretty experienced in handling prison populations.
Just a thought.
5
A Promising Harbinger?
Israel’s
Summerof
Content
By Abraham Rabinovich
JERUSALEM
Q
UIET IN the South, quiet
in the North; Hamas and
Hezbollah humbled; Iran
stumbling; Bibi saying
“two-state solution” and
liking the sound so much
he says it again without being prompted.
Too good to be true?
The voice of experience—four decades of experience slaloming between
hope and despondency in the post-Six
Day War Middle East—would say yes,
too good. Israel’s summer of content, it
would add, will give way sooner or later
to what passes hereabouts for reality.
However.
The inner ear, braced for a wakeup call,
hears an alien sound—one that might,
just possibly, indicate that some new political dynamic is coming over the hill
strong enough to change the familiar
rhythm.
First the good news. The firing of missiles and mortars from the Gaza Strip into
Sderot and other Israeli towns has, after
eight years, almost completely stopped.
In the immediate aftermath of Israel’s
three-week incursion into Gaza in January, rocketing continued on a reduced
scale for several weeks as Hamas and its
allies sought to demonstrate they were
down but not out. This tapered off as Israel responded forcibly to each attack. Hamas’ rhetorical bluster has ceased too, the
“bring it on” taunts from spokesmen and
the warnings that the gates of hell would
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU
open for any Israeli troops daring to enter
Gaza. The Hamas leaders emerged from
the rubble clearly stunned at what they
had wrought. They have even heeded Israel’s demand that they rein in smaller
militant groups firing missiles, some-
thing they refused to take responsibility
for in the past.
The Lebanese border also is quieter
than it has been in years. The war against
Hezbollah three years ago, regarded in
Israel as a tactical failure, has proven a
strategic success. Poundings inflicted on
southern Lebanon and other Hezbollah
centers still reverberate there. Hezbollah
leader Hassan Nasrallah said afterward
that had he known what Israel’s reaction
would be, he would not have provoked it
with a cross-border raid. Indications are
that the sentiment has been reinforced
since then. His fiery rhetoric has been
considerably damped down, and he no
longer refers to Israel as a “cobweb” that
can be brushed aside.
Hezbollah has rebuilt its military infrastructure in southern Lebanon and
possesses some 40,000 missiles, Israeli officials say, three times as many as it
had during the 2006 conflict. But Hezbollah’s new role as a central player in
mainstream Lebanese politics has made
it, willy-nilly, a more responsible actor.
ABRAHAM RABINOVICH writes frequently for the NEW LEADER on the Middle
East. His latest book, The Yom Kippur
War, is now available in paperback.
6
If it were to attack Israel it would mean
that all of Lebanon, not only Hezbollah, would be a legitimate target, making
pressures for its restraint ever more tangible. Although in 2006 Israel generally
avoided attacking the national infrastructure, it need have no such compunctions
now.
Despite vows of vengeance against
Israel for the assassination of senior
Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh over a year ago, Nasrallah has not
yet found a way to keep his promise without risking a major Israeli counterblow.
To avoid that he has attempted hitting
Israeli targets abroad, including an embassy in central Asia, but those efforts
have failed.
Only if Israel attacks Iran is Hezbollah likely to attack Israel. Hezbollah’s
missile arsenal was furnished by Tehran
precisely to serve as a deterrent against an
Israeli strike.
Meanwhile, strategic cooperation between Israel and Egypt, the key country
in the Arab world, has reached an unprecedented level, thanks to their shared
perception of the Iranian threat. That was
demonstratively shown in July when
an Israeli submarine, believed capable
of carrying nuclear tipped cruise missiles, passed for the first time through
the Suez Canal from the Mediterranean
to the Red Sea, on the surface for all to
see, particularly Tehran. In the past, Israeli submarines wishing to position
themselves on the approaches to Iran
would have sailed submerged around
Africa, a voyage taking weeks and requiring refueling. The Egyptians permitted two of Israel’s most advanced
missile boats to pass through the canal a
few days later.
This strategic cooperation has developed despite the election of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not one of
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s favorite people, and the appointment of
Avigdor Lieberman as Israel’s foreign
minister. Last year, before his appointment, Lieberman said publicly that if
Mubarak does not wish to visit Israel—
he has come only once, for the funeral
of Yitzchak Rabin—he can “go to hell.”
Unsurprisingly, Lieberman is non grata
in Cairo. By linking with Israel on Iran,
though, Mubarak has demonstrated that
Egyptian national interests trump personal feelings.
In addition, press reports in June had
Saudi Arabia giving Israel permission to
overfly Saudi territory if it launches an
attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Both
Riyadh and Jerusalem issued quick denials. But the reports reflect the general
feeling of Arab leaders that the strategic
threat posed by Iran places the Arabs and
Israel on the same side of the fence. In
any case, Israel did not ask for Saudi permission in 1981 when its planes flew low
over the Saudi desert on their way to destroy the Iraqi nuclear reactor outside
Baghdad.
On nonmilitary fronts, too, the good
news this summer has been indisputable. Israel’s tennis team, of which little
was expected, won a place in the Davis
Cup semifinals for the first time in July with a stunning victory over tennis
giant Russia.
Thus far, Israel has come through the
global economic crisis much better than
HOSNI MUBARAK
most Western countries. This has been
due in large part to the guidance of Stanley Fischer, the North Rhodesia-born
governor of the Bank of Israel, who was
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s thesis adviser at MIT. Early in
the crisis Fischer was asked about reports
that his former student had been consulting with him about strategy by telephone
from Washington, but he declined to
comment.
And then, of course, there were the
stunning events in Iran itself. Since the
vigorously disputed result of its June 12
presidential contest between hardline incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and
the defeated, popular moderate Mir Hossein Moussavi, the country has been in
turmoil. Even Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei’s admonishments could
not quickly quell the unrest, suggesting
a modification of Iran’s confrontational
stance has become a possibility.
G
IVEN THE dramatic developments in Tehran and
the newfound tranquillity along Israel’s borders,
the Middle East appears
poised for something. All the actors in
the region are tired. All the scenarios, it
seems, have been tried and have petered
out. Neither Israel nor the Arab countries
have charismatic leaders capable of offering rousing new scripts.
Enter Barack Obama. Every new
American President brings to the region
hope of change, a hope that usually sinks
into the sands ere long. Obama may be
an exception. His skin, his middle name,
his respectful outreach to Muslims have
carved out for him a credibility in the
Arab world his predecessors did not enjoy. Similarly, his calculated coolness toward Israel, while annoying the Israelis,
has enhanced his status in the region as a
fair-minded interlocutor. The Middle East
is ready for fair-minded intervention, and
there is no one better positioned for the
task than Obama.
What is clear after decades of struggle is that, left to their own devices, Israel and the Palestinians are incapable of
resolving their differences. In formal and
informal talks, however, they have drawn
up formulas that narrow those differences significantly. To close the remaining gaps—political and psychological—
an outside force is required, someone
able to persuade, cajole and, if necessary,
intimidate.
As a young member of Parliament 20
years ago, Netanyahu drew up a map of
Israel’s “vital interests” that left 40 per
cent of the West Bank to a Palestinian
autonomous entity, not a state. In announcing this past June at Obama’s urg-
7
THE SUEZ CANAL
ing his readiness to accept a Palestinian
state alongside Israel, Netanyahu crossed
a major divide. Palestinian negotiators
have come a long way too. Previously insistent on a complete Israeli withdrawal
to the pre-Six Day War borders, most now
accept that uprooting every Israeli settlement is unrealistic and that a land exchange could be a solution.
Shaul Arieli, a former Israeli infantry
brigade commander who has become a
leading peacenik and a founder of the
Council for Peace and Security, believes
the territorial controversy could be resolved if the Palestinians ceded the 4.5 per
cent of the West Bank to Israel—where
major settlements exist—and accepted
in return an identical amount of Israeli
territory abutting the West Bank on the
south and abutting the Gaza Strip. This
would enable 80 per cent of the 300,000
Israelis currently living in the West Bank
to stay in their homes. Rooting out the
other 20 per cent would undoubtedly involve a monumental battle within Israel
but is at least feasible.
That is basically the proposal former
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made informally earlier this year in his final meeting
with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. According to the newspaper Ha’aretz,
Olmert proposed that the Palestinians
establish their state on 93.5 per cent of
the West Bank, plus the equivalent of another 5.8 percent in the form of Israeli
territory. The small difference outstanding would be made up by a land corridor
linking the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Where earlier corresponding propositions always left Israel with a few percentage points more of land, Olmert was
offering a 100 per cent tradeoff. Abbas
did not reply to the proposal made by
the lame duck prime minister, but this
precisely would be the stuff of negotiations.
In this context, the current tiff between
the U.S. and Israel over settlements is
more symbolic than substantive. Israel
has not built new settlements for years;
the construction it wants to do now is
mostly within large settlement blocs it is
likely to retain in any final agreement.
But the symbolism is important to a President trying to establish his bona fides
with the Muslims.
O
N THE ISSUE of Jerusalem,
Olmert favored handing
over to Palestinian sovereignty the East Jerusalem
neighborhoods inhabited by Arabs. This would permit the
Palestinians to declare their part of Jerusalem the capital of their state. Israel would retain sovereignty over Jewish
communities built in East Jerusalem
since the Six Day War. When Ehud Barak was prime minister he made a similar offer to the late Palestinian leader
Yasir Arafat. Olmert also proposed creating an international body that would
supervise the most sensitive area of all—
the walled Old City, with its concentration of holy places, including the Temple Mount.
Netanyahu is diametrically opposed
to any such schemes. His insistence on a
“united Jerusalem” leaves no room for a
Palestinian capital called Jerusalem or
an internationalized Old City. But an
important factor in Olmert and Barak’s
approach is its removing some 250,000
Jerusalem Arabs from the country’s demographic scales. That is a formidable
consideration likely to bear weight with
much of Israeli public opinion and one
Netanyahu cannot lightly dismiss, for
the areas involved are rarely visited
by Israelis and have no connection to
Biblical Jerusalem. Furthermore, since
Netanyahu strongly opposes the return
of any Palestinian refugees to Israeli territory, he would be hard put to sustain his
opposition to giving up the Arab neighborhoods in face of the demographic
argument.
The refugee question is the other
major agenda item alongside the territorial issue and Jerusalem. Here as well
dogma rules at present: The Palestinians are demanding the “right of return”
for millions of refugees with the same
vigor that Netanyahu demands a “united
Jerusalem.” It is fairly safe to assume,
though, that both problems can be resolved without great difficulty if serious
negotiations are launched. Israeli officials have suggested a token return of
several thousand refugees to Israel, and
some Palestinian officials have indicated
they do not believe they can achieve
much more.
There are numerous other issues in
contention, some of them no less charged
than the prominent ones mentioned above.
They include sovereignty over the Temple Mount and Palestinian recognition of
Israel as a Jewish state. Jerusalem also insists that once an agreement is arrived at
it must be seen by the Palestinians as an
end to their conflict with Israel, not as a
base from which they can mount additional demands in the future. Arafat’s refusal to accept this was one of the reasons
Barak’s attempt to reach an accord with
him failed.
In sum, the differences between Israel
and the Palestinians are bridgeable. The
key is a firm interlocutor who can persuade the two sides that peace is not as
scary as it looks.
8
No Sense of Community
Obama
and
Russia
By Allen C. Lynch
O
F ALL THE PEOPLE in the
world President Barack
Obama has addressed,
the Russians have proved
most resistant to his rhetorical sway. This despite the fact that he
has replaced the frosty posture of his predecessor’s second term with a policy that
focuses on common American and Russian interests.
Still, in classic diplomatic terms the
July 6-7 Moscow summit was a success. The two sides reached a framework
agreement for significant reductions
(one-third or more) in each country’s
arsenal of offensive nuclear weapons.
Russia agreed to let the U.S. overfly its
airspace for up to 4,500 flights per year
to reinforce the war effort in Afghanistan. Direct consultations between the
Russian and U.S. militaries—broken off
by the George W. Bush Administration
after the Georgian-Russian War—are to
be resumed, and there will be joint assessments of ballistic missile threats
from states like Iran and North Korea.
The two countries will work together,
too, in the areas of intelligence and security concerning Afghanistan and the
containment of Islamic terrorist organizations.
BARACK OBAMA
Especially notable was the creation
of a new formal body headed by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
and her Russian counterpart, Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov. It will try to
maximize effective bilateral collaboration by preventing a conflict in one
sphere from undermining cooperation
in others.
P
RESIDENT OBAMA’S attempts
to use his hortatory talents in
Moscow to inspire a sense of
community, however, failed.
The political machine of Prime
Minister Vladimir V. Putin (the former
and possibly future Russian president)
was not about to allow what it viewed as
an appeal over the Russian capo’s head.
True, on July 7 Obama did deliver the
commencement address at the Moscow
New Economic School, a procapitalist
business institution established with U.S.
financing and guidance in 1992. In his
matchless rhetorical style he outlined
his vision for a transformed AmericanRussian relationship. All of the right
notes were struck: He acknowledged the
rich treasury of Russian high culture; recognized the Russian people’s enormous
sacrifices in the battle against the Nazis;
evoked the still revered President John F.
Kennedy’s call to organize relations on the
principle that “we are all human”; conceded that ending the Cold War had been
a joint endeavor; admitted U.S. policy
mistakes toward Russia in the post-Soviet
years; argued that common international
interests should drive current bilateral relations; and lauded democratic values
while insisting his government would not
impose them on anyone.
But almost nobody in Russia heard,
or learned about, what Obama said. His
speech was not broadcast live on any Russian television station with nationwide
reach. All of them are either owned or
controlled by the government, and Putin
will not let competitors, foreign or domestic, plant doubts about the message
he wants the Russian man in the street to
hear. Even Russian television coverage
of Obama’s Presidential campaign had
been a bare-bones affair.
More surprisingly, the graduates, faculty and guests who did hear the speech
(roughly 1,000 people according to the
Moscow Times) were unmoved. They did
ALLEN C. LYNCH,a new contributor to THE
NEW LEADER, is a professor of politics at
the University of Virginia and the author
most recently of How Russia Is NotRuled.
9
not respond once during the substantive
delivery, reserving their polite applause
for the introduction and conclusion. This
was remarkable, for the U.S. Embassy
picked the venue precisely because it believed the audience would be favorably
disposed toward the United States and
Obama’s message. Why didn’t he arouse
the enthusiasm here that he had clearly
stimulated in Cairo, throughout Europe
and in Latin America?
Part of the answer, I think, lies in his
announced intention to “reset” the American-Russian relationship. “Reset” implies
starting over, on a clean slate, to move forward. Most Russians, though, see Obama
not as a promising new leader but as the
ruler of the great world power that helped
promote, and has benefitted mightily
from, the decline of their country over the
past two decades.
Indeed, Putin’s own political strength
is built in large measure on resentment
over Russia’s domestic collapse in the
1990s—assisted unwittingly by U.S.
economic policies and advisers—and
its humiliation abroad in the form of
NATO expansion, culminating in the 1999
U.S.-led war against Serbia, Russia’s
ally. All of this occurred during President Bill Clinton’s Administration and
served to undermine the political base of
pro-Western Russian reformers. So the
Russians have heard the lofty rhetoric of
democratization, marketization and liberal peace before, and they are understandably skeptical about rhetoric as a
substitute for tangible results in the here
and now. Their indifference to Obama
reflects a disbelief as well in moral appeals of any kind. You can’t fool a Russian, even with the truth.
M
OREOVER,
given the
high bar set for American credibility by both
the people and the government in Russia, minor mishaps tend to be pounced upon as
signs of perfidy. Hence the angry reaction when less than three weeks after the
summit Vice President Joseph R. Biden
told the Wall Street Journal Russian weakness gave the United States the whip hand
in the relationship. Putin, after all, can
testify that not so long ago the center of
foreign policy and national security gravity was located in the office of bluntly
hostile Vice President Dick Cheney.
Obama’s having chosen Biden specifically for his foreign policy expertise reinforced the Russians’ suspicion that the
Vice President’s indiscretion revealed the
President’s true intentions: to exploit and
magnify Russia’s manifold vulnerabilities. Strengthening the conviction was the
knowledge that such “accidental” utterances do not take place without serious
consequences in Putin’s Russia. Although
Secretary of State Clinton quickly insisted that Russia remains a “great power”
and valued partner, the episode underscored the dangers of rhetorical diplomacy.
From Putin’s perspective, for instance,
if Russia is a “great power” it is entitled to
primacy in the territories of the former Soviet Union, just as the United States has
historically enjoyed pre-eminence in Central America and the Caribbean. The Russians even speak of their Monrovskaya
Doktrina to legitimize their national security concept. Yet Obama, like Clinton and Bush before him, maintains that
(except for Russia) every country in the
former USSR, including Ukraine and
Georgia, is eligible for NATO membership and Russia has no right to say anything about it.
Even if grossly undiplomatic, Biden
was not wrong in pointing out the longterm economic and demographic trends
sapping Russia’s strength at home and
abroad. But for the foreseeable future,
Russia will retain enough power assets
to assert its claim for primacy along its
borders and complicate the advancement
of American interests in countries like
Afghanistan and Iran. Russian cooperation is also essential in moving on global
problems like control of weapons of mass
destruction, energy security, cyber hacking, and carbon dioxide emissions.
Since a politically costly rebuke of
his Vice President is out of the question,
Obama will have to make a diplomatically costly sacrifice of U.S. interests in
either Georgia or Ukraine—drawing the
line at NATO admission would do nicely—in order to persuade the Russians of
the sincerity of his “reset.” Sensitive
diplomacy will have to be applied and
difficult political choices will eventually have to be made.
Ironically, Obama’s task will become
more difficult if the U.S. economy recovers strongly from the recession. The resulting increase in demand for oil and
natural gas will raise fuel prices and the
revenue flows that make up more than
half of Russia’s annual budget. Global
recovery thus reinforces Putin’s hand
and keeps Russia a contender in the postSoviet neighborhood.
VLADIMIR V. PUTIN
Fortunately, Putin is not intent upon
challenging the United States globally.
Nor, as Vice President Biden clumsily
averred, does Moscow have the power to
challenge the U.S., even if it had the will
to do so. Rather, what Putin and the entire Russian national security elite want
is to assert Russia’s interests in the territories of the former Soviet Union, which
they define as constituting the real security belt of post-Soviet Russia.
Since the United States never seriously contested or even questioned Moscow’s reach in these regions when they
were part of the USSR, it remains at best
baffling and at worst alarming to Russian
political elites that the U.S. is seeking
alliances in the region today. If Obama’s assumption of a Russian-American
partnership does not take hold, Putin’s
Russia retains enough resources, as last
summer’s war with Georgia showed, to
deny Washington the collaboration it
needs to advance legitimate U.S. interests in the region and beyond.
10
CultureWatching
Why Libraries
Still Matter
By Stefan Kanfer
A
S A CHILD ,
James Baldwin sought to escape from
a harsh stepfather and the
miseries of Manhattan’s
black ghetto. He did not
have to go far. His sanctuary, a Harlem
public library, was located down the block.
By the age of 13 the young refugee had
determined to become a writer. There
was no stopping him after that.
Variations of Baldwin’s biography are
familiar to just about every librarian in
the country. Generation after generation,
children—some privileged, some middle-class, some barely literate—have
been changed forever by the simple act
of reading. Once inside a book, they
found a world as wide as their imaginations. “Getting my library card,” recalls
Oprah Winfrey, “was like American citizenship.” Columnist Liz Smith concurs:
“The day I discovered that one could go
to the public library and take out books
was one of the happiest of my life.” Light
versifier Richard Armour put it this way:
Library
Here is where people,
One frequently finds,
Lower their voices
And raise their minds.
And Dr. Suess added:
The more that you read,
The more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
The more places you’ll go.
But that was before the age of Google
and DVDs. Have you been in your local
library lately? My branch in Westchester,
New York, like most such institutions,
remains a fine repository of books. But
computers now sit on its desks, awaiting
users who want a free gateway to the Internet. As for those shelves near the front,
the ones that formerly held scores of
encyclopedias—they are currently offering hundreds of movies on discs. According to a librarian there, this is as it should
be. “Bear in mind,” she says, “that libraries are, first and foremost, centers
of information. Books are only one of
many conveyances, and all are equally
important.”
Maybe. In my view, though, books
remain first among equals. The word library, remember, comes from the Latin librarium—bookcase. Indeed, until
recently libraries held only books. The
immense library in Alexandria, Egypt,
was a classic example; so were the smaller ones in Greece, most of them privately
owned and maintained. Wealthy Romans, avid admirers of the Hellenic style,
acquired their own books, laboriously and expensively copied in Latin. The
stoic Seneca sneered at the ostentatious
book collectors of his time, men who
showed off their acquisitions but never read them: “Like bathrooms and hot
water,” he observed, “a library is got
up as standard equipment for a fine
house.”
Despite such criticism, Julius Caesar
frequently spoke of establishing a public
library in his empire. He was assassinated before it could be built, but the historian Asinius Pollio convinced his fellow
Romans to build a grand structure divided into two sections, one for books in
Greek, the other for those in Latin. By 14
C.E. Rome had three public libraries,
housing some 20,000 volumes. Although
these were allegedly for every Roman,
they were really confined to scholars with
the proper credentials. The masses would
have to buy their own books, at prohibitive prices.
That situation prevailed throughout
England, the Continent, the Middle East,
and Asia until Gutenberg invented movable type and permanently altered civilization. Printed and bound books quickly
11
replaced the scrolls and handwritten volumes usually done by monks, who could
take years to produce a single copy. A
golden age of reading began. France
established the Bibliothèque Nationale
in Paris. Italy had libraries in Milan,
Florence and the Vatican. There was a
German State Library in Berlin, and
a Russian one in St. Petersburg. Perhaps the greatest of them all, the British
Museum Library in London, was opened
in 1759.
The libraries of the New World took a
little longer to get going. The oldest one
in America was created in 1638, when a
Massachusetts clergyman named John
Harvard bequeathed his 400-book collection to a new university. It returned the
favor by adopting his name. In 1731, Benjamin Franklin founded the small Library
Company of Philadelphia. Members paid
for its book purchases, and then could
borrow volumes gratis. Other such libraries sprouted up as well.
It was not until the advent of Andrew
Carnegie that free public libraries became oases of enlightenment across the
United States. The penniless Scottish
built a vast industrial empire based on
the manufacture of steel. His personal fortune was in excess of $480 million, much of which he gave away. To
him such charity was not a kindness, it
was a duty. Carnegie’s declaration, The
Gospel of Wealth, spelled this out: In
a capitalist system a small fraction of
plutocrats would accumulate more money than they could possibly spend. They
were obliged to take care of their families’ needs; beyond that, the wealth
should be spent on the welfare of the
community.
The magnate lived up to his own ideal.
He aided churches, endowed universities
and supported the arts. But the bulk of his
fortune was spent on libraries. He funded the building and supplying of 1,679 of
them in the U.S. and its then possessions,
Hawaii and Puerto Rico. His charity could
not have come at a more opportune time.
Thousands of immigrants were arriving
at Ellis Island every week, most of them
anxious to get on in the New World by
reading and writing in a new language.
Carnegie believed books would create a
homogeneous society, helping newcom-
immigrant arrived in New York in 1848
at the age of 12. A year later Andrew
was working full-time in an Allegheny, Pennsylvania, cotton mill. From there
he went on to a series of jobs, each more
profitable than the one before. By the
time he retired at the age of 65, he had
ers to learn new things, realize their ambitions and, at the same time, become
more fervent patriots. “Show me the man
who speaks English, reads Shakespeare
and Bobby Burns,” he wrote, “and I’ll
show you a man who has absorbed the
American principles,” because “he will
most likely read also the Declaration of
Independence and Washington’s Farewell Address.”
Essentially Carnegie was correct. In
America an explosion of literacy occurred between the mid-19th and mid20th centuries. Libraries, as the cultural
hearts of thousands of towns and cities,
contributed to the social cohesion that
rallied the country through two World
Wars and the Great Depression.
A
LL THIS is changing, howev-
er, for a variety of reasons.
It is convenient to blame bilingualism,
illegal immigration, political correctness, and the whole grab bag of societal shifts. But to me, the library stands
as the transforming force. For it is no
longer simply a place where you read
or take out books; today it is an information and entertainment center where
books are no longer the moral and intellectual authority.
Of course, libraries have always offered mysteries, juvenile fiction, top-ofthe-charts bestsellers. This would seem
to put them on the same footing with
cinema. But does it, really? Compare
the two. Every movie has a roster of credits. Along with the scenarist it lists a
director, members of the cast, a set designer, a composer, and a lengthy list
of talents from key grip to best boy. The
fiction reader assumes all those roles
and more. With books nearly everything is left to the mind. In DVDs, almost
nothing is.
True, light works make up only a fraction of the volumes in a library. They are
overwhelmed by classical literature, history, biography, atlases of the world,
memoirs, hardbacks and paperbacks of
science, mathematics, poetry, drama,
religion, philosophy, psychology, plus
scores of other categories. The problem
is, those books are being used a little less
every year. For no techie has come up
with a way to expand the 24-hour day, and
time spent looking at movies or browsing the Internet is time spent away from
real reading. Moreover, just as clocks
have to obey the iron laws of time, shelves
12
have to accommodate the harsh restrictions of space.
To make room for DVDs something
has to go, and that something is usually
clothbound and paperback volumes. Not
to worry, the librarians insist; storage has
been redefined. A 600-page book can
now be squeezed down to the size of a microchip. Once reduced, it can be put in
cyberspace, ready to be called up by hitting a few computer keys.
That’s the trouble. As every football
coach knows—and constantly iterates in
the locker room—our greatest strength
can also be our greatest weakness. A library that offers the latest in research
tools is also cutting off a main source of
inspiration and delight: serendipity. To
wander in a library is to come upon unexpected treasure, the equivalent of exploring an attic filled with riches. In a
recent lament about contemporary research, William McKeen, chairman of the
Journalism Department at the University
of Florida, recalls a recent exchange with
members of a freshman class:
“I require the 240 students to subscribe
to the New York Times Monday through
Friday. I haven’t even finished announcing this in class the first day, when the
hands shoot up.
“‘Can’t we just read it online?’ they
ask, the duh? implicit.
“‘No,’ I say, and the eyes roll. They
think I’m some mossback who hasn’t embraced new media.
“‘Why not?’ Challenging, surly, chips
on their shoulders.
“‘Because then you would only find
what you’re looking for.’”
Just so. Persons seeking information
will find Google an excellent source for
answering a question on, say, the publication dates of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels.
They might also find a minibiography of
the Russian master. What they won’t find
are three volumes of quirky and opinionated lectures Nabokov gave when he was
an unknown assistant professor at Wellesley and Cornell. The first addresses
the works of Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Here he is on Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde: “If you have the Pocket Books edition I have, you will veil the monstrous,
abominable, atrocious, criminal, foul,
vile, youth-depraving jacket—or better
say straitjacket.” The second anatomizes
the wonders of Russian literature. The
third concerns Don Quixote. And then
there is Speak, Memory, the luminous
recollection of Nabokov’s boyhood in
imperial Russia. Only a rambler among
books will find these unique items.
McKeen wonders about libraries. “Do
people browse anymore? We have become
such a directed people. We can target what
we want, thanks to the Internet. Put a couple of key words into a search engine and
you find . . . what you’re looking for.” Unfortunately, he notes, surfers are confined
to a narrow corridor. En route to a few
facts, they miss the “time-consuming but
enriching act of looking through shelves,
of pulling down a book because the title
interests you, or the binding.” That book
might be of no consequence—or it just
might turn out to be “a dark chest of wonders, a life-changing first step into another world, something to lead your life
down a path you didn’t know was there.”
I can speak from personal experience
about that sort of serendipity. Rummaging through some library shelves in
search of a book about Romania, where
my grandfather was born, I happened
upon a little-known history, The Destiny
of Europe’s Gypsies by Donald Kenrick
and Grattan Puxon. I sat down and read it
in a single afternoon, so absorbed I forgot to eat lunch. The next day I began a
novel about gypsies in the Holocaust,
based on what I had read. The Eighth Sin
was published by Random House and
became a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection—none of which would have happened except for that chance encounter.
T
HE NOTION of a computerized
library is intelligently attacked
in Fool’s Gold by Mark Y. Herring, an
academic librarian. Subtitled Why the
Internet is No Substitute for a Library,
it examines the contemporary perception
of the Web as the researcher’s greatest
boon. If we define knowledge as “any
bit of datum, right or wrong, factual
or not, fraudulent or accurate,” Herring writes, “then, yes, the Web should
replace all libraries. On the other hand,
if knowledge includes something about
accuracy, appropriateness, balance, and
value then the Web cannot arrogate to
itself a place of pre-eminence to knowledge seekers.”
His sentiments were echoed in a report by scholars at University College in
London: “It is clear that users are not
reading online in the traditional sense;
indeed there are signs that new forms of
‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power
browse’ horizontally through titles,
contents pages and abstracts going for
quick wins. It almost seems that they
go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”
French historian Lucien X. Polastron
has examined the ways libraries have
been demolished through the ages. In
Books on Fire, he accuses the Web of being a new kind of destroyer: “In the eyes
of the professional who surfs it every
day, like a miner in the depths with battered fingers, almost all of it appears to
consist of slag, plagiarism, and dead
skins from sites that have molted—a
vertiginous demonstration of stupidity
and vulgarity.”
That is too harsh. Despite its furious critics, the Web, the Net, the Information Highway by any name, is a useful
device (I have, in fact, employed it in writing this piece.) We are far better off with
it than without it. Think about the ease
of getting from place to place by clicking onto MapQuest. Or shopping for
some obscure item—including very reasonably priced new and used books—by
consulting Amazon. Or looking up significant dates in history. Or copying the
lyrics of a half-forgotten song written
in the last century. In times past, a researcher or writer might have spent days
tracking down that material; today it
flashes on the computer screen in a matter of minutes.
Nonetheless, Polastron, Herring, McKeen, and others make an indisputable point. The computer is a tool, not a
crutch, a gateway to knowledge, not a
substitute for it. It is time for librarians
to recognize a central truth: Ceding too
much to the new technology can lead to
their own obsolescence. You can make
book on it.
13
SummerBooks
Ironies of the
Civil War
By Christopher Clausen
A
S ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S BICENTENNIAL fades
into the back file of anniversaries, the Civil War
Sesquicentennial looms ominously. The illfated 1961-65 Civil War Centennial, it will be
recalled, was a classic example of a meticulously planned commemoration gone awry because of its almost
diabolical overlap with the height of the civil-rights movement, which seemed to be fighting some of the same battles
and inspired a drastic change in the relatively neutral way most
academic historians interpreted the War until that time.
Perhaps a century was too short a period for the requisite
historical distance. The last Civil War veteran died in 1959.
Even today, especially in the South, there are
more 80-year-olds than you might think who
have childhood memories of grandparents
telling them their childhood memories of the
burning of Atlanta or Richmond or Columbia.
The living memory of such events endures, in
this extended sense, for much longer than
a single lifetime.
Of course, intimacy with what is
understood as a glorious defeat
can be a mixed blessing. Undoubtedly it had something to
do with the South’s stubborn
defense of segregation for a
century after Appomattox and
the subsequent failure of Reconstruction.
Part of the War’s price, too, was the
North’s tacit agreement to let the
vanquished run their impoverished
WILLIAM T. SHERMAN
states according to their own prejudices within broad limits (no
more actual slavery, no further attempt at secession), and build
as many monuments as they liked to the Confederate soldier—
so long as they consented once again to be more or less willing
citizens of the United States.
A deal of this sort is inevitable if you force the inhabitants
of 11 states to remain a component of your country after
defeating them in a conflict that took a total of 600,000 lives,
but shrink from ruling indefinitely by martial law. The bargain—admirably recounted by C. Vann Woodward in Reunion and Reaction (1951)—is what many historians began to
reject passionately by the 1960s, along with the longstanding assumption that the South was fighting
for an honorable albeit misguided cause.
The sticking point, to nobody’s surprise
except perhaps the Civil War Centennial
Commission’s, was the complex of issues and
obsessions the press and many historians
habitually pare down to the single
word “race.”
Two new books neatly illustrate most of these points. An
eerie sense of the Civil War being both impossibly remote
yet almost close enough to
touch, with streamers of
unfinished business trailing
behind, may be one reason so
many accounts come out every
year of battles that have been written about many times. One tactic
ULYSSES S. GRANT
14
is to narrate them in the light of political issues they seem to
shelter with a jug of rum. (Like all officers, they were white.)
embody. By treating the politics of the 1860s as if its concerns
The charge went off with a terrific explosion that completely
were much the same as ours, popularizing historians can simulstartled the Confederates, killing or wounding some 278 of
taneously say something new and make the War seem closer.
them and blasting a hole that remains a tourist attraction to this
The most obvious issue to dwell on is the wrongs suffered
day. After pausing in awe at the unexpected scale of its impact,
by black Americans, slave or free. In No Quarter: The Battle of
white infantry began pouring into the massive Crater to take
the Crater, 1864 (Random House, 411 pp., $28.00), Richard
advantage of the enemy’s disorder.
Slotkin takes us back to the last summer of the War, when the
Showing the skill and discipline that made the Army of
South was gradually losing but there was a real question
Northern Virginia one of the legendary forces in the world’s
whether the North would win before public support collapsed.
military annals, however, the Confederates soon regrouped
At the time it seemed quite possible
and began firing artillery into the
that Lincoln could lose the Presidenmilling mass of Union troops, who
cy to General George B. McClellan,
quickly found themselves trapped
the peace candidate nominated by the
in their own pit. Their commanders
Democrats.
botched the opportunity about as
“The Battle of the Crater is worth
badly as any event in the entire War.
a closer look,” Slotkin announces,
At this stage the 4th Division went in
“because the flash of its explosion
as reinforcements, and all hell broke
illuminates the centrality of race in
loose.
the tangle of social and political conSome officers nerved their black
flicts that shaped American life as the
troops for the attack by reminding
Civil War approached its climax. . . .
them of Fort Pillow, an earlier action
The animosities exposed on this batin Tennessee where, Union propatlefield were the same passions that
ganda claimed, Confederates had
would wreck postwar attempts to remassacred black soldiers who were
construct the nation as a multiracial
trying to surrender. (That matter is
democracy.”
still controversial among historians.)
Ulysses S. Grant, by now comSome black soldiers at the Crater
RICHARD SLOTKIN
mander of the U.S. Army, struggled
accordingly rushed Confederate polike his predecessors to defeat Robert E. Lee’s forces in Virsitions shouting “Fort Pillow!” and “No quarter!” Prevailing
ginia, while William T. Sherman had begun his march through
briefly over their startled enemies, they began killing prisoners
Georgia. In effect, the two friends were competing to see who
until their officers stopped them.
could win a major victory first against the weakened, badly
When the soon trapped elements of the 4th also found the
outnumbered, yet still defiant Confederates. Following a sesituation hopeless and tried to surrender, some Confederates
ries of indecisive battles in which his losses were greater than
repaid them in kind. A North Carolina private recalled his felthe number of troops opposing him, Grant faced the prospect
low soldiers responding, “No quarter this morning, no quarter
of a stalemate in the trenches before Petersburg.
now.” A major from the same state wrote that “such slaughter
Then a regiment of innovative Pennsylvania coal miners deI have not witnessed upon any battle field anywhere. Their
cided to try tunneling under the Confederate lines and planting
men were principally negroes and we shot them down until we
a charge big enough—some four tons—to create an opening
got near enough and then run them through with the bayofor an offensive that could take Richmond and end the War.
net. . . . We was not very particular whether we captured or killed
Leading the attack would be the 4th Division of the IX Corps,
them.”
the largest formation of black troops in the (segregated) Union
Slotkin’s account ventures onto relatively new and conArmy.
troversial ground by asserting that white Union troops likeIt may come as a surprise to hear that political sensitiviwise began massacring their black fellow soldiers. “Northern
ties about using black troops in a looming bloody battle were
Whites [sic] were able to kill Black [sic] men wearing their
not all that different than they would be today. In fact, Generuniform because they too believed that the uniform, the flag,
al George Gordon Meade vetoed the idea shortly before the
and the nation belonged to the White man, and that the Black
attack, although the 4th had already trained for it. Grant latman’s presence in their midst as comrades was an insult to their
er explained to Congress, “if we put the colored troops in
dignity as White men.” More to the point, some white Union
front . . . and it should prove a failure, it would then be said,
soldiers believed that killing blacks would (in the words of
and very properly, that we were shoving those people ahead
a New York captain) “preserve the whites from Confederate
to get them killed because we did not care anything about
vengeance.”
them.”
How widespread such beliefs and actions were is hard to
Things began to go wrong when the two Union commandsay. Many Union soldiers, white and black, did become prisoners of the operation prepared for it by hiding in a bombproof
ers of war. What happened in the heat and panic of ferocious
15
2, 1864, a month after the Crater and two months before
the election.
“Sherman wasted no time,” Wortman declares. “He set
in motion a shocking first and unprecedented step of what
would become the most controversial military measure in
American history.” After expelling virtually the entire civilian population of Atlanta, he burned what was left of the
business district and prepared to march on Savannah. It was
at this point that he made the statement everyone remembers
(if not always accurately): “War is cruelty, and you cannot
refine it.”
Wortman’s account of events in the city before, during and
after its destruction is sometimes awkward and novelistic. He
misuses terms like “firestorm,” which has a definite meaning
he seems unaware of. Nevertheless, the reader gets a vivid sense
of what it was like to be a helpless resident of the Confederacy’s second city (New Orleans having been taken long ago)
when it fell to one of the inventors of total war.
OWN IN GEORGIA, Sherman was having better
Black Southerners, of course, saw it all much differently than
luck. He was also expressing racial views that
their former masters. An Atlanta boy freed from slavery by
would have made him feel at home on the other side. When a
Sherman’s soldiers was the first black graduate of West Point
Confederate general referred to the Union Army’s “negro alin 1877. Postwar Atlanta, Wortman stresses, “became a maglies,” Sherman indignantly replied, “We have no ‘negro allies’
net for freemen,” the home of the South’s largest black middle
in this Army.” His disdain for freed slaves almost got him fired.
class. For whatever reasons, it escaped much, though not all, of
Yet it was he, not his more politic superior, who saved Lincoln’s
the racial turmoil and violence that plagued other Southern
re-election.
cities from the end of slavery until quite recent times.
In The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta (PubBut 1877 had a more ominous significance. In that
licAffairs, 464 pp., $28.95), Marc Wortman narrates the
year, Northern occupation troops were finally withdrawn
familiar story of Sherman surroundfrom the Southern states where they
ing Atlanta, overwhelming it, and
had kept Reconstruction governstarting his march to the sea. Unlike
ments in power. The result was a
most writers since Gone with the
dramatic decline in black opportuWind, he concentrates more on the
nities, an increase in oppression,
fate of the city itself than on the dea national forgetting of the Fourstruction that ensued as Sherman
teenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
targeted the civilians of Georgia and
The age of iron segregation was
the Carolinas.
under way. The fact that black sol“Two stalemated battlefronts poidiers had fought bravely in the
soned national political sentiments,
War made little difference to Northalready appalled by the costs of the
ern public opinion, while in the
War,” Wortman notes. “Even with
South they were equated with the
Union armies battering and bedetested forces of occupation.
sieging the rebels, many believed
Not until after Southerners had
the War remained unwinnable.”
fought on the same side as NorthernUnfortunately for the South, Sherers in two World Wars and the solidiman was a master of mobile warfare.
ty of the Union was beyond question
He propelled his forces from Tenwould the country seriously reconMARC WORTMAN
nessee into the depths of Georgia
sider the sad bargain through which
with long, fragile supply lines—ultimately with no supply lines
its reunification had been accomplished. Despite his disdain
at all.
for black troops and his skepticism toward the social revolution
Even when Confederates faced him with something
that Reconstruction sought to bring about, the man universally
like equal numbers (a situation Grant never had to contemidentified with the Deep South’s continuing rage and determiplate), they were rarely a match for him. After shelling Atnation to rule its own roost was William T. Sherman. The ironies
lanta at a distance, he simply outflanked his opponents on
of the Civil War and memory, as we approach the Sesquicentheir own territory, cut off the rail lines that supplied them,
tennial and try to get it more nearly right this time, are past
and took the city without a major battle. It was September
counting.
hand-to-hand combat reflected, as Slotkin emphasizes, the
racial presuppositions of the soldiers on both sides, but discipline did eventually reassert itself. The official Union count
gave a total of 3,826 casualties, of whom 504 were killed or
mortally wounded. Almost three times as many were missing
and presumably prisoners.
By the standards of the Wilderness or Cold Harbor, that
number of casualties was almost trivial. But expectations had
been high, and the effect of the Crater on Northern opinion was
to strengthen doubts about Grant’s leadership. As the two
armies settled into the long stalemate Grant had hoped to avoid,
voters could be excused for wondering whether the Lincoln
policy of refusing to compromise with the South was either
wise or practical.
D
16
End of
the Romantic
Revolutionary
Zhivago’s Children: The Last
Russian Intelligentsia
By Vladislav Zubok
Harvard.
464 pp. $35.00.
Reviewed by
Robert Belknap
Professor of Russian,
Columbia University
LADISLAV ZUBOK has written a splen-
V
did account of Russian intellectual
and cultural life in the half century after the Great Patriotic War, which we call
World War II. He vividly portrays not
only “the struggle of intellectuals and
artists to regain autonomy from an autocratic regime,” but “the slow and painful
disappearance of their revolutionaryromantic idealism and optimism, their
faith in progress and in the enlightenment of people.”
In those years the enormous, blundering empire carried out a more radical
transfer of power with less bloodshed
than humanity has ever managed before.
Zubok realizes that the lives and episodes
he presents were only a part of this extraordinary exploit, but he does not believe
the couple of thousand genuine intellectuals were mere bystanders. He has a clear
sense of the interaction among the political, cultural and intellectual worlds.
As a veteran Slavist, I experienced
much of what he describes or followed it
in the media as it unfolded. At Columbia
University or in Russia itself I talked with
many of the individuals and types whose
activities he outlines. For most readers,
this book will make history come alive;
for me, it was partly a nostalgia trip and
partly a chance to stand back and find
words to characterize the people and
events I knew. The author’s adjectives
struck me as incredibly apt on virtually
every occasion. In addition, he has plainly
spent enough years among the archived
and printed diaries, letters, memoirs, and
other materials to catch the quotation that
nails a moment or a movement or a person.
Zubok traces the ethos he is studying back to the 19th century and to the
early Soviet intelligentsia, with its rebellious independence, scientism, desire to
ameliorate its milieu, and almost familial coherence. In the scholarly world, it
has become customary to treat much of
Modernism as a recrudescence of Romanticism after its submersion under 19thcentury Realism. The word “romantic”
permeates the book, offering one explanation not only for the attitudes of the 1960s
but for the genuine Russian and worldwide excitement at the idea of revolution
in the 1920s and ’30s. Revolution, nationalism, liberation, self-fulfillment,
innovation, and the common man had
all been valorized around 1800, and Zubok sees the values and the optimism of
the early Russian Revolutionary movement as something romantic shared with
the Modernism that matured over the
same period.
For its central conceit, the book takes
Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago as the spiritual father of the intellectuals who thrived
and wilted through the vicissitudes of Soviet and post-Soviet times. It recounts the
way Pasternak’s special status in the cultural world led not to execution but to harassment that lasted until his death in
1960, six years after Stalin’s. Zubok depicts many great symbolic spectacles, including Stalin’s, Pasternak’s and Bulat
Okudzhava’s funerals, concerts, plays, exhibits, and speeches, beginning with Nikita S. Khrushchev’s Secret Speech that
laid out an array of Stalin’s crimes for the
first time. He presents the trauma this
produced and the bafflement of the bureaucrats over what to say about it without
Stalin to tell them. When I first went to
Russia, in 1956, I had already read it in
New York—where it was initially published in English in a special annotated
section of this magazine—but was told officially that it was a fabrication of the CIA.
HIVAGO’S CHILDREN is not a sophisticated academic history. It is absolutely free of jargon and methodological
explanation. Although it concentrates on
events and people who made headlines,
it treats them not as moving causes but as
Z
exemplars. It distinguishes the good guys
from the bad guys, and is aware that some,
like Khrushchev, played strong roles on
both sides.
At Benny Goodman’s 1962 Leningrad concert, we learn, “The first rows
looked like the window of a luxury store:
Black fox boas hung around the thick
necks of women; their smug husbands sat
next to them, Soviet deputy badges on
their broad chests, hands folded, double
chins swelling over the big knots of broad
ties.” I think that tells us what Zubok
thinks of Soviet bureaucrats, but he also
knows they could be infected by Goodman’s energy, and that among them there
were “enlightened apparatchiks.” His heroes, however, are the uncompromising:
scientists like Andrei Sakharov, survivors
like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, outspoken
poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and editors like Andrei Tvardovsky, whose journal Novy Mir reached millions.
VLADISLAV ZUBOK
The writer Andrei Sinyavsky used to
express the fear that the Russian intelligentsia would lose its proper function of
critical opposition if Russia developed a
decent government. Zubok cites other
threats: the emigration of key figures (including Sinyavsky), the government control of journalism, and the emergence of
ultranationalism. His book ends sadly,
with the sense that a promising period is
over. I hope he is wrong.
It is true that my friends are bored with
Russian politics, that anti-Semitism has
moved into high places again, that the
17
Orthodox church has too few educated
priests, that only the elite has access to
much news, and that everything about
Russia is less romantic. Yet during more
than a millennium of bad government
Russians have developed a delicacy in
dealing with it.
In Soviet times, I knew an editor who
had received his annual visit from his
censor’s Moscow boss. They chatted, and
the boss complained about an article that
had to be censored because it mentioned
Sakharov favorably. Since Sakharov’s
noble activities had been kept from Soviet readers, the editor innocently asked
what was wrong. “Don’t you listen to the
Voice of America?” came the response,
“You’ve got to.” The censor’s boss did
not want everybody to listen to the Voice
of America, but in that class society a
figure as exalted as the editor had the
obligation to do so. Zubok’s sadness may
underestimate the place coping played
throughout the period he covers and on
into the present.
Living in a Soviet dormitory the year
after Benny Goodman visited, I found the
Russian students fell into two groups,
those studying German, mathematics,
physics, etc. and those studying the History of the Communist Party or the Philosophy of Marxism-Leninism. With only
one exception, the first group seemed livelier and smarter to me. More to the point,
despite their having little in common, the
two groups dealt with each other freely
and comfortably. It was as if both realized
they would have to spend their careers
together—the academic or practical people being dependent upon, but also indispensable to, the Party or administrative
people.
My Russian roommate that year was
reading my pocket address book the first
time I came back from the bathroom. He
never told me that the price for rooming
with an exotic foreigner was a frequent
report to the Security Office, but he let
me know it by getting caught that first
evening.
Zubok talks about the “pragmatic cynicism” that enabled some artists to survive in Stalin’s days, but my roommate
was engaged in something closer to the
way writers and editors dealt with censors: unspoken negotiation. We became
good friends for as long as he lived, and
that year we talked about every subject—
political, personal, religious—with one
strict limit: I never mentioned another
Russian. He wasn’t a sensitive soul, and
I’m not very paranoid, so neither of us
minded his reporting on me, but we did
not want him to have to report on my
friends.
Perhaps Zubok and his favorite heroes
were dreaming of a romantic unrestrictedness, and realistically the decline of the
intelligentsia he laments as his book concludes is simply the equilibrium of history reclaiming its own. Or perhaps the
Russian’s skill at unspoken negotiation
was what enabled them 20 years ago to
achieve a greater revolution than the Bolshevik one. In any case, Zubok makes it
a glorious story to read!
A Lucky
Choice of
Enemies
Germany 1945:
From War to Peace
By Richard Bessel
HarperCollins.
522 pp. $28.99.
Reviewed by
Donald R. Shanor
Author, “After the Russians: Eastern
Europe Joins the West”
ERMANY began 1945, the last year
of World War II, still the defiant,
hated and feared colossus of Europe.
Adolf Hitler promised victory in his New
Year’s speech. But within four months,
its armies crushed on battlefields and its
cities destroyed by bombing, Germany
had become the abject victim of its Soviet, American and European enemies. The
most remarkable change of all, though,
was yet to come that same year, when it
stood at the Stunde null—the absolute
bottom. Germany started slowly to rise
again, economically, peacefully, democratically, and to attain the power in Europe that Hitler sought through barbaric
conquest.
G
This study of the pivotal year by British historian Richard Bessel designates
1945 as the turning point of the 20th century in Europe. The search for an explanation, Bessel says, “needs to begin with
the enormity of the violence which overwhelmed Germany during the last year
of the War,” when nearly half a million
troops were killed in a single month and
total deaths from the bombing of civilians approached the same figure. I would
suggest an earlier beginning: the violence
Germany inflicted on Europe from day
one of the conflict it initiated. Bessel notes
that 6 million Germans died in the War.
But 6 million Poles, most of them Jews,
also died between 1939 and 1945, as did
25 million Soviet citizens, along with 2
million Americans, British, French, and
other Allied populations, civilian as well
as military.
In 1945 those deaths were to be
avenged. That January nearly 4 million
Soviet troops pushed westward in advances as great as 50 miles a day, while
the Americans, French and British headed toward Germany’s Rhine River defenses. The Germans threw in teenagers
and old men and shot those trying to surrender, but that only slowed the collapse.
The Russians, in the meantime, were
paying back the Germans for their losses
in human lives and industrial capacity in
another way. They dismantled factories
and railways, shipped off prisoners to restore Soviet cities, roads and factories,
and permitted their troops to rape and loot
without control. In claiming for itself and
other Eastern countries the former German territories across Eastern Europe,
the Russians made the state of war and
the dislocation of populations permanent.
Millions of refugees struggled across the
borders on the Oder and Neisse Rivers
with tales of brutality and dispossession.
As they settled in towns and cities all
across the west of Germany, their stories
mingled with those of the bombings’ survivors, who shared equal losses of family and property.
Russia’s revenge was a factor equal to
the defeat of the Wehrmacht in German
consciousness in those early postwar days,
and its consequences were as important
and long-lasting. It led to Germany joining its Western conquerors against the
18
Soviet Union—first politically through
the free choice of its leaders, then economically with the massive U.S. aid of
the Marshall Plan and initial stages of the
cross-border European Coal and Steel
Community, and finally militarily as a
member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
ERMANY 1945 tells the story of crushing German militarism well, but it
does not pay sufficient attention to the
other major element in the rise of postwar Germany: the perceived threat from
Moscow that spurred the Western Allies
G
RICHARD BESSEL
to help Germany recover. It does follow
the early moves in that direction, however. Only two months after V-E Day, Bessel writes, the French were extending a
hand to those they had helped vanquish.
France’s occupation commander, General Pierre Koenig, called on Germans to
accept European and American democracy and “lay down with an indestructible
firmness the bases of a Franco-German
rapprochement, which is indispensable
for the reconstruction of Europe.”
The United States had already dropped
Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau
Jr.’s plan for reducing Germany to an agricultural society without heavy industry
or armaments. In fact, the Americans were
the first to establish self-government in a
West German city. An anti-Nazi mayor
was installed while the fighting was still
going on, and calls went out to other leaders long in exile or prison to take part in a
new democratic Germany.
France wanted coal and iron sources
in the Saar and other regions, the impetus for Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman’s Coal and Steel Community that
gave birth to the European Union. Britain, its economy devastated by the War,
urged a minimal occupation.
In contrast, the USSR and some of its
Eastern European satellites exacted payment in territory, industry, infrastructure,
and forced labor from the defeated Germans. The West agreed with the shifting
of borders, but opposed terrorizing the
Germans.
That terror—unpunished rape, mass
deportations, and the seizure of property
ranging from homes and factories to entire provinces—was heaped on the mammoth losses of the War that had broken
the spirit of German militarism. Aware
of the Soviet excesses, the West became
deeply concerned about the postwar gains
of the Communists, not only in Europe
but in China and other parts of Asia.
Soon this resulted in acrimonious
meetings of the four-power Allied Control Commission. By 1946 President Harry S. Truman’s secretary of state, James
F. Byrnes, declared openly in a speech
during a visit to Stuttgart: “It is not in
the interest of the German people or in
the interest of world peace that Germany
should become a pawn or a partner in a
military struggle for power between the
East and the West.”
Battered and defeated, Germany found
hope in the new approach Byrnes advocated: “It is the view of the American government that the German people
throughout Germany, under proper safeguards, should now be given the primary
responsibility for the running of their
own affairs. . . . The United States favors
the early establishment of a provisional
German government for Germany.”
ESSEL has not written a “poor Germany” book and certainly not a “poor
Nazis” one. Rather, Germany 1945 is a
meticulously detailed examination of
how the catastrophe of Hitler’s war ultimately forced Germany—at the grass
roots—to renounce the militarism and
expansionism that had dominated its history from the time of the Napoleonic wars.
As we know from the disagreements between Washington and Berlin, this renun-
Revisiting
‘Daniel
Deronda’
The Jewish Odyssey
of George Eliot
By Gertrude Himmelfarb
Encounter.
180 pp. $25.95.
Reviewed by
B
ciation still determines German policy
in issues as crucial as how large a role it
should play in the war on terror and as
minor as whether to restore the Iron Cross
as a medal for bravery.
The Germans were devastated in 1945,
but they were lucky in their choice of enemies. After the War, fear of the Russians
was matched by forgiveness and aid from
the Americans and, eventually, friendship and a welcome to join in creating
a new united Europe by the French and
British. Older Germans today still recall
their tears of relief when Byrnes assured
them in 1946 that there would be aid and
rehabilitation, not the virtual scorched
earth threatened during the War by Morgenthau.
The Soviets did scorch the earth in
Germany’s East, and other Eastern European nations claimed or reclaimed chunks
of territory. But the actions and threats of
the Communists served only to make the
Western embrace warmer. Two years after Byrnes’ speech, the Marshall Plan for
European recovery was launched (and rejected under Soviet pressure by Eastern
Europe). In another two years the Coal
and Steel Community, embracing France,
Germany and the Benelux countries, was
formed as the seed of the European Union.
Jacob Heilbrunn
Contributor, New York “Times Book
Review,” “Wall Street Journal”
NLIKE ITS counterparts on the Continent, England has never countenanced a murderous hatred of Jews. Quite
the contrary. In the 19th century its preeminent historian, Thomas Babington
Macaulay, inveighed in Parliament against
U
19
the “Civil Disabilities of the Jews,” and
shortly afterward proclaimed this an
“absurdity and injustice.” Benjamin Disraeli, accompanied on the hustings, to be
sure, by chants of “Old Clothes” and similarly unsavory epithets, nevertheless became William Gladstone’s great rival, the
prime minister and, not least, Queen Victoria’s favorite. Nathaniel Rothschild became the first Jew in the House of Lords
in 1885.
But if Jews in Britain were not subjected to the sort of torments Jews endured in Germany or France or Russia,
they have undeniably been targets of
causal social snobbery, particularly in
British literature. Examples include Anthony Trollope depicting Ferdinand Lopez as an avaricious speculator in The
Prime Minister, Evelyn Waugh describing Anthony Blanche as a wandering Jew
in Brideshead Revisited, and Kingsley
Amis referring to the young American
student Irving Macher as a “Hebrew jackanapes” in One Fat Englishman.
A notable opponent of such expressions was George Eliot, who created in
her novel Daniel Deronda (1876) what
Lionel Trilling once called, not without
some misgivings, an “exemplary Jew.”
Now thedistinguished historian Gertrude
Himmelfarb, professor emeritus at the
Graduate Center of the City University
of New York, has come to rectify the
slights that have been heaped upon
Deronda, mainly by English critics like
F.R. Leavis, who looked askance at the
explicitly Jewish material that comprises
the second half of her novel. For Eliot did
not simply portray Jews in a favorable
light. She called for the establishment of
a Jewish homeland.
Himmelfarb makes many shrewd
and penetrating observations about Eliot’s last work of fiction, especially its
themes. And at a moment when English departments are bastions of obscurantism, her prose is a pleasure to read.
Perhaps most valuable, though, is the deployment of her vast historical knowledge to set Daniel Deronda in its proper
political and social context. She shows
that Eliot not only anticipated the emergence of Israel but helps to legitimize
it. In her zeal to transform Eliot’s novel into the inspiration for creating the
Jewish state, however, I think she sometimes stretches her argument past the
breaking point.
As Himmelfarb notes, Eliot devoted
great efforts to comprehending first
Christianity and then Judaism. At the
age of 23 she translated David Strauss’
two-volume The Life of Jesus. “By the
GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB
time she concluded that work,” says Himmelfarb, “her immersion in Strauss had
given her a more acerbic view of both
Christianity and Judaism—and of religion
in general.” She also translated Ludwig
Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, and that prompted her to conclude
marriage needed no ratification by any
authority, either religious or secular. Himmelfarb audaciously suggests the young
Eliot did more than any other English
writer to import German culture to England in the 19th century, even more than
Thomas Carlyle.
Y THE EARLY 1860s, Eliot began to
shed her antireligious beliefs and to
develop a respect for what she called the
“great religions of the world.” On a visit
to Prague in 1858 she and her companion,
George Lewes, visited the Jewish burial
ground and magnificent old synagogue
there. In addition she visited Frankfurt,
which plays a key role in Daniel Deronda.
But Himmelfarb makes it clear that
meeting the young Jewish scholar Emanuel Deutsch had the most influence on
Eliot’s interest in Judaism. An assistant
B
at the British Museum, he asked her
to read an article he had written about
the Talmud that focused on the links
between Judaism and Christianity. Its
publication made Deutsch a celebrity.
Himmelfarb believes Daniel Deronda is
“a memorial to him—to him personally
in the guise of Mordecai, and to his vision of Judaism.”
In the novel, Mordecai is the seer who
introduces Deronda, the ward of Sir Hugo Mallinger and unaware of his Jewish
heritage, to his own past. After he rescues
a young Jewish woman named Mirah
from a suicide attempt by drowning, Deronda meets her family, owners of a bookshop, as well as Mordecai. Deronda then
learns from Mordecai that he is, in fact, a
Jew and that his purpose is to help establish a Jewish homeland. Mordecai believes “the world will gain as Israel gains.
For there will be a community in the van
of the East which carries the culture and
the sympathies of every great nation in
its bosom.”
Subsequently, Sir Hugo informs Deronda that his ailing mother, who lives in
Genoa, wishes to see him, and she admits
to being Jewish. Something of a protofeminist, she sought to flee her Jewish
heritage, partly by handing her son off to
a British gentleman. But her plan backfired. The very measures she took to prevent Daniel from becoming a Jew, she
realizes, have aroused his curiosity about
Judaism.
Daniel goes on to Mainz to recover the
effects of his learned grandfather and
seeks to follow in his footsteps. “Deronda embodies the wholeness of Judaism,”
says Himmelfarb, “retaining the virtues
of the English Christian gentleman, as
he once was, while discovering and
abiding by his true faith as a Jew—and,
more dramatically, fulfilling his mission
as a pioneer in the Jewish homeland
in Palestine.” The novel ends with Deronda married to Mirah and sailing for
Palestine.
Daniel Deronda, Himmelfarb maintains, revolves around a quest for religious and national identity. “His,” she
writes, “was a traditional Judaism rooted
in the past, an inheritance (like the inheritance of his grandfather’s chest) that
bound together all Jews, at all times and
20
places, in a single nation.” At bottom, that
is a Burkean notion of past traditions serving as the basis for the present, whether
the country is Britain or Israel.
IMMELFARB’S highly stimulating
book is obviously meant to be a vindication of the idea of a Jewish state,
which has come under fierce attack in recent decades. But can a novel serve as an
argument for reviving Israel? Daniel Deronda is more of a historical curiosity, in
this regard, than a founding document.
The ending is a little too pat and romantic to be fully convincing. Furthermore,
Lionel Trilling’s apprehensions about
Deronda’s unalloyed virtue were not misplaced. In the end, Deronda is a figure of
such consummate perfection that he resembles an archetype rather than a human being.
Nor is that all. Himmelfarb is so intent on endowing the novel with contemporary significance that she conscripts
Natan Sharansky into her analysis. He
becomes a kind of modern Deronda who
similarly views Judaism as a communal
identity that manifests itself as a national
one. This is a bit of a stretch. The cosseted Deronda has very little in common
with Sharansky, who fought his way to
freedom. More important, invoking Sharansky undercuts her point that Daniel Deronda shows the history of the Jews
is not simply a lachrymose one. In her
words: “It reminds us that Israel is not
merely a refuge for desperate people, that
the history of Judaism is more than the
bitter annals of persecution and catastrophe, and that Jews are not only, certainly
not essentially, victims, survivors, martyrs, or even an abused and disaffected
minority.”
Undoubtedly Himmelfarb, who takes
some swipes at the late Edward Said’s depiction of Eliot as a propagandist for colonialism, would recoil at the suggestion
that she herself is politicizing Daniel
Deronda. Yet the political implications
of the novel are apparent, and that is why
Leavis and others disdained them. The
reaction of Eliot’s critics may reveal more
about them than Daniel Deronda does
about Israel. Still, transforming the novel
into a basic document of the post-1945
Jewish state goes too far. Theodor Herzl
and Max Nordau had a far more decisive
H
effect than Eliot. Israel does not need
to enlist her novel to help justify its existence.
Perhaps what is most impressive about
Daniel Deronda is its underscoring the
humanity and luminosity of Eliot’s thinking. Unlike some of her contemporaries,
such as Carlyle, she was wholly free of the
vulgar taint of anti-Semitism. Himmelfarb movingly shows how she steeped
herself in the study of history and philosophy to produce a profound examination
of English society and Jewish aspirations.
That is firm enough ground to stand on.
Searching
for the Right
Prescription
The Healing of America:
A Global Quest for
Better, Cheaper, and
Fairer Health Care
By T.R. Reid
Penguin.
288 pp. $25.95.
Reviewed by
Sanford Lakoff
Dickson professor emeritus
of political science, University of
California, San Diego
S
what’s needed is reconstructive surgery. Every economically advanced nation except ours provides universal access
to health care—even though we not only
spend the most on this necessity but lead
the world in biomedical education, research and technology. In his new book,
veteran Washington Post journalist T.R.
Reid reports on his survey of why other
countries do better, drawing anecdotally on his experience as a foreign correspondent and a patient with a chronically
painful shoulder. His informative and
timely account bears importantly on the
current debate over how to fix our woefully misshapen health care system.
That debate has finally gotten serious.
At last the political planets seem aligned
in favor of real change, as they obviously
OMETIMES a mere face-lift won’t do;
were not when Congress rejected Hillarycare and television ads featuring “Harry and Louise” soured public opinion on
any role for government. This time the
push has a determined champion in the
White House, strong popular support,
engaged committee chairs in Congress,
and most impressively of all the endorsement of the very interest groups—associations of hospitals, physicians, insurers,
business, and “Big Pharma”—that ambushed the Clintons’ campaign. Diehard
Congressional Republicans have revived
the old scares about “socialized medicine,” but they are now shouting into the
wind of polls showing that 85 per cent of
the electorate wants reform and believes
health care is a basic right.
Among conservatives, crying “socialism” is a Pavlovian response to any spending initiative that does not raise the defense
budget or subsidize agribusiness. But in
the current climate it is hard to imagine
any of them spouting the insouciant and
ill-informed view of George W. Bush, who
said in 2007 that there was no need to be
concerned about the 46 million Americans lacking health insurance because
“after all, you just go to the emergency
room.”
Bush, who had free access to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, was apparently unaware that overuse of this
expensive form of care has been driving
up total costs, forcing hospitals to shift
the burden to the insured, and leading
many to close their ERs altogether. Moreover, as Reid points out, American hospitals may legally turn away sick people—
and regularly do—if they cannot prove
they have the means to pay. Hospitals are
only required to admit anyone about to
deliver a baby or facing severe risk of
death. No one can go to the ER for prenatal screening or a blood test or other
exams that could diagnose a disease before it becomes life-threatening.
On economic grounds alone the need
for reform is acute, especially given what
we get for what we spend. According
to the Council of Economic Advisers,
the U.S. now devotes almost 18 per cent
of its gross domestic product (GDP) to
health care, much more than the other
countries Reid discusses. (In 2005, when
the U.S. spent 15.3 per cent, France spent
21
11 per cent, the United Kingdom 8.3
per cent, Canada 9.8 per cent, Switzerland 11.6 per cent, Japan 8 per cent, Germany 10.7 per cent.) Without curbing
rising costs, our spending is projected
to grow to a staggering 34 per cent of
GDP by 2040. General Motors’ need for
a government bailout, blamed in part on
its health care commitments, showed
dramatically how such escalation hurts
competitiveness.
Consider, too, that in no other industrial country does one declare bankruptcy because of an inability to pay medical
bills—as 700,000 do annually in the U.S.
As for outcomes, an editorial in the Economist put the comparison bluntly: “Even
though one dollar in every six generated
by the world’s richest economy is spent
on health—almost twice the average for
rich countries—infant mortality, life expectancy and survival rates for heart attacks are all worse than the [Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development] average.”
EVERTHELESS, the favorable portents
do not guarantee that whatever finally emerges from Congress’ sausage
grinder will be sustainable and sound
enough to serve as a platform for further
refinement. The long-term aim is clear:
to mandate continuous, portable, affordable basic health insurance for everyone,
without regard to medical status; ready
access to high-quality care and needed
medications; and at least some choice
among providers—all in a way that is
“revenue neutral” (i.e. does not add to the
budget deficit).
The mix of taxation and cost-cutting
that would make this possible is being
hotly debated and is open to compromise.
A likely incidental innovation, pioneered
by France and Germany, is an electronically readable medical ID card that would
code a patient’s entire medical history.
(The Germans, with typical precision
and linguistic charm, call this die Elektronische Gesundheitskarte.)
The potentially fatal weakness of the
plans under consideration is that they
keep in place the existing hodgepodge of
employer-managed schemes plus those
offered to small businesses and individuals by both not-for-profit and forprofit insurers. To impose some order
N
on this pluralistic universe, a national
health care “exchange” would match individuals and small businesses with insurers and would subsidize dissatisfied
or uncovered consumers. In addition, a
medical advisory board would establish
reimbursement standards that reward
providers for good care management
and modify the present fee-for-service
payment.
Progressive Democrats want a public
entity similar to Medicare added to the
mix, to put pressure on the existing plans
to lower costs. (Reid estimates that our
health care industry spends roughly 20
per cent of its gross on administrative
costs, whereas Medicare’s administrative
costs run under 5 per cent). Republicans
and conservative Democrats oppose the
public option, fearing that the private
plans would not be able to compete and
we would soon have a system with the
government as the single payer—à la
Canada, the U.K., Italy, Scandinavia, and
elsewhere.
As Reid points out, in some countries
nongovernmental insurers are used, but
they are not allowed to profit from basic policies. In Germany, for example,
citizens must join any of 400 sickness
T.R. REID
funds, all of which are not-for-profits
that “exist to pay people’s medical bills,
not to provide dividends to shareholders.” The U.S. “is the only nation that
lets insurance companies extract a profit from health care coverage.” Although
it may theoretically be possible to fi-
nance a fair and cost-effective health
care system through for-profit insurance, Reid concludes, “no country has
ever made it work.”
HATEVER PLAN is adopted, actually achieving the desired objectives
will entail efforts that go beyond legislation. Many more (lower paid) primarycare physicians and geriatric specialists
will be needed than are now entering
those careers. Some benefit is expected
to accrue from relieving the pressure on
emergency rooms, but the savings may
not be as great as forecast—especially if
the law excludes the estimated 11 million
illegal immigrants who will still rely on
emergency care. Cost containment will
inevitably require “rationing”—that is,
reimbursing some procedures and not
others—as well as hard decisions on what
to allow for end-of-life care. (The final
year of life now consumes 28 per cent of
Medicare’s expenditures.)
Drug prices can be reduced by better
bargaining and encouraging production
of generics, but pharmaceutical companies must still have enough incentive to
develop new drugs that could provide better treatment and radical cost savings. New
efforts have to address environmental
hazards and promote healthier lifestyles.
Caps are also needed on malpractice
awards, which inflate doctors’ insurance
costs, force them to practice defensive
medicine, and drive some—notably in obstetrics—out of the profession.
Yet those problems can be dealt with
pragmatically. The underlying issue, as
Reid recognizes, is whether this country
will join others in acknowledging that
when it comes to health care, individual
liberty must be balanced by a sense of social “solidarity,” or what President Barack Obama calls “responsibility.”
When the United States was founded,
radicals like Tom Paine believed that government should provide welfare for the
poor and security for the elderly. Had
medical care been as beneficial then as it
has since become, he would surely have
included it among the Rights of Man.
After the Revolution, the value system
that came to prevail was frontier individualism (what Louis Hartz labeled “irrational Lockianism”), later reinforced by
Social Darwinism.
W
22
The Great Depression forced a change
of thinking. In 1935 Franklin D. Roosevelt’s closest aide, Harry Hopkins, said,
“With one bold stroke we could carry the
American people with us, not only for unemployment insurance, but for sickness
and heath insurance.” That proved to be
a bridge too far. Not until 1965 were Medicare and Medicaid added to the safety
net provided by the Social Security Act.
Once conservatives regained power,
the ideological pendulum swung back to
reliance on the market as the answer
to all problems, with consequences now
too onerous to ignore. If the Center that
elected Obama holds, we will resume the
quest for balance and equity by adopting
a system of universal health care, and figure out through trial and error how to
make it work.
As for Reid’s ailing shoulder, he found
relief, of all places, in India. Practitioners
of traditional healing arts there checked
the astrological omens, had him drink
“vile” herbal concoctions, and ferociously massaged the evil spirits out of his
shoulder. Go figure.
Our Third
Legislative
Branch
Packing the Court: The
Rise of Judicial Power
and the Coming Crisis
of the Supreme Court
By James MacGregor Burns
Penguin.
326 pp. $27.95.
Reviewed by
Henry F. Graff
Professor emeritus of history,
Columbia University; editor, “The
Presidents: A Reference History”
AMES MACGREGOR BURNS, whose
books on American government, on
leadership in a democracy, and on Franklin D. Roosevelt in peace and war are
widely acknowledged masterpieces, has
written another classic. This time he has
focused his literary craftsmanship and research skills on the Supreme Court. Arriv-
J
ing at a moment when that institution is
about to be reshaped once more, Packing
the Court should be read by politicians
on both sides of the aisle in Congress and
by citizens everywhere who care about
the future of the republic.
The Court has been the subject of other
major works. One thinks especially of
Henry J. Abraham’s masterful Justices,
Presidents, and Senators, and William
E. Leuchtenburg’s The Supreme Court
Reborn, a luminous scrutinization of how
FDR remodeled the judicial branch to
serve his ends. But Burns, an emeritus
professor of political science at Williams
College, has a purpose beyond the mere
description of historical characters and
their performances. He shows how the
Court has turned into a veritable third legislative branch consisting of unelected
members artfully chosen by administrations eager to deny or arrest popular
needs. Moreover, he stresses, the Founding Fathers never granted the Court the
right to judge what is constitutional. To
end the practice, he calls for mending the
Court’s ways and returning power to the
people.
The story Burns unfolds to make his
point is extraordinary. In 1801, during
John Adams’ closing weeks in office after being defeated by Thomas Jefferson,
he appointed his secretary of state, John
Marshall—a distant cousin of Jefferson
but a Federalist—chief justice. He also
appointed a slew of “midnight judges” to
prevent Republican control of the judicial branch. The overburdened Marshall
neglected to deliver their commissions before Adams’ departure, however, and Jefferson told his secretary of state, James
Madison, to withhold them. The case of
one of those affected, William Marbury,
was brought to the Supreme Court, where
his lawyer argued that the Judiciary Act
of 1789 authorized forcing Madison’s
hand. As Burns explains, Marshall faced
a dilemma: If he issued the writ Marbury
was seeking, Madison might ignore it,
“setting a precedent that could hobble
the Court for years.” But if he found in
favor of the new Administration, “that
would expose the Court’s weakness in the
face of executive authority, again a dismal precedent.”
Marshall’s solution was to declare that
although the plaintiff was entitled to
the writ, the section of the Judiciary Act
authorizing it conflicted with the Constitution and therefore was not valid. His
decision marked a remarkable road turn
JAMES MACGREGOR BURNS
in American history: It established the
right of the nation’s highest court to
declare a law unconstitutional. The system of political checks and balances the
Founders had created, embracing the
houses of Congress and the executive
branch, had received a capstone not provided for in the country’s great charter
that put the Supreme Court on an equal
footing in legislative matters. Jefferson
was delighted that he did not have to seat
the men Adams had appointed, but he
did not accept the notion that the Court
had the authority it firmly claimed for
itself. And Burns argues persuasively
that this wrongly assumed final judgment
on legislation has plagued the country
ever since.
Indeed, by misperforming as it did,
the Court may have unconsciously and
unforgivably contributed to the Civil
War. Its handling of the Dred Scott case
is a dramatic example. Scott, it will be
recalled, was a slave who sought his freedom because he had lived for a time on
free soil. After years of litigation, his
case reached the Supreme Court in 1856.
The following year the long-awaited
decision finally came from Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. An admired man
appointed by Andrew Jackson, Taney
shook the nation when he declared in
23
his majority opinion that no slave or
descendant of a slave is a citizen. The
most sensational part of the decision
maintained that the Federal government
was obliged to protect slaves as property wherever their owners took them. In
a word, slavery could exist anywhere,
even in the territories. The 1820 Missouri Compromise, which had limited
the area of slavery, was therefore unconstitutional. The impact of this conclusion
was breathtaking—a perfect instance of
the Court acting in a fashion unimagined
by the Founders.
HE DETERMINATIVE role of the Supreme Court was illustrated again in
the 1930s when Charles Evans Hughes’
Court invalidated several of FDR’s major
New Deal programs, including particularly the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the Agricultural
Adjustment Administration (AAA). It
may be said that those decisions opened
the era of concern about the Court that
we still appear to be in. The reasoning of
the nine justices in the NRA case (the
“Nine Old Men,” as critics called them)
was that regulating the wages and hours
of workers had been improperly taken up
by the executive branch and belonged
only to Congress. As for the AAA, the
justices held that the processing tax
it mandated was invalid because it took
money from one group of citizens for
“the benefits of another.” The President
termed both conclusions “horse and buggy decisions.”
After his re-election in 1936, FDR
aimed to remodel the Court because he
feared that the Wagner Act approving
unionization and the Social Security
Act might be in danger. He proposed that
a new justice be named for every one
on the bench who did not retire after
reaching 70 years of age. The size of the
Court would be enlarged, and limited, to
15 justices, probably because at the time
six were over 70. The proposal was
strongly criticized and did not become
law. Meanwhile, though, the Court responded to the widespread disapproval
of its decisions and practically ceased its
attack on New Deal legislation. A cynical
comment then was: “A switch in time
saves Nine.”
Burns reminds us of the surprising
T
behavior of some of the justices. Felix
Frankfurter, an honored professor of law
at Harvard, proved to be a nuisance on
the Court. He almost came to blows with
Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, President
Harry S. Truman’s old friend. When Vinson died suddenly in 1953, Frankfurter is
said to have declared the death was the
first clear evidence he had ever seen that
a God exists. In an earlier era there was
James C. McReynolds, who had been
Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general until
the President “kicked him upstairs” to the
Court. An insistent, cranky misanthrope
and an unashamed anti-Semite, he refused to speak to fellow members Louis
D. Brandeis and Benjamin N. Cardozo.
It is said that McReynolds also always
turned his back on Jewish lawyers who
pleaded before the Court.
EVERAL JUSTICES immensely disappointed the Presidents who named
them. Theodore Roosevelt was astonished at the dissenting opinions of Oliver
Wendell Holmes Jr., whom he appointed
in 1902. Dwight D. Eisenhower regarded
his naming Earl Warren to be chief justice and putting William J. Brennan Jr. on
the Court as his two most telling mistakes
as President—although they were clearly two of the most influential figures in
the Court’s history. Most devout Republicans felt hugely let down by the liberal
decisions of departing David Souter, who
was chosen by President George H.W.
Bush as a reliable conservative.
How justices are selected is not always
easy to discern. Years ago, while serving on the National Historical Publications Commission with Justice Brennan,
I asked him how he came to be on the
Court. “Well,” he said, “Eisenhower was
so impressed by John Kennedy’s bid
for the Democratic vice presidential
nomination in 1956 that when he had to
make a Court appointment he said to
[Herbert] Brownell [his attorney general], ‘Go get me an Irish Catholic.’”
Burns’ book does not have this story, of
course, but it has a mountain of other
revealing tales.
Whether Packing the Court can undo
what Marshall did, as Burns seriously
urges, I seriously doubt. Nevertheless, it
opens a window on the Supreme Court’s
doings that should concern all of us.
S
Gotham’s
Good Time
Landmarks
Automats, Taxi Dances,
and Vaudeville: Excavating
Manhattan’s Lost Places
of Leisure
By David Freeland
NYU Press.
288 pp. $19.95 (paper).
Reviewed by
Clyde Haberman
New York “Times” columnist
C
OLSON WHITEHEAD, a talented young
writer living in Brooklyn, observed
in an essay several years ago that the
physical city of the past is, for a true New
Yorker, often more real than what exists
at present. “No matter how long you have
been here,” Whitehead wrote, “you are a
New Yorker the first time you say, ‘That
used to be Munsey’s’ or ‘That used to be
the Tic Toc Lounge.’”
By that definition—and it’s not a bad
one—David Freeland is as true a New
Yorker as you are likely to find. In a city
where endless change is about the only
constant, he searches for what once was
or what, at best, survives as a remnant.
“Our buildings reflect who we are as people,” he says. Even if many of those buildings are spectral now, they “can still speak
to us today and tell us something about
their histories.”
Freeland is not concerned with architectural triumphs like stately banks,
inspiring churches or centers of political power. He goes in for racier stuff:
buildings from the 19th and early 20th
centuries where ordinary people sought
entertainment, relaxation and (gasp!)
raw sex. Unlike a majestic bank or a neoRenaissance church, old-time dance halls
and gambling joints come and go in a
blink. You have to catch them while you
can, Freeland says in his Introduction, or
risk losing them forever: “These are the
places that most often disappear after
their economic usefulness runs out, casualties of an American popular culture
that is always moving to the next trend.”
24
He adds: “Places associated with entertainment culture possess dramatic and
sometimes turbulent histories.” Indeed,
where are you more likely to dig up fantastic stories—in a bank, notwithstanding
the recent revival of interest in Dillinger,
or in a Harlem swing club called Pod’s
and Jerry’s Log Cabin, where Billie Holiday got her start?
Even the staid Automat, that early
mode of fast-food dining pioneered a
century ago by Joseph Horn and Frank
Hardart, can produce some great yarns.
One day in 1933, a man was found dead
in the bathroom of a Horn & Hardart on
the Upper West Side. Moments later, a
middle-aged woman dropped dead. Both
had been poisoned. It turned out that
the man, despairing over financial losses
brought about by the Depression, decided to kill himself by dousing a seeded
roll “with enough cyanide to take out a
borough.” The woman was known in
the neighborhood as a scavenger, who
would hang out at the Automat to grab
table scraps. She polished off the guy’s
half-eaten roll. (And then it was discovered that she had $45,000 stashed in the
bank—equivalent to nearly $740,000 in
2009 dollars.)
REELAND, a writer on popular culture
and music history, focuses here on a
few Manhattan neighborhoods that have
undergone such enormous transformations over the decades that it is virtually
impossible in some instances to detect
what was there in 1970, let alone in 1870.
Reading this book is like going on a walking tour with a really knowledgeable
guide, who knows not only what building to point out but also what stories lurk
behind the front door.
We stop early on at 50-52 Bowery (De
Bouwerij, by the way, is Old Dutch for
“farm”). A commercial building sits
there now, obscuring the remains of what
was once the Atlantic Garden, a highly
popular concert hall and tavern for much
of the second half of the 19th century. The
Atlantic was at the heart of repeated legal
battles over whether beer sales and entertainment should be allowed on Sunday.
At 841 Broadway, off Union Square,
we visit a building whose rooftop, starting in 1896, was home to the American
Mutoscope Company (later to morph in-
F
to Biograph). It is believed to have been
the first movie studio in Manhattan. Although the movie industry shifted before
long to Hollywood, the rooftop studio “re-
DAVID FREELAND
mained firmly a New York institution,”
Freeland writes. “During its early years,
American Mutoscope often solicited story ideas through the use of public newspaper ads. And if an idea was accepted,
most likely it would be filmed using
actors pulled from Union Square vaudeville houses; or, if they were not available, bartenders, sales clerks or anyone
else who happened to work within the
vicinity.”
The tour goes on. Second Avenue
below 14th Street was home to a oncevibrant Yiddish theater. Streets in the 20s
and 30s west of Fifth Avenue formed the
notorious Tenderloin district, ridden with
crime and graft. Received wisdom is that
it got its name in the 1870s when a corrupt police sergeant named Alexander
(Clubber) Williams was transferred there
from his less lucrative former precinct.
“I’ve had nothing but chuck steak for
a long time,” Clubber boasted to a colleague, “and now I’m going to get a little
bit of tenderloin.”
No. 6 West 28th Street is today an uninteresting store selling perfumes, sneakers and wristwatches. But at the turn of
the last century, it was home to a popular
gambling house run by an ex-bank robber named Thomas (Shang) Draper. Also
based on West 28th Street was the music publishing center known as Tin Pan
Alley. A dominant figure on the street
was Harry Von Tilzer. His name is barely
known today. More familiar to you should
be his brother, Albert. Still not ringing a
bell? In 1908, Albert Von Tilzer wrote
the music to a number heard endlessly
throughout the American summer: “Take
Me Out to the Ball Game” (with words
by Jack Norworth).
Freeland takes us to Harlem and the
Lincoln Theater on West 135th Street,
now a church. People came there to hear
Mamie Smith, billed as “Queen of the
Blues.” Her fame would not endure. The
singing Smith better known today is Bessie. But when Mamie walked onto the
Lincoln stage in 1922 and “opened her
mouth,” we are told, “the sound was clear
and penetrating; it rose to the balcony
sconces and lodged in the filigree.”
Freeland ends his tour in Times Square,
which of course remains a center of entertainment. But it has none of the glitter
of the Diamond Horseshoe, Billy Rose’s
nightclub in the Paramount Hotel, which
still stands on West 46th Street. Then
again, it has come far from the tawdriness
of the Orpheum, at 46th and Broadway.
Its taxi dancers, their toes crushed by
companion-starved men, inspired the
Rodgers and Hart Depression classic
“Ten Cents a Dance.” Years later, as Times
Square degenerated from tawdry to sinister, young women offered a good deal
more than a dance—and for a lot more
than a dime.
The book is not without its ironies.
One reason the Tenderloin district disappeared is that a thick slice of it in the West
30s was carved away to build the majestic Pennsylvania Station, opened in 1910.
Five decades later, that Penn Station disappeared, too, torn down in one of the
greatest urban crimes ever. Yet the demolition had a saving grace. It ignited a
lasting movement of landmarks preservation.
The author is on the side of the preservationists. “New Yorkers are an inherently curious lot; once they make the city
their own they want to know everything
they can about it,” he writes. “The challenge they will face in the future is that
exploring history becomes more difficult
once the physical markers themselves
are gone.”
25
On Fiction
A
Matter of
Inheritance
By Brooke Allen
R
EADING A NOVEL BY RICHARD RUSSO is a bit like
watching a good athlete perform: There is a natural grace that makes an inherently difficult feat
look easy, something anyone could do. Of course,
we know otherwise because so few novelists can
do it—so few, too, who have managed to create a fictional
world recognizably their own. Russo’s territory, blue-collar
upstate New York and rust belt Pennsylvania, with their dying industrial towns and increasingly obsolescent denizens,
is by now instantly identifiable as his personal demesne. This
grim landscape, like William Kennedy’s, has proved to be
peculiarly filmic: Russo’s third book, Nobody’s Fool, made
into a movie directed by Robert Benton, was in my opinion
one of the best films to come out in the 1990s. Paul Newman
(nobody’s fool himself), recognizing the dramatic force in the
author’s father figures, those baffled old rogue elephants,
followed that up with a leading role in the filmed version
of Empire Falls, the novel that garnered Russo the 2002 Pulitzer Prize.
Russo is one of the few male writers content to remain within the arena of the domestic novel, a genre long dominated by
women. And his fiction is untainted by conventional outward
signs of literary masculinity such as Big Ideas, cosmic despair,
macho posturing, or extravagant stylistic experimentation.
Among contemporary novelists, Russo’s closest peer is probably Anne Tyler. Both confine themselves largely to the infinitely fascinating permutations of family relations. Like Tyler
also, Russo has not become a really major novelist due to a certain innate coziness, a stubborn unwillingness to admit to
tragedy or true hopelessness. Although his “happy” endings
(or more precisely, his guardedly optimistic ones) are not al-
ways satisfactory, Russo is unapologetic about them. “I am
such a cautiously but definitely congenitally hopeful person,”
he has said. “My characters don’t so much get out of trouble as
learn how to live with it.”
The author’s eighth book, That Old Cape Magic (Knopf,
261 pp., $25.95), contains much vintage Russo material: the
middle-aged man dealing with the death of his parents, with
his own impending old age and death, and with a marriage
that despite outward appearances of felicity has an unacknowledged central fissure. Jack Griffin is the son of mid-level
academics, English professors at a second-rate university. He
has always loathed the bitterness, born of professional disappointments, that colored his parents’ entire lives and with which
they did their best, or so it seems, to infect him. “At Yale, where
they did their graduate work, they came to believe they were
destined for research positions at one of the other Ivys, at least
until the market for academics headed south and they had
to take what they could get—the pickings even slimmer for
a couple—and that turned out to be a huge state university
in Indiana.” Mired in the Midwest, they brood and bicker and
plan futilely for the dream life on Cape Cod they will clearly never achieve.
Russo, who earned a PhD in English from the University
of Arizona and taught at Southern Illinois University’s Carbondale campus, is an expert at depicting the ignoble, often
vicious jealousies and strivings of academia, occasionally
rivaling even past masters like David Lodge. Straight Man
(1997) was an entire novel on the subject. There is plenty
of this kind of fun in That Old Cape Magic, but in the main William and Mary, Jack’s parents, are destructive rather than
humorous forces, and the novel comprises an exploration of
26
through his point of view, we initially take everything he says
to be entirely reasonable. As the action continues, however, we
start to see gaps in his logic. Eventually, we figure out that he is
not the nicest guy in the world, and that he has been unconscionably hard on Joy. Why, when he claims to love her? “Was
it possible that her contentment was the cause of his funk? Her
ability to still want what she wanted so long ago?” Or is it simply because he is “a congenitally unhappy man,” as Joy claims?
Things come to a head on Cape Cod, at the wedding of
Laura’s best friend. A year later, at Laura’s own wedding, a second urn, Mary’s, has joined William’s in the trunk of Griffin’s
car, and Griffin and Joy are now separated, accompanied to
their daughter’s event by new partners. Can their marriage be
salvaged? Do they want it to be? How much abuse can a marriage take before it is definitively over?
Russo is good on marriage and the myriad deceptions and
self-deceptions it engenders. In a Washington Post article on
former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s fall from grace,
Russo wrote: “What I know about marriage is that identities
over time tend to merge. Eliot’s wife was once her own person,
but down the years she’s lost some of that individuality, surrendered it willingly, never suspecting she might have further use
for it.” This is very much true for both Griffin and Joy, as indeed it was for William and Mary, permanently entwined years
after their unpleasant divorce. Who is Griffin without Joy? Was
HEN WE MEET GRIFFIN he is 50ish and ripe for
it a mistake to surrender so much of his individuality? If he
were to seize it back again, what would he do with it?
the traditional midlife crisis. His father, long diThe author also writes about middle age with pleasing convorced, has recently died and he now finds himself in a funk,
creteness. Chatting with his daughter on the phone, for instance,
with bouts of insomnia and disorientation. “Suddenly it was as
Griffin is surprised when Laura asks whether he and Joy are
if his dead parent, his living one, his old profession and his boyplanning a trip to Truro. “Griffin scrolled back through the last
hood self were all clamoring for attention.” His new mode is
week’s worth of conversations with Joy, many of which, truth
suspension, indecision: “. . . more and more he found himself
be told, had been at cross-purposes. But ‘Truro’ did provoke
stalled, in the middle of whatever room he happened to be standthe faintest of recollections, though
ing in, and he realized that this had been,
far too smooth and slippery to grasp.”
of course, his father’s classic pose.” WilThis seems to me a perfectly exact deliam’s ashes still sit in their urn in the
scription of the way one struggles with
back of Griffin’s car; he has tried to scatmemory in middle age, just as Griffin’s
ter them in the waters off the Cape, the
mental suppression of the signs of Joy’s
family’s old fantasyland, but he can’t do
displeasure with him is all too psychothe deed. He is literally possessed by
logically plausible. We all behave this
William’s spirit. Meanwhile his mother
way, at least on occasion. How else can
pesters him with constant phone calls
we live with the knowledge of how deand waspish comments. Like so many
spicable we are, at heart?
old people, she is “revising her life story
As the previous paragraph indicates,
to suit herself.” In the process she is
I found very black depths in That Old
naturally revising Griffin’s early life
Cape Magic, depths the ever-optimistic
as well, and he resents it. “The problem
Russo fails to plumb. This does conseemed to be that you could put a coustitute a failure on his part. As limned
ple thousand miles between yourself
RICHARD RUSSO
by Russo, it would have been more realand your parents and make clear to them
istic to picture Griffin becoming an alcoholic or a suicide, or
that in doing so you meant to reject their values, but how
at the very least an embittered old man like his father. Instead,
did you distance yourself from your own inheritance?”
he is contentedly domesticated within his long-tainted marGriffin is a classic example of the unreliable narrator—or
riage. That kind of easy way out is why Russo, an intelligent,
rather, since That Old Cape Magic is written in the third perhumane man and a gifted writer, is less than entirely interestson, the unreliable central consciousness through which the
story is filtered. Since we see through his eyes and perceive
ing as an artist.
how our parents’ attitudes inevitably permeate our own, for
better and for worse.
Griffin has done everything he can to keep William and
Mary at arm’s length throughout his adult life. He chose a
career as a Hollywood screenwriter not only to assure a geographical distance from them but as a means of symbolically rejecting their values, particularly their snobbish refusal
to countenance any sort of writing other than academic criticism. For a while Griffin is happy enough with his precarious profession and its accompanying “adrenalin rush, his
mind racing in that . . . calculating, savvy L.A. way.” His wife
Joy seems perfectly content in California—too much so, perhaps: Her ability to be easily satisfied irks Griffin in some way
he can hardly understand. Maybe it is because he has been
imbued, after all, with his parents’ eternal dissatisfaction. At
any rate, he eventually decides to turn to fiction writing, taking a teaching position at an East Coast college to pay the bills.
Joy and their daughter Laura, with their customary equilibrium, appear to adjust to their new lives without difficulty.
But Griffin continues to be uneasy, feeling that he has somehow given in to his parents by opting for an academic job.
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27
The Fuel of
Art and Life
Why This World: A Biography
of Clarice Lispector
By Benjamin Moser
Oxford.
479 pp. $29.95.
Reviewed by
Philip Graham
Author, “Interior Design: Stories”;
forthcoming, “The Moon, Come to
Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon”
LARICE LISPECTOR, a giant of 20thcentury Brazilian—and world—literature, so coveted privacy and personal
mystery that her various interviews over
the years were filled with contradictory
answers. Refusing to be pinned down in
her fiction as well, she hid “behind her
characters or inside her allegories,” as
Benjamin Moser aptly puts it in his elegantly written, carefully researched biography. He makes the most of his access
to the author’s letters; of the unpublished,
highly autobiographical novel based on
the family’s escape from Ukraine and
early years in Brazil, written by Elena,
Clarice’s older sister; and of Lispector’s
annotated copies of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s work.
One of Moser’s aims is to restore Lispector’s relatively unknown Jewish roots.
There are still editions of her books translated into English that refer to her as
“Russian” or “Ukrainian.” But the family
suffered near starvation and horrific pogroms in the chaos of Eastern Europe following World War I. When they finally
managed to immigrate to Brazil and settle in the northeastern city of Recife, Clarice was two years old.
Though she retained no direct memory of the deprivations her parents and two
older sisters had endured, Clarice grew
up in a shell-shocked family struggling
to learn Portuguese and make do in an utterly foreign country. Her mother, moreover, had been gang-raped by Russian
soldiers and was slowly dying from syphilis. Clarice invented magical stories to
comfort her as her paralysis advanced.
“A little girl’s stories,” unfortunately,
C
“were not enough to save a woman from
devastating terminal illness.” Her mother died before Clarice’s 10th birthday.
Since Lispector was convinced at a
young age of God’s indifference, it was
perhaps inevitable that in adulthood she
turned her gaze inward. Influenced by
Spinoza, she rejected “assigning human
meanings to the inhuman world,” the illusions we entertain that our world is
under control. Moser acknowledges that
“the Jewish motifs in Clarice Lispector’s
writings beg the question of the extent to
which their inclusion was deliberate.”
Nevertheless, he maintains convincingly
that, deliberate or not, her “personal experience was . . . a microcosm of the broader Jewish historical experience,” and that
this is reflected throughout her writing.
Although Moser develops parallel
narratives of Jewish history in the 20th
century (including outbreaks of antiSemitism in Brazil) and Lispector’s life,
to his credit he does not put the author
in a narrow sociocultural mold. Rather,
through close examination of her work he
demonstrates eloquently that her greatest
literary gift, what earned her distinction,
was her exceptionally detailed understanding of the insistent lives we live inside ourselves. Lispector was never more
powerful as a writer, Moser observes, than
when “she sought the universal meaning
within her particular experiences.” The
trademark of her often astonishing psychological candor can be seen in this single sentence from The Hour of the Star
(1977): “Who has not asked himself at
some time or other: am I a monster or is
this what is means to be a person?”
AME CAME to Lispector when she
was still in her early 20s. Her first
novel, Near to the Wild Heart (1943),
was awarded the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize. The thrill of that book turns on
the contrast between the amoral, wild
Joana—“I will break all of the nos that
exist inside me”—and the placid, conventional Lídia, who represented two
warring forces within Lispector. This tension proved to be the ongoing fuel of her
art and life.
Near to the Wild Heart warned of the
ultimate impossibility of joy in marriage,
but soon after its publication Clarice married Maury Gurgel Valente, a diplomat
F
who was posted over the next 15 years in
Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States. Perhaps Lispector hoped marriage would create a balance within her,
since she believed that “Writing can drive
a person mad. You must lead a serene life,
well appointed, middle class. If you don’t
the madness comes.”
During this time Lispector continued
writing her short, remarkable novels: primarily interior journeys dotted with occasional signposts from the exterior world
to help mark the way. But the isolation
from her beloved Brazil increasingly
weighed upon her, and she came to see
the diplomatic life as an environment
“made up of shadows and shadows.”
By 1959, Lispector decided to leave
her husband and return to Brazil with their
two young sons. She found a country that
BENJAMIN MOSER
was beginning to be transformed by bossa nova, the radical urban planning and
architectural modernism of Brasília, and
the world-famous flair of its soccer playing. More important, the public that had
previously praised more than read her—
finding her quicksilver prose sometimes
difficult to follow—finally caught up with
her particular version of modernism, especially as exhibited in her short stories.
The tropicalista music pioneer Caetano Veloso, remembering his excitement
when he first read her story titled “The Imitation of the Rose,” wrote: “I was looking
for or waiting for something that I could
call modern.” He discovered in Lispector
an aesthetic happiness that “came with the
experience of growing intimacy with the
world of feelings that the words evoked.”
28
No longer a diplomat’s wife, Lispector drew closer to her wild heart and created some of her best work. Yet despite
continuing financial support from her exhusband, Clarice had to write newspaper
columns on fashion and etiquette (albeit
with her usual unmistakable style) so that
she and her two sons could live comfortably. Eventually, she did serious newspaper essays—crónicas—that gained a
wide audience and also drew more readers to her fiction. She responded with a
string of late masterpieces, including a
number of celebrated short story collections and the novels The Passion According to G.H. (1964) and The Hour of the
Star. But a content domestic life was
never again to be hers. Dogged by the demands of a schizophrenic son, and suffering the pain of disfiguring scars from a
fire in her home, the celebrated Lispector became personally isolated, her existence a wearying burden.
T AGE 55 Clarice revisited Recife,
as if searching for the sources of her
early inspiration. Her last novel, The Hour
of the Star, examines the fragile life of
Macabéa (the name is a veiled reference
to her own Jewish origins), an impoverished young woman from northeastern
Brazil who ultimately is struck by a passing car. As Macabéa lies on the cobbled
street, Lispector spends several pages debating whether or not to allow her to die—
as if her character’s passing would be a
form of farewell for herself too. Die Macabéa does, and the novel was published
just days before Clarice Lispector succumbed to cancer.
Moser’s monumental project could
have been a violation, a tearing away of
the veil of privacy Lispector so carefully
wore. But for all of his detailed and illuminating research, he remains endearingly loyal to his subject. His complex
and nuanced biography allows Lispector
her essential mystery.
The reader cannot help noting Benjamin Moser’s quiet approval when he
quotes Lispector’s insistence in the posthumous novel A Breath of Life (1978):
“The I who appears in this book is not I.
It is not autobiographical, you all know
nothing of me. I never have told you and
I never shall tell you who I am. I am all of
yourselves.”
A
Pynchon
Up Close
Inherent Vice
By Thomas Pynchon
Penguin.
369 pp. $27.95.
Reviewed by
Mark Kamine
Contributor, “TLS,”
New York “Times Book Review,”
the “Believer”
A
Vice (369 pages), we were joined on
the beach by our friend CF, who expressed
his envy that I already had a copy of the
new Pynchon. He had read all of the author’s novels except the previous one,
Against the Day (1,085 pages), which he
was saving so that he had it to look forward
to. But since a new one was on its way, he
thought he might tackle that first. This
seemed to be an intuitive working out of a
mathematical concept—infinite regression or something—that was right up Pynchon’s alley. Equally up Pynchon’s alley,
CF has a B.S. from Harvard, a Ph.D. in
nuclear physics from Princeton, and has
taught at Stanford and other such places.
Now, though—a sign of the times Pynchon
could undoubtedly make much of—he
was keeping a sports information bureau’s
computers tuned up to spit out statistics.
I did nothing to dampen CF’s enthusiasm for the new work. There is nothing to
be done with Pynchon fans. He is precisely what they apparently want or need: a
polymath, a jokester, an uncharacteristically science-and-math savvy literary
writer, a biographical mystery, a legend.
He is also amazingly consistent. His novels are crammed with arcana, historical
data, references to scientific theory, sex
with a kind of Playboy magazine vibe
(perhaps a result of his coming of age in
the ’50s), silly names, puns, acronyms. He
is all things to a select group of people. I
imagine Silicon Valley possessing a dense
population of Pynchonites, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and maybe even
Cambridge, England. He is not, however,
by a long shot, everyone’s cup of tea. And
his new novel is sure to keep it that way.
S I WAS NEARING the end of Inherent
V., his debut (463 pages), allegedly reflects in its composition its principal scientific trope, something to do with animate
matter turning into inanimate matter, the
letter V being a kind of illustration of the
process. The hero is Herbert Stencil. Another character is called Benny Profane,
and a pair of stewardesses are named Hanky and Panky.
The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon’s second and shortest novel (152 pages), features a heroine named Oedipa Maas. It has
a lot of talk about entropy and a secret ancient organization somehow involved
with mail service. Brevity makes it Pynchon’s most accessible effort, for those
not obsessed. Investigation by an outsider
would best begin here. You can at least
take credit for trying if it ends here as well.
If not, proceed directly to Gravity’s
Rainbow (760 pages), whose title may describe the parabolic trajectory of the V-2
rockets Germany launched against England during World War II. You will meet
dozens more funny-named characters,
brush as closely up against scientific and
historical events as you do dinosaurs in a
theme park, and come away months (probably) later with something to boast about
even if you barely understand it. Only the
most stalwart need go any further.
Vineland (385 pages) chronicles the
tail end of Northern California hippiedom. Cartoonish and mercifully, for Pynchon, short, it has since been outdone by
Denis Johnson’s similarly located, similarly outrageous, and more sharply observed
Already Dead. Pynchon’s fifth novel, Mason & Dixon(773 pages), is a jokey, dialogheavy look at exploration and astronomy.
Against the Day (forgive me CF) is all
but unapproachable, not only because of
its record-setting length but also due to its
unfortunate innovation. Pynchon iterates
a turn-of-the-last-century narrative voice,
placing words and phrases like “scuttlebut,”
“south of the border” and “remembrance
stick” unnecessarily in parentheses and
employing a latinate vocabulary that he
slips in and out of, like an American actor
not quite up on his English accent.
OW WE HAVE Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s take on crime fiction and the
psychedelic ’60s. Usually, to his credit,
ahead of the curve—he firmly introduced
into mainstreamish fiction a certain dark-
N
29
ly ironic attitude and his vaunted empirical bent—Pynchon seems this time to
have fallen a few days late. There have
been a number of recent, and more successful, postmodern noirs, including
Michael Chabon’s strikingly imaginative The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
and Denis Johnson’s undeniably funny Nobody Move. Pynchon’s effort approaches neither.
The story of a beach-dwelling hippie
private eye named Larry “Doc” Sportello, Inherent Vice has an overheated plot
full of excursions and incursions, plus
plenty of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. All
of it goes nowhere fast. The pot-smoking,
long-haired protagonist takes on client
after client, case after case, while keeping himself stoned and in the arms of a
string of women. It is kind of a cross between an R. Crumb cartoon and a James
Bond movie.
Central to Doc’s pursuits are the disappearances of real estate tycoon Mickey Wolfmann and Doc’s ex-girlfriend
Shasta. She is a looker, as is every woman
in the novel. They are all of course randy
as hell, and spend time enjoying threesomes, spankings, and the attentions of
Doc when not flouncing around in a
“tiny little skirt,” a “black bikini of negligible size,” or “red vinyl minidresses.” I
don’t think Pynchon’s fan base includes
a large proportion of the gender so described.
LOODED with clients, questioned by
cops, shot at by Feds, Doc ricochets
pinball-fashion into the thick of a grand
conspiratorial showdown involving an
organization or boat or person called The
Golden Fang. Given the author’s track
record, there is no doubt some sort of
scientific theory being illustrated by random yet connected eventualities. Charles
Manson and the Federal government figure into it. So does an early form of the
Internet called ARPAnet—and this, fans
will be sure to tell you, really was at the
root of the Internet before Al Gore invented it.
Pynchon shamelessly plants a number of these harbingers. “Someday,” Doc’s
aunt lectures him, “there will be computers for this, all you’ll have to do’s type in
what you’re looking for, or even better
just talk it in.” A manager of a crumbling
F
casino off the Las Vegas Strip tells Doc:
“It’s what they’ve got planned for this
whole town, a big Disneyland imitation
of itself. Wholesome family fun, kiddies
in the casinos, Go Fish with a table limit
of 10 cents, Pat Boone for a headliner,
nonunion actors playing funny mafiosi,
driving funny old-fashioned cars, making believe rub each other out, blam,
blam, ha, ha, ha.”
HAT ASTONISHES about Pynchon,
once you take the plunge, is how
bad the writing can be. There is the remarkably tasteless joke not worthy of
Mad magazine (“the only magazine Doc
read with any regularity was Naked Teen
Nymphos, which he subscribed to, or at
least used to till he began to find the
few copies that made it to his mailbox
opened already and with pages stuck
together”); the replay of the racist cliché
(“The engraving work was too exquisite not to have some Fiendish Oriental
Provenance”); the failure to keep track
of what he has written (“I should’ve
probably thrown ’em all away a long
time ago,” a widow tells Doc after showing him a box of Polaroids featuring her
deceased husband, although the “long
time ago” was merely a “few months
back,” as we learned half a dozen pages
earlier).
To boot, there is this description of
President Richard M. Nixon’s picture on
counterfeit U.S. currency: “Nixon was
staring wildly at something just out of
sight past the edge of the cartouche, almost cringing out of its way, his eyes
strangely unfocused, as if he had himself
been abusing some novel Asian psychedelic.” After hundreds of pages of such
stuff—or thousands, if you attack the
oeuvre—one might come to understand
the trick of staring at something while remaining unfocused.
Nevertheless, God bless Pynchon, I
say, for having to a significant extent inspired the writing career of David Foster
Wallace (as a recent New Yorker profile
of him averred). Thanks also for his evident influence on the fabulists of the ’60s
and ’70s, as well as the satirists, cyberpunks and postmodern anti-ironists of
the ’80s and ’90s. It is good to know people are getting something out of Pynchon. Me? I give up.
W
Action vs.
Reverie
Exiles in the Garden
By Ward Just
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
279 pp. $25.00.
Reviewed by
Rosellen Brown
Professor of English, the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago;
author, “Half a Heart”
HEN WARD JUST published his first
book of stories in 1973, its captivating title hooked me: The Congressman
Who Loved Flaubert promised a rare wedding of political savvy to literary yearning. Ever since, this immensely productive
journalist-turned-fiction writer has been
amply fulfilling that promise in novels,
stories and nonfiction. He has written
about war, the challenges of honest news
reporting, the intricacies of family drama,
and—these days most relevantly—about
the blinding erotic dazzle that emanates
from men who triumphantly run for office. No one was ever better positioned to
produce a book titled Honor, Power, Riches, Fame, and the Love of Women (1979).
Because Just is so conversant with the
Washington scene a good bit of his work
is set there. But this exceptionally urbane
author has spent enough time abroad to
range comfortably across Europe as well.
It is no wonder that in describing him
critics frequently invoke Henry James.
Though Just’s prose style is far more
transparent, his fiction is fine-grained,
introspective, almost entirely characterdriven, and peppered with smarter talk
than most of us can manage. Moreover,
the issues he raises both implicitly and
explicitly are large and resonant, calling
into question national character and behavior. Yet it is his great gift that they are
always embodied, never facile or abstract.
Just’s new novel, Exiles in the Garden,
contrasts—as did James time and again—
the relative simplicity of American life
with that of the Europeans, whose history
has been pockmarked by wars and other
disruptions, not to mention the pain of
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30
exile and expatriation. His protagonist,
Alec Malone, is infinitely more sophisticated than James’ iconic innocent, Lambert Strether. For one thing, Alec is the
son of a powerful nine-term U.S. senator,
and despite having grown up in a swirl of
political intrigue and cynicism, his Americanness allows him to share with many
of James’ characters an exemption from
the historic turmoils of Europe.
Alec has no desire to follow in his
father’s weighty footsteps: He is a photographer given to reverie, who has admittedly devoted his life to “the absence of
conflict.” What could be a more perfect
metaphor for stasis and safety? He has no
interest in photojournalism or even the
kind of portraiture that catches subjects
“unawares, their attention elsewhere. . . .
The truth was, he preferred stationary objects, the Confederate infantryman or a
garden at dusk.” When the newspaper editor for whom he works offers him the
chance to go to Vietnam, he refuses on the
grounds that “No photograph ever ended
a war.” Worse, “if I went to the war, my
photographs would make it beautiful.”
Given the power of certain serendipitous pictures that have, in fact, galvanized
worldwide sentiment, Alec’s resistance
may not only be self-serving, it may be
wrong, but he firmly refuses to consider
his profession “a civic duty.” He knows he
has displeased both his father and his editor; nevertheless, it is his luxury to stand
firm and feel himself morally justified.
LEC MARRIES the lovely Czech-born,
Swiss-raised Lucia. They settle in
Georgetown, where they have a daughter,
Mathilde, and he discovers the complexity of exile—not only his wife’s but their
expat neighbors’. Listening over the fence
to the Croats, Bulgarians, Hungarians,
Poles, and Russians who gather in the
garden next door to mourn their status—
“refugee, exile, émigré, or displaced
person”—Alec sees them as “damaged
goods, a second-rate theatrical troupe
giving nightly performances of the heartbreak of Central Europe.” To Lucia they
are tragic: “grief clung to them.”
Eventually Lucia leaves Alec for Nikolas, a Hungarian philosopher/novelist
whose specialty is “declining civilizations.” At the funeral of Alec’s father,
however, she unexpectedly shows up with
A
Mathilde, now in her 40s. Then, as if to rub
salt into her ex’s wounds, Lucia tells him
Nikolas believes “only a European can
write successfully of the American situation, its pathos, its inner contradictions, its
strife. It’s the European who has the authority to make such assessments, given our
direct experience of the burden of the previous century. It’s history from the point of
view of the victims.” These must be among
the more unique and irritating defenses of
a man who has made off with one’s wife.
EARS LATER Alec discovers Lucia’s
remarkable long-lost father, Andre
Duran, living in a nest of retired exiles
right there in D.C. The old man, whose
mysterious life has most likely contained
unsavory acts he chooses not to detail,
challenges Alec to recognize the difference between his American comfort and
the demands made on those forced to undergo atrocities that, unlike Alec’s wartime refusals, they could not avoid: the
war in Spain, the invasions of Central Europe, the depredations of Stalin.
“Probably a clever prosecutor could
paint Andre as a war criminal and he
would not be a convincing witness in his
own behalf,” Alec observes. “Remorse
was not in his nature.” The people he may
have harmed in the course of defending
himself “were more or less expendable
or valueless, like civilian casualties, collateral damage.” Alec is riveted by this
man whose “endurance seemed to him
all but superhuman.”
In comparison, for better and worse,
Alec finds he cannot “remember his
ambitions for himself when he started
out . . . except for a vague desire to record
daily life, its fundamental stillness, its
pauses and silences and unexpected rewards.” Interestingly, he never quite defines his predilections and prerogatives
as those of an artist; he is simply not “un
homme engagé.”
But it is impossible to forget that Alec
is the son of a man for whom, early on,
“the domestic life of his own family was
usurped by the civic life of the nation.
That was the life that counted.” Although
Alec’s passivity may be a rebuke, or at least
a corrective, of the way his father lived, he
was too mild, too quietly composed to verbally throw it up to him. His is “a sidelines
sort of life, peaceable for the most part.”
Y
He recognizes that the two men he least
resembles, his father and Andre Duran,
possessed a vitality he thoroughly lacks.
Some readers may want to shake Alec,
may wonder if the Henry James story that
most resembles his is “The Beast in the
Jungle,” in which a man discovers too late
that while he waited for it to occur, his
true life has passed him by. Alec himself
ponders the question. To this reader, he
is a very realistic example of what might
be called “the second generation,” the
one that comes after the wily, entrepreneurial, tumultuous scene-stealers.
In one of Just’s many acute observations of the Washington scene, Alec muses
that maybe he had no interest in being center stage because he was inoculated by
having been born there: “I was never attracted to Washington the way my parents
were and perhaps that’s because they were
from someplace else. They were immigrants. Union Station was their Ellis Island, the Lincoln Memorial their Statue
of Liberty.” Like the literal migrants the
book teems with, they can’t quite go home
again; they have switched allegiances
and their old neighbors in the towns they
came from are now “outsiders.”
ET JUST AS administrations change,
so does each new homeowner “put
his stamp on the property,” Alec thinks.
“A fountain and a giant cedar made way
for a tennis court as years later the tennis
court made way for a cactus. Idle aristocrats made way for foulmouthed lawyers
who made way for Republican oil men.”
For his father and his ilk, Alec had an
explanation: “Live long enough in Washington . . . and they give you bells on your
clothes and a false face, like a jester or a
Kabuki dancer. They made you a legend.”
No wonder he prefers to concentrate his
Leica on unchanging objects that do not
perform a single clever trick.
Few writers are more authoritative than
Ward Just about the city we cannot take
our eyes off. And he reliably creates characters doomed to grapple with, accede
to, or resist its peculiar demands. But Exiles in the Garden ends on an unsettlingly ambiguous note. Is Just tacitly taking
sides in the agon between action and
reverie? Whether or not he is, the contest
brings to light a great deal to ponder and
delight in.
Y
31
On Poetry
Verse as the
Supreme Fiction
By Phoebe Pettingell
S
INCE THE ADVENT of Modernism, definitions of poetry have become blurred. One can no longer define
verse by the use of meter, much less rhyme. Prose
poems that employ neither are clearly poetry because
they rely on the association and repetition of images—
not narrative, character development or explication. Laurie
Sheck’s new work, A Monster’s Notes (Knopf, 530 pp., $30.00),
is described by the publisher as “her first work of fiction.” But
her meditation on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein reads like the
latest stage of this brilliantly original poet. She imagines the
botched creature surviving into the present. He has kept a notebook of quotations from the writer, interspersed with his own
thoughts. In addition, it contains excerpts from letters by Mary
Shelley and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont; from Mary’s dead
mother, the feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; plus
a correspondence between Henry Clerval, a character in Frankenstein, and an Italian leper. Although there is no plot, it helps
if you are aware of the triangular relationship involving Mary,
Claire and Percy Bysshe Shelley. It is also useful to have read
the remarkable novel Mary wrote at 19 about the scientist Victor Frankenstein, who produced a giant humanoid that became
his nemesis.
Sheck’s monster is not the original novel’s murderous protagonist seeking revenge on those near and dear to his creator.
Instead, he is a rather gentle solitary who longs for human affection but feels obliged to live apart because his appearance
provokes horror and revulsion in all who see him. The book’s
premise is that, as a child, Mary used to sit at the grave of her
mother, who died a few days after giving birth to her. The monster, hiding behind a bush, would read scraps of writing to her.
The two never spoke to each other. Sometimes she left him of-
ferings of bread or chocolate, but he never accepted them. After
a while these meetings ceased. Later, Mary reproached herself
for not trying to win his confidence or proffering her friendship. Examining her motives, she comes to the conclusion that
there is something cold and inhuman in her personality. He, in
turn, resents her portrayal of him in her novel as a vengeful
fiend. Nevertheless, he remains obsessed with her and with
Claire, whom Mary disliked but brought along when she eloped
to the Continent with Shelley.
Like Penelope, Ulysses’ wife, Sheck weaves a complex tapestry of subjects and ideas that grows more significant with
every repetition. In “Ice Diary,” the book’s main section, the
monster reviews fragments of letters from Claire to Fanny Imlay, her stepsister and Mary’s half sister, who committed suicide after the Shelleys’ elopement. Claire’s reminiscences of
death and emotional loss are interwoven with accounts of the
Arctic explorers: their reactions to snow blindness, cold and
starvation, along with their excitement at viewing frozen
icescapes few other humans have witnessed. Romanticism focuses on the sublime in nature—oceans or mountains that surpass human creations and transport us beyond ourselves into
the realm of “the other.” Yet paradoxically, Romantic landscapes in literature are never neutrally observed. They reflect
passions the writer wishes to convey.
Frankenstein was begun when the Shelleys, Byron and
Claire (then his mistress) were living on the shores of Lac
Léman near Geneva, in the shadow of towering Mont Blanc.
As Mary subsequently wrote, the quartet was “acting in a novel,
being an incarnate romance.” This sounds delightful, until one
realizes she means they were heedlessly naïve and irresponsible. That summer of love ultimately resulted in Claire losing
32
custody of the daughter she bore to Byron and complicated the
delusions that breed destruction, and that emotional sepaShelleys’ relations with the mercurial nobleman. In Mary’s
ration from others engenders cruelty.
story, Alpine glaciers give way to arctic wastes as the maker
Gradually, the reader of A Monster’s Notes perceives that
pursues his creature in an attempt to destroy what he has creatthe interweaving of diverse passages in different voices echoes
ed. For Sheck, however, the glittering ice mirrors the loneliness
the Shelleys’ own marginalia and commentary on texts. The
of her characters, their feelings of alienation and separation.
21-year-old poet’s scandalous “Queen Mab” was more conSheck excels at depicting our introversial for its lengthy prose adner anxieties of incompleteness and
denda—including a defense of free
brokenness. In A Monster’s Notes,
love—than for the content of the
Fanny’s grieving family discovers
verses themselves. He made many
a paper in her drawer describing a
notations on the original Frankendream: “Mary’s leg was taken off and
stein manuscript, and Mary incorgiven to me. My arm was removed
porated a majority of them. After
and a machine clamped it on to Clare
her husband’s premature drowning,
[sic]. . . . But even though our body
she was forbidden to write a biparts were being exchanged I still felt
ography of him by his father. But
different from them, and alone. There
she managed to circumvent this
was no blood. . . . And how would
stricture by talking about him in
Shelley know who Mary was, which
the notes to her edition of his colone? When I tried to speak I didn’t
lected poems. In the same way,
know whose voice would come out
the monster’s collection of fragof my mouth and this frightened me.
ments comments poetically on
There was a drowned woman too
both Mary and Shelley: their lives,
who was brought in and she, too, extheir creations, and the themes that
changed body parts with us.” On one
preoccupied them. Mary’s fascilevel, this conveys a vivid image of the
nation with brokenness and the
poorly blended Godwin household.
abuse of creative impulses conAfter the death of her mother, Mary’s
trasted with Shelley’s obsession
LAURIE SHECK
father, William Godwin, found himwith a free society—even as he
self with a stepdaughter (Fanny) and a newborn baby. He soon
limited his own and his family’s options by flying in the face
married a neighbor to help care for the children. She brought
of conventions.
her son and daughter (Claire) by a previous marriage. The secInterspersed among epistles and voices are jottings about
ond Mrs. Godwin disliked her two stepdaughters, while GodDNA; a scientist who tries to instill feelings in robots; Alberwin, a philosopher obsessed with ideals, knew nothing about
tus Magnus, the 13th-century theologian and alchemist who
child rearing despite his theories on the subject. The drowned
devised a speaking automaton (he figures prominently in
woman of the dream is Harriet Shelley, the young wife abanFrankenstein); and people who have suffered disfiguring illdoned by the poet when he ran off with the teenage Mary. She
nesses or accidents that make them repulsive, or psychological
killed herself in despair by jumping into a river, an act Mary’s
quirks that affect their thinking in strange ways. “Misery wanown mother once attempted unsuccessfully.
ders in hideous forms over the earth,” Wollstonecraft wrote.
On another level, Sheck subtly suggests that Mary’s monSheck’s poetic musings illustrate the truth of that statement as
ster, made of human parts albeit not exactly human, parallels
well as the way daughter Mary corroborated it in her haunting
her own sense of disjointedness. Modern critics have noted that
novel. A Monster’s Notes, with its evocative repetitions, tantaVictor Frankenstein is partly modeled on both Godwin and
lizing images of loneliness and lyrical language proves that
Shelley. The former’s philosophy was not enough to save his
even if fragments do not make a whole, properly arranged they
children from sad, disordered lives. The latter, despite bursting
enlarge our comprehension of the incomplete world encomwith utopian ideas for the betterment of society, abandoned
passing us.
his first wife with two little children, then dragged the second around Europe to the detriment of her babies, all but one
of whom died from infections. These hardships and heartwrenching losses, coupled with the constant presence of anothALLACE STEVENS, as we shall see, understood
er woman or couple living with them throughout their time
that too. He was already generally acknowltogether, took a heavy toll on the marriage. Mary gradually
edged to be one of the great poets of a richly literary generation
withdrew into numb depression. Though Frankenstein was
before his death in 1955. In many ways this was remarkable, for
written early in their relationship, it eerily prefigures the misbesides being difficult to read—thanks to a preoccupation with
ery to come. Sheck demonstrates how conscious Mary was,
abstractions and the sound of words—he lived outside the litereven at 19, that good, even noble intentions often spring from
W
33
ary culture as a lawyer for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. What on earth was the average reader to make of
a poem entitled “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” which
begins,
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
John N. Serio, editor of Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems
(Knopf, 327 pp., $30.00), declares in his Introduction, “No other
poet I know of has written so elegantly and so persuasively about
the beauty and significance of poetry in everyday life.” Until
readers have accustomed their ears to Stevens’ music, that sounds
as outrageous as claiming Stravinsky’s wild rhythms imitate bird
song. But once acclimated to this poet’s melodies and mental
games, well-captured in the new selection, they tend to concur.
Everyday life, as Sheck’s monster keeps recording, is full of
bits and pieces that do not quite fit together. We dream of wholeness, while the universe we inhabit remains full of jagged edges,
missing links, unsolved mysteries. Our own behavior often confounds us; experience, cracked by disjunctions and loose ends,
lacks the smooth narrative of a story. Stevens always tried to
encourage the use of our intellect to reshape experiences that
fall short of our desires. Yet we don’t like to believe satisfaction
exists only in our heads. We keep projecting our dreams onto
what lies around us. In “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” therefore
Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden’s choral.
The poet at first seems to contradict the usual platitude by
claiming the human body is eternal, whereas the memory or
ideal of it remains a shadow. He goes on to demonstrate how
this is, in fact, correct: The incarnate lasts, even though each
man, woman, animal, plant, or even rock exists in a continual
state of flux, formed only to pass away. Nonetheless, life and
time renew themselves continually. Evenings cycle into mornings and noons, then dusk falls again; spring, after giving way
to the other seasons, returns; maidens become women and
mothers who give birth to the next generation. These recurrences are as reliable as the knowledge that a particular day will
never come again, or that our bodies eventually decay.
“The chief defect of humanism is that it concerns human
beings,” Stevens wrote in a letter. “Between humanism and
something else, it might be possible to create an acceptable fiction.” In other words, we could experience and imagine more
than we typically allow ourselves to, if we were not shackled
by stale notions and our
own confusions. Like all
genuine poets, Stevens
believed that allowing
ourselves to feel, see,
taste, smell, and touch
what lies beyond the
boundary of self is the
only way to truly savor
our brief moments on
earth. This is “the supreme fiction,” the muse
for molding the shards
of perception into someWALLACE STEVENS
thing that enables us to
glimpse a larger reality. Fiction is metaphor. It allows us to embrace something, not merely define or describe it. Just as poetry is “the best words in the best order,” according to Coleridge,
it is also the ultimate “armory of the human mind,” for what we
cannot express we can only endure.
S
ERIO PARAPHRASES Helen Vendler’s observation that
Stevens’ inspiration derived from “personal disappointment, in thwarted desire, and in a profound and brutal misery.” The seemingly jovial but intensely private businessman,
who regularly got drunk at parties and once punched Ernest
Hemingway in the jaw, seems to have had almost no intimates.
Unhappily married, he came home from work to his private study
where he read and wrote poems. He loved to travel and was especially taken with tropical landscapes. “Life is an affair of people not of places,” he noted. “But for me life is an affair of places
and that is the trouble.” The first half of the 20th century was,
after all, an age of formalized behavior and repressed personal
feeling. While Stevens’ contemporary, T.S. Eliot, depicted the
struggle of humans to communicate with one another, Stevens
evoked what he called “the Interior Paramour”—the deepest part
of the imagination—as he sought to picture wholeness, richness,
humor, and grace in the face of what too often felt like souldestroying unhappiness, ennui, and crushing discouragement.
In “A Primitive Like an Orb” he managed to sing joyously about
bright excellence adorned, crested
With every prodigal, familiar fire,
And unfamiliar escapades: whirroos
And scintillant sizzlings such as children like,
Vested in the serious folds of majesty,
Moving around and behind, a following,
A source of trumpeting seraphs in the eye,
A source of pleasant outbursts on the ear.
Wallace Stevens understood that we can no longer treat the
world as external. We are the product of our experiences, and if
we are poets, we also fashion our own complicated and fantastic structures from our imaginings. Supreme fictions, indeed.
34
OnTelevision
How
Reality
Works
By Marvin Kitman
I
RECENTLY READ in the New York
Times that the hottest thing in Indonesia is reality television. Indonesian Idol and a host of other
American-inspired programs, all
purveying our values, have become so
popular that reality TV is threatening to
replace Islam as the people’s religion. I
was not surprised. We have been going
through a similar cultural transformation
here in what used to be called “God’s
Country,” before television.
Reality TV as we know it was invented by a Dutch production company,
Endemol, in 1999. It quickly swept the
Netherlands, Germany, Spain, and the
United Kingdom, like the Black Plague.
Some believe the British brought it to
our shores to pay us back for their losing the Revolutionary War. The invasion
began in 2000 with Big Brother on CBS.
Its plot was simple: A group of strangers were locked in a house on the CBS
back lot in Los Angeles, where they proceeded to get on one another’s nerves
for 15 weeks. This was as interesting
as watching a security camera. Nevertheless, it was followed on commercial
stations by a variety of fly-on-the-wall
surveillance dramas featuring men and
women who allowed themselves to be
locked up in a loft, a dorm, a ship container, whatever.
There are others who say credit for
reality TV belongs to Public Television.
They point to the Louds on PBS’ An
American Family, the rage for 12 weeks
in 1973. Labeled vérité TV at the time, it
broke new ground when one son came out
of the closet, and almost caused an earthquake when Ma and Pa Loud broke up
right in front of the cameras. But the genre
did not catch on, because relatively few
real people watched the highbrow channels.
My own introduction to this form of
entertainment came in 2000, as I watched
Endemol’s Fear Factor on NBC. It starred
average Joes stripped to their underwear
who climbed into a pit and had 400 rats
dumped on top of them. Not until American Idol in 2002, though, did the Age of
Reality TV really dawn. With its attraction of so many music lovers, the television industry began to smell the Nielsen
numbers. Aping Gaul, reality television
soon divided into three parts: talent contests, dating shows and social experiments.
I was the first critic to prophesy that
American Idol, the prima donna of talent contests, would never succeed. Who
would want to hear a selection of shower
singers week after week, and then spend
money on a phone call to vote one of them
off? I had heard more impressive talent
on radio’s Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour.
Little did I realize Idol would quickly become television’s leading cultural institution, much the way Arturo Toscanini
and the NBC Symphony did in the medium’s infancy.
Contestant shows came in several
flavors. One type featured celebrities,
many of whom were legends in their own
minds, trying to act like real people and
failing. Others starred real people being,
well, real.
Dating shows explored the state of
contemporary relationships. My favorite,
The Bachelor on ABC (2002), presented
25 windup dolls, one with a Master’s degree. For 15 seconds of fame, they lowered their self-esteem enough to grovel
before a handsome geek who thought he
was God’s gift to womankind in a Miss
Making Total Fools of Themselves on
National TV competition.
In the course of my years-long study
of reality TV, I kept hearing Dorothy
Parker’s remark about the theater. Coming up the aisle the first night of a play,
she said, “What fresh hell is this? Are
35
we to be spared nothing?” Her words
rang especially true when reality TV began to put celebrities in real-life social
situations. For me the ultimate “fresh
hell” was the night in 2002 that The Anna
Nicole Show premiered on the E! Network. The episode concerned a hefty
Anna Nicole looking for a house with a
large bathtub. The real estate agent never
thought to sell her the Baths of Caracalla
in Rome.
A close second was The Simple Life
on Fox in 2003. It starred two famous
real people, Paris Hilton and the chubby
one, Nicole Richie, bumming around
the country doing real things like flipping hamburgers. Much of the time you
couldn’t hear what they were saying. Not
that it mattered. Nothing Paris Hilton has
ever said mattered, except: “You get out
of the way. Let me get in front of the camera. Nobody wants to see you; they just
want to see me.”
“A
H, REALITY, what a concept,” Robin Williams declared one night in 2000, as if speaking
for television’s creative community. The
notion of using ordinary people instead
of professional actors on theoretically
unscripted dramas, comedies, documentaries, game shows, and their mutations, was indeed an epiphany for the
industry. There were three reasons for
its success: (1) It was cheap. (2) It was
cheap. (3) Audiences loved it, even if you
and I hated it.
The 83 slices of “real life” nourishing the tube when I stopped counting a few years back had all the right
demographics. They were popular with
young women, young men, teens, subteens, and apparently even the unborn.
No wonder the concept spread like
kudzu throughout the prime time schedules.
New ideas in TV programming are a
communicable disease. My studies have
found a pattern: After network A comes
down with, say, a hit doctor show, network B almost invariably is infected
by the same germ. Some germs are contrary, so a successful Western on network
B breeds another Western on A. Either
way, before you know it there is a pandemic.
But the big question about reality TV
is: Why do we care? For instance, why do
we care about Jon & Kate Plus 8, the life
of a couple with twins and sextuplets, on
the once prestigious Learning Channel?
This is more than a rhetorical question.
Ten million people, according to Nielsen,
cared enough to tune in the week this was
being written. Shortly afterward the couple split. What effect that will have remains to be seen.
In any event, part of the answer to the
big question is the rubbernecking factor.
Watching reality TV is like watching a
traffic accident. The ordinary reality show
is just glass shattered on the highway, fire
trucks, stretchers, the jaws of life. Occasionally a show is so unbelievable it is like
watching a car filled with kids from the
inner city going to a Fresh Air Fund camp
slam a minivan full of widows and orphans on their way to play the slots in Atlantic City.
The other part of the answer is the humiliation factor, a key reality TV ingredient. Quite a large segment of the TV
population doesn’t mind being humiliated on a reality show. After all, it is a way
to become an instant star, if only for an
instant, without having to do anything except be a real person. Still more people
enjoy watching others being humiliated
and thinking to themselves, “Thank God
it’s not me.”
The weakness of the reality TV as
entertainment concept is that real people can often be quite boring. That’s where
the TV creative establishment kicks
in. First, they select a real person bound
to create controversy: a gay, a black, an
Uzbekistani, a nun, or a gay black Uzbekistani nun. The real people are then
coached to act in a certain manner by offscreen handlers who feed them talking
points sure to create heat. In addition,
events are manipulated through editing and postproduction legerdemain.
The end result is called “enhanced reality,” or scripts.
Fortunately, the quality of real people
is improving. By this 10th year of reality
TV, a whole generation of young people
has been mutating, adapting their behav-
ior by watching role models on the tube.
Seven in 10 teenagers, a recent survey
found, hope to gain fame by appearing on
a reality TV show. They know intuitively
that acting like a real person, as seen on
TV, improves the chance of achieving
their goals. Who said TV is not educational?
Not the estimated 10,000 who showed
up early one morning in March to audition for the 12th series of Tyra Banks’
America’s Next Top Model. They risked
their lives, limbs and hairdos in the riot
that broke out on the lines in front of the
Park Central Hotel in Manhattan when a
car overheated on the street and they
thought it was a bomb.
T
ELEVISION’S ROLE in defending democracy has been little appreciated. Our secret weapon in
the war against the evil Soviet empire
was sitcoms, the awful ones of the 1960s
and ’70s. The folks behind the Iron
Curtain didn’t laugh at them either. But
they saw such details as the maid arriving at the house driving her own car.
And when kids were sent up to their
rooms, each one went to his or her own
room.
We also hit them with Dynasty and
Dallas, which were seen as documentaries about life in capitalist America.
Cassettes of reruns smuggled behind the
Berlin Wall had more impact than anything Ronald Reagan had to say about our
rusting nuclear deterrent.
Today governments are obsessed with
blocking seditious messages on the Internet and cell phones. But there is no way
to stop reality TV, a concept whose time
has come.
Karl Marx said religion is the opiate of the masses. Well, he was wrong.
TV is the opiate of the masses—although
some still say opium is the opiate of the
masses.
Mark my words. Before long the whole
Muslim world will be enthralled watching So You Want to Be an Arab Oil Millionaire and its spin-off, So You Want to
Be a Mullah. Onward, reality TV soldiers.
Please return to the Home Page.
36

The New Leader | May/August 2009 | Volume XCI

Transcrição

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