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CAMUS: Un Copain

ONCE, IN AN excess of irritation with his small son Jean, Camus ordered him from the supper table to bed. “Good night, minor writer of no importance,” muttered the child as he withdrew. Camus was easily hurt by bad notices and had a long memory for feuds. Sartre was probably right to say of him that “he had a little Algiers roughneck side.” But the prickliness and the vanity, which disfigured many of the disputes he conducted in his life, seem more and more irrelevant with the lapse of years. Camus would not fit; every attempt to categorize him left a noticeable penumbra, a jagged outline around the figure. In his labor of love, Albert Camus: A Biography, Herbert Lottman has tidied up a great number of old rows and given us a clearer look at Camus’s real importance.

For over a decade, argument concerning him has been caught in a boring and artificial dichotomy. There are those who claim to revere him for his apolitical artistry and his deep humanity, while in fact marking him up for his anticommunism. And there are those who reply that he funked the only moral issue which ever touched him personally because he never came out for the Algerian FLN. In many ways, the repetitiveness of these polemics recalls the various posthumous efforts to conscript George Orwell—with whom there are some other suggestive parallels.

For example, Conor Cruise O’Brien manages to suggest (by a very slight elision in his book) that Camus was part of the CIA-sponsored offensive of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. In fact, he adopted the same policy toward that organization as he did to communist front groups. In politics, his friends tended to be of the unorganized Far Left—not unlike Orwell’s Catalan revolutionaries. He was always available to help Republican Spain, as he was to intercede for imprisoned Greek communists or victimized Hungarians and Czechs. The stoutest defense of his Nobel Prize—which was elsewhere blurred by Cold War barracking of all kinds—came in the review Révolution prolétarienne. The article was entitled “Albert Camus, Un Copain.”

The wavering over Algeria, which looks more rather than less damaging nowadays, was certainly less disgraceful than the retreats made by some (such as the French Communist Party) who had less excuse. We know from Lottman that Camus was more engaged than he let on—FLN militants recall that he offered them shelter in his house and that he spoke to them at rallies in Algiers, with fascist settlers baying at the doors. His position and his tactics were far more intricate and complex than have usually been allowed (after all, he left the Algerian Communist Party because it downplayed Arab nationalism). But he certainly did get it wrong, and he did commit himself to statements—like the celebrated one about defending his mother above justice—which made him look a prig. (This famous antithesis between Justice and Mother, like the endlessly recycled Forsterian choice between Friends and Country, is false because it can never really be posed the other way around, and never comes up in “real life.”)

Could it be fair to say that he mistook reality in Algeria because he minded about it so much? Even O’Brien concedes that Sartre’s position, though superior politically, was much easier personally. Camus knew and loved the Algerians; even in the 1930s we find him putting on integrated productions of Malraux’s plays in Algiers itself, in the company of two fine old fellow travelers named Bourgeois and Poignant. His errors were not all that rank if one bears his commitment in mind.

Much ridicule has been poured on Camus’s idea of the Mediterranean as the civilizing measure of humanity. As a philosophical scheme, it obviously lacks depth, and it clearly finds its counterpart in his personal dislike of Germany and the North. I think it does contain some clues to his Algerian stand—the hope that French and Arab culture might fertilize each other was always accompanied by the insistence that the two peoples should be equal. It was in the beautiful Roman Algerian seaside town of Tipaza that he decided to join the Communist Party; whatever the symbolism here, it most certainly is not colonialist. Likewise, his admiration for Kazantzakis, and even his feeling that fascism and communism were tempered once they got to Italy and Yugoslavia: these may be idealistic but are not intuitively inhuman or stupid.

As he eluded classification politically, so Camus kept surprising the critics with his fictions. No sooner had they concluded that he had become formalistic and dry than he hit them between the eyes with The Fall (1956). Claude de Freminville, in a letter on the young Camus, concluded that he “continues to think despair, even to write it; but he lives hope.” It was this contrast, which may remind some people of Gramsci’s famous “pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will,” that gave rise to much of what is misleadingly called “the Absurd.”

Camus had a knack for noticing grotesque things—not just in individuals, but in attitudes. A great deal of it he kept to himself. Lottman has a good example: that of Camus, vanquished in a public exchange with Sartre and Jeanson, taking revenge in his journal by writing, “Temps modernes. They admit sin and refuse grace.” His lifelong obsession with capital punishment, and his bitter opposition to it in literature and in life, was another source of unhappy reflection. One can surmise his reaction, when proposing a petition against political executions, on being told by Simone de Beauvoir that those were the only sort she did believe in. Lottman makes it plain that the guillotining in The Stranger is indeed rooted in an experience undergone by Camus’s father; the pungent feeling of disgust was not something he could vary from case to case.

All of Camus’s involvements were essentially reluctant, which is why he is often remembered with resentment by those to whom politics was the stuff of life. He cannot have been a very sortable comrade, and the chapters on his journalistic period, especially with Claude Bourdet on Combat, show him to have been a spiky and difficult colleague even when things were going well. Again, there is an echo of Orwell here.

In Britain, the phrase “we are all guilty” is taken by reactionaries as the acme of bleeding-heart leftist doublethink. Camus didn’t find it a joke phrase at all, and perhaps, if Britain had endured Nazi occupation, there would be fewer to sneer at it there. He would often, on public platforms, tell the story of the concierge in the Gestapo headquarters, doing her cleaning every morning amid the victims of torture and explaining, “I never pay attention to what my tenants do.” His post-Resistance journals contain the entry:

Temptation to flee and to accept the decadence of one’s era. Solitude makes me happy. But feeling also that decadence begins from the moment when one accepts. And one remains—so that man can remain on the heights where he belongs… . But nauseous disgust for this dispersion in others.

Lottman has written a brilliant and absorbing book, which supplies new insight simply by including all the light and shade. The detail and the care are extraordinary; further slipshod generalizations about Camus will simply not be tolerable from now on. Now at least we have a clear voice about the importance of liberty and the importance of being concrete about it. Here is what Camus said at a joint rally of French and Spanish trade unionists in 1953:

If someone takes away your bread, he suppresses your freedom at the same time. But if someone seizes your freedom, rest assured, your bread is threatened, because it no longer depends on you and your struggle, but on the pleasure of a master.

For all the occasional pomposity and introspection, for all the ambiguities over certain personal and political crises, the evidence is that Camus labored in the spirit of that declaration. In The Exile and the Kingdom, when Jonas’s last message cannot be deciphered as between solidaire and solitaire, the irony of the two words now seems neither absurd nor self-indulgent, but realistic and necessary.

(New Statesman, July 20, 1979)

BRIDESHEAD REVIEWED

IN 1945, shortly after he had completed Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh received a letter from Lady Pansy Lamb. Her name might make her sound like one of Waugh’s own less probable creations, but she was a friend and a contemporary and a woman of shrewd taste. She wrote of Brideshead:

But all the richness of your invention, the magical embroideries you fling around your characters cannot make me nostalgic about the world I knew in the 1920s. And yet it was the same world as you describe… . Nobody was brilliant, beautiful and rich and the owner of a wonderful house, though some were one or the other… . Oxford, too, were Harold Acton and Co really as brilliant as that, or were there wonderful characters I never met? … You see English society of the 20s as something baroque and magnificent on its last legs… . I fled from it because it seemed prosperous, bourgeois and practical and I believe it still is.

Score one for Lady Pansy. We all see, of course, that she is right. Her brisk and knowing style reveals the magic of Sebastian Flyte as an affected sham. And besides, isn’t Brideshead rather repulsive? In its pages we find the most appalling snobbery, the most rancid sort of Catholicism, commingled with deplorable attitudes toward women, and a sympathy, at times barely concealed, for prewar fascism. Yet the fact remains that Lady Pansy, though she may have had a good memory for the period, did not know what she was talking about.

Brideshead Revisited may appeal to the nostalgic and the reactionary, but not because it idealizes the 1920s. It is written as a hymn of hate toward the entire modern world and the emerging mass society of cleverness and greed. Waugh may have drawn Sebastian Flyte in glowing colors (before consigning him to a signally abject fate), but he did not forget “Boy” Mulcaster, the slob and bully, or Rex Mottram, the moneyed philistine and opportunist. Nor, for the most part, did he glamorize English social relations or English bourgeois mores. In 1945, Waugh felt that a certain world had perished forever. But his recording of it was still markedly less elegiac than might have been expected.

Why, then, does the book continue to fascinate? Everyone has a secret garden, at least in imagination, which they fear has been, or will be, invaded and trampled. By the time of the final desecration of Brideshead Castle by the British army, Waugh has emptied it of all but the most incidental of its original cast. The house and its chapel alone remain—the chapel’s lamp providing the only light in the encircling gloom. Waugh himself said later that “the book is about God.” So there is more than the secret garden at stake.

I think Waugh aims for, and achieves, quite a different effect. The “sense of loss” he evokes has primarily to do with World War I. When he wrote to a friend that “I should not think six Americans will understand it [Brideshead],” he was being more than his usual chauvinist self. He may have meant that the memory of 1914–18 was not really as present or as poignant in the United States. But it is present in Brideshead, slyly but unmistakably, from the first episode to the last. Waugh is calling on a common store of English folk memory—well caught in a recent essay by John Keegan in The New York Review of Books:

The close at Shrewsbury at evening, Great Tom tolling over Peck, wickets falling at Fenner’s, the shades gathering under the chestnut in Balliol garden quad. Englishmen are still brought up on this sort of imagery, if not directly then by osmosis. Indeed for Englishmen of a certain class it is impossible to escape its effect. It does not, of course, describe an England they inhabit.

Brideshead opens in 1923. At Oxford, the undergraduates are, ex hypothesi, too young to have fought in the trenches. Small changes have occurred, including a slight improvement in the standing of women, and as Charles Ryder’s servant remarks testily to him:

“If you ask me, sir, it’s all on account of the war. It couldn’t have happened but for that.” For this was 1923 and for Lunt, as for thousands of others, things could never be the same as they had been in 1914.

(Needless to add here that Lady Pansy would have been right if she had pointed out that “millions” rather than “thousands” would be less elitist.) Charles himself is not untouched—we learn that his mother died while serving with a medical unit in Serbia. Later, describing Charles and Sebastian together in Venice, Waugh has an extraordinary passage, which should be quoted in full:

The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly—perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless. On some days life kept pace with the gondola, as we nosed through the side-canals and the boatman uttered his plaintive musical bird-cry of warning; on other days, with the speed-boat bouncing over the lagoon in a stream of sun-lit foam; it left a confused memory of fierce sunlight on the sands and cool, marble interiors; of water everywhere, lapping on smooth stone, reflected in a dapple of light on painted ceilings; of a night at the Corombona palace such as Byron might have known, and another Byronic night fishing for scampi in the shallows of Chioggia, the phosphorescent wake of the little ship, the lantern swinging in the prow and the net coming up full of weed and sand and floundering fishes; of melon and prosciutto on the balcony in the cool of the morning; of hot cheese sandwiches and champagne cocktails at the English bar.

I remember Sebastian looking up at the Colleoni statue and saying, “It’s rather sad to think that whatever happens you and I can never possibly get involved in a war.”

Soon afterward, Sebastian is a wreck; his charm spoiled and his “epicene” beauty departed. As Waugh says, “The languor of Youth—how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!” I see no reason for Youth with a capital Y in this context unless Waugh intended to remind us of the poems of Wilfred Owen—the “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and all the other verses in which England haltingly came to realize that it had massacred its rising generation a few years before.

That massacre included, in Brideshead terms, Sebastian’s three uncles. His mother, Lady Marchmain, remains obsessed with their deaths. Mr. Samgrass, the tame and sycophantic historian whom she hires to compose their memorial volume, is also the spy she retains to watch Sebastian at Oxford. She judges all men by the manner in which they measure up to her lost brothers. Sebastian cannot possibly enter the contest with these shades. Especially since his father, too, was lost in the war—in the sense that he went off to battle and never came back, preferring to remain on the Continent with his cynical Italian mistress.

Later in the story, after Sebastian’s collapse, Charles Ryder gets melancholy drunk with the boorish Lord Mulcaster. They are both eager to join the upper-crust rabble that in 1926 formed private squads to break the General Strike:

We went to a number of night clubs. In two years Mulcaster seemed to have attained his simple ambition of being known and liked in such places. At the last of them he and I were kindled by a great flame of patriotism.

“You and I,” he said, “were too young to fight in the war. Other chaps fought, millions of them dead. Not us. We’ll show them. We’ll show the dead chaps we can fight, too.”

“That’s why I’m here,” I said. “Come from overseas, rallying to old country in hour of need.”

“Like Australians.”

“Like the poor dead Australians.”

The boozy bathos of this little scene does not hide the depth of feeling. Indeed, like other English writers of the period, Waugh often preferred to approach the subject by means of allusion. In his magnificent study The Great War in Modern Memory, Paul Fussell points out that only in England did the classical tag Et in Arcadia ego retain its authentic significance. It means, not “And I have dwelt in Arcadia too,” but “Even in Arcadia I, Death, hold sway.” The whole first section of Brideshead is entitled “Et in Arcadia ego.” Early in the story, Charles Ryder’s rooms at Oxford are embellished with

a human skull lately purchased from the School of Medicine, which, resting in a bowl of roses, formed, at the moment, the chief decoration of my table. It bore the motto Et in Arcadia ego inscribed on its forehead.

Fussell also points out, by reference to Siegfried Sassoon and others, the powerful symbolism of the 1914–18 holocaust.

One consequence of all this, if I am right, is that the homosexual undertones of the novel become more comprehensible. I don’t think there is much doubt that Waugh means us to understand a love affair between Charles and Sebastian. Again, the context is of doomed youth and of the idea, so essential to the mythology of the Great War, that the summer of 1914 was the most golden and languorous of all:

Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.

Wilfred Owen’s own homosexual preference was seldom directly evident in his poems (the letters are more explicit). But the cult of youth and beauty, and the influence of A. E. Housman, are both powerful clues. Waugh, writing in 1945, could hardly have been innocent of the suggestions in that last paragraph. It’s clear, anyway, that the “grave sin” was not smoking or drinking. So when Anthony Blanche remarks to Sebastian during this time, “My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pincushion,” he doesn’t merely remind us once more of martyrdom, but chooses the one that has always had the greatest homosexual appeal—the lissome youth bleeding and transfixed. Owen’s dying boy soldiers are not for away in that utterance either. (Nor are Walt Whitman’s or Yukio Mishima’s.)

It may be that “the book is about God,” but there is no real theology in it. Lord Marchmain’s deathbed repentance is a sickly farce, embarrassing to serious Catholics. The wrangle over Julia’s marriage to the divorced Rex is a mere drawing-room drama, where the fear of “scandal” easily vanquishes any matter of principle. Sebastian’s terminus among the monks is a chance result of his own dissipation. The only Catholic with any sort of vocation in the whole lot is little Cordelia, and she volunteers to go and help General Franco. Waugh believed in original sin, all right—he literally personified it in dialogue. For example, Sebastian writes to Charles: “I am in mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The doctors despaired of it from the start.” And his sister Julia says much later:

“Always the same, like the idiot child carefully nursed, guarded from the world. ‘Poor Julia,’ they say, ‘she can’t go out. She’s got to take care of her little sin. A pity it ever lived.’ they say, ‘but it’s so strong. Children like that always are. Julia’s so good to her little, mad sin.’”

But really, aside from painful constructions like that, Brideshead is pretty much free of religiosity. It is not read, nor was it ever read, as a work of devotion or apology. But worse parodies have been made of it. One of them is playing at the moment on PBS.

I expect this series to do very well. British made, and featuring Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, it trades on a certain image of my country that seems to go down well in America. It is the same image that is catered for by Alistair Cooke in his urbane openings to “Masterpiece Theatre” and by Robert Morley in his plummy promotion of British Airways. A country idyllic, antique, and lovably eccentric, where traditional good manners are upheld at the relatively low cost of an admittedly “outmoded” class system.

The gorgeousness of scenery and setting have been very lovingly done. The hints of upper-class debauchery and high jinks are all there. But there is little subtlety and less tragedy, and none of the feeling of a maimed and bereaved country. The characterization is all wrong, too. Jeremy Irons plays Charles Ryder as a heartbreaker, but Ryder is supposed to be a bit of a stick. (In answer to a query from Nancy Mitford as to how anybody could fall in love with him, Waugh allowed, “He is dim.”) Sebastian Flyte appears as a second-rate camp individual, instead of the careless but complex figure he cuts in the novel. Anthony Blanche becomes a leering little queen, whereas the book makes plain that he was tough and intelligent as well as sexually versatile. Some of the minor characters are exquisite (Mr. Samgrass is just right, and Gielgud is splendid as Ryder’s awful father). But poor adaptation and editing have removed countless nuances that are vitally necessary. (Watch the early scene where Blanche warns Ryder of Sebastian’s charm, and then look it up in print.) Finally, beware of the bookstore. Little, Brown has reissued its 1945 edition in a gruesome “book of the series” format. Get the 1960 revised edition if you can.

Brideshead Revisited is not a comedy of social manners or a tract. It is not the intellectual’s “Upstairs, Downstairs.” It is not a bland celebration of the English country house. It is an imperfect, often awkward, but finally haunting rendition of a national myth. Composed during the last world war, it illuminates the influences, and captures the sense of longing and waste, that had led to it from the previous one.

(The Nation, January 23, 1982)

DECIMATION:The Tenth Man

IN HIS ARTICLE “The Other Man,” Graham Greene described the sensations, partly queasy and partly hilarious, which came over him when he realized that he was being shadowed for life. The existence of a full-time doppelgänger was a cause for some self-congratulation (the sincerest form of flattery), for a touch of unease (What does he want?), and for occasional irritation (What if he’s a nuisance and people think it’s me?). Readers of the essay may have felt that this was just the sort of thing that was meant to happen to Greene. The shadow tended to make more appearances in exotic latitudes, to be shy of cameras and interviews, to be enigmatic when confronted. The full truth about him, one felt, was probably known only in some melancholy brothel or shabby confessional: just the kind of sibling one might have expected.

Now, to Greene’s own surprise, he finds that he once wrote a long short story about a man who survived by a desperate act of impersonation. The Tenth Man lay in who knows what box or file over the course of four decades. When it was written, Dien Bien Phu had yet to fall; Cuba was still a casino island; Kim Philby, a trusted servant of the Crown. But the pages moldered on. Begun for MGM studios, and composed in a time of exigency, they have been retrieved by that great truffle-hound Anthony Blond, who has done the state some service. I still cannot rid myself of the feeling that this may be a hoax. Take, for example, the following:

It was horrifying to realize that a man as false as that could sum up so accurately the mind of someone so true. The other way around, he thought, it doesn’t work. Truth doesn’t teach you to know your fellow man.

Or, from the succeeding page:

But it was a stranger who replied to his ring: a dark youngish man with the brusque air of a competent and hard-worked craftsman. He packed the sacrament in his bag as a plumber packs his tools. “Is it wet across the fields?” he asked.

Here, surely, are the forgotten entrants in the renowned New Statesman competition, where Greene parodies were invited and the master himself came in a pseudonymous third.

Still, whoever actually wrote this book (or film script) certainly knew his business. The action originates in a dank French jail during the Nazi occupation. The prisoners are held as hostages against any act of violence by the Resistance. When a German NCO is slain, the reprisal is predetermined: one man in every ten must die (a surprisingly lenient decision, by the standards of, say, Oradour). The sadomasochistic detail is provided, however, by the Nazi stipulation that the prisoners themselves must cast the lot. Readers of The Tenth Man will probably never again employ the word “decimate” in its slack, inexact form.

The alphabet decides the draw, just as a defective watch determines the pace and timing. A reverse order of precedence is hit upon for no good reason, which gives the lead character, Chavel, an illusory feeling of being at the right end of things. The illusion is short-lived.

It’s actually quite difficult to sustain tension in a scene where everyone knows what the outcome will be. Greene once wrote of Brideshead Revisited that certain decisive episodes, chapter length in memory, turned out to be a mere few paragraphs on rereading. He called it a real test of narrative, and by that test he has succeeded. Had MGM ever made the film, it would have necessitated some intense perspiration close-ups and breath-intakes, with many cutaways to the ticking timepiece. You could surmise that it was genuine Greene a few pages later, when the whole business takes a sudden lurch:

As Voisin said, it wasn’t fair. Only Lenôtre took it calmly: he had spent a lifetime in business and he had watched from his stool many a business deal concluded in which the best man did not win.

Voisin has a point. Chavel, the prosperous attorney, wants to cheat the firing squad by offering his whole patrimony to a substitute. And there is a taker, Janvier, who has always wanted to impress his female relations by dying as a rich burgher… .

Swallow that, and forget for the moment that it was Dostoevsky who wrote that a condemned man would suffer anything rather than keep his appointment. The redeemed Chavel finds himself in a dilemma analogous to that of Raskolnikov. One compromise with death exacts another. Janvier’s sister and mother take up their wretched inheritance, the mother ignorant of the price and the sister made miserable by her awareness of it. Can Chavel keep away from his old estate after the Liberation? Not in this script, he can’t. And, like Raskolnikov (and Voisin), he has to object: “It isn’t fair. This isn’t my fault. I didn’t ask for two lives—only Janvier’s.”

For—and by all means suspend your disbelief here—Chavel signs on as an anonymous servitor in his old mansion. Better to serve in heaven than rule in hell? The elements of a Catholic morality tale, at any rate, are all in place. Thérèse, sister of the departed Janvier, is living a Havisham-like existence on her unwanted inheritance and seems to be kept alive only by hatred and desire for vengeance. Chavel, under his newly assumed name of Charlot, feels it his mission to free her from this rancorous obsession. The redeeming power of love is brought into play. And his lawyerly little mind is well evoked as he rehearses the necessary special pleading in a nearby cabbage patch:

Already the charge against himself had been reduced to a civil case in which he could argue the terms of compensation. He wondered why last night he had despaired—this was no occasion for despair, he told himself, but for hope. He had something to live for, but somewhere at the back of his mind the shadow remained, like a piece of evidence he had deliberately not confided to the court.

A fair depiction of the trials of accidie and the temptations of guilt. And further confirmation that Greene is correct in supposing that he did write it. Not even the New Statesman competitors could have easily come up with:

“Can I have your blessing, father?”

“Of course.” He rubber-stamped the air like a notary and was gone.

Greene has traditionally divided his fiction into “novels” and “entertainments,” and it’s noticeable that neither definition is awarded to The Tenth Man. There is, at the last, no moral resolution to the story. Nor is there a completely memorable major character like Scobie or Wormald or Dr. Magiot. The final scenes resemble a Wildean or Gilbertian denouement, with people popping up randomly to contribute their individual “twists.”

Still, the saving seediness of the protagonists is an authentic Greene touch. Chavel/Charlot can torture himself all he wants, but there is no suggestion that a better man died in his place. The females are dreary; the fellow prisoners appallingly stoic; the sole resistant character is a resentful cripple. French society, sketched against a backdrop of shame and dislocation, is sufficiently bleak to satisfy the most ardent fan. The sole cheerful note is struck rather imperfectly by Carosse, the phony and carpetbagger who typifies the period and who almost spoils Chavel’s own imposture by a more inventive one of his own.

The Tenth Man may have been forgotten for decades, but it obviously contributed subliminal “prompts” to other better-known works. Betrayal, mistaken identity, remorse—these are the familiar themes. We learn in the author’s introduction that MI5 once proposed to MI6 an official-secrets prosecution on the basis of one of the fantasies here engendered. Who would have been indicted if C had given the go-ahead? Greene or the other man? Men are still told off by numbers, with a continuing search for someone to make up a fourth. We live on the porous boundary between Greeneland and reality.

(The Times Literary Supplement, March 15, 1985)

POOR DEAR CYRIL

THERE IS A difference between an epigram and an aphorism. Cyril Connolly, who certainly understood the distinction, seems never to have cared much about it. David Pryce-Jones, who refers to Connolly’s style as “aphoristic,” seems not to know the difference. An epigram is a witty saying or a deft observation. An aphorism is a concise or clever statement of a truth or a moral. Epigrams, then, are amoral, ephemeral, and often produced purely for effect, while aphorisms have a certain solemnity and preachiness. I think it no insult to Connolly to describe his stuff as, at its best, epigrammatic.

Oscar Wilde, somewhere, makes one of his characters a martyr to the epigram. The man is prepared to ruin his own argument or poison a valuable social occasion for the sake of coining a swift and memorable mot. Connolly seems to have been like that—fatally tempted by the bitchy remark or (if you’ll allow me) the momentary shaft. He would jeopardize friendship for gossip and dinner parties for one-liners. This was the destructive obverse, perhaps, of his youthful will to please, his discovery that being amusing and obliging was a hedge against ostracism. “Diverting” might be the word here, with its twin connotations of wit and deflection. For much of his life, Connolly seems to have put off the reckoning by reverting to the skills and artifices of boyhood.

“Boyhood” also seems an appropriate keyword. Connolly’s “Theory of Permanent Adolescence” seemed dated a couple of decades ago, with its stress on the retarding and narcissistic effects of public-school mores on English life. But it may have surfaced again, resplendent and reborn, in the half-affectionate cult of the Sloane Rangers and the recent influx of hereditary porkers into the House of Commons. Like Connolly himself, this generation seems doomed and determined to evolve from joli-laid into laid as fast as can be.

Pryce-Jones remarks quite aptly of Connolly in his book Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir, that, “with some part of himself, he managed to believe that his head start and his many privileges really had been handicaps.” Thus equipped, he fought a long battle against not deprivation but inanition. Decades seem to have gone by, on the evidence of this book, with its hero undergoing a random series of moods, fluxes, deferrals, fads, and lapses. The effect is enervating rather than otherwise, because Connolly’s changes of pace and rhythm give no impression of energy, but simply one of restlessness and occasional despair. It would be a chronicle of wasted time if it had not produced some writing of quality, and some worthwhile reflections on the elusive business of friendship.

Connolly rather specialized in epicene yearning and smoldering, as only an adolescent who has been smitten with his peers can yearn and smolder. In a letter to Robert Longden (“Bobbie”), written when he was at Oxford in 1924, he implored:

Anyhow please don’t sleep with Ronnie, he is too tall for you. Smith would be better (this is the page of a letter that one’s parents always find)… . I get awful лοθοσς here, not seeing a soul all day and having a nice bedroom with a fire.

Hero worship, jealousy, the classics—Simon Raven has spun trilogies out of less (without adding the slightly comfy and banal bit about the fire and the bedroom). But the impress of schooldays seems, as it does in Raven’s fictional betrayals, to be indelible. By 1939, with air raids and conscription in prospect, Connolly is writing of wartime that “if we’re all back at school one must be/a prefect.” Two major qualities of public-school life seem to have stayed with him despite his effort, in Enemies of Promise, to exorcise and ridicule the whole idea. The first was a certain eagerness to truckle and toady to those above or ahead of him: possible patrons like Berenson, Pearsall-Smith, and Nicolson. The second was a marked tendency to shun and scorn, not outcasts (Connolly enjoyed slumming and the demimonde), but the lower orders. On and on he goes about “Jews” and “niggers,” and his only qualm about enlisting as a special constable in the General Strike is that he may thereby “lose caste” with his more radical friends. Pryce-Jones’s memoir, you may guess, will fit snugly against the more substantial bookend formed by the Diaries of Evelyn Waugh.

Reviewing Enemies of Promise in Scrutiny, Q. D. Leavis frowned upon its “cosy social homogeneity” and claimed to detect “the relation between knowing the right people and getting accepted in advance of production as a literary value.” Pryce-Jones regards this as a smear and a caricature of how the “right people” emerge. How does he know? There is a rampart of evidence, much of it thrown up by Mr. Pryce-Jones, to show that Connolly was very careful indeed about the cultivation of contacts and outlets. Mrs. Leavis may have been unkind—Pryce-Jones oddly accuses her of being jealous—but it’s rash to assert that she wasn’t on to something.

This book takes the form of an unevenly cut sandwich. First is Pryce-Jones’s exegesis of Connolly’s life and early letters. Then comes a longish and slightly indigestible “journal,” spanning the years 1928–37 in the career of “CC” and his pals. Finally, there is a thin slice of eulogy and apologia. The central section is, I find, a bit rebarbative. Peter Quennell and Maurice Bowra and Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell and much of Bloomsbury and good old “Sligger” Urquhart, every nickname footnoted and every nuance spelled out in pokerface—do we really need all this again? There’s some quite cutting stuff about the New Statesman, which I shan’t give away, and some fresh glimpses here and there, but it’s really another dose of the familiar compound. By which I mean: a dash of the remittance man, some rackety traveling, a tincture of furtive sex (with much sniggering about lesbians), and the business of voyaging long distances the better to fret about some spoiled darling left behind in the Home Counties. Every emotion is either ecstatic or near-suicidal, with the result that both kinds are transitory or shallow. In The Rock Pool, one of the best novels of booze and anomie ever written, this mental atmosphere somehow works. Laid out in its original staccato jotting, it cloys very fast. The only really absorbing thing is Connolly’s gradual pupation into a heterosexual. Having left school under a cloud—a cloud no bigger than a boy’s hand—he comes to see the point of women, even if he does take a long and operatic time about it.

One comes back, or is returned, again and again to the business of “Permanent Adolescence.” Pryce-Jones is perceptive about this loom of Connolly’s youth, but occasionally very crass. In his reading of Orwell’s account of prep-school purgatory (“Such, Such Were the Joys”), he makes two extraordinary and unfair judgments. One, that Orwell did not care about the fate of a rich Russian contemporary—or at least about the fate of that contemporary’s father. Second, that Orwell used “albino” as a term of abuse. I challenge anybody to look up the essay and find for Pryce-Jones in this. And if he is dense about Connolly’s most famous school friend, how is one to weigh his other opinions?

Amid the longueurs and the repeated sense of being, like Connolly himself, stranded in time, this book does supply the outlines of a portrait. A portrait of a mood rather than an age, and of a manner rather than a personality. It contains one of the most tragic lines I have recently read (“Once married, Cyril was never thin again”) and one of the silliest (“Sexually,” said Harold Nicolson, “I represent a buffer state”). Parody and teasing are not quite enough, however. They seem to confirm, for Pryce-Jones as well as Connolly, the adage or maxim or apothegm or epigram or even aphorism that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first describe as “promising.”

(New Statesman, July 22, 1983)

I DARE SAY

THE EXISTENCE OF Mr. Reginald Maudling is a thing to marvel at, to ponder of a white night, and, if such is your way, to hoist high as an example. His Memoir is, appropriately enough, fat, boring, and dense. It is of interest only insofar as it shows the workings of an instinctively reactionary and commonplace mind. The prose is as primitive as the politics. Here, for instance, is his summary of the Dutschke deportation: “One of the hazards of a Home Secretary is that he is bound to bump into a certain amount of such cases, and the passions that arise are very considerable.” No further revelation of that nasty little episode is permitted.

Maudling is, in like manner, evasive and unilluminating about his role in the internment crisis in Ulster. The entire account of his most important political catastrophe takes up three vapid paragraphs, compared with eight devoted to his prep- and public-school days. Your reviewer began to squirm in his chair when the scene moved to Oxford. “Life in Oxford in the mid-1930’s was extremely agreeable. It was to some extent over-shadowed by the growing menace of Hitler.” It is, I assure you, all as fresh and crisp as that. Sodden, Rotary Club style is the order of the day, and I think the book must have been dictated (probably to the long-suffering Beryl, judging by the number of random tributes to her many qualities). Take, for example, Maudling’s reflections on the Real Estate Fund of America:

One of the great advantages of my business appointments was that they made it possible for me to travel extensively. I think it is of very great value to this country and to the world generally, that both politicians and businessmen should be able to travel widely, and to meet one another. The problem, of course, is one of money.

Just so. As for his relationship with Jerome Hoffman, in case you are interested, he merely says that “for some time after I had resigned the Fund seemed to prosper … but then it collapsed along with other funds operating in the same field.” He omits Hoffman’s record of fraud and his spell in the slammer.

It’s conventionally said of Maudling that, although lazy and incompetent, he’s really quite cuddly and acceptable. I don’t think this is true at all. He was once told by his headmaster that he was vain and selfish, and that shot was right on the mark. But he’s also a natural authoritarian, sycophantic to the strong and contemptuous of the weak. (The victims of Bloody Sunday, for instance, don’t even rate a line here.)

He says of William Armstrong, whom he met at Oxford, “Was there ever a man more clearly destined to become Head of the Treasury?” Was there ever a more fat-headed remark about the worst Head of the Treasury since the war? He says of Suez: “I certainly believe it was a morally correct action.” He says of Vietnam that the Americans went “to leave their own blood and treasure there, in defense of what they thought to be right.” After resigning over the Poulson affair, he remembers receiving from Henry Kissinger, who had problems of his own, a handwritten letter from the White House, of the most friendly kind. Terrific. The absence of any reflective or critical capacity is astounding—or would be, if we did not have his political record as a reminder.

Even where he makes some shift to be interesting, as he does on the Middle East, he contrives to leave a nasty taste. Despite his buffoonlike asides on Suez, Maudling is rather pro-Arab, and especially pro the fat and rich ones. He records some absorbing visits to the area and says that he is not popular with sensitive Jewish opinion. Then he spoils the whole thing by talking of a “final solution” for Israel—as unhappy and sloppy a phrase as he could have picked. As Thatcher looms, there are plenty of wiseacres to say that the Heath team was more statesmanlike, more in touch, more realistic, and more tolerant. Memory, hold the door. Here is a book that reminds us of what kind of people they were. No impulse for nostalgia need arise. We are well shot of Reggie.

(New Statesman, June 30, 1978)

THE MOUTH OF FOOT

IN THE FOLLOWING passages, who is being assessed by whom?

It is the superlative ease, the unruffled assurance with which that mind works, which first impresses those who meet him. One can hardly hear the mechanism working at all and yet the results have a perfect precision. Without any sense of strain or pretention, that marvellous instrument absorbs all the arguments presented to it and sifts from them an endless flow of conclusions framed in smooth, yet vibrant English.

Or, in a comparable vein:

What [he] so valiantly stood for could have saved his country from the Hungry Thirties and the Second World War … genius.

The first paragraph is an appreciation of Lord Goodman. The second is a paean to Sir Oswald Mosley. The author in both cases is Michael Foot.

He exhibits here (as he does at much greater length in Debts of Honour) the three distinctive traits of his character as author and as politician. These are a deep reverence for the Establishment, especially for its more gamy ornaments; a fascination with certain reactionary rebels; and a prose style which relies on hyperbole for such effect as it can command.

There is a fourth ingredient, only hinted at in the above. It is a pervasive and amusing variety of chauvinist Anglophobia—very highly developed and of an intensity usually found only among Americans.

This ought to make for an enjoyable if not very enlightening read. But it doesn’t. The treacly exaggerations start to cloy after a while; it’s like eating a whole box of chocolate creams. Swift is “the foremost exponent of lucidity in the English language.” Max Aitken “was as handsome as Apollo, as swiftly moving as Mercury.” Isaac Foot “must have been just about the happiest man who ever lived.” Randolph Churchill “set the Thames, the Hudson, the Tiber or the Danube on fire with his boiling intoxicant invective.” There is no subtlety, no light or shade. Everybody has got to be larger than life.

Foot was apprenticed to flattery at the court of Beaverbrook and learned his trade well. The longest essay in this collection of profiles and memoirs concerns the old monster himself. He would not be able to claim that Foot did not take him at his own valuation. Apparently Beaverbrook favored the “rumbustious, marauding private enterprise system which had enabled him to become a multi- or as he would call it, a Maxi-millionaire.” And which enabled him to keep Foot (and to a more parsimonious extent, Tribune) in fair old style. Luckily, Beaverbrook was quite nice if you really knew him, as well as “a volcano of laughter which went on erupting till the end.”

This rebarbative style is more of a trudge when it is used to praise a good man than when it is employed to whitewash a villain. Ignazio Silone was a very great writer and a very fine comrade. But he was not “the New Machiavelli” and didn’t pretend to be. Bertrand Russell was and remains an inspiration in philosophy and politics. But who really regards him as a “Philosopher Englishman”? And how many takers for the following estimate?

He became one of the chief glories of our nation and people, and I defy anyone who loves the English language and the English heritage to think of him without a glow of patriotism.

What the hell, one is moved to inquire, has that got to do with it? It might be truer to say that Russell would resent very much any attempt to annex him and his thought in such a way. A man who gave so much of himself to other countries, and who was so opposed to the crappy orthodoxies of British arrogance, cannot be captured in lines and thoughts like Foot’s. Not that Foot’s admiration for Russell is feigned. I should say that most of his essay on Tom Paine was inspired by a piece Russell wrote in 1934—except that Foot inserts a factual error about Jefferson that Russell did not make.

This tendency to hero worship results in some very bizarre formulations. Say what you like about Disraeli (“the Good Tory”), it is difficult to recognize anything “Byronic” in his career or in his novels. Yet that is the precise epithet Foot selects for him. There is a great deal yet to be learned about Robert Blatchford, but it will not be found out by calling him “just about the best writer of books about books there ever was.” For one thing, such praise is meaningless. For another thing, it elides the obvious about Blatchford—his miserable declension from an affected socialism to an unaffected racialism and insularity. Perhaps Foot finds the reminiscence an uncomfortable one.

The obverse of Foot’s credulity about people and institutions (who now remembers his slavishly adoring biography of Harold Wilson?) is an unattractive streak of sentiment. He manages to enlist a kind of sympathy when he writes about H. N. Brailsford or about Vicky. Even though the Brailsford essay is clotted with overwriting (“glorious,” “imperishable,” etcetera), one can see that Foot does not need to strain for effect on this occasion. The subject matter tells its own story.

But all the rest is rambling and bluff. Apparently Sarah Churchill, “given her magnificent head,” could have salvaged England in the reign of Queen Anne. Apparently “the magnanimous English Left, led as usual by the Irish,” came to the rescue of Jonathan Swift. These reworkings have at least the merit of improbability (especially in the latter case, coming as it does from the Orangemen’s best friend—the man who dealt them a new hand to buy Callaghan an extra month).

I don’t think that Foot can ever have blotted out a line. The collection is much harder to read than it must have been to write. Did he, for instance, really mean to say the following about his poor wife?

The room of her own, the room where she works when she is not cooking, gardening, shopping, cleaning, making beds, entertaining and the rest, is a feminist temple, a shrine dedicated to the cause of women’s rights.

If this is one of Foot’s arch bits of self-mockery, I think we should be told. When a man can write about Beaverbrook that “I loved him, not merely as a friend but as a second father,” one needs a stone of some sort to separate parody from the real thing.

The point about hero worship is not that you may be worshipping the wrong hero. It is that you surrender your reason and suspend your critical faculties. Foot’s book on Aneurin Bevan, though written with much greater care than the present collection, is a disappointment because it makes its subject into a devotional figure and thus greatly exaggerates his real importance in our time. Issues like Churchill’s conduct of the war, Tito’s treatment of political opposition, or the Russian invasion of Hungary are shaped in a Procrustean fashion to fit Bevan’s own role. The book cannot be read (unlike, say, Isaac Deutscher s biography of Trotsky) as a guide to the period in which the central figure operated.

Still less do any of these portraits fulfill that necessary function. Once you start calling Beaverbrook a “buccaneer,” it is only a short while before you find you have written this:

The military vision of Churchill and his chief advisers was still fixed on other and lesser objectives and it was Beaverbrook who, within the Cabinet, seized and sustained the initiative to turn the national energies along the road of commonsense.

Eh? Does Foot read his articles through when he’s finished?

Foot is never happier than when writing about World War II. It is a favorite theme in his contemporary speeches as well. He seems to remember a period of social harmony, democratic impulse, and social innovation. His famous polemic Guilty Men (which he penned under the nom de guerre of Cato) has an account of Dunkirk that could have come from the Boy’s Own Paper. Such an attitude, which might have made agitational sense in wartime, has more than outlived its usefulness. I remember hearing Foot invoke the spirit of Dunkirk in the Commons on the night Labour lost the vote of confidence in 1979; it was ghastly to hear the titters of the Tories and to see the embarrassment on the Labour benches.

In 1940, also, it might have been permissible for a socialist to write as if Britain did not have an empire (though Orwell, for one, kept insisting that the subject be remembered). Foot contrives to daub his portrait of Beaverbrook as if the man had never been an imperialist at all. He does have the grace to recall “Max” at the time of Munich, but only to mention it as an aberration. For the rest, this beautiful friendship, and its seminal role in Our Island Story, is preserved and mummified forever in scented prose. It seems almost unkind to disturb it now.

Foot is a charming old ham in one way, and one should not be surprised at his liking for fellow hams. He has given plenty of harmless pleasure to hopeful audiences in his time. Some say that his present attachment to the most flagrant conservatism is the result of a “mellowing” process. Others talk darkly of a “sellout.” But, as far as can be discerned, Foot is quite right to claim consistency in his own record.

He has never been otherwise than a poseur, moving smoothly, for instance, from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament into Callaghan’s Inner Cabinet on the Cruise missiles and back into irrelevant pacifist attitudes. Like Disraeli, he is a quick-change artist. The objection comes when he dresses up this act as socialism and thus disfigures a good idea. (Just as he here proposes Disraeli as a radical—because he once gave a civil audience to that old fraud and chauvinist H. M. Hyndman.)

In his brief essay on Vicky’s enduring cartoons, Foot asks the reader, “And, if he had lived, which of us would have escaped the lash?” Good question. I believe that there does exist a link between Foot’s gullibility as a person, his credulity as a profile writer, and his disqualifications as a politician. The same weakness of character that makes him fawn in print makes him a conformist in politics. The same glutinous style (he even writes of the acid Defoe that “the truth he had bottled up within himself for so long poured out in golden spate”) has its analogue in the gross sentimentality which marks his public speaking.

A good test is this: listen to a Foot speech, whether made on a party conference platform or in the House of Commons. Mark the dewy response it sometimes gets. Then grab a copy of Hansard or the conference report and read the thing. Full of evasions, crammed with corny special pleading, usually rounded off with an appeal for unity, and generally couched, behind its rhetorical mask, in terms of strict political orthodoxy. A classic case is his defense of Mrs. Gandhi’s merciless Emergency, where a crude and reactionary political maneuver was defended by Foot as an inheritance from the splendid days of Congress, and a necessary insurance against “destabilisation.”

Another relationship exists in the matter of detail. Whether he is writing about Tom Paine or justifying the last Labour government’s breaking of the firemen’s strike, Foot likes to deal in sweeping generalities. He once echoed Lamb’s toast to Hazlitt, “Confusion to Mathematics,” by proposing the toast “Confusion to Economics.” How predictable, then, that he would become the stout defender of the most dismally conventional economic policy when he got anywhere near power. And how regrettable, when discussing Tom Paine, that he should say, with habitual absolutism, that Jefferson “never wavered” in his high opinion of Paine. It is important, in any evaluation of Paine’s American years, to recall the coldness that did interrupt his relationship with Jefferson.

These details matter. In Britain, it is pretty easy to get a reputation as a radical. The standard of our politicians is such that, when they prove literate at all, they are hailed as Romantics, Renaissance men, Revivalists. The timing of this book could not have been more fortunate; we shall be able to examine both vainglorious claims at once.

The best interim obituary may be that written about Foot’s hero Disraeli by Lady Gwendolen Cecil:

He was always making use of convictions that he did not share, pursuing objects which he could not own, manoeuvring his party into alliances which though unobjectionable from his own standpoint were discreditable and indefensible from theirs. It was an atmosphere of pervading falseness which involved his party as well as himself.

(New Statesman, November 14, 1980)

BORN-AGAIN CONFORMIST

I

ANGLO-AMERICAN commentary on “culture and society” has sometimes been infiltrated by writers who believe they are Orwell but who think like Babbitt. Norman Podhoretz, for example, is to Manhattan what Bernard Levin has become to London’s commuter belt—a born-again conformist with some interesting disorders of the ego. If this seems an excessive way to begin a consideration of a “serious” writer, then recall what Alfred Kazin wrote in his essay on the brave days of Podhoretz’s own magazine Commentary:

There is real madness to modern governments, modern war, modern moneymaking, advertising, science and entertainment; this madness has been translated by many a Jewish writer into the country they live in, the time that offers them everything but hope. In a time of intoxicating prosperity, it has been natural for the Jewish writer to see how superficial society can be, how pretentious, atrocious, unstable—and comic.

There is the measure of Podhoretz’s betrayal. Kazin was writing in 1966. One year later, Podhoretz published Making It, a drooling libation to the bitch-goddess success, in which he made his peace with intoxicating prosperity and abandoned the crisp, even lucid style of his earliest critical writings. Making It was an awful book all right, but it did have certain attractive qualities of the chutzpah sort—a kind of eagerness and a wideness of the eyes.

In Breaking Ranks, the eyes have narrowed appreciably. Podhoretz here makes his peace with modern government, modern war, and modern moneymaking. Robert Lekachman has described the jacket photograph as “the spitting image of a central banker age 70 who has just plunged his country into a depression for its own good.” I think it more closely resembles a man about to unload some underwater real estate. Podhoretz sets down, in the wretchedly affected form of an open letter to his son, the experience of personal assimilation and adjustment, the business of growing up out of “radicalism.” Like many letters nowadays, this one gives the impression of having been typed rather than written. It is a torment to read, but it does offer some clues to the mind-set of the neoconservative—more especially the insecure, name-dropping, self-obsessed, and slipshod variety.

The first and most obvious thing to say about Podhoretz is that he is an ex-radical in the same way that Richard Nixon is an ex-President. He never had any real claim on the noble title. His boldest ever essay was “My Negro Problem,” written in 1963, when he advocated planned miscegenation in a style offensively glib. This qualification does not restrain him from a tremendous exhibition of self-regard as the man who single-handedly defied the “Left Establishment.”

While it is true that New York publishing has had a febrile tendency to the radical chic (and a parallel tendency to overreact to the egregious Podhoretz, thus confirming him in his conviction of martyrdom), you would not find our Norman querying the local narcissism for an instant. It is indeed, for him, the very breath of life. It’s no exaggeration to say that his review of the reviews of Making It gets more space than Vietnam, desegregation, nuclear weaponry, environmentalism, and Watergate all put together. But this is not the chief failure of proportion and perspective. If Manhattan is the navel of the world, and if it groans under a marxisant dictatorship, then what does that make Norman? Why, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn combined—what else?

Should this sound like an overstatement, try the following as an example. Podhoretz has already made the straight-faced claims that “Making It did more than fly in the face of the radical party line” and that it made him “a traitor to [his] class.” Then Norman Mailer dumped on the book too. Listen:

The fact that Norman Mailer—a founding father and patron saint of the “Left Establishment” and, though not perhaps quite so brave as he thought he was, much less cowardly in this respect than most—should have felt himself forced into a maneuver like this was all the proof anyone could have needed that the “terror” had become pervasive and efficient enough to make strong men quake and to leave no one feeling safe.

Sic. This preposterous extract gives a representative flavor of Podhoretz’s clichéd and dismal style, as well as of his insulting manner. To compare his salon bust-up with the reality of Stalinist terror—leave alone the reality of McCarthyite persecution about which Commentary was always so equivocal—makes the paranoia of F. R. Leavis (Podhoretz’s old supervisor) seem like mildness itself.

But if only that were all. Just as Making It dropped the name of Leavis whenever possible, so Breaking Ranks is larded with references to Lionel Trilling. Trilling was an authentic defender of the “reasonable” and the “moderate,” in a fashion Podhoretz tries in vain to emulate. He is prayed in aid, often in ways he might not have admitted, throughout these pages. Only once is he abused—for advising Podhoretz not to publish Making It in the first place. Suddenly, sycophancy is replaced by its twin brother of spite:

I did not understand until much later, and then only in the light of how Trilling would conduct himself in the coming years, how telling a sign it was of his own failure of nerve.

Everything, then, is defined in relation to Podhoretz. He has all the third-rater’s loathing for those people better equipped to face high tasks and principles. Gnawed (if we are to be charitable) by this sense of his own paucity, he’s driven to a series of ungenerous and inaccurate sketches. On Noam Chomsky:

Far from reciprocating the support he had received from the American government, Chomsky was later to issue a bitter denunciation of his fellow intellectuals for being pro-American, though unlike him, many he denounced had never received any government grants.

On Irving Howe:

Yet in view of the fact that the socialism to which he was committed had no discernible content, I began to think that his stubborn loyalty to the word, as well as the idea, came out of the same primitive loyalty that made so many Jews go on calling themselves Jews.

On A. J. Muste:

Whatever else Muste exuded, he looked and talked even less like a winner than [Norman] Thomas.

On Jason Epstein:

Jason felt trapped by the life. I felt trapped by the ideas. Together we made a team.

In the sense that he is incapable of representing an opposing viewpoint, Podhoretz does not really qualify as an intellectual at all. The patronizing and low-rent level of those (typical) quotations is depressed still further by Norman’s other dirty little habit. He throws off names (Delmore Schwartz, Hannah Arendt, Philip Rahv) as if to suggest—never quite claiming—that they somehow associated themselves with the author.

As a result, everything Podhoretz does or says is on the record. One imagines him tooling off to keep a luncheon appointment with a publisher and mentally intoning, “It was on March 12, 1976, that Podhoretz went to have lunch at Harper & Row …” But he gets nervous at the absence of witnesses, and makes them up, too.

So it seems that Making It was not a catharsis. Nor did its title intend any saving irony. Podhoretz really is like that: the child was father to the man. His latest autobiography of an autobiography has the piss and vinegar of the original—only it’s gone sour. Even the self-deprecation is now conceited. This finds its corollary, as do his cheap portraits of American radicals, in a certain power-worshipping trait.

For not everyone is insulted here. Lyndon Johnson is held up as a model President, combining agrarian shrewdness with a capacity as “one of the great senators of modern times.” Daniel Moynihan, of course, can do no wrong (Podhoretz even tells one of his jokes twice in his excitement—a joke, moreover, which he would surely denounce as snobbish radicalism if told by anyone else). He weaves in some slightly ambiguous toadying to the Kennedy family. Leslie Fiedler is described in a rather otiose way as “the wildly brilliant literary critic.” There’s also some posturing around the idea that Podhoretz “knows” England and can synthesize its finest into the pages of his magazine:

There were, for example, R, H. S. Crossman, C. A. R. Crosland and Denis Healey—all future cabinet ministers and all talented intellectuals by any definition of that term (they were all, by the way, past or future contributors to Commentary as well).

Talented and intellectual. Better still:

Machines and factories—those “dark Satanic mills” which as William Blake had said as far back as the late eighteenth century were ruining “England’s green and pleasant land.”

Oh, that Blake.

After all this, it’s just a weary duty to record that Podhoretz thinks Vietnam was no more than “a mistake” (and never confronts the case of those he slanders for taking the harder view). Or that he only mentions Kissinger once, to accuse him of being too tender-minded in dealing with the OPEC nations. Or that he feels that “the underlying belief of Amerian radicalism in the 1960s was that all the sufferings of the human heart were caused and could therefore be cured by laws and kings.” Like all reactionaries who think that they are against the stream, and who appear to believe in his case that American power is controlled by The New York Review of Books, Podhoretz winds up mouthing mainstream commonplaces under the illusion that he is saying the unsayable.

One need not be a “liberal” to object to his desecration of that ambivalent but honorable term. He doesn’t even seem to know what he’s talking about. On page 117, he speaks slightingly of “the liberal idea that any and all technological advances were to be welcomed.” Later he records and overstates Trilling’s view that the whole literary tradition (and ipso facto a goodish bit of what Podhoretz defines as liberalism) stands in opposition to industrialism and the industrial revolution. It doesn’t matter so much that both statements are misleading as it does that they do not cohere. Podhoretz, once again, is chewing more than he bites off.

His “book” concludes with a hail of badly aimed shafts at the sexual-minority movements. This is no more than a grace note to the crashing chords of nonsense and venom that have gone before. Podhoretz, the man who says, “in 1970, shortly after my growing doubts about radicalism had coalesced and come to a head in a conviction so blazing that it ignited an all-out offensive against the Movement”—this same Podhoretz ends up whining about contraception and homosexuality Commentary was once flatteringly termed an organ of the “military-intellectual complex.” To criticize its editor in his own terms would be to echo Kazin’s phrasing—superficial, pretentious, atrocious, unstable, and (unconsciously) comic.

(New Statesman, March 21, 1980)

II

On January 13, 1898, Georges Clemenceau’s Paris newspaper, L’Aurore, published an article over the name of Emile Zola. In it, Zola denounced the military, political, judicial, and clerical hierarchies of France. He excoriated the cynicism and the brutishness of those who had condemned Captain Alfred Dreyfus, and he made it plain that their actions were infected with, and motivated by, anti-Jewish bigotry. The article compelled the retrial of Dreyfus and led to his eventual acquittal and reinstatement. It also changed France more than any polemic had done since Voltaire or Marx. In 1945, when Charles Maurras, the spiritual leader of French fascism, was convicted of collaborating with the Nazis, he denounced the verdict as “the revenge of Dreyfus.”

Looked at in one way, the Dreyfus case was historic and encouraging because it was the first occasion on which a European country divided itself passionately on the question of justice for a Jew. Dreyfus was victimized, but also vindicated. The legions of the Catholic Church and the other anti-Semitic rabble were beaten. Theodor Herzl, who witnessed the Christian mobs calling for the death of Jews, drew the equal and opposite conclusion. He was sufficiently affected to conclude that Jews would never be safe in Europe, and from his reaction to the Dreyfus case we can date the birth of modern Zionism.

Zola’s germinal article was entitled “J’Accuse.” In an article in the September 1982 issue of Commentary (written before the Beirut massacres), Norman Podhoretz felt morally and personally secure enough to appropriate the title for his own purpose. He argued, or at any rate asserted, that the outraged response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon could be compared to the anti-Dreyfus frenzy. In short, he accused the critics of Sharon and Begin of being anti-Semitic.

That is an old argument, and anybody who has ever written critically about Israel can testify to its force. Anti-Semites are usually but not invariably anti-Zionist. Some critics of Israel are anti-Semitic. Some Jews regard Zionism as a blasphemous assault on the teachings of their religion. Some Zionists were pro-fascist (like Begin’s mentor, Jabotinsky). Some Nazis were even sympathetic to Zionism. The author of the Balfour Declaration, Arthur Balfour, disliked very much the prospect of Jewish immigration to Britain and spoke hotly of the “dual loyalty” problems it would create. The leading opponent of the Balfour Declaration in the Cabinet, Edwin Montague, was also its only Jew. He described Zionism as “anti-Semitic in result.”

Taken singly, these examples may be mere ironies. Taken together, they show that there is no necessary—no logical—identity between anti-Israeli (or anti-Begin) views and anti-Jewish ones. Anti-Semites are people who dislike Jews because they are Jews. Moreover, they dislike them for reasons not merely of complexion or physique or supposed inferiority, but for reasons having to do with religion, history, secrecy, mysticism, blood, soil, and gold. Given the “right” circumstances, such a prejudice can and does become murderous and unappeasable. To be accused of harboring it, therefore, is no joke.

Curiously, Podhoretz does not actually accuse anyone of harboring it. He plants a few innuendoes against individuals, but he isn’t enough of a Zola to deal in plain words or to offer any evidence. Apparently, the new wave of anti-Semitism in America has no active anti-Semites in it. This certainly distinguishes it from its historical predecessors and must come as something of a relief to anybody who has studied or experienced previous periods of pogrom or intolerance. (In Poland in 1968, there was an anti-Jewish purge mounted under an anti-Zionist guise. Nobody was in any doubt as to the identity of those responsible, and their leader, General Mieczyslaw Moczar, is notorious to this day.)

The nearest Podhoretz comes to a definition is this:

For example, whereas the possibility of a future threat to its borders was (rightly in my opinion) deemed a sufficient justification by the United States under John F. Kennedy to go to the brink of war in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the immense caches of arms discovered in PLO dumps in Southern Lebanon have not persuaded many of the very people who participated in or applauded Kennedy’s decision that the Israelis were at least equally justified in taking action against the PLO in Lebanon.

Criticism of Israel based on a double standard deserves to be called anti-Semitic.

This argument has a long way to go before it is even half-baked. But it is revealing stuff, all the same. Apparently, if you supported Kennedy over Cuba and you don’t support Begin and Sharon over Lebanon, you are a Jewbaiter. Well. What if (like many Jews) you opposed Kennedy and support Sharon? What if (like any sane person) you opposed Kennedy’s readiness to destroy the human race in his undeclared war on Castro and now oppose Sharon?

Podhoretz does admit what has become obvious: that “loose or promiscuous use of the term anti-Semitism can only rob it of force and meaning.” As if sensing the swamp of gibberish that is opening at his feet, he adds generously: “Conversely, criticisms of Israel based on universally applied principles and tempered by a sense of balance in the distribution of blame cannot and should not be stigmatized as anti-Semitic, however mistaken or dangerous to Israel one might consider them to be.”

Responses to the mass killings at the Shatila and Sabra camps are, it might be thought, as nearly in conformity with those criteria as it is possible to be. The Israeli army occupied West Beirut, in defiance of an earlier agreement, on the pretext of securing law and order. It admits that it permitted the Phalangist troops to enter the camps. It cannot claim, having armed and trained the Phalange for years, not to know of its views on Palestinians.

Then came the flares, the bulldozers, and the rest. Here, surely, is a case that by any standards would expose the army responsible to criticism. Armed with Podhoretz’s own criteria, I wondered what he would say about it.

On September 24, he surfaced in The Washington Post to assert that those making a fuss about Shatila were anti-Semitic. This must mark a new low. Apart from abandoning his own rather lax standard of what is permissible in the criticism of Israel, Podhoretz is defaming, as bigots or self-haters, many of the most eminent Jews in Israel and the United States. We don’t yet have a term for this prejudice.

There are two remaining ironies in Podhoretz’s article. In seeking to excuse and minimize the massacre, he resurrects the old argument about the Palestinians being the authors of their own destruction. By having armed men in their midst, so runs this view, they invite death from the skies or murder by night. (There don’t seem to have been any guerrillas to defend Shatila or Sabra, but that is beside the point.) I hope, very sincerely, that Podhoretz’s logic (which is also official Israeli logic) is never used against the Jewish settlers in the West Bank. These people, who are opposed by the Arab inhabitants not because they are Jews but because they are settlers, have made their homes and enclaves into armed camps with the help of the ever-considerate Sharon. Should the world shrug if someday civilians are massacred there?

Podhoretz wrote very warmly in his Commentary article of Menachem Milson, then head of the occupation authority in the West Bank. He spoke of Milson’s distinction between the PLO and the Palestinians. He said, sardonically, that “the PLO and its apologists have naturally done everything in their power to sabotage and discredit Milson.” But it took more than that to get him out of office. It took Sharon. Milson, a hard-liner and a writer for Commentary, resigned his post over the Shatila/Sabra affair. Podhoretz, writing after that extraordinary piece of news, talks as if Milson, too, were a victim of anti-Semitic paranoia. No theoretical reductio ad absurdum could be more crushing. Even William Buckley, leader and teacher of the American Phalange, was forced to tell Podhoretz in two public epistles that his cry of anti-Semitism was not intellectually reputable.

On one point, though, Podhoretz is right. It is indecent and illiterate to compare Israel to Nazi Germany. But not all those who do this can possibly be ill-intentioned. Rabbi Arnold Wolf, former Jewish chaplain at Yale, said of Shatila, “It’s Babi Yar all over again and this time we’re not innocent.” The rabbi was obviously reaching for a standard of cruelty and horror that matched the crime. But he’s still wrong: Babi Yar was part of a process of literal genocide. “Genocide,” along with “Final Solution” and “Holocaust,” is a term not to be lightly used for propaganda. By the same token, it is wrong for the Israeli government to speak of the Palestinians as neo-Nazis and for Israeli apologists to invoke the Holocaust against every criticism. If the moral chaos exists, it is partly because of Israeli special pleading. Podhoretz should also object to that, but he doesn’t.

No honest person would be the loser if the morally blackmailing argument of “anti-Semitism” were dropped from the discourse. Any fool can tell a real anti-Semite a mile off. Any fool can see that the Phalangists are in the same tradition as the persecutors of Dreyfus. Any fool can see that Begin uses the memory of the Holocaust to muffle his own guilt. But it takes a real fool to confuse the editor of Commentary with Emile Zola. Who the hell does Podhoretz think he is?

(The Nation, October 9, 1982)

THE TROUBLE WITH HENRY

I

WHEN I HAD finished digesting The White House Years, I was so replete with its mendacity and conceit that I took a vow. I swore that I would never read another work by Henry Kissinger until the publication of his prison letters. But the old prayer “O Lord, Let Mine Enemy Write a Book” has proved too strong not to be answered once again.

How does one review a book like Years of Upheaval for a magazine like The Nation? After all, our readers have been battered by a revelation or two in their time. It would be insulting to “reveal” to them that Kissinger lies about his part in the Nixon bugging scandal and otiose to inform them that he still cannot face the truth about the bombing of Cambodia and the subversion of Chile. I suppose one might resort, in the light of Seymour Hersh’s excellent forensic material, to some discussion of Kissinger’s complicity with Nixon’s anti-Semitism. If I interviewed the king of Saudi Arabia, and he droned on about “Jewish traitors,” and I replied, “Well, your majesty, there are Jews and Jews,” would I get respectful reviews from people named Max Frankel and Stanley Hoffmann?

So let’s get the obvious out of the way, and the power-worshipping reviewers along with it. This entire book is predicated on an enormous and conscious falsehood. Kissinger (or HAK, as he calls himself in photograph captions) would have us believe that he was constructing an intelligent and imaginative foreign policy, which was haltered and finally crippled by an extraneous force. It’s as if HAK were plowing a harmless furrow and was hit by lightning out of a clear sky. Hersh’s material shows that Kissinger was implicated not only in the actual violations that became known as Watergate but in the power plays overseas that made the illegal invigilations “necessary.” Q.E.D. Kissinger lies. What does this prove except that we have credulous book critics?

So we need not waste time exploding HAK’s apologia. It is, like the policy on which it was based, autodestructive. The volume repays study all the same. It contains, for instance, the following aperçu:

Hanoi and Washington had inflicted grievous wounds on each other; theirs were physical, ours psychological and thus perhaps harder to heal.

And this:

Our immediate task was to stop the war; to remove nuclear weapons from Greece while Turkey invaded Cyprus would eliminate all restraints on Turkish military action. I also feared that if we once withdrew nuclear weapons we might never be able to return them—setting a dangerous precedent.

And this:

No nuclear weapon has ever been used in modern wartime conditions.

What have we here? What we have is an appalling moral deafness. And a species of doublethink whereby the “wounds” of Washington and Hanoi can be equated, whereby the country that ceases to harbor nuclear weapons becomes “dangerous,” and whereby the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be simply forgotten. Many people on the left become embarrassed by talk of morality; they prefer to insist that it is policies and institutions, not individuals and personalities, that really “count.” Now, it is probably true that the policies Kissinger followed and the leaders he served demanded a robotic and ruthless operative. But, on the evidence of this horrible book, the specific character of HAK did make a life-and-death difference to thousands of people.

The thing is so badly written that the eye often slides over the atrocities (how on earth could Stanley Hoffmann praise the style?). Take this small but useful example. During the October 1973 war in the Middle East, the Portuguese government was reluctant to let its airfields be used for the resupply of Israel:

I had therefore drafted a Presidential letter of unusual abruptness to Portuguese Prime Minister Marcelo Caetano that refused military equipment and threatened to leave Portugal to its fate in a hostile world. By the middle of Saturday afternoon, the Portuguese gave us unconditional transit rights at Lajes airbase.

There you have it—the relish in bullying and the implication, always present in the book, that you have to play hardball in this world if you want results. But there is no mention of the client status of the Portuguese dictatorship elsewhere, no mention of the colonial wars it was fighting with HAK’s support, and no mention at all of the Portuguese revolution that took place the following year. So, when he comes to describe his tussle with Congress over intervention in Angola, HAK has abolished all the complexity of recent history by simple elision.

There is only one occasion when HAK admits the prime importance of local factors and allows that the internal life of a nation is more than the sum of its links to the United States. That is when he seeks to wriggle off the hook about Chile. He would prefer us to think of the coup as something spontaneously generated by endogenous conditions. (He also asks us to believe that Allende committed suicide.) As usual, he achieves his effect by a combination of omission—there’s nothing on the famous “make the economy scream” meeting—and special pleading. He also stretches the definition of euphemism by admitting that, after Pinochet took power, “rumors of torture were widespread.” Just read the sentence twice—you will have done more than the editors of this book or most of its reviewers have done.

You can, of course, agree with The New Republic, whose reviewer was Walter Laqueur. As he puts it in his worldly way, “It’s an all too well-established fact that prolonged government service … usually has a debilitating effect on a person’s ability to write.” Passing over the matter of Laqueur’s own fluency, and forgetting the stylistic contributions of, say, Churchill, Talleyrand, Trotsky, and de Gaulle, and bearing in mind that Laqueur makes this point in order to praise Kissinger’s writing ability, I beg to differ. It is not politics and good writing that do not mix. It is the great mass of lies and crimes, moldering undigested at HAK’s core, that makes his style so evasive and convoluted. Hardest to take are the moments of crackerbarrel philosophy that punctuate the narrative: “It is easy to go with the tide; more difficult to judge where the tide is going.” Lots of that kind of thing.

Very occasionally, there is a moment of genuine re-elation and interest; Usually, these occur when HAK is trying to justify himself. The following, for instance, is a useful account of the real logic of the Nixon foreign policy:

Détente helped rather than hurt the American defense effort. Before the word détente was even known in America the Congress cut $40 billion from the defense budgets of Nixon’s first term; even so dedicated a supporter of American strength as Senator Henry M. Jackson publicly advocated small defense cuts and a “prudent defense posture.” After the signing of SALT I, our defense budget increased and the Nixon and Ford administrations put through the strategic weapons (the MX missile, B-l bomber, cruise missiles, Trident submarines, and more advanced warheads) that even a decade later are the backbone …

Etcetera, etcetera. I imagine that paragraph, at least, will be read with consuming interest in Moscow.

This book is a dishonest account of a period in which America’s internal politics were debauched (it was the legal system, not the “liberals,” that did in Nixon) and its foreign policy became synonymous with dictatorship and aggression. Reading it really made me feel sick. There’s a lot of talk these days, much of it flatulent, about various “hangovers” of the 1960s. There are a lot of things about the 1960s that I don’t miss. But, to judge by the reception accorded this volume, one thing we seem to have lost is the ability to be shocked—morally shocked—by politicians. There has been a dulling of the nerve of outrage. This encourages Kissinger, in the supreme arrogance with which he closes his book, actually to pose the question of whether he was too good for us. Get hold of Years of Upheaval. It deserves, as we say in the trade, the widest possible audience. In its pages, and in the parallel text which Seymour Hersh is supplying, you can see the character of the real totalitarians. The men who frame and blackmail their domestic opponents and murder their foreign ones. The men who believe that nuclear warfare is justified and guerrilla warfare is not.

(The Nation, June 5, 1982)

II

A favorite anodyne, and a plausible last resort for dubious characters in tight corners, is the one that runs, “Well, I think we should concentrate on issues rather than personalities.” Usually, this defense is employed by people who have spent entire careers projecting their own, or somebody else’s, “personality” and who are faced with the uneasy realization that the poor candidate has become threadbare or been caught out. Skeptics and freethinkers, sickened by overemphasis on image and public relations, often fall for this baited line. But a moment’s thought will show that personalities do matter, in politics no less than in any other field. The German elections of 1933 were the last occasion on which all Germans were allowed a free vote. It would be hard to maintain that the voting was not—well—a trifle personalized. The victorious candidate was, to be sure, the instrument of greater forces than the mere individual. Nonetheless …

All this ought to be obvious, but I’ve made the point in its grossest form in order to draw attention to a surprising fact. For several years, the foreign policy of the United States was, by any definition, the unique and individual province of Henry Kissinger. Probably never before, and certainly never since, has a secretary of state been so untrammeled in the exercise of office and power.

In The Price of Power, Seymour Hersh has written a book which says in effect that the secretary was a moral and political catastrophe, interested principally in pleasing one of the most sordid Presidents on record. Yet the critic who complains that Hersh’s book is a personal vendetta will be the very same critic who says that Kissinger “brought peace” in Vietnam or “made the opening” to China. Those who claim belief in exceptional statesmen should accept that such statesmen are responsible for the logical and probable, not to say the intentional, consequences of their actions. But with Henry the K and his defenders, one encounters the same species of fawning credulity as is apparent in a certain school of Churchill chroniclers. When he was great, he was a titan. When he was a fool or a knave, it was due to uncontrollable or unforeseeable tides. We have Thomas Carlyle to thank for some of this, but I suspect that good old power worship and sycophancy still play their substantial part.

A classic example here is supplied by Norman Podhoretz, editor of the unmissable Commentary. Podhoretz spent some years decrying our hero as a man who was naïve about the Russians, gullible about the Third World, and slippery when it came to Israel. Yet in June 1982, in his landmark essay “Kissinger Reconsidered,” he approached as nearly as he ever will to humility. “One of the great works of our time,” he said (twice) about Years of Upheaval, Kissinger’s second volume of memoirs. “High intellectual distinction,” “writing of the highest order”; one could go on—and Norman did. No diplomacy ever ventured by the shuttling Doctor was half so skillful as his diplomacy with the press and with a certain coterie of scribes in particular.

Hersh has written his book in conscious opposition to the hagiographic version, and is unapologetic about having done so. When I watched him on “Nightline” in June 1983, being faced with a squad of inquisitors, some of whom 1 knew to have been at Kissinger’s sixtieth birthday party a few days before, I could scarcely fault him for his abrasive derision. There are many well-placed people who regard Kissinger as somehow occupying a position above politics and who view an attack upon him as profane or even unpatriotic. Even if he were as great a man as they think he is, or as he thinks he is, this would be an unwholesome state of affairs.

What does Hersh allege? He says that Kissinger was personally involved in riveting dictatorship onto Greece and Chile. He says that Kissinger was not just complicit in the bugging and lawlessness of Watergate, but actually an instigator of it. He says that Kissinger indulged Nixon’s foulmouthed anti-Semitism and drunken crisis management while sniggering about the latter to more “polished” friends. He says that Kissinger winked at the Pakistani near-genocide in Bangladesh in order to win favor with Peking—and thereby drove the Indian government to seek an alliance with Moscow. He says that Kissinger prolonged the war in Indochina, at some cost, to a point where only he and his master could settle it and take the credit. He says (the slightest of his charges but the one that has received the most media attention) that Kissinger sold himself to two masters in the 1968 election and was prepared to take the lower bidder as long as it was the victorious candidate.

The above allegations have this to be said for them: they are all true. They will survive, and in most cases have survived, any amount of checking and corroboration. So will some others that I can think of but that Hersh has no room for, such as Kissinger’s direct collusion in the dismemberment of Cyprus in 1974. Even his admirers at Commentary allow that he was conned, during the SALT talks, into thinking that the Soviets were more anxious for a deal than they really were. Which error led him to the madness of the MIRV, and thus to a superpower pact that was cynical without being effective—the worst of both worlds. No doubt Kissinger thought, as many such men before him have thought, that ruthless men would understand one another. That is a near-infallible sign of a naïve person.

Kissinger’s defenders, I notice, tend to scorn vulgar detail. The history books, they are fond of saying, will vindicate him as the man who brought disengagement from Vietnam, contact with China, and understanding with the Soviet Union. Their argument, with its suggestive reliance on the all-forgiving “long view,” is not as null as it can be made to look. Kissinger was associated continually with policies that resemble that triad. “Well, Mr. President,” he told Nixon on October 12, 1972, “it looks like we’ve got three out of three”—signifying China, SALT, and peace in Vietnam.

Yet the two men had only the simulacra of these achievements. And if one had called for any of them in 1968—the year in which, to coin a phrase, Henry “took off”—one would have had no deadlier antagonist than Kissinger himself. His magic, and, to an extent, that of Richard Nixon, is to be able to say that certain things are wrong unless they do them, and to make sure that such things are undoable by anyone else. The Hersh passages on the Vietnam peace talks in 1968 are an excellent case in point, if rather horrid to reflect upon. He shows that Kissinger urged Thieu of South Vietnam to hang tight for a better deal from the Republicans—thus consummating a power play of Henry’s own and making him indispensable to the incoming Administration. And Hersh shows how Kissinger in office was ready to dump Thieu, and even ready to contemplate killing him, when he continued to stand awkwardly in the way of the White House plan to evacuate Vietnam on cosmetic terms. The intervening months and years cost—well, you know what they cost.

Norman Podhoretz says that Kissinger has “a judicious respect for even the least powerful of nations and the sensitivity of an anthropologist to the distinctive features and beauties of even the least imposing of cultures.” He also says that Kissinger’s “easy willingness to tell stories at his own expense is the surest mark of a supreme self-confidence.” Now, on the first point we know that Kissinger described Bangladesh as an “international basket case” a few months after it achieved an appallingly hard-won independence that he had tried to abort. We know that he told the ambassador of Cyprus to Washington that his president, Archbishop Makarios, was “too big a man for so small an island”—and this just before a fascist coup against Makarios of which Kissinger had direct foreknowledge. We know that he said of Chile that its people were too irresponsible to be allowed to choose their own president, and we know (with even more detail supplied by Hersh) what he did to Chile when it flouted his wishes. We know that he endorsed Nixon’s plan to bomb the Palestinians in their Jordanian havens in September 1970, a decision that, as Hersh shows, was only averted by the timely disobedience of Melvin Laird. These fastidious attitudes toward “the least imposing of cultures” would be enough for most men.

As for his “easy willingness to tell stories at his own expense,” I may convict myself of lacking humor when I say that I can’t see it. I have read, in his memoirs, the frequent references to a faux pas on his own part—usually at some baroque occasion in Saudi Arabia or Eastern Europe. But such stories are designed to suggest a pleasing lack of formality on the part of the teller. Self-critical, Kissinger is not. Whenever anything goes wrong, and plenty of things did toward the end of his term, he blames it on the “tragedy” of Watergate, which left the United States fatally disabled in leadership. This, coming from Kissinger, is an unusually feeble excuse. He was not tripped up, in his selfless international jet-setting, by the hubris and nemesis of Richard Nixon. He was caught in the same web of intrigue and deceit that he and his chosen boss had helped to spin. For him to claim Watergate as something exogenous, a deus ex machina that spoiled his diplomacy, is in other words a vulgar three-card trick. A man who compares himself freely to Archimedes, looking for a spot from which to move the world, should not always say, when things go awry, that it is somebody else’s fault.

Hersh, though, does tell a story at Kissinger’s expense, but I doubt that the Doctor will find it all that amusing. In September 1970, at about the time when he was urging that the Sixth Fleet be used to plaster the Palestinians (and just imagine how much nearer that would have brought a peace agreement), Kissinger charged into the office of H. R. Haldeman. He bore with him a folder of the now-traditional aerial-reconnaissance photographs which depicted various structures on the island of Cuba. “It’s a Cuban seaport, Haldeman, and these pictures show the Cubans are building soccer fields… . These soccer fields could mean war, Bob.” Haldeman inquired for more details of the Doctor’s signs and portents. “Cubans play baseball. Russians play soccer.” From this meeting, Kissinger cranked up the United States to a condition approaching full alert, until even Nixon realized that it was a false alarm. Unrepentant in his memoirs, Kissinger himself says that “in my eyes this stamped it indelibly as a Russian base, since as an old soccer fen I knew Cubans played no soccer.” They do, of course, very enthusiastically. The World Cup is a big event in Cuba, and any visitor can testify to the popularity of the game. I’m retelling the story at such length because it illustrates several things about Kissinger that often escape comment. First, his singular faith in his own judgment, and his peremptory way with subordinates. Second, his love of crisis and drama—one might almost say his need for these things. Third, his ingratiating pseudodemotic style (“as an old soccer fan,” forsooth). Finally, his ignorance. Cuba, it seems, joins that roster of less imposing cultures, a nearby country of which he knows nothing.

One may need silver bullets to fell a reputation like Kissinger’s. Hersh’s book is not, I’m bound to say, written in an outstanding silvery fashion. But its dense and difficult pages do contain the material for a revision of the most inflated career of our day. People like Kissinger behave as if they have a franchise on the world. The least (and, alas, usually the most) one can do is examine their qualifications for ownership. This, Hersh has done. I’m driven to the reviewer’s cliché of simple recommendation If you don’t take my word for it, get and read the book.

One returns, after closing it, to the matter of personality. Kissinger posed as a man of detachment and impartiality, but he was always committed to the sustenance, and dependent on the patronage, of Richard Nixon. He affected a lofty and long-run view of affairs but dabbled ceaselessly in short-term backstairs pettiness. He scorned the “tender-minded” critics of his designs and praised toughness, but he failed in all his jousts with people tougher than himself. The vengeance he exacted on weaker opponents, at home and abroad, is a matter of record and, thanks to Hersh, of well-documented record. Is there anybody who will say, carefully and specifically, that they know of a country or a good cause that is better off for Kissinger’s attentions?

(Inquiry, September 1983)

III

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Henry Kissinger’s most signal achievement is to have got everyone to call him “Doctor.” There are literally millions of Ph.D.’s and second-rate academics in the United States, but he is the only one below the rank of professor to have managed to pull off this trick. And to pull it off, furthermore, without getting himself called “Doctor Death” all over the place—a nickname which would suit him much more than it does the good physician Owen.

There are three Mr. Kissingers. The first we know through Seymour Hersh and William Shawcross, and through the testimony of his former aides. This man is a power worshipper and a sycophant. He bugs his friends’ telephones; he arranges for governments to fall and for “difficult” politicians to disappear. You can find his spoor in Bangladesh, in Chile, in Cambodia, in Vietnam, and in the slimy trail leading to the corridors of the Watergate building. This man is good at being somewhere else when things go wrong and very good at taking credit for things like “the opening to China,” which would have occurred years previously were it not for the opposition of people like Nixon and himself.

The second Mr. Kissinger is a feature of the chat show and the rubber-chicken speaking circuit. For vast fees, he will send a vicarious thrill through an audience of Rotarians and their wives. I have seen the act a few times now, and it was on about the third occasion that I noticed the penchant for other people’s nervous laughter that is his stock-in-trade. He understands the pornographic appeal of power, secrecy, and the control over life and death. He is very good at hinting at his familiarity with these things.

The third Mr. Kissinger, and, I’m very much afraid, the one under review, is the aforesaid second-rate academic. This Mr. Kissinger is the old hand at the think tank; the after-dinner guest at the mediocre foreign-affairs circle; the pundit of the opinion page and the member of the commission of inquiry. In Observations: Selected Speeches and Essays, 1982–1984, we encounter intoxicating topics like “A New Approach to Arms Control” and “Issues Before the Atlantic Alliance.” Solemnity, turgidity, and bureaucratese are the norms. Triteness is all. Cop this, for example, from the essay “Mr. Shultz Goes to China” (January 1983):

To the Chinese, Americans often appear unstable and slightly frivolous. To Americans, the Chinese occasionally present themselves as either inscrutable or uncommunicative.

You don’t say. The urge to write “swell” in the margin of this book came over me at least three times in every chapter. It came over me, for instance, in the opening paragraph of “The Crisis in the Gulf” (1982):

The governments of the Gulf face a fourfold threat: Shiite radicalism, Moslem fundamentalism, Iranian revolutionary agitation, Soviet imperialism.

That sentence is as well thought out as it is grammatical. The first three “folds” are actually triple invocations of the same fold, the fourth is standard issue rhetoric, and there is no mention of the oil price, the presence of large Palestinian diaspora populations, the American weapons industry, or the pressure for political and social modernization. But then, logical encapsulation is not Mr. Kissinger’s strong suit. In “A Plan to Reshape NATO” (1984), we encounter the following aperçu:

Too many seek to position themselves somewhere between the superpowers—the first step toward psychological neutralism. Thus Europe’s schizophrenia: a fear that the United States might not be prepared to risk its own population on a nuclear defense of Europe, coupled with the anxiety that America might drag Europe into an unwanted conflict by clumsy handling of Third World issues or East-West relations.

There are more than syntactical problems with that passage. First, many countries actually are “somewhere between the superpowers”—a position the discomfort of which Kissinger has no means of understanding. Second, having identified America as being in two minds (which it is), he awards the condition of “schizophrenia” to—the Europeans! Whence cometh this man’s reputation for ruthless clarity?

Occasional nuggets of interest protrude from the sludge of cliché and self-regard. We learn that Mr. Kissinger approaches South Africa from the perspective of “a well-disposed outsider.” We discover that he thinks that the Suez invasion was okay, and Eisenhower and Dulles were wrong in opposing it. We are favored with the information that the Soviet Union is behind the upheaval in Central America. These nasty revelations are barely enough to keep one going, however, through prose like this peroration, unloaded on an audience of bankers in Washington in 1984:

All great achievements were a vision before they were a reality. There are many in this room better qualified to fill in the many blanks for an overall design.

My major point is that the world needs new arrangements. A burst of creativity is needed to eliminate our dangers and fulfil our promise.

Swell. I hated every minute it took to read this book, but I think it may have been worthwhile. On pages 93–110 of the American edition, there appears an interview that Mr. Kissinger gave to the editors of The Economist in 1982. It is called “After Lebanon: A Conversation.” The questions are unbelievably tough. He is asked, for instance, “Do you see still, after recent events, an opportunity for progress in the Middle East?” After that, the questioning gets perceptibly easier. The recorded interjections are of a toadying, collusive kind that make a Reagan press conference seem like hardball. So I think I have worked out what it is that allows the Kissinger reputation to survive. He has lied to Congress, he has betrayed his colleagues, and he has seen all his famous “mediation” efforts come to naught. But when it comes to the press, his diplomacy is unrivaled. Flatter the hacks, and you need never dine alone.

(Literary Review, September 1985)

FALSE START

THE ACCEPTED categories of British politics show a stubborn resistance to redefinition. For the most part we continue to judge actions by reputations instead of reputations by actions. Thus, the prime minister is repeatedly and tiresomely identified as “a monetarist,” despite the profligacy of her Treasury. Thus, the leader of the Opposition is lazily identified as a socialist, despite his evident distaste for anything more than mild dirigisme laced with insularity. Most oddly of all, the Social Democratic Party, which is consecrated to the preservation of British politics and institutions in their postwar centrist pattern, is believed to be bent on “breaking the mold.”

In this Lilliputian world, which is chiefly written about by correspondents and practitioners who have every interest in keeping the clichés alive, it is only exceptionally that a genuine political book is written or, indeed, read. There was a time when social democrats freely quoted Edward Bernstein and even Anthony Crosland, while more traditional socialists would riposte with R. H. Tawney, G. D. H. Cole, and (when they dared) Karl Marx himself. The Conservatives, who usually feel less need of ideological reinforcement, had Hayek or Oakeshott and, since the collapse of Heath, have made halfhearted gestures at their disinterment. Generally, though, empiricism was good enough for our grandfathers and might be expected to outlive intellectual fads in our own time.

The need for the programmatic book is still felt most keenly on the left of center. This may be why, at first glance, two books by William Rodgers (The Politics of Change) and Michael Meacher (Socialism with a Human Face: The Political Economy of Britain in the 1980s) exhibit so many superficial resemblances. Both have portentous titles. Both are designed to plug present-day gaps in the political front. Both give the impression of having been written on the intercity trains to their authors’ respective northern constituencies. Both bear the heavy impress of a mentor (Gaitskell for Rodgers and Benn for Meacher). Both are written with a practiced eye for sudden shifts in public opinion.

Of the two men, I should unhesitatingly nominate Rodgers as the more successful in this respect. He has really learned how to get away with things; and that learning is his main—one might as well say his sole—political skill. Imagine the grave nodding among the lobby correspondents as he intones the following in his introduction:

But how many Labour politicians regularly include in a public speech a ringing declaration of faith in a mixed economy? How many argue the role of profits in the private sector? The conventional wisdom inhibits. Some matters are better not talked about—or mentioned only in whispers. Similarly, it is strange that Conservative Ministers should feel uncomfortable about discussions with the TUC when a third of all trade unionists lately voted Conservative and the TUC is a major influence on industry and the economy. It is strange that the CBI—representing most of British industry, including the public sector—should not have easy and informal relations with most Labour Members of Parliament.

Here we have the familiar, something-for-everyone paragraph that has come to typify the prose style of the Social Democrats. It reminds one of nothing so much as the old Wilson-Heath duet, when exhortations to “both sides of industry” were the staple. Yet Rodgers apparently regards it as an act of supreme political courage and iconoclasm to echo these hackneyed sentiments.

Note also the question-begging. Either the TUC is a force for torpor and waste in the national economy (as the SDP really maintains) or it is not. (The fact that many trade unionists vote Conservative is neither here nor there—nor is it “lately,” but a steady factor in the last dozen or so general elections.) Of course it is a “major influence on industry and the economy.” Rodgers adores the obvious. But he prefers the safe ground of calling for dialogue rather than taking a position on the outcome. Fair enough—except that he is calling for a party which will dispense with “fudging and mudging.”

Still, a kind of evenhandedness has served Rodgers well in the past, and he guesses, probably correctly, that it is this old ingredient of politics, rather than any fresh departure, which commends the SDP to the voters of today. He is thus extremely careful to avoid sharp questions even when he has to raise them. For example, he lays a little more stress than is modest on his twenty years as an MP and minister. Most of those years were spent on defense and foreign policy. Indeed, it was his disagreement with Labour’s revived tendency to unilateralism that in large measure caused his defection. Yet the book contains practically nothing on nuclear weapons as a defense policy, and less than nothing on foreign affairs. Hidden away in a banal rumination on the trials of ministerial and civil existence, we find the following:

What became known as the Chevaline programme for the improvement of Polaris missiles (eventually costing the taxpayer £1,000 million) was not explained to the House of Commons until (in a Statement on 24 January 1981) it had been completed. The Defence White Paper of 1975 had said of Polaris, “We shall maintain its effectiveness.” Subsequently, as Minister of State for Defence, I was instructed to say that the Government was “up-dating” Polaris, although not going in for “a new generation” of nuclear weapons. There was no question, for example, of “MIRV-ing.” It is impossible to believe that those towards whom secrecy was justified, in particular the Soviet Union, failed to put two-and-two together or would have been wiser had the costs of the programme been revealed. A Member of Parliament with normal access to Washington defence gossip could also have made a shrewd guess at what was happening. Why, then, was Parliament not told?

Is he asking us or telling us? He’s certainly not recommending anything. What he reveals, evidently without intention, is his own familiarity with coterie politics and his habituation to what he would no doubt call, with his gift of phrase, the corridors of power. These, evidently, are where he intends to roam, come what may. I rate this book as the least amusing of the many SDP volumes—less weighty even than David Owen’s and much less hilarious than Shirley Williams’s. In terms of pith, it ranks with Jaroslav Hašek’s famous manifesto “The Party of Moderate Progress Within Bounds of the Law.”

Michael Meacher has tasted office but not power and feels that the loss is ours as much as his. He writes with infinitely more energy and conviction than Rodgers, and his nerve of outrage has not been hopelessly dulled, as has that of his rival. On the very first page appears the telltale “agonized reappraisal,” and this tone is maintained fairly steadily throughout. What one gets, in return for persistent and sometimes trudging reading, is a thoughtful and useful book.

Where William Rodgers spends a few self-regarding pages on the difference between being a “social democrat” and a “democratic socialist,” Meacher spends much of his time arguing for a personal but defensible definition of what socialism is in the first place. The ingredients are on first reading rather short of a surprise: planning, harnessed to protectionism, in order to maximize employment, aim for equality, and reduce dependence on overseas exploitation. These are standard Bennite themes; all one can add is that the section on planning in this book is very detailed and involves many tiers of “planning agreement” and economic-sector analysis. “Useful for the specialist” might be the best judgment here. But the chief interest of the book, and I suspect its chief motivation, is the argument about political democracy and individual liberty.

Meacher is perfectly well aware that most people are not socialists because most people are suspicious of, or hostile to, the extent of bureaucracy, conformity, and mediocrity that socialism seems to necessitate. He takes this point on the chin and nearly floors himself in the process. A whole chapter, very dense and passionate, is given over to the question “Does a Socialist Society Already Exist?” Meacher prints a little chart which “rates” five putative socialist regimes under seven socialist headings. The Soviet Union passes only one test, which oddly enough is “real full employment.” Yugoslavia comes out as “political democracy with individual freedom.” Despite these absurdities, and the sophomoric way in which they are laid out, it does emerge gradually that Meacher’s ideal was the Dubček experiment in reformist socialism. This is a humane and reasonable conclusion, if rather an unexciting one. At any rate, the chapter shows more grappling with hard issues than anything in The Politics of Change. Behind Meacher’s eagerly flashing Fabian spectacles, a brain and a conscience are striving to engage.

Socialism with a Human Face suffers, however, from being poorly written. The following passage is not untypical:

After all, in the last analysis, what is life for? Man, even capitalist man, cannot live by material things alone. Yet at present he is severely starved of moral or spiritual values by the sheer unbalanced weight of materialistic propaganda grossly distorting the value system of society in the economic interests of the capitalist Establishment. Both the religious side of man and the secular construct of the welfare state, each of them motivated by aspirations which transcend the self, have been downplayed by the selfish forces of materialism, and a counterrevolution is urgently needed if Western man is to rise above the distortion of his present unidimensional mould.

We can see what he means here (the Marcusian echo makes me feel ten years younger), but only because the ideas expressed are so trite.

Britain’s politicians may be Lilliputian, but the problems they face are Brobdingnagian. Probably the greatest is the issue of democracy itself. Meacher, at least has the sense of the overweening power of the state and the permanent bureaucracy. His chapters on this topic, which are well researched and presented, are better than the callow use of the phrase “capitalist Establishment” might suggest. He has some persuasive evidence that the Treasury and its political allies have used IMF power and pressures on sterling purely to win internal battles and preserve a sort of state within the state. This, not reselection of MPs, is the real threat to the oft-invoked sovereignty of Parliament.

Some of Britain’s problems are too large for either Rodgers or Meacher to face. The relationship with its Irish neighbors is ignored. The arms race is merely touched upon. British readers who are black or brown will not find that they worried either distinguished MP very much. But at least Socialism with a Human Face can be criticized for failing at various points. The Politics of Change should be criticized for not trying at all.

(The Times Literary Supplement, June 25, 1982)

EARACHE

DIANA MCLELLAN is precisely the sort of British journalist I left London to get away from. The Fleet Street gossip column is a hideous invention, at once bullying and sycophantic. Under the pretense of daring exposure and rapier wit lurks a horrid conformism and a lust for easy targets. As for the style necessitated by this kind of journalism, it is typically arch, gushing, and repetitive. Unfunny euphemisms (“confirmed bachelor” for homosexual) are thought of as subversive coinage. The mighty and the famous occasionally use such columns to take revenge on their friends by means of leaks. But for the most part the scandal page is a banal conveyor belt for received ideas, old gags, and witch hunts against the deviant. The really bad gossip writers aren’t even reactionary—just boring. McLellan is a soupy blend of both.

What on earth, one is moved to inquire, does The Washington Post want with one of these exhibits? The paper has cut down the appearances of “Ear” to four a week, as if to say that it doesn’t really endorse this shop-soiled survivor of the defunct Washington Star, but the comparative rarity of the column’s appearance only makes it look worse. Perhaps Ben Bradlee thinks that McLellan has that elusive Brit cachet? But, no, that can’t be right.

Here is a ripe sample from Ear on Washington: A Chrestomathy of Scandal, Rumor, and Gossip Among the Capital’s Elite—what some have called a wickedly mischievous love-it-or-hate-it-you-must-read-it anthology:

“I see you wear a hearing aid too, senator.”

“Oh, well, yes. But it’s not because I’m hard of hearing, just helps filter out background noise in the hearing rooms.”

“Oh, really? What kind is it?”

“Let’s see. Exactly 4:30.”

I wish I had a dollar for every year that has elapsed since I first heard that joke. McLellan attributes it to Senator Charles Percy, which is odd since, for a gossip columnist, she uses blind attributions (“one aide”) more than most—almost as often as she employs the word “darling.”

That habit by itself gives the lie to her claim to fearlessness, (In truth, I have seldom met a gossip columnist who wasn’t a coward.) You can search through this entire collection of cultured pearls without finding a single real gem, a single item that would embarrass anybody rich, famous, or powerful. The only tales that are even faintly waspish concern members of the Carter hick entourage, now safely removed from pelf and power. On their own, these are no funnier than the labored gags about ham-fisted servants that used to appear in Punch. (As I had feared, the antique story about gauche dinner guests drinking from their fingerbowls appears here more than once.)

Then there’s the pseudoknowing style of writing. Give ear to this:

It is very poor form in Washington to use your host’s bed for any purpose other than storing outer clothing. Even a rather hip D.C. crowd was enraged on going to the bedroom of one chic political journalist to retrieve their coats. They found them buried beneath an amorous New York journalist and his then current belle.

Everything is wrong with that paragraph. The first sentence tells you what the last sentence (I refuse to call it a punch line) is going to be. “Rather hip,” “chic,” “amorous,” and “belle” are not naughty or clever; they are tired affectations. And what’s the point of the tale if McLellan doesn’t identify the New York journalist? (I know, but The Nation is for family reading, not sleazy revelations.)

On almost every page there is either a breathtaking “so what” story or a whiskered and recycled curio. The line about the man who gets his lab sample back with a note warning that his horse may have diabetes cracked many a grin during the Depression. It’s hardly any better when it’s (allegedly) quoting Walter Mondale on Billy Carter’s beer.

Diana McLellan is a sort of sad omnivore. All jokes are funny, all gossip is “scandal,” anything involving people she’s heard of is a revelation about the private lives of the stratospheric. But she has no sorting process. The only “scoop” she ever got—the bugging of Blair House—turned out to be a turkey. She lacks the most basic attribute of a gossip writer—a posture of antagonism. Here she is, revealingly, on the denizens of her Washington beat:

The great show rolls on. The players make us mad, they make us laugh, they make us cheer and cringe and blow razzberries and pay taxes.

They’ve got an awful lot of guts.

I salute them.

She does what? Here we are in the Washington of Ronnie and Nancy, with crass vulgarity and foolishness abounding on every side, and The Washington Post has a gossip column that is, by its own admission, perfectly innocuous! Alexander Pope described this kind of courtier coverage very well:

Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike

Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.

Alike reserved to blame, or to commend,

A timorous foe, and a suspicious friend.

McLellan, with a style and a column that grow more ingratiating and desperate every week, is certainly not going to risk offending the supply-side high society. Her reputation, then, is the only really mysterious thing about her.

(The Nation, September 11, 1982)

SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY

SOMETHING TERRIBLE seems to happen to David Cornwell (alias John le Carré) every time he leaves England or, to be generous, every time he leaves northern or eastern Europe. Give him a drizzle-sodden English prep school, a gentleman’s club in London, a high table at Oxford, a windswept beach or a dripping forest “somewhere in Germany,” and he can make a show of things. What he must curb is his yearning for the exotic East, or for anything that doesn’t fit the prescribed European categories of the freezing Cold War. The Honourable Schoolboy, which relied so much on Hong Kong, was a failure partially mitigated by some doses of colonial British ambience. With The Little Drummer Girl, John le Carré has finally found the point where he is quite definitely out of his depth.

If this novel were a film (and it reads like the result of a script conference with a greedy agent), it would be the sort of movie that one views only on airplanes. The characters are all either clichéd or impossible, the scenery banal, and the moral dilemmas bogus. There are egregious errors of fact and continuity, and the effort to sustain tension sags into such longueurs that it would have any discerning customer tearing off his earphones and—which I’ve always thought the airlines bank on—calling hoarsely for an expensive drink.

Despite its excessive length, the book is alarmingly easy to summarize in point of plot. The Israeli secret service badly desires the death of a certain Palestinian guerrilla. They feel they need two things in order to encompass this objective. The first, of course, is a girl, who must be simultaneously gullible and plausible—both of these to a degree which tries the imagination. The second is the cooperation of various intelligence officers in other countries—principally Britain and West Germany. It goes without saying that neither the girl nor the other agents should ever know precisely what it is they are being asked to do, but that they should do it anyway. Only the glacially intelligent men from Mossad, plus of course Mr. le Carré himself, are ever privy to what is going on. And sometimes even they, especially Mr. le Carré, seem uncertain as well.

The Little Drummer Girl has been inexplicably praised by some reviewers, and no more explicably decried by others, for its sympathetic presentation of the Palestinians. In practice, le Carré deals in stereotypes which, when they are not boring, manage to be insulting to both sides in the Palestine conflict. Thus, Israelis are shirt-sleeved and grizzled, their occasional doubts dissolved with wry humor and ruthless, lethal dedication. The Palestinians are chaotic, colorful, sexually exuberant, but liable to turn rancidly nasty at any moment. Since this is 1983, it is of course understood that they both share a tender feeling for their mutual, twice-promised homeland. Le Carré has adapted various speeches and pamphlets into unimpressive dialogue, with persons babbling on at great length uninterrupted, in order to show that he has read both sides and is “evenhanded.” But when he strays far beyond the cuttings library, he is lost. He has one of his Palestinian protagonists traveling from Beirut to Istanbul and over the land border to Greece. He does it all (before he is daringly kidnapped by the relentlessly vigilant, etcetera, etcetera) on a Cypriot diplomatic passport. Turkey is the only government in the world that does not recognize the Republic of Cyprus. A Cypriot passport (most of all a diplomatic one) is a means of getting unwelcome attention in Turkey. Then le Carré has the Mossad team receive a telex message from the Israeli Embassy in Athens. There have not been, since 1948, full diplomatic relations between Israel and Greece. Both of the above examples are extant controversies in the region. They are not trifling by any standard, and certainly not in the case of an author much touted for his mastery of detail.

The slipshod approach to politics and ideas in this book is not at all offset by its characterization. “Suspension of disbelief’ may be a necessary faculty in a theatergoer, but modern fiction is supposed to carry a certain conviction to its readers and consumers. In the central person of Charlie, the young British actress conscripted by the Israelis to act as bait for their target (he uses the analogy of goat and tiger as if he had thought of it himself), le Carré has invented a figure who is simply and literally incredible. Everything about her is implausible at best; she has no real identity or motivation, and it therefore makes no sense for the Israelis (who can command both qualities with ease) to employ her. She is expected to play the part of widow to a man she never met, and we are expected to believe that this man’s family or friends never really knew him. Le Carré here is impartially insulting the intelligence of the Israelis and the Palestinians, as well as that of his readers. Huge swaths of narrative are taken up with Charlie’s internal monologues and hysterical conversations:

She put her knuckles in her mouth and discovered she was weeping. He came and sat beside her on the bed, and she waited for him to put his arm around her or offer more wise arguments or simply take her, which was what she would have liked best, but he did nothing of the kind. He was content to let her mourn, until gradually she had the illusion that he had somehow caught her up, and they were mourning together. More than any words could have done, his silence seemed to mitigate what they had to do. For an age, they stayed that way, side by side, till she allowed her choking to give way to a deep, exhausted sigh. But he still did not move—not towards her, not away from her.

“Jose,” she whispered hopelessly taking his hand once more. “Who the hell are you? What do you feel inside all those barbed wire entanglements?”

This is rubbish. Not only is it written at the level of pulp romance fiction, but it clearly disqualifies the girl for the role in which “Jose” (her pet name for the Mossad agent Joseph) is supposed to be molding her. (Another silly slip occurs at about this point. Charlie, who has earlier shown herself as a deft spouter of modish anti-Zionist propaganda, says that she has never heard of Deir Yassin.)

Perhaps half-aware of his cardboard or contradictory characters, and even of his extreme unfamiliarity with the region or the issues, le Carré spends some time trying to set out the symbols and totems of the conflict. Here again, cliché lies in wait for him. The Israelis pay visits to the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem in order to strengthen their resolve. The Arabs get a bow in their direction with a description of what must be the hideous Kiryat Arba settlement in Hebron. A punch line is made out of the unsurprising fact that a Palestinian woman has a biochemistry degree from an American university. Something, in fact, for everybody. I was especially pleased to find, on page 328, the oldest and stalest line of all: the one that appears in the first story of every journalist on his first trip to the region—the one that reads, “from crackling loudspeakers wailed the muezzin, summoning the faithful to prayer.”

At only one point does le Carré catch and sustain any really intriguing or vivid dialogue or insight. The meeting between the Mossad and the British secret service is very well done indeed and reminds one of how he got his reputation. The Brits are instinctive anti-Semites who have learned to “respect” Israeli cunning, and the Israelis are tough guys who expect nothing better from the Gentiles who once hunted them under the Mandate. But this is home ground for our author, and he obviously felt safer on it.

Finally, I’m moved to protest at le Carré’s creation of Professor Minkel, the bumbling Israeli academic who protests at the maltreatment of Arabs and is, by what le Carré no doubt considers an irony, made into a pawn of the Mossad. The whole is a poorly crafted caricature of Professor Israel Shahak, a man whose ceaseless work for human rights should not be cheapened in this way. Le Carré has used him lazily as the basis for an unconvincing figure, and then got bored and thrown him away. That, in effect, is what he has done here with the whole drama and struggle of the Middle East.

(Literary Review, July 1983)

SAME, ONLY MORE SO

AGAINST STUPIDITY, as we know, the gods themselves labor in vain. The study of history is replete with idiocy; not the idiocy of the simple-minded but the elaborate crassness of those who set out to deceive themselves. Santayana remarked somewhere that fanaticism consisted in redoubling your efforts when you had forgotten your aims, and the examples of Custer, Haig (Sir Douglas), and George III are known to every schoolboy. It’s no coincidence that most of the famous citations of foolishness are military. Not only does war give immense latitude to the stupid and the blinkered, it also passes verdicts in rather a swift and summary manner.

Barbara Tuchman’s book The March of Folly considers epic folly from the standpoint of a contented liberal. Having reviewed the question, Why were the Trojans so gullible about that horse? Ms. Tuchman surveys three other self-destructive episodes. She writes about the Renaissance secession; about the British and their brilliant provocation of pro-independence feeling among the American colonists; about the United States and its heroic attachment to illusions about Vietnam. These three evidently deserve their place in any anthology of the higher loopiness.

Ms. Tuchman writes in rather a lofty manner, as if what she had to say was laughably obvious. Sometimes, indeed, it is. “Folly’s appearance is independent of era or locality; it is timeless and universal, although the habits and beliefs of a particular time and place determine the form it takes.” Well, yes, I think we can all agree about that. In less tautologous form, she instructs us that, “Shorn of his tremendous curled peruke, high heels and ermine, the Sun King was a man subject to misjudgment, error and impulse—like you and me.” No argument there either, though it would be equally true to say that His Majesty was fiasco-prone even when not shorn of his tremendous curled peruke and other garnishings. Ms. Tuchman is the doyenne of the middle-brow American talk circuit, and some of her archness and triteness in this role has been allowed to infect her prose.

The recurring failure of ruling classes to act in their own apparent best interests is, from a Marxist point of view, a worthwhile conundrum. Marx himself was very intrigued by the role of accident and by the blinding effects of ideology, and E. H. Carr in What Is History? made use of Montesquieu’s famous dictum, “If a particular cause, like the accidental result of a battle, has ruined a state, there was a general cause which made the downfall of this state ensue from a single battle.”

As often as not, the crisis of a system is provoked by something which only a few people consider significant at the time. The Trojan case is too imbricated with divine interference to make a good paradigm, and you can’t have Christianity without schism, so Ms. Tuchman’s first two examples are a little unsatisfying. But she can show without difficulty that the British Crown was willfully deaf on the question of taxation in the Americas and could probably have dissuaded Washington and his confreres from a step which, until the very last, they were most reluctant to take. She can “prove” that one American President after another allowed himself to be deceived about the state of affairs in Vietnam, on several occasions, for instance, insisting that pessimistic reports be redrafted for purposes of unity and consolation.

The explanation employed by American pop psychologists in such cases is that of “cognitive dissonance.” Ms. Tuchman writes of this diagnosis with some respect. Cognitive dissonance is the ability (she terms it the tendency) “to suppress, gloss over, water down or ‘waffle’ issues which would produce conflict or ‘psychological pain’ within an organization.” “An unconscious alteration in the estimate of probabilities” is, in the jargon, the result. The average person, realizing the capacity for self-sustaining illusion in his or her daily life, may begin to sympathize with rulers who practice the same trickery on themselves. Only human, after all, “like you and me.” That is just what is wrong with the theory, and with much of Ms. Tuchman’s narrative. American presidents and other mighty figures are often rather toughminded. They never seem to develop the illusion that they can abolish poverty and privilege, nor do they fall prey to fantasies about universal justice. They are perfectly well aware of the self-interest of their backers and themselves. It is precisely by acting upon it that they create disaster and ruin. This could be because their interest does not reflect the general interest—a possibility that Ms. Tuchman, with all her fondness for paradox, never canvasses.

America went into Vietnam with its eyes relatively open, and with the intention of supplanting a French colonial empire. As it happened, the Indochinese people had outgrown foreign rule by 1954 at the latest, and Vietnam was where—and how—the United States found this out. Here we see Montesquieu’s relation between an accidental and a general cause, rather than Ms. Tuchman’s speculative stuff about presidents trying to look good in front of their advisers. She’s not wrong about the political shenanigans involved (in fact she summarizes them very well), but she sees an irony in American conduct where none exists. Her conclusion—the very acme of spurious evenhandedness—is: “Perhaps the greatest folly was Hanoi’s—to fight so steadfastly for thirty years for a cause that became a brutal tyranny when it was won.” This is too fatuous for words. Either Hanoi communism is brutal and tyrannical or it is not, and, if it is, then it did not “become” so in 1975. And how are the Vietnamese supposed to have duped themselves into resisting an alien partition and occupation? This is not even good journalism, let alone good history.

Ms. Tuchman’s book belongs several shelves below her earlier work on General Stilwell in China, and many shelves below Isaac Deutscher’s Ironies of History. I’m impelled, finally, to one ad hominem reflection. If ever there was an example of a nation creating a disaster for itself, and screening out the discordant voices within, it is Israel under the new leadership of the Revisionist movement. Watching it is like viewing a film of which one has already seen the end. In the United States, where historians and moralists commingle as opinion makers, this matter is debated almost daily. Among the loudest voices which damn all criticism of Israeli policy as made in bad faith is—but endings are the prerogative of historians with hindsight.

(New Statesman, July 20, 1984)

BETTER OFF WITHOUT

CONTRARY TO ALL interpretations, from liberal to Stalinist, Karl Marx did not believe that religion was the opium of the people. What he did say, in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, was this:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The demand to give up the illusions about its conditions is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not so that men will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation, but so that they will break the chain and cull the living flower.

This makes it plain even on the most cursory reading that Marx had a serious understanding of religious belief. He was anticlerical and, especially in his writings on the civil war in France, he denounced the cynical way in which the ruling order deceived its subjects by means of a Christianity in which it did not itself believe. But, unlike many of his radical contemporaries, he did not hold that religion could be legislated away. Nor did he believe that mere advances in social or economic emancipation would make the supernatural redundant.

Michael Harrington’s excellent study of this question, The Politics at God’s Funeral, confirms the wisdom of the authentic Marxist approach, against the vulgarizations of those who have succeeded him. Left to themselves, most thinking people have opted for a view that is in effect agnostic. Once the Church loses its monopoly and becomes just another competitor in the battle of ideas, it loses everything else that makes for the domination of faith. Science has easily undone the creationists (who have been only a joke in this generation), but it has also demolished the assumptions about man’s place in the universe that are necessary to sustain religion. Even those who still describe themselves as believers are living with doubts and compromises that would have been seen as unthinkably heretical only a few decades ago. Real, old-fashioned visceral faith is now found only in those countries where it is persecuted.

Still, as G. K. Chesterton once put it, when people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing—but rather believe in anything. It’s not easy to regard agnosticism or atheism as naturally coextensive with progress when one surveys the wasteland of capitalist materialism, the sinister credulity of “cult” members, or the hysterical adulation heaped on mortal leaders in parts of the communist world. Chesterton was an unscrupulous Roman Catholic apologist, but he had a point. Michael Harrington, who has honestly lost his faith—but is, I’m sorry to say, still nostalgic for it—wants to lay God decently to rest in order that we may mourn him properly and then see where we stand. As he puts it:

A strident, anti-clerical atheism is as dated and irrelevant as the intransigent anti-modernism of Pope Pius IX. Even more to the point, atheist and agnostic humanists should be as appalled by de facto atheism in late capitalist society as should people of religious faith. It is a thoughtless, normless, selfish, hedonistic individualism.

I believe that I am right in identifying this as a statement of belief on Harrington’s part. He has not lost his reverence for the religious life (recall his writings on Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker), and he wants to preserve Christian values in a secular movement of community. This makes it the more interesting that, in one of his few mistakes, he confuses Hegel’s term Aufhebung. He renders it, in his appendix on Kant, as meaning “the culmination, the completion.”

In fact, Aufhebung means, and was used by Hegel and Marx to mean, the transcendence of an idea or a system of ideas. In order to retain Christian values (whatever they may be) while rejecting religious authority or the religious explanation of reality, one must reject Christianity itself. Socialism may be, as Harrington would like to argue, the “culmination” of those values as well as of the Enlightenment. But it has to start by understanding religion, as Marx did, the better to vanquish it.

Nor can one so easily say, as Harrington does, that the old anticlerical battles are quite over. Whenever Western reactionaries are in a tight comer, they proclaim to be defending “Christian civilization.” The child martyrs of the Iranian army, drafted before their teens, are told by their mullahs that an Iraqi bullet will send them to Paradise. The Polish workers were enjoined by their spiritual leaders to spend their spare time on their knees. What sort of advice was that?

The list runs on—anybody who has seen an Israeli election knows that the mere mention of the holy places of Hebron or Jerusalem is enough to still the doubters and divide the dissidents. And everybody knows that the “Christian Democratic” parties of Europe have a reserve strength of religious iconography they deploy when they think nobody is looking. We are not as far out of the medieval woods as some suppose.

Harrington’s book, nonetheless, is lucid enough to supply the material for its own criticism. He begins with an exposition of Kant, Hegel, and the French philosophes. He shows that all attempts to marry new discovery and new thought with existing religion only drove the two further apart. He stresses the way in which philosophers before Marx considered themselves a privileged group and thought that skepticism was permissible in their own cases but dangerous and subversive if allowed to permeate the people. He rightly compares Marx to Prometheus. But Prometheus could not assume that the gods were necessarily benign.

This is difficult terrain. There are, obviously, millions of people who cannot bear the idea that the heavens are empty, that God is dead, and that we are alone. There are also secular radicals who feel a bit queasy at the idea. And there are people who do not believe that God is dead because they never believed that he was alive in the first place. Most irritating of all, there are still people on the left who say feebly that, “after all, there are so many ‘progressive’ church people. Look at the Maryknolls or Archbishop Romero.” This is usually said by those who are not themselves religious but who feel that religion is good enough for other people—usually other people in the Third World. It is just as trite and unoriginal as the view that the shameful papal concordat with fascism “proves” the reactionary character of Catholicism.

Harrington is actually very adroit in his discussion of the religious and mystical element in modern tyranny. He shows that the Nazis, though they made opportunistic use of the conservative churches, were also hostile to Christianity and sought to replace it with bogus pagan rituals. While the Stalinists, publicly committed to atheism, called upon old traditions of Russian orthodoxy as well as the “God-seekers” and “God-builders” whom Lenin had almost driven out of the Bolshevik Party. Lunacharsky, Gorki, and others who tried to synthesize Marxism with Christianity cannot have intended that their ideas would become a synthesis of orthodoxy and Stalinism symbolized by the gruesome Lenin mausoleum. Still less can they have intended that the mausoleum would help legitimize the exorbitant and grandiose cult of Stalin himself. Harrington does not say so, but the Stalin cult was less of a blasphemy on Eastern Christianity than it was on Bolshevik materialism, however vulgar. Why else would the Soviet regime still take such care to maintain a tame Orthodox Church with its very own archbishop? What we have to face as an enemy is not any particular religion but the slavish, credulous mentality upon which all religious and superstitious movements feed.

After publishing The Future of Illusion, Freud began to doubt that its optimistic predictions would be vindicated. He hoped that people would gradually, as it were, “grow out” of the need for faith and subjection. The appalling mixture of modernism in technology and antiquity in superstition—which drove Freud from Vienna and which might be the ideal definition of totalitarianism—made him wonder if he might not have been too sanguine.

Wilhelm Reich, Freud’s disciple (about whom Harrington is easily dismissive), argued that the Left did not know how to speak to people except in arid, bread-and-butter terms. His work on repression and mass psychology was designed to undercut the Nazi appeal and to dilute the materialism of Marxism. It collapsed into eccentricity and foolishness, but it was an important try. It anticipated much of the radical spirituality of our own time. It also recalled missionary Christianity, which often maintained that, by codifying and ritualizing primitive magic, it civilized paganism and witchcraft. A fair claim, but one that reminds us that man made God in his own image and not the other way around.

Can man, unassisted by God, make himself in a new image? Harrington believes it can be done and that “men and women of faith and anti-faith should, in the secular realm at least, stop fighting one another and begin to work together to introduce moral dimensions into economic and social debate and decision.”

As the conclusion to a fairly rigorous book, that strikes me as a very insipid one. It could have been part of some bland ecumenical exhortation or some trendy encyclical. Neither believers nor unbelievers need to give up anything if they want to join the battle for socialism. But, if the religious promise is good or true, then there is no absolute need for socialism, and therefore the believer must always be joining in spite of his or her beliefs. That the two schools should “stop fighting” is, fortunately, impossible. If it were possible, it would not be desirable.

In a country like the United States, where religion and religiosity are everywhere and where elements on left and right claim divine authority, atheists and humanists need to be more assertive rather than less. I’m thinking here of the prevalence of pathetic oxymorons like “Liberty Baptist” or “Liberation Theology.”

In his masterly book The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, G. M. de Ste. Croix shows that there is no evidence that Christianity ever improved the lot or the morals of any people—and a great deal of evidence the other way. Its holy texts are the warrant for slavery, genocide, monarchy, and patriarchy, and, even more important, for servility and acquiescence in the face of those things. The apologetic “modern Christian” who argues faintly that of course the Bible isn’t meant to be taken literally is saying that it isn’t the word of God. He is, thereby, revising his faith out of existence. If the religious have so few real convictions left, why are socialists supposed to defer to their insights? Michael Harrington has ably summarized the evidence for the death of God. He should now start to “transcend” his grief for the departed.

(In These Times, November 16–22, 1983)

FROM HERE TO DEMOCRACY

WHEN HENRY Adams wrote his fictional satire on Washington life in 1880, he entitled it Democracy. It pleased him, perfect snob that he was, to associate the world of shenanigans and mediocrity with a political idea for which he felt disdain. He issued the book anonymously, hoping that the vulgar public would make the wrong guess about its authorship, and hoping particularly that they would attribute it to his friend John Hay.

If Joan Didion had published her Democracy anonymously (a remote contingency, in view of the fact that she inserts herself as a character in its early stages) and had invited us to guess at its provenance, how would one proceed? Take, for example, the opening of chapter 12:

See it this way.

See the sun rise that Wednesday morning in 1975 the way Jack Lovett saw it.

From the operations room at the Honolulu airport.

The warm rain down on the runways.

The smell of jet fuel.

Obviously, the writer of this is a student with some, but not many, course credits in Hemingway. Perhaps majoring in The Sun Also Rises. But wait. What about this section, toward the close of part 2?

Which was when Adlai said maybe she heard she could score there.

Which was when Inez slapped Adlai.

Which was when Harry said keep your hands off my son.

But Dad, Adlai kept saying in the silence that followed. But Dad. Mom.

Aloha oe.

Here, surely, we can trace the undigested influence of Kurt Vonnegut? But these purely textual interrogations are inadequate, in themselves, to the task of inference. What does the book, taken as a whole, reveal about its author? We may intuit that the author is nervous, edgy, alive to the nuances of menace even in the most banal situation. We can detect, and acknowledge, a sort of thwarted perfectionism—a concern with getting an atmosphere right and a nagging anxiety that this ambition has not been quite fulfilled (“Aerialists know that to look down is to fall. Writers know it too”). This writer must be introspective, even self-doubting. The cuticles, perhaps, a little gnawed.

There are clues, too, in the references to parts of the West Coast and to midtown Manhattan. Why, for instance, do Harry and Inez identify themselves as living, not on Central Park, but at 135 Central Park West? That fine building actually houses Mick Jagger, Carly Simon, Whitney Ellsworth, and the splendid and gracious hostess Jean Stein, at one of whose soirees I once met, briefly, a tense and frail woman wearing dark glasses. She had recently published an account of what it felt like to be very insecure indeed about being an American in El Salvador. Yes, I think I would have guessed that the author of Democracy was Joan Didion.

Her novel (Democracy is handily subtitled “A Novel”) has thirty chapters and is unevenly divided into three parts. There are two trinities in the action also. One is a triangle of the time-honored kind, between the heroine Inez Christian, her conceited husband Harry Victor—who thinks he is good enough to be President—and her lover, the sinister, hard-boiled Jack Lovett, who broods on the decline of the West and does his poor best to arrest it. The second triangle is one of location: Democracy is set in Hawaii, in Saigon (though we never actually go there except in reported speech), and in the bi-coastal world of American movers and brokers. The context is of a family crisis—hard to summarize but involving murder and a runaway daughter—which is uneasily synchronized with the collapse of America’s “commitment” to Vietnam.

The staccato organization and the style of the novel make it both easy and difficult to read. One is reminded of the rapid crosscutting that Hollywood, a Didion haunt, has imposed on modern narrative. Effort must be expended in turning back pages for brief and testing refresher courses. But the effort is often worthwhile. If you valued Ms. Didion as herself in The White Album, you will like Inez Christian’s internalized reflections, and if you recall her essay “In the Islands” from that collection, you will have a rough map by which to read Democracy.

Hawaii, least typical of all American states, offers an angular perspective. It refracts, into mainland American life, happenings from the Pacific and Indochina. Pearl Harbor is there. James Jones chose Schofield, Hawaii (a place-name which sums up the combination of the exotic and the quotidian), as the setting of From Here to Eternity. Jones had his Robert E. Lee Prewitt, the exemplary “grunt,” and Ms. Didion has her Jack Lovett. Lovett is the best evoked of her characters, and we’ve all met him somewhere:

All nations, to Jack Lovett, were “actors,” specifically “state actors” (non-state actors were the real wild cards here, but in Jack Lovett’s extensive experience the average non-state actor was less interested in laser mirrors than in M-16s, AK-47s, FN-FALS, the everyday implements of short-view power, and when the inductive leap to the long view was made it would probably be straight to weapons-grade uranium), and he viewed such actors abstractly, as friendly or unfriendly, committed or uncommitted; as assemblies of armaments on a large board. Asia was ten thousand tanks here, three hundred Phantoms there. The heart of Africa was an enrichment facility.

This is a deft portrayal, showing (correctly) how noisy the “quiet” American can often be. It also, at its close, has a (presumably) intentional echo of Conrad. Ms. Didion tells us in “In the Islands” that she came to maturity holding before herself the example of, among others, Axel Heyst in Victory. Her recent work has been preoccupied with the question of why, in this American century, the world is so inhospitable to Americans. Even when, as in her Salvador, she overdramatizes this, she still recognizes and conveys it in a way that few of her contemporaries can. There are, she seems quakingly to suggest, certain latitudes and sweltering interiors where Mr. Kurtz, or his American analogue, should just not venture. This is a daunting thought, and one which is utterly antithetical to the prevailing temper of raucous bullishness in the United States. But those body bags which Didion saw coming into Honolulu airport in the early 1970s are with her still—and are present in these pages. As a result, there are no more winners in Democracy than there were in Victory.

The brittle, febrile style of the novel may be intended to match its message, if “message” is not too assertive a word. The tone, if so, is subtly wrong for the purpose. Preferable is the way in which Didion boldly records the robust American speech of Lovett and of the worldly fixer Billy Dillion, a friend of the family (“A major operator, your brother-in-law. I said, Dick, get your ass over to Anderson, the last I heard the Strategic Air Command still had a route to Honolulu”).

In the background, which advances and recedes, are Pacific nuclear tests, real-estate criminals, political opportunists of every stripe, and endangered American innocents who force the weary professionals to clean up after them. In a perhaps unconscious concession to the time, Ms. Didion makes all her liberals into platitudinous poltroons. It’s not absolutely clear whether she thinks, with some part of herself, that Americans are too good for this harsh, ungrateful world or too ill equipped for it. Inez, for example, finally moves to Asia and “ceases to claim the American exemption.” Her junkie daughter is preferred, by her maker, to her pompously radical brother. These loose ends may be part of the fray in Didion’s own warp and woof. The White Album found her in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, fretting about tidal waves and confessing that “I have trouble making certain connections.” In Democracy, she briskly discards a whole agenda of questions about the personality of her characters, saying that they are “suggestive details in the setting, but the setting is for another novel.” That could very well be.

(The Times Literary Supplement, September 14, 1984)

UMBERTO UMBERTO

JORGE LUIS BORGES, the blind Argentine novelist and ex-librarian, is perhaps the most complex and imaginative literary craftsman alive today. A few years ago, he published a story about an infinite library: a labyrinth of books and shelves that “existed” in a shifting continuum of space and time.

Umberto Eco, the Italian semiotician, has constructed a fourteenth-century Italian abbey, the center of which is a labyrinthine library organized on mystical, recondite principles. The guardian of this library’s secret is a blind savant named Jorge of Burgos.

It is tricks and allusions of this kind that have made The Name of the Rose into a success on so many levels. It has generated enough interest to justify the publication of a Postscript, in which the author explains himself by raising more questions than he cares to answer. The Name of the Rose can be read for diversion, as a thriller or a historical romance. It can also be mined for various guessing games (even the meaning of the title is opaque), for stylistic insights and linguistic conceits. A knowledge of Latin and some grounding in the history of schism and medieval philosophy are useful but not essential.

The novel’s central character, William of Baskerville (Eco likes Conan Doyle as well as Borges), is a rationalist and a logician who is compelled to argue within the framework of Christian orthodoxy. He enters the abbey as an outsider, charged with an investigation into murder and back-sliding. The entire narrative is based upon his method and his personality—there is scarcely a scene that he does not command.

As an Englishman, imbued with Roger Bacon’s love of scientific inquiry and Peter Abelard’s attachment to logical procedure, he is distrusted at once by the more superstitious and dogmatic elements within the abbey. Moreover, as a former inquisitor who resigned his post in disgust, he has given proof of his willingness to tolerate heterodoxy and even—the key word in the novel—heresy. It becomes impossible for him to confine his inquiry to the narrow course proposed by the authorities.

The narrator, a young and credulous monk named Adso, plays the part of a prompter in a Socratic dialogue, feeding lines and questions to the master. He notices early on that William possesses “curiosity, but at the beginning I knew little of this virtue, which I thought, rather, a passion of the covetous spirit.” It is also the case, reflects Adso, “that in those dark times a wise man had to believe things that were in contradiction among themselves.”

In “those dark times” the emperor and the pope were sworn foes, who might make peace at any moment to combine against another enemy. Varying Christian factions maneuvered against one another. And for “the simple,” God and the devil were everyday presences. So, too, was the impending Apocalypse, signs of which were detected on every hand. But the doctrinal center of the Church was also unstable, and yesterday’s imperative could well go into tomorrow’s discard. When the pope is rumored to be reconsidering the existence of the fiery pit: “Lord Jesus, assist us! Jerome cried. And what will we tell sinners, then, if we cannot threaten them with an immediate hell the moment they are dead?”

The difficulty is, evidently, that small heresies—even William’s vice of “curiosity”—will inevitably lead to bigger ones. The least challenge to the edifice of the faith must therefore be avoided, or crushed. In this instance, the faith is enshrined by the Aedificium: the library. Here, as the abbot puts it, may be found “the very word of God, as he dictated it to the prophets and the apostles, as the fathers preached it without changing a syllable.”

But someone is moving through the abbey and the library, and murdering its devout servants at the rate of one a day. The order and method of dispatch is designed to suggest a prefiguration—even an enactment—of the Apocalypse. One by flood, one by blood, one by poison: the last days are being inexorably counted off. It takes William of Baskerville some little time to realize that this panic-inducing sequence is a brilliant feint and that the false trail is intended to lead away from the mysterious library.

The conclusion (which I’ll leave as obscure as I can) has also been prefigured in the text. Jorge of Burgos is determined that no pre-Christian enlightenment be allowed or tolerated. Once you concede that humanity possessed numerous truths and values before the Bible, you may as well admit that Christianity is just another religion. And this would endanger more than just the spiritual hierarchy. The work of Greek and Jewish predecessors, then, must be kept hidden from profane “curiosity.”

In the metaphorical, allegorical conflict between William and Jorge, their recurring dispute concerns Aristotle, who taught that laughter is a cathartic and vivacious thing. It is precisely because of this passage in the Poetics that Jorge opposes Aristotle so viciously:

Laughter frees the villein from fear of the Devil, because in the feast of fools the Devil also appears poor and foolish, and therefore controllable. But this book could teach that freeing oneself of the fear of the Devil is wisdom. When he laughs, as the wine gurgles in his throat, the villein feels he is master, because he has overturned his position with respect to his lord; but this book could teach learned men the clever and, from that moment, illustrious artifices that could legitimize the reversal.

One could go on (and Eco does, for pages). But the point is made. There are secrets that the vulgar multitude must not know. “The license of the plebeians must be restrained and humiliated, and intimidated by sternness.”

Even William’s friends counsel him: “Mortify your intelligence, learn to weep over the wounds of the Lord, throw away your books.” There is, naturally, more than pure theology at stake. Abbeys and monasteries did not only hold monopolies of learning and education; they were centers of economic, political, and even military strength. They exerted immense influence over the market and were the possessors (“in trust,” of course) of extraordinary wealth.

Indeed, there is a striking modernism about The Name of the Rose, often missed by those who look for mere analogies in it. At one point, Adso asks the ignorant monk Salvatore why a fundamentalist Christian sect, the Shepherds, has decided to turn on the Jews:

He explained to me that all his life preachers had told him the Jews were the enemies of Christianity and accumulated possessions that had been denied the Christian poor. I asked, however, whether it was not also true that lords and bishops accumulated possessions through tithes, so that the Shepherds were not fighting their true enemies. He replied that when your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies. I reflected that this is why the simple are so called. Only the powerful always know with great clarity who their true enemies are.

The climate of repression and denial is very well evoked; it is obviously the source from which many of the terrors and delusions in the abbey derive. Those who brood on the imminence of Armageddon, with its visions of dreadful woman-beasts, or who employ it to frighten others, are prey to awful fears themselves. Eco writes as far as possible as if he were a denizen of the fourteenth century, but only by the most lurid imaginations of the Apocalypse (perhaps easier now than in any intervening epoch) can he recreate the holy terror by which Jorge of Burgos conceals his real purpose.

Jorge’s real purpose, by preventing access to a lost book of Aristotle, is to prevent Adso from asking the question he is eventually forced to ask:

But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primigenial chaos? Isn’t affirming God’s absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to his own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?

Eco’s Postscript to The Name of the Rose both confirms and questions this interpretation. He allows that any reader can find more in the book than its author intended. He suggests that many of his own themes and repetitions are subconscious or accidental (my own use of the word “curiosity” falls into this category). But, despite his playful attitude to serious textual criticisms, he insists that the reader submit to certain demands and disciplines:

If somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.

Elsewhere, Eco’s Postscript is less satisfying, as when he says that his characters (Jorge in particular) have written their own parts and that a cosmology, once created, will determine the rhythm and the outcome of a novel. But his insights at least balance his frivolities, and when he jokes about readers mistaking modern texts for medieval ones, and vice versa, he is being acute:

If a character of mine, comparing two medieval ideas, produces a third, more modern idea, he is doing exactly what culture did; and if nobody has ever written what he says, someone, however confusedly, should surely have begun to think it

(In These Times, January 30–February 5, 1985)

BLUNT INSTRUMENTS

I HAVE NEVER been able, except in my lazier moments, to employ the word predictable as a term of abuse. Nor has the expression knee-jerk ever struck me as a witty way of denigrating a set of strongly held convictions. The pseudoscientific word Pavlovian (which is often used by mistake to describe a nonconditioned reflex) is even less help. It is favored by the sort of sage who describes as “schizophrenic” someone who is of two minds about where to eat lunch. Such sages will also describe as “paranoid” or “conspiracy-theorist” anyone who believes that the CIA hired the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro or that the FBI sent notes to Martin Luther King, Jr., urging him to commit suicide.

Speaking purely for myself, I should be alarmed if my knee failed to respond to certain stimuli. It would warn me of a loss of nerve. I have written in the past year about the MX missile, constructive engagement, the confirmation of Edwin Meese and other grand guignol episodes. Naturally I hope that my arguments were original, but I would be depressed to think that anyone who knew me or my stuff could not easily have “predicted” the line I would take.

In the charmed circle of neoliberal and neoconservative journalism, however, “unpredictability” is the special emblem and certificate of self-congratulation. To be able to bray that “as a liberal, I say bomb the shit out of them” is to have achieved that eye-catching, versatile marketability that is so beloved of editors and talk-show hosts. As a lifelong socialist, I say don’t let’s bomb the shit out of them. See what I mean? It lacks the sex appeal, somehow. Predictable as hell.

Picture, then, if you will, the unusual difficulties faced by Charles Krauthammer, newest of the neocon mini-windbags. He has the arduous job, in an arduous time, of being an unpredictable conformist. He has the no less demanding task of making this pose appear original and, more, of making it appear courageous. At a time when the polity (as he might well choose to call it) is showing signs of Will fatigue, it can’t be easy to write an attack on the United Nations or Albania or Qaddafi and make it seem like a lone, fearless affirmation. An average week of reading The Washington Post oped page already exposes me to appearances from George Will, William F. Buckley, Jr., Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz, Emmett Tyrrell, Joseph Kraft, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, and Stephen Rosenfeld. Clearly its editors felt that a radical new voice was needed when they turned to the blazing, impatient talents on offer in The New Republic— and selected Krauthammer. I dare say Time felt the same way when it followed suit. We live in a period when a chat show that includes Morton Kondracke considers that it has filled the liberal slot.

Of Krauthammer’s book, Cutting Edges: Making Sense of the Eighties, with its right little, trite little title, George Will has already written that it comes from “the best new, young writer on public affairs. It is only a matter of time, and not much time, before the adjectives ‘new’ and ‘young’ will be put aside.” I don’t doubt it. There’s certainly nothing new or young here. And it’s only a matter of reading the book to make one realize that the other adjective will be not so much put aside as stuffed elsewhere.

In common with most but not all of his conservative columnist colleagues, Krauthammer does not write very well, reason very well, or know very much about anything. In common with them, too, he holds the “unpredictable” view that the United States is far too modest and retiring as a world power. In common with them, finally, he thinks that it takes an exercise of moral strength to point this out.

Do I shrink from giving an example that encapsulates all these shortcomings? I do not so shrink. Here’s a paragraph, recycled from a Krauthammer column in The New Republic:

In the 1984 Democratic campaign, the principal disagreement over Central America was whether the United States should station twenty advisers in Honduras (Walter Mondale’s position) or zero (Gary Hart’s). On Angola, El Salvador, Grenada, Lebanon and Nicaragua, the Democratic position has involved some variety of disengagement: talks, aid, sanctions, diplomacy—first. In practice this invariably means—only. Force is ruled out, effectively if not explicitly.

Scrutinizing this clumsily written passage, one is struck by the following:

  1. Charles Krauthammer used to work as a speechwriter for the ridiculous Mondale. Ordinarily, he underlines this bit of his résumé in order to show that he is a former bleeding heart, knows the score, has been an insider, has seen the light, has lost his faith and therefore found his reason—all the familiar or predictable panoply of the careerist defector.

  2. To have known and worked for Mondale, and to have kept a reasonably attentive eye on the press during the 1984 election, is presumably to know that Mondale publicly called for a quarantine of Nicaragua. A quarantine is an armed blockade.

  3. Ronald Reagan’s military excursions to Beirut, Grenada, the Honduran border, and elsewhere all received the sanctification of the House and Senate Democratic leadership. So it might be said that nobody wanting to make a case for the Democrats as appeasement-sodden buffoons could have argued it in a more unlettered, sly, and misleading manner.

Can it be that Krauthammer enjoys coveted space, and Establishment affection, more because of this manner than in spite of it? The suspicion cannot be groundless. This man actually began a column, in 1985, by telling that antique story about Calvin Coolidge and Dorothy Parker as if he had minted it himself. He believes, or at any rate he writes, that “the death of Senator Henry Jackson has left an empty stillness at the center of American politics.” That would be pardonable, if corny, in an obituary piece, but it introduces a rather unexciting reflection on the fate of Cold War liberalism which omits to mention that Jackson’s clones (Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, Kirkpatrick, and other of Krauthammer’s favorites) are all over the place.

In a slim field, my nomination for the most memorable and emblematic quotation would go to his view that “the great moral dilemmas of American foreign policy arise when the pursuit of security and the pursuit of democracy clash. Contra aid is not such a case. That is Cruz’s message. Is anyone listening?” That was in The Washington Post—this year. It contains everything that has made Krauthammer a figure. Cliché (“moral dilemma,” “pursuit”). False antithesis (“security” versus “democracy”). Pomposity (Hubert Humphrey posing as Winston Churchill in the sonorous periods of the sentencing). Banality (Arturo Cruz original at this late date?). Last and as usual, the parroting of the Reaganite party line, written as if by a lonely, ignored dissident (Listening? They’re fighting a war for him). This is affectation, poorly executed.

In this entire salad of emissions, I could find no “cutting edges” and nothing that qualified as “against the stream” of the regnant orthodoxy. And, as a regular reader of Krauthammer, I can recall only two columns of his that I have admired. One was about the birth of his son Daniel. The other was about the absurdity and implausibility of the Star Wars project. Neither of those articles appears here—the first because it came too late to include and the second because it was Krauthammer’s only moment of dissent and misgiving, and, what with one thing and another, he would rather forget it. I think I could have predicted that.

(The Nation, November 16, 1985)

THE BLOOD NEVER DRIES

WHEN THE Chartist leader Ernest Jones first heard the boast that the British Empire was one on which the sun never set, he riposted, “And on which the blood never dries.” Among the chief beauties of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman narratives is their taste for imperial gore. Those who have followed the old braggart through his previous campaigns will remember the suicide charge of the 21st Lancers at Balaklava (in which he took part by accident), the butchery in the Khyber Pass, and the sanguinary revenge taken upon the Indian mutineers. Who can forget, also, the moment when the slave ship Balliol College tossed its human cargo over the side to escape arrest and detection?

Surrounded as he is by heaps of cadavers, Flashman is no Victorian Rambo. He is the perfect illustration of Dr. Arnold’s precept that a bully is always a coward. Beneath his magnificent whiskers and medaled chest, there is an abject, scheming poltroon, who whimpers with fear at the sound of the foe and falls over himself to betray friends and colleagues. Anything is thinkable if it preserves him with a whole skin. The very qualities which got him expelled from Tom Brown’s Rugby School—deceit, cruelty, and funk—fit him admirably as a man to take credit for the sacrifices of others.

With this episode, he is whirled up in the hellish carnage of the Taiping Revolt. In this, the bloodiest civil war in human history, China convulsed itself in an attempt to throw off the “foreign devils.” Great Britain’s prized opium trade—the greatest narcotics scandal of all time—was at stake. Human life was not so much cheap as barely reckoned at all. Flashman goes through the whole blood-bolted affair with his bowels like water, but he never loses his faculty for description. If you like this sort of thing, then Flashy’s your man:

When the guns haven’t come up, and your cavalry’s checked by close country or tutti-putti, and you’re waiting in the hot, dusty hush for the faint rumble of impi or harka over the skyline and know they’re twenty to your one—well, that’s when you realize that it all hangs on that double line of yokels and town scruff with their fifty rounds a man and an Enfield bayonet. Kitchener himself may have placed ’em just so, with Disraeli’s sanction, The Times blessing, and the Queen waving ’em good-bye—but now it’s their grip on the stock, and their eye on the backsight, and if they break, you’re done. Haven’t I stood shivering behind ’em often enough, wishing I could steal a horse from somewhere?

This passage from Flashman and the Dragon gives the flavor of Fraser’s historical sense (notice how he makes a point of the reactionary gentry’s rendition of Disraeli) as well as his talent for bathos—from Sir Henry Newbolt to Schweik in one move. Not only are the Flashman books extremely funny, but they give meticulous care to authenticity. You can, between guffaws, learn from them.

There is a chapter in this book which I would select from a strong field as being exemplary. It recounts Lord Elgin’s decision in 1860 to raze the Summer Palace at Peking, and it depicts the manner in which the order was carried out. The Summer Palace was not just a building. It was a gorgeous landscaped park of over two hundred temples and great houses. Contemporary accounts of it and its contents show it to have been the summit of Manchu taste and civilization, perhaps unequaled in history. Fraser, through Flashman, shows how Elgin came to his conclusion (revenge for the hideous treatment of British and French prisoners) and why he pressed on (to show the Chinese that the Son of Heaven, their emperor, was a fake). The pages which describe the actual desecration—while Elgin read Darwin and Trollope in his tent—are vivid, moving, and awful. They promote Fraser well out of the thriller class and into the ranks of historical novelists.

There is lots more, of course. We meet the cultivated Sir Garnet Wolseley, the original for “the Very Model of a Modern Major-General.” F. T. Ward, the Yankee adventurer, is excellently well drawn. Flashman himself, who had been showing worrying signs of conscience in recent books, is back in midseason form. His powers of description have not deserted him (“Her skipper was one Witherspoon, of Greenock, a lean pessimist with a cast in his eye and a voice like coals being delivered”), and neither has his Stakhanovite tumescence. Old addicts will mainline Flashman and the Dragon. New addicts are to be envied. The words Albion Perfide will never sound alien again.

(The Washington Post Book World, May 4, 1986)

STYLE SECTION

HITCHENS HAD been in Washington four years, working for a magazine that might have been published on Pluto for all the clout it had. “Screw you,” he would quip wryly to himself as hostesses failed to catch his eye and as movers and shakers in Georgetown and Foggy Bottom looked wildly over his shoulder upon introduction. He’d been meditating revenge ever since a taxi driver had failed to recognize his catastrophically unfashionable address, and the canker of rancor had eaten deeper as he was successively excluded from the Gridiron Club, a decent table at the White House correspondents’ dinner, and—final indignities came in pairs—from the Z list at the Reagan inaugural ball and the A list at “The McLaughlin Group” advertisers’ buffet.

A novel. That would show them. One of those through-the-fly-button, fly-on-the-wall novels. A novel with short, staccato sentences. Often with no verbs in them. The sort that are harder to read than they are to write (the sentences, that is).

What was necessary for success? The people didn’t actually have to be characters. The Brit diplomat, for example, could be “Sir Rodney, terminally boring, from a well-known and titled family, and as rich as he was dull.” The ambitious Secretary of State would, of course, be a “crusty old” figure. Color of hair? “White.” Style of hair? “A mane.” Type of tie? “Bow.” Eyes? “Silver blue changing to steely gray.” Nose? “Beaked.” This kind of stuff practically wrote itself. A woman at the Soviet Embassy could be—why not?—“a short, stocky woman with an enormous chest, a rather heavy mustache, a mole on the end of her nose, and her mousy gray-brown hair pulled back in a bun.”

The President, of course, would present more of a problem. You had to have a President, but people could tell them apart even when they had no human characteristics at all. Why not a decent, avuncular type whose good intentions were thwarted by crafty, self-seeking advisers? Not easy to believe in, admittedly, but at least a type that hadn’t featured lately. Perhaps—yes—perhaps an unsuspected health problem that would get the old turkey out of the picture at the midway point. Then a drama of succession. The Vice President catapulted into the Oval Office. No need for verbs at all. The heartbeat factor.

What of sex? Try as you will, you always end up writing for men here. Hitchens collapsed into the conventions with a relief he had not suspected in himself before. Sara Adabelle Grey, the Southern darling married to the Vice President, was to find herself First Lady in a rush. Meanwhile, she was “ravishing” (several times in about six pages), “glamorous,” and “fabulous.” Her husband would have to make do with “distinguished” until a better word came along, which it never did. Should he have a kink? By all means. And what a kink! (He thought oral sex was overrated.) Allison Sterling, ace reporter and goddaughter to the stricken President, was “elegant, confident, and untouchable.” His thesaurus in ribbons, Hitchens invented one other grande dame, Edwina Able-Smith, voracious mate to the stuffed-shirt Brit. She had “had affairs with half the richest, most powerful and famous men in the world,” but she was too exhausting to appear at all after the second chapter.

The women needed men—boy, did they need men—but all they got was Desmond Shaw. Shaw was a hard-drinking Boston-Irish reporter who had a way with him. “His curly black hair was disheveled; his Burberry had the requisite stains and rips (‘bullet holes’); his shirt collar was unbuttoned; his tie was loosened and there was a tiny spot on it.” He had a deep voice, an occasional brogue, a smile that flattened females like pancakes; and he would do anything for a story except master English prose. There had never been an actual journalist with all these characteristics (though there had been plenty with the last one), but Hitchens knew what the public expected, and was no snob.

For more than five hundred pages, the novel turned on Des and his triflings with these two women. Whenever Hitchens introduced a new twist to the tale, he was careful to honor the forerunners of the trade. Georgetown hostesses said “divine” a lot, and also “darling.” Women, when confronted with sexual innuendo, “blushed” or “flushed” or “felt the blood rush to their faces.” That happened on pages 69, 77, 118, 139, 147, 149, 165, and 167 (three times). He had never seen a woman in Washington blush in this way, any more than he had seen people get drunk on one or two glasses of wine, but he knew the rules. In the fiction of the nation’s capital, a bottle of hock is a bacchanalia, and half a bottle of hock at lunchtime is a debauch. An odd rule, to be sure. But not made to be broken. (Hitchens himself must have spilled about a bottle a day just getting the glass to his lips.)

Other conventions proved more troublesome and several times threatened to clog the narrative utterly. Journalism in Washington is notoriously sycophantic. “Respectful” would be a euphemism for the behavior of reporters in the presence of the powerful. Still, for dramatic purposes, there is supposed to be something called an “adversary” relationship. He had dared to cast one reporter as being literally in bed with the President’s wife. Did he dare show the whole press corps in bed with the presidency? He would lunch alone for the rest of his life if he did that. With a moan of shame, he found that he had written the following paragraph about a “Meet the Press” TV show. Intrepid Allison was questioning the White House Chief of Staff:

During the campaign you were always fighting or reported to be fighting with somebody. Since you’ve been in the White House, there has hardly been a week when you weren’t engaged in some form of combat with some colleague or staffer… . Do you think there is something about you which provokes these kinds of reports, and in the end, is this kind of behavior really helpful to your President?

The reporter next to her gasped under his breath. “Heavy stuff …”

Actually, for the toadying atmosphere of 1986, this was quite heavy. But still he felt that he might be observing bipartisan idiocy a little too formally.

On, on—that was the answer. Reading over what he had typed, he felt a certain sense of achievement. There were some things that needed tidying, some rough edges. He noticed that he had typed, to introduce a long passage, the words, “It was a coincidence that Sonny Sterling and Sadie Grey had the same birthday.” Well, what the hell else could it have been? A conspiracy? He made a note to revise, but he never did. Then there was Allison recalling to herself, while sipping a kir, her first night of shame. “‘Now’ was all he said. She didn’t have time to tell him she was a virgin.” What if she had had time? What did time have to do with it? Ah, well.

Hitchens was still nagged as he blotted the last page and wondered about movie rights. The title was good—no question. But had he avoided controversy enough, or too much? Why had nothing happened? Why were none of the subplots ever resolved? Why did they just disappear? He guessed that this was Washington. Anyway, too much substance and you got called an advocacy journalist.

When he heard that a leading Washington lady had beaten him to the entire formula, he was crushed out of shape. It showed that no journalist had a monopoly on ingenuity. It also meant another address where the doorman wouldn’t know him.

(The Boston Sunday Globe, August 3, 1986)

MUGGED BY REALITY

WHEN The Bonfire of the Vanities was still a glint in its maker’s eye, I heard the maker himself describe its intended scope as Dickensian. When pudding came to proof, the only Dickensian thing about this capacious entertainment was its serialization, episode by episode, in a monthly magazine. And, when even the readers of Rolling Stone forbore to ask for more, the pudding was withdrawn from the public subscription and a new recipe contrived. The final concoction is diverting, deceptively light and various, with a distinct aftertaste. Only the other week, Mayor Ed Koch of New York was angrily heckled by black citizens of Harlem as he tried to smirk his way agreeably through a commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr. In the course of the next day, I heard more than a dozen people remark that this event was a vindication of the opening chapter of The Bonfire of the Vanities, wherein the mayor is thoroughly Mau Mau-ed (and pelted with mayonnaise). More recently, having taken an ill-advised wrong turn off the West Side Highway above 110th Street, I was impressed at the instant, uneasy jokes made by fellow passengers about the scene in Bonfire where a missed exit spells ruin.

In some fashion, then, Wolfe has proved his continuing ability to touch a nerve in the general subconscious. The Bonfire of the Vanities treats of reticence-inducing subjects like class envy, racial hatred, vaulting ambition, and hectic greed. It scorns those who try to emulsify these basic questions. At its mid-point, and rather obviously, it introduces Poe himself, via The Masque of the Red Death, to show that not even Prospero can purchase immunity. The slight but definite tug of nastiness in the underlay of the text is probably necessary to qualify it as a romp through modern manners.

One thing that distinguishes this novel from the Dickensian is the relative ease with which it can be summarized. A rich and spoiled Wall Streeter named Sherman McCoy, who is innocuous rather than innocent, can hardly credit his luck in the possession of a sumptuous Park Avenue spread, a fashionable wife and adorable daughter, a lubricious mistress and a franchise upon life in general. Driving the lubricious one into town for an off-the-record soirée, he takes a wrong turn from the airport and commits the moral equivalent of a hit-and-run in the smoldering wasteland of the Bronx. A confederacy of hypocrites—the opportunist public prosecutor, the demagogic black “community” leader, the shameless Brit journalist, the ambitious attorney—combines to dismember him. Butchered to make a New York holiday, McCoy is condemned to the filthy pit of the city’s nether regions, where the hideous words “criminal justice” have become oxymoronic.

The telling of this rather banal unsuccess story allows Wolfe to do some very accomplished eavesdropping. He excels at the nuances of pseudery, making clever use of the undoubted fact that, in New York society, there is no shame, no infamy, but only celebrity. At an early show-off dinner given by Leon and Inez Bavardage, McCoy fails to shine. At a dinner thrown by Silvio and Kate di Ducci after his exposure, much is made of him. Wolfe, however, cannot resist ramming home his tiny point. He compels poor Sherman to say, on the way home with his wife: “It’s perverse, isn’t it? Two weeks ago, when we were at the Bavardages, these same people froze me out. Now I’m smeared—smeared!—across every newspaper and they can’t get enough of me.”

This is a clunker of a nudge. We’d noticed that, thanks all the same! Wolfe’s fondness for italics and exclamation marks is indulged to the full in this book, and I would defend it because it helps to capture the way New Yorkers talk. But his aptitude for names is rather hit-and-miss. Leon and Inez Bavardage are good, the di Duccis less so, Lord Gutt and Lord Buffing feeble. Nunnally Voyd, the ambivalent mid-Atlantic novelist, is just about O. K. The descriptions of place settings, fad food, décor and snob accessories come rapidly and acutely enough. If anything, Wolfe is a little too good at that kind of detail. Very often, he will identify or stigmatize one of his creations simply by a telling or withering register of the brand of loafers or make of briefcase. His emphasis on the “designer” aspect of today’s chic saves him a good deal in the way of characterization. His obsessively knowledgeable touch also makes one wonder whether he really feels contempt for this sort of affectation.

The underclass and its boiling, pointless, vicious life is always “the other” in The Bonfire. There is a brilliantly witty and unsettling depiction of the Bronx courthouse and its environs, which introduces Judge Myron Kovitsky, “the warrior of Masada,” as he faces down a vanload of snarling felons. This highly promising early scene is not built upon. In fact, it merely inaugurates a whole series of unbuttoned sequences in which ethnicity among cops, lawyers, and defendants is paramount. As in John Gregory Dunne’s Red White and Blue, the new bluntness about such matters is presented with defiant insouciance. No doubt, this candor is refreshing to many. I lost count of the number of times that Wolfe employed animal noises to represent human ones when venturing across the tracks. His fabled ear has evidently not lost its cunning.

Upon one ethnic stereotype, however, Wolfe plays a genuinely unfashionable hand. He writes with some mordancy about the English exiles of Manhattan, expressing an educated dislike for members of that inexplicably popular minority. They turn out here to be chiefly spongers and queens, posturing for their supper and then sniggering at the vulgarity and gullibility of their hosts. Much American Anglophobia is rather ill-informed and fails to draw the requisite blood. Wolfe knows better. Here is Peter Fallow, Brit-on-the-make who is suffering himself to be bought a costly lunch by a source: “Fallow stopped listening. There was no way Vogel could be deflected from his course. He was irony-proof.” Other passages, too lengthy for quotation, establish Wolfe as unsettlingly au courant with the freeloaders from the Old Country.

An insight of the stricken McCoy’s which Wolfe likes enough to repeat is that: “A liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.” This makes a neat but obvious inversion of Irving Kristol’s likable remark that “a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality.” That gag more or less opened the Reagan era—guilt-free; hostile to self-criticism; impatient with the sickly platitudes of reform and “compassion.” And this is, in every line and trope, a Reagan-era novel. It foreshadows rather than anticipates the collapse of the Wall Street commodity fiesta. It depicts a society of narcissism and debauch, where everything is on sale and where Thomas Hobbes has been thoroughly internalized. The characters in Wolfe’s world indeed know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Yet the total effect is not so much a satire on these mores as it is an expression of them. Reading Wolfe, you could suppose that New York City over the past decade had seen the victimization of the rich by the poor, the white by the black. The only figures who are actually painted as responsible for their actions are the bigmouth tribunes of Harlem and the Bronx. All the others, reprehensible and avaricious as they may be, are the mere playthings of circumstance. The chaotic ending, which is fictionally very weak and overwrought, takes the form of a vile mob scene in which the dominant emotion is Exterminate All the Brutes!

The city argot is well-caught, the social absurdities are lovingly etched, and there is the best description of an Englishman awakening to a primordial hangover since Lucky Jim. But the people are mostly representatives, who strut and fret their moment. And when Wolfe decides to mingle with the luckless and the downtrodden, he does so in the person of Mistah Kurtz rather than Mr. Pickwick.

(The Times Literary Supplement, March 18–24, 1988)