=== Page 1 === 2002 $7.00 $8.50 Canada MARIO VARGAS LLOSA Letters to a Young Novelist Partisan Review REVIEWS Edith Kurzweil nthony Chennells Igor Webb David Rodman hristopher Busa Gyorgyi Voros POETRY nus Khoury-Ghata Rosanna Warren) Mario Luzi tr. Thomas Day) Patrick Gilmore Katie Ford orothea Tanning Todd Hearon Steven Cramer FICTION Kutumba Rao 21> ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL Planting the Seeds of Modernism NORMAN MANEA An Interview SANFORD PINSKER Cynthia Ozick, Aesthete DAVID SIDORSKY Post-Mortems of the Sixties HARVEY SACHS Leaving Italy DMITRY SHLAPENTOKH The New Anti-Americanism AL SUNDEL Heartaches and Limitations: Isaac Bashevis Singer NICHOLAS X. RIZOPOULOS The Autumn of Our Discontent === Page 2 === BENNINGTON WRITING SEMINARS MFA in Writing and Literature Two-Year Low-Residency Program FICTION NONFICTION POETRY Scholarships available For more information contact: Writing Seminars, Box PR Bennington College Bennington, VT 05201 802-440-4452 Fax 802-440-4453 www.bennington.edu CORE FACULTY FICTION Douglas Bauer Martha Cooley Elizabeth Cox Maria Flook Lynn Freed NONFICTION Sven Birkerts Susan Cheever Lucy Grealy POETRY April Bernard Thomas Sayers Ellis Jane Hirshfield Amy Gerstler Amy Hempel Alice Mattison Jill McCorkle Askold Melnyczuk Rick Moody Phillip Lopate George Packer Bob Shacochis David Lehman Ed Ochester Liam Rector Jason Shinder WRITERS-IN-RESIDENCE Robert Bly Lyndall Gordon Donald Hall PAST FACULTY IN RESIDENCE Agha Shahid Ali Edward Hoagland Coleman Barks Richard Howard Lucie Brock-Broido Marie Howe Robert Creeley Carole Maso Stephen Dobyns E. Ethelbert Miller Susan Dodd Sue Miller Mark Doty Howard Norman William Finnegan Marjorie Perloff Karen Finley Robert Pinsky George Garrett Mary Robison Vivian Gornick Roger Shattuck Barry Hannah Ilan Stavans === Page 3 === a Alice James Books alice james books presents | An Ordinary Day xue di "The Poems in An Ordinary Day demanded to be written. They depict a lonely, beautiful terrain between (and including) China and the United States, and convey a sense of exile that is powerful and urgent. Through- out the collection, Xue Di's voice is consistent, singular, and clear." -Adrienne Su THE CAPTAIN LANDS IN PARADISE "Sarah Manguso's poems weirdly plumb and strikingly frame what we're up against: the now in which the Muse drives a silver pickup, mystery only announces itself out of grief for us, and to reach harbor is to under- stand there will be no end of searching. Hers is a startling, disturbing, and original voice." -Carl Phillips sarah manguso The Captain Lands in Paradise Self and Simulacra liz waldner "An ornately strange, elegant investigation of our begotten and made- selves. Methods and language archaic and contemporary, botanical and anatomical, inflorescent, cotyledonal-with hair and members. Lady bugs for consolation. A brave new unmalicious mind." -CD. Wright LIVE FEED LIZ WALDNER "In Live Feed, Tom Thompson leads the pastoral deeply into a wild darkness of the here and now. Even more wonderfully, he leads it all the way to new light and hearty wakefulness. The project of American poetry is freshly companioned by these poems." -Don Revell tom thompson LIVE FEED Ladder Music ellen doré watson "Ellen Doré Watson has the wonderful ability to translate idea, emotion and her keen view of the world into verbal energy and rich patterns of sound. Her poems bang about on the page and are a great pleasure to read." -Stephen Dobyns ELLEN DORÉ WATSON 238 main street, farmington, me 04938 207.778.7071 www.umf.maine.edu/~ajb an affiliate of the university of maine at farmington === Page 4 === NEW DIRECTIONS BOOKS Spring 2002 HOMERO ARIDJIS EYES TO SEE OTHERWISE/OJOS DE OTRO MIRAR. Eds. Ferber & McWhirter. Var. trans. Extensive selection by Mexico's greatest living poet. Bilingual. $19.95 pbk. original PAUL AUSTER THE RED NOTEBOOK. True Stories. All of Auster's remarkable, imaginative tales. "Aliterary original who is perfecting a genre of his own." —Wall St. Journal. $10.95 pbk. NINABERBEROVA THE BOOK OF HAPPINESS. Tr. Schwartz. An outstanding novel about a young Russian woman's life after the Revolution. "Deftly nuanced...."—Wash. Post $12.95 pbk. CAMILO JOSÉ CELA BOXWOOD. Tr. Haugaard. Final novel by the '89 Nobel Prize winner. Marvelous writ- ing about the exquisite and the crass in Cela's birthplace, Galicia. $25.95 cloth. MAURICE COLLIS FOREIGN MUD. An enduring classic about the illegal opium trade in Canton during the 1830s. "Nothing but pleasure." -Daily Telegraph An ND Classic. $16.95 pbk. H.D./BRYHER ANALYZING FREUD. Letters. Ed. w/intro Friedman. Annotated; Index; Photographs. A landmark study of Freud, H.D., modernism, gender, and sexuality. $37.95 cl. GERT HOFMANN LUCK. Tr. M. Hofmann. A bittersweet, funny child's eye view of a family in decline on the day the family splits up because of the mother and father's divorce. $23.95 cl. SUSAN HOWE THE EUROPE OF TRUSTS. Three brilliant, landmark books unavailable for years: The Liberties, Pythagorean Silence, and Defenestration of Prague. $16.95 pbk. LASZLO KRASZNAHORKAI THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE. Tr. Szirtes. A powerful novel, in the tradi- tion of Gogol, about a mysterious circus in a small Hungarian town. $15.95 pbk. LULJETA LLESHANAKU FRESCO. Selected Poetry. Tr. Israeli and others. Intro. Peter Constantine. The debut col- lection in English of a leading voice of the new Albanian poetry. $12.95 pbk. orig. JAVIER MARÍAS A HEART SO WHITE. Tr. Jull Costa. Breathtaking novel about family secrets, winner of the '97 Dublin IMPAC Prize for best novel published worldwide in English. $14.95 pbk. KAZUKO SHIRAISHI LET THOSE WHO APPEAR. Trs. Grolmes and Tsumura. Poetry from more than 15 col- lections. "Shiraishi is the Allen Ginsberg of Japan." —Donald Keene. $12.95 pbk. orig. RICHARD SWARTZ A HOUSE IN ISTRIA. Tr. Paterson. A wonderfully comic novel about a Swedish man's desperate desire to acquire a deserted house in the Balkans. $23.95 cl. LUIS FERNANDO VERISSIMO THE CLUB OF ANGELS. Tr. Costa. A deliciously witty novel about the sin of gluttony as one by one ten gourmands die after eating their favorite meal. Recipes incl. $21.95 cl. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS COLLECTED POEMS. Ed. w/Intro; Notes Rossel and Moschovakis. The definitive edition of all of the playwright/poet's poetry. Complex and honest. $29.95 cl. Send for free complete catalog NEW DIRECTIONS, 80 8th Avenue, NYC 10011 Visit our website: www.ndpublishing.com === Page 5 === Partisan Review EDITOR-IN-CHIEF William Phillips EDITOR Edith Kurzweil EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Brenda Pike ASSOCIATE EDITOR Steven Marcus CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Stanisław Baranczak Morris Dickstein Jeffrey Herf Don Share Rosanna Warren Jacob Weisberg CORRESPONDING EDITORS Leslie Epstein Eugene Goodheart Roger Shattuck FUNDING PROVIDED IN PART BY MASSACHUSETTS CULTURAL COUNCIL CONSULTANTS John Ashbery Frank Kermode Barbara Rose PUBLICATIONS AND ADVISORY BOARD Joanna S. Rose, Chairman Cynthia G. Colin Judith Ramsey Ehrlich Stephen Feinberg Richard Grimm Frederick J. Iseman Marjorie Iseman Nina Joukowski Köprülü Mary Kaplan Vera List David B. Pearce, M.D. Joan C. Schwartz Tama Starr Dorothea Straus Jon Westling Peter Wood Edwin M. Zimmerman PARTISAN REVIEW, published quarterly in Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall by PARTISAN REVIEW, Inc., is at Boston University, 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215. Phone: 617/353-4260. Fax: 617/353-7444. Website: www.partisanreview.org. E-mail: partisan@bu.edu. Subscriptions $25.00 a year, $44.00 for two years, $63.00 for three years; foreign subscriptions, including Canada, $31.00 a year, $50.00 for two years; institutions, $36.00 a year. For subscription inquiries, telephone 617/353-4106. All payments from foreign countries must be made by U.S. money order or checks drawn on U.S. account. Prepaid single issue $7.00. Add $1.50 for postage and handling. US ISSN 0031-2525. Copyright © 2002 by PARTISAN REVIEW, Inc. Periodicals postage paid at Boston, Massachusetts and additional entries. Postmaster: Send address changes to 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215. Distributed in the U.S.A. by C.M.G., 250 West 55th Street, New York, NY 10019 (Phone: 800/223-0860). Available in microfilm from University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Indexed by the American Humanities Index. Send manuscripts (originals or clear photocopies only) to 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215. No manuscripts will be returned nor queries answered unless accompanied by self-addressed envelopes. No responsibility is assumed for their loss or injury. === Page 6 === PR SPRING 2002 Volume LXIX, Number 2 CONTENTS CONTRIBUTORS 166 ARTICLES MARIO VARGAS LLOSA From Letters to a Young Novelist 167 ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL Planting the Seeds of Modernism: 173 An Evening with Annie Cohen-Solal NORMAN MANEA An Interview 186 SANFORD PINSKER Cynthia Ozick, Aesthete 206 DAVID SIDORSKY Post-Mortems of the Sixties: 240 Deep Structure Specters and Walking Zombies HARVEY SACHS Leaving Italy 255 DMITRY SHLAPENTOKH The New Anti-Americanism: 263 America as an Orwellian Society AL SUNDEL Heartaches and Limitations: Isaac Bashevis Singer 272 NICHOLAS X. RIZOPOULOS The Autumn of Our Discontent 282 FICTION KUTUMBA RAO The Job 218 === Page 7 === POETRY 230 Vénus Khoury-Ghata (tr. Rosanna Warren) Mario Luzi (tr. Thomas Day) Patrick Gilmore Katie Ford Dorothea Tanning Todd Hearon Steven Cramer BOOKS EDITH KURZWEIL Intellectuals or Pundits? 293 Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline by Richard A. Posner ANTHONY CHENNELLS From Bildungsroman to Family Saga 297 The Sweetest Dream by Doris Lessing IGOR WEBB T. S. Eliot's Achievements 302 Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot by Denis Donoghue DAVID RODMAN Advice from an Elder Statesman 306 Does America Need a Foreign Policy?: Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century by Henry Kissinger CHRISTOPHER BUSA Clement Greenberg 309 Clement Greenberg: A Critic's Collection by Karen Wilkin and Bruce Guenther GYORGYI VOROS Living by the Word Alone 314 I Remain: Voices of the Hungarian Poets from Transylvania Edited by Gyöngyvér Harkó, Translated by Paul Sohár LETTERS 320 Editor's Note: In the Winter 2002 issue, we should have noted that Adam Zagajewski's poems, “Circus,” “Castle,” and “Speak Softly,” were trans- lated by Clare Cavanagh. === Page 8 === CONTRIBUTORS MARIO VARGAS LLOSA's Letters to a Young Novelist, translated by NATASHA WIMMER, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. . . . ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes des Sci- ences Sociales. . . . NORMAN MANEA is Francis Flourney Professor of European Culture and Writer-in-Residence at Bard College. . . . A Ph.D. student at Oxford University, EDWARD KANTERIAN has published sev- eral articles about Romania. . . . ERIC GRUNWALD is Managing Editor of AGNI. . . . SANFORD PINSKER has written The Uncompromising Fictions of Cynthia Ozick. . . . KUTUMBA RAO is one of the major writ- ers of twentieth-century Indian Telugu literature. . . . RISHI REDDI's fic- tion has been published in the Louisville Review and Prairie Schooner . . . Poetry by VENUS KHOURY-GHATA has received the Prix Apolli- naire, the Prix Mallarmé, and the Prix Supervielle. . . . ROSANNA WAR- REN's most recent book of poems is Stained Glass. . . . MARIO LUZI is the author of Viaggio terrestre e celeste di Simone Martini. . . . THOMAS DAY has taught at Rome University. . . . PATRICK GILMORE is currently completing his second novel, Landscape with Spies. . . . Deposition, KATIE FORD's first book, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press. . . . DOROTHEA TANNING's memoir, Between Lives, was recently published by W.W. Norton. . . . TODD HEARON's poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Poetry, Ireland Review, and Southern Humanities Review. . . . STEVEN CRAMER is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand. . . . DAVID SIDORSKY is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. . . . HARVEY SACHS's edition of The Letters of Arturo Toscanini—his sixth book—is forthcoming from Knopf. . . . DMITRY SHLAPENTOKH is Associate Pro- fessor of History at Indiana University. . . . AL SUNDEL is completing a novel about King David and his era. . . . Academic Director in the Hon- ors College at Adelphi University, NICHOLAS X. RIZOPOULOS is a Senior Research Associate at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs. . . . EDITH KURZWEIL, University Professor Emeritus at Adelphi University, is Editor of Partisan Review. . . . ANTHONY CHENNELLS is Associate Professor of English at the University of Zimbabwe. . . . IGOR WEBB's latest book is From Custom to Capital: The English Novel and the Industrial Revolution. . . . DAVID RODMAN has published articles in Israel Affairs, The Journal of Strategic Studies, MERIA Journal, and Midstream. . . . Provincetown Arts is edited by CHRISTOPHER BUSA . . . GYORGYI VOROS is the author of Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. === Page 9 === MARIO VARGAS LLOSA From Letters to a Young Novelist STYLE IS AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT, though not the only element, of narrative form. Novels are made of words, and the way a writer chooses and orders his language largely determines whether his stories possess or lack the power of persuasion. Of course, a novel's lan- guage cannot be disassociated from what it relates to-words shape their subject. The only way to know if a novelist has succeeded or failed in his undertaking is to decide whether, through his writing, the fiction lives, liberates itself from its creator and real life, and impresses itself on the reader as an autonomous reality. It is, therefore, what a text conveys that determines whether it is effi- cient or inefficient, life-giving or lifeless. In order to identify the ele- ments of style, perhaps we should begin by eliminating the idea of correctness. It doesn't matter at all whether a style is correct or incor- rect; what matters is that it be efficient, or suited to its task, which is to infuse the stories it tells with the illusion of life-real life. There are nov- elists who write very correctly, obeying the grammatical and stylistic imperatives of their times, like Cervantes, Stendhal, Dickens, García Márquez; and there are others, no less great, who break all the rules, making all kinds of grammatical mistakes, like Balzac, Joyce, Pío Baroja, Céline, Cortázar, and Lezama Lima. From an academic point of view, their style is full of improprieties, but that does not keep them from being good or even excellent novelists. Azorín, who was an extra- ordinary prose stylist (and nevertheless a very boring novelist), wrote in a collection of autobiographical essays titled Madrid: "The man of let- ters writes prose, correct prose, classical prose, and yet that prose is worth nothing without the leavening of grace, worthy intent, irony, dis- dain, or sarcasm." It is a sharp observation: stylistic correctness alone does not guarantee either the success or failure of a work of fiction. Editor's Note: Excerpted from Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. To be published in June 2002 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2002 by Mario Vargas Llosa. Translation copyright © 2002 by Natasha Wimmer. All rights reserved. === Page 10 === 168 PARTISAN REVIEW On what, then, does the success of a novel's language depend? On two qualities: its internal coherence and its essentiality. The story a novel tells can be incoherent, but the language that shapes it must be coherent if the incoherence is to be genuinely and convincingly simu- lated. An example of this is Molly Bloom's monologue at the end of Joyce's Ulysses, a chaotic torrent of memories, feelings, thoughts, and emotions. Its power to bewitch derives from a prose that is seemingly ragged and fragmented, but beneath its unruly and anarchic surface retains a rigorous coherence, a structural consistency that follows a model or original system of rules and principles from which it never deviates. Is the monologue an exact description of consciousness in motion? No. It is a literary creation so powerfully convincing that it seems to us to mimic the meandering of Molly's consciousness when really it is inventing it. Julio Cortázar boasted in his later years that he was writing "worse all the time." He meant that in order to express what he longed to express in his stories and novels, he was increasingly obliged to search out forms of expression beyond classic forms, to defy the flow of lan- guage and try to impose upon it rhythms, patterns, vocabularies, dis- tortions, in such a way that his prose might more convincingly represent the characters or occurrences he invented. In truth, Cortázar's bad writ- ing was very good writing. His prose was clear and fluid, beautifully imitating speech, incorporating and assimilating with perfect assurance the flourishes, quirks, and phrasings of the spoken word. He made use of Argentine colloquialisms, of course, but also French turns of phrase, and invented words and expressions with such ingenuity and such a good ear that they didn't stand out in his sentences, but rather enriched them with the "leavening" that Azorín believed was required of a good novelist. The credibility of a story (its power to persuade) doesn't depend solely on the coherence of its style-no less important is the role played by narrative technique-but without coherence, credibility is reduced almost to nil. A writer's style may be unpleasant, and yet, thanks to its coherence, effective. Such is the case of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. I don't know what you think of his writing, but his short, stuttering little sentences, plagued with ellipses and packed with exclamations and slang, irritate me. And yet, I have no doubt that Voyage to the End of the Night and also, though not so unequivocally, Death on the Installment Plan, are novels of overwhelming persuasion. Their sordid outpourings and === Page 11 === MARIO VARGAS LLOSA 169 extravagance hypnotize us, making irrelevant any aesthetic or ethical objections we might raise in good conscience. I have a similar reaction to Alejo Carpentier, without a doubt one of the greatest novelists of the Spanish language. His prose, when removed from the context of his novels, is exactly the opposite sort of writing I admire (I know it's impossible to make such a distinction, but I make it to clarify my point). I don't care for his stiffness, his academicism, and his bookish mannerisms, which always give me the sense that they are informed by meticulous searches in dictionaries, a product of that old passion for archaisms and artifice which seized the baroque writers of the seventeenth century. And yet, this same prose, when it tells the story of Ti Noel and Henri Christophe in The Kingdom of This World, an absolute masterpiece which I've read at least three times, has such a con- tagious and overwhelming power that it cancels my reservations and antipathies and instead dazzles me, making me believe wholeheartedly everything it has to tell. How does the starched and buttoned-up style of Alejo Carpentier accomplish such a thing? Thanks to its unflagging coherence and its aura of indispensability. His style has a conviction that makes readers feel that he tells the story the only way it could be told: in these words, phrases, and rhythms. It is relatively easy to speak about the coherence of a style, harder to explain what I mean by essentiality, a quality required in the language if the novel is to be persuasive. Perhaps the best way to describe essen- tiality is to explain its opposite, the style which fails to tell a story because it keeps us at a distance and lucidly conscious; that is to say, conscious of reading something alien, not experiencing the story along- side its characters and sharing it with them. This failure is perceived when the reader feels an abyss that the novelist does not successfully bridge in writing his tale, an abyss between what is being told and the language in which it is being told. This bifurcation, or split between the language of a story and the story itself, annihilates the story's power of persuasion. The reader doesn't believe what he is being told, because the clumsiness and inconvenience of the style make him sense, between word and deed, an unbreachable divide, a fissure that exposes all the artifice and arbitrariness that fiction depends on, and which only suc- cessful fictions manage to erase or hide. These styles fail because we don't feel they are necessary; on the con- trary, as we read we realize that the same stories, told in a different way or in other words, would be better (which in literary terms simply means more persuasive). We never feel any dichotomy of language and content when we read Borges, Faulkner, or Isak Dinesen. The styles of === Page 12 === 170 PARTISAN REVIEW these authors—each so very different from the rest-persuade us, because words, characters, and things constitute an indissoluble unity; it is impossible to conceive of one part without the others. It is this per- fect integration of style and content that I refer to when I speak of the quality of essentiality any creative writing must possess. The essentiality of the language of great writers is detected, by con- trast, in the forced and false writing of their epígonos. Borges is one of the most original prose stylists of the Spanish language, and perhaps the greatest Spanish stylist of the twentieth century. For that very reason, he has exerted a great influence, and if I may say so, an unfortunate one. Borges’s style is unmistakable, and functions extraordinarily well, giv- ing life and credibility to a world of sophisticated intellectual and abstract ideas and curiosities. In this world, philosophical systems, the- ological disquisitions, myths and literary symbols, reflective and specu- lative tasks, and universal history (contemplated from an eminently literary perspective) provide the raw material of invention. Borges’s style adapts itself to its subject matter and merges with it in a powerful alloy, and the reader feels from the first sentences of his stories and essays that these works have the inventive and sovereign quality of true fictions, that they could only have been told in this way, in this intelligent, ironic, and mathematically precise language—not a word too few, not a word too many—with its cold elegance and aristocratic defiance, privileging intellect and knowledge over sensation and emotion, playing with eru- dition, making a technique of presumption, eluding all forms of senti- mentality and the body and sensuality (or noting them at a great distance, as lower manifestations of existence). His stories are human- ized thanks to their subtle irony, a fresh breeze that lightens the com- plexity of the arguments, intellectual labyrinths, and baroque constructions which are almost always their subject matter. The color and grace of Borges’s style lies first and foremost in its use of adjectives, which shake the reader with their audacity and eccentricity ("No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night”), and in its violent and unexpected metaphors, whose adjectives or adverbs, besides fleshing out an idea or highlighting a physical or psychological character trait, often serve to foster a Borgesian atmosphere. Precisely because it is essential, Borges’s style is inimitable. When his admirers or literary fol- lowers copy his way of using adjectives, his irreverent sallies, his witt- icisms and poses, their stylings are as obvious as badly made wigs that fail to pass as real hair, proclaiming their falseness and bringing ridicule upon the unhappy heads they cover. Jorge Luis Borges was a formida- ble creator, and there is nothing more irritating or bothersome than the === Page 13 === MARIO VARGAS LLOSA 171 “mini-Borges” whose imitations lack the essentiality of the prose they mimic, making what was original, authentic, beautiful, and stimulating something caricaturish, ugly, and insincere. (The question of sincerity or lack of sincerity in literature is not an ethical issue but an aesthetic one.) Something similar has happened around another great prose stylist of the language, Gabriel García Márquez. Unlike Borges's style, his style is not sober, but is instead exuberant, and not intellectualized at all, rather, sensory and sensual. Its clarity and correctness reveal classical origins, but it is not stiff or old-fashioned—it is open to the assimilation of say- ings and popular expressions and to neologisms and foreign words, and it possesses a rich musicality and conceptual purity, free of complica- tions or intellectual wordplay. Heat, taste, music, all the textures of per- ception and the appetites of the body are expressed naturally and without fuss, and fantasy draws breath with the same freedom, casting itself unfettered toward the extraordinary. Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera we are overwhelmed by the certainty that only in these words, with this grace and rhythm, would these stories be believable, convincing, fascinating, moving; that, sepa- rated from these words, on the other hand, they would not have been able to enchant us: his stories are the words in which they are told. And the truth is that words are also the stories they tell. As a result, when a writer borrows a style, the literature that is produced sounds false, like mere parody. After Borges, García Márquez is the most imi- tated writer in the language, and although some of his disciples have been successful—that is to say, they've attracted many readers—the work, no matter how diligent the disciple, fails to take on a life of its own, and its ancillary, forced character is immediately evident. Litera- ture is pure artifice, but great literature is able to hide that fact, while mediocre literature gives itself away. Although it seems to me that with the preceding I've told you every- thing I know about style, in view of your letter's demands for practical advice, I'll give you this: since you want to be a novelist, and you can't be one without a coherent and essential style, set out to find your style. Read constantly, because it is impossible to acquire a rich, full sense of language without reading plenty of good literature; and try as hard as you can, though this is not quite so easy, not to imitate the styles of the novelists you most admire and who first taught you to love literature. Imitate them in everything else: in their dedication, in their discipline, in their habits; if you feel it is right make their convictions yours. But try to avoid the mechanical reproduction of the patterns and rhythms of their writing, since if you don't manage to develop a personal style, your === Page 14 === 172 PARTISAN REVIEW stories will likely never be invested with the power of persuasion that will make them come to life. It is possible to seek and find a style of your own. Read Faulkner's first and second novels. You'll see that from the mediocre Mosquitoes to the estimable Flags in the Dust, as the first version of Sartoris was called, Faulkner found his style, the labyrinthine and majestic language, part religious, part mythical, and part epic, that animates the Yoknap- atawpha novels. Flaubert also sought and found his style between the first version of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, written in a torren- tial, unmoored, lyrically romantic style, and Madame Bovary, in which that unbridled style was severely curtailed and all its emotional and lyri- cal exuberance sternly repressed in favor of an "illusion of reality," which he managed to perfect in five years of superhuman labor, the same amount of time it took him to compose his first masterpiece. As you may know, Flaubert had a theory about style: that of the mot juste. The right word was the one word—the only word—that was able to aptly express an idea. The obligation of the writer was to find that word. How did he know when he had found it? A whisper in his ear: the word was right when it sounded right. The perfect correspondence between form and content-between word and idea-translated itself into musical harmony. That is why Flaubert submitted his sentences to "la gueulade," the shouting test. He'd go outside to read aloud every- thing he had written, out to an avenue of lime trees that still exists near what used to be his house at Croisset: the "allée des gueulades," the shouting way. There he'd read as loudly as he could what he'd written, and his ear would tell him if he'd succeeded or if he'd have to keep try- ing words and sentences until he achieved the artistic perfection he pur- sued with such fanatic tenacity. Do you remember the line by Rubén Darío, "My style in search of a form"? For a long time I was disconcerted by it: aren't style and form the same thing? How is it possible to search for form, when it is there in front of you? Now I understand better, because, as I mentioned in one of my earlier letters, writing is only one aspect of literary form. Another, no less important, is technique, since words alone do not suffice in the telling of good stories. But this letter has gone on too long, and I'd bet- ter leave that discussion for next time. Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer === Page 15 === Planting the Seeds of Modernism: An Evening with Annie Cohen-Solal Edith Kurzweil: I first want to thank Dan and Joanna Rose for their hos- pitality and to welcome you to celebrate Annie Cohen-Solal's new book, Painting American. The French title is more provocative: Un jour, ils auront des peintres. This was Matisse's verdict when he visited the United States in 1933. Annie has written about the interchange between French and American artists up to the end of World War II, and she will finish by talking about Jackson Pollock. As some of you know, Annie's first book was about Paul Nizan and her second one, which she was writing when we met in Paris in the early 1980s, was about Jean-Paul Sartre. It was translated into many languages, and Annie caught the attention of Helmut Kohl when she spoke about it on television. He mentioned her to French President François Mitterrand, who soon asked her to be the French cultural counselor in the United States. During the time she was here, about ten years, many among you met her at the French Embassy. I have read the French edition of her new book, which won the Prix de l'Académie des Beaux-Arts, and I am sure that it will soon earn her many more prizes. That's all I'm going to say now, because Annie will talk in depth about her subject. She just told me she's work- ing on another project, a book about the connections between intellec- tuals and painters, and how they interacted with each other, much as the so-called New York intellectuals and painters did. Now to Annie. Annie Cohen-Solal: Thank you, Joanna and Dan, for welcoming me here, and thank you, Edith, for introducing me and organizing this get- together. I could not think of a better place to speak about my work, because I find on your shelves so many of the books that I have in my own library. I sense a sort of European-American atmosphere here. This book took me five years to write, but altogether ten years to pro- duce. I first thought about it when I arrived in New York to work at the French Embassy. I had just completed a book on Sartre, and you know talking about Jean-Paul Sartre in the United States is not a great assign- ment, because apart from the Partisan Review crowd, who had met him, he is not exactly a hero in this country, to say the least. I remember inter- viewing William Phillips, Lionel Abel, William Barrett, as well as many others. So, when I came here, I had in mind another project, which was === Page 16 === 174 PARTISAN REVIEW to investigate the years between 1944 and 1948, when the cultural hege- mony of Europe shifted to the Unites States. I wanted to know more about this period, to find out how the Europeans came to realize that things would not continue as usual, and how they reacted to this change. I arrived to take my position as French cultural counselor in October 1989, and within two weeks I met Leo Castelll. "I'm going to teach you all you need to know about American art," he told me. While I was in charge of opening exhibitions of French impressionists in Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, here was Leo Castelll teaching me about Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and the like. I could not have asked for a better mentor than him. He was a European who had arrived from Trieste in 1941 and who knew everything about the connections between Ameri- cans and Europeans. I learned voraciously from him. Little by little, as I grew interested in the unique aspects of the American cultural system, I realized how hard it must have been for the French and the Americans to interact, because the two models couldn't be further apart. In France we have a state-supported system for the arts, while in America artists rely on private aid. In France the system is hierarchical and centralized, while in America it is more scattered. These things are changing in both countries, but I remember when I arrived here there was a controversy at the National Endowment for the Arts about pornography and art, and everyone was asking me how things were done in France. And I said, "Well, you can talk about anything you want." It's amazing to analyze the gap between the cultural policies of France and the U.S. But what I really needed to do was to examine the roots of the Amer- ican model. One of the greatest assignments that I had at the Embassy was to open the doors of the Barnes Foundation near Philadelphia. It was extraordinary to learn about what Dr. Barnes had done in the thirties and about the board of Lincoln University. In the end, we managed to get the show to the Musée d'Orsay, which was wonderful. So little by little I learned about the people who had paved the way for modern art in America. I soon realized that I needed to know more about earlier times in order to describe these people, and it became evident that the existing books on the period weren't totally convincing. One of them, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, remained very much influenced by the Cold War. It gave the CIA a large role in the images of abstract expressionism. But I felt that it presented an overly ideological vision. So I decided to investigate what I call the "intercultural space." I love work- ing on this space between cultures, which is very thin and mysterious, particularly in the visual arts, as it is a field in which the tradition of rit- ual pilgrimage has played a major role. Painters have traveled in Italy === Page 17 === ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL 175 between Rome and Florence, between Florence and Venice, between Venice and Amsterdam. Then, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Paris became the center of the art world, just as Florence had been dur- ing the Renaissance. Paris lost its supremacy to New York one century later. I felt compelled to understand the complexity of this cultural shift. At the Embassy, I interviewed everyone I met in order to understand the elements that had a part in this rapid change. After I left my diplo- matic assignment, I worked in the archives of American art at the Smith- sonian and in French museums, trying to dig out the voices of the characters of my work. They turned out to be not only the painters, but also the collectors, the patrons, the museum directors, the museum cura- tors, the critics, and the teachers. This network of people made it possi- ble, in different periods, for the United States to create an extraordinary group of institutions, with extraordinary art, within a very short time. What first struck me is that the fundamental events took place much sooner than we usually learn from traditional American art history, and in a much different way. First of all, I should tell you that I am not an art historian, but a cultural historian, and that I am approaching the field of art not through the paintings, but through the actors behind the paintings. In other words, I am considering not so much the text, but the context. It soon appeared to me that at the very same time as the French system changed, around the middle of the nineteenth century, so did the American system. The French system was very much a monop- oly; it stood for absolute excellence in the art world. This ran through all the Parisian institutions: the École des Beaux-Arts, the best school in the world; the Musée du Louvre, the best museum in the world; and the Salon, where living artists exhibited twice a year. So Paris had it all. However, the French system evolved, partially because of demogra- phy—the increase in the number of new painters—and partially because of the arrival of new patrons. The impressionist painters were the first symptoms of that change. First Courbet in 1855, then Manet in 1863, challenged the rigidity of the French model and of French official art. Therefore, within a decade there arrived on the market a large number of paintings belonging to the so-called "New Painting," but the primary French patron, the French state, was not interested in this kind of art. At the same time the American scene was also changing dramatically. In this country, as you know, artists have been stigmatized by many: by the Puritans who founded this country, for religious and political rea- sons; by the pioneer culture; and by the businessmen. For a long time the artist was not thought of as a productive person. It was around the middle of the nineteenth century with people like Emerson and the === Page 18 === 176 PARTISAN REVIEW changes of urbanization and other elements that the status of the artist changed. Art became something essential for the new industrialists, the so-called robber barons, who needed to symbolically assert their social position. Now there was a real need for assembling art. One man, in between these two scenes, would have an enormous impact: Paul Durand-Ruel. This dealer saw the potentiality of the market in America. He came to New York in 1886 and brought over three hundred paint- ings from Paris for a value of $80,000. Americans were not savages, he pointed out; rather, their taste was simply more "open" than that of the French. I was lucky enough to be accepted into the archives of his Paris estate and to find there many unpublished documents. In these archives, I saw the press clippings for Durand-Ruel's show in New York, and they were extraordinary. One critic wrote that it was amazing that the most wonderful art created in one country for the last twenty-five years was being shipped part and parcel to another country. Within ten years, Paul Durand-Ruel would sell his most beautiful paint- ings made by the artists in Paris, the painters of l'Ecole de Barbizon, and the Impressionists to American collectors. I stumbled upon this fact thanks to a letter written to him by a journalist in 1895 asking where the most beautiful French paintings were located in American collec- tions. Durand-Ruel replied in a ten-page letter, proceeding city by city, collector by collector, painting by painting, and concluded by stating that seventy-five percent of the most beautiful paintings produced in France could be found in America. It was stunning to observe how fast the visual arts map of the United States was evolving, considering that the first museum built in this country dates from 1870. In researching Painting American I discovered that the American insti- tutions and collectors, among other actors, paved the way for American artists. And bringing such an extraordinary patrimony to another coun- try is a way of planting seeds in that country, to influence generations of painters. We sometimes forget, for example, that the Metropolitan Museum had three paintings by Manet before any museum in France had any. These canvases were refused by the French officials, who were decid- ing what to buy for the French public museums' collections. When the World's Columbian Exposition took place in Chicago in 1893, the French official pavilion displayed only official artists such as Bouguereau, Jean- Léon Gérôme, and the military painter Edouard Detaille, but none of the Impressionists. However, some French Impressionist paintings would be shown by a curator named Sarah Hallowell, a friend of Mary Cassatt who had worked as a dealer for the Potter Palmers, famous collectors from Chicago. Hallowell had assembled the most wonderful foreign === Page 19 === ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL 177 paintings belonging to private collections in America, among them many French impressionist paintings, which she displayed in such a way that they appeared to be already part of art history. You can imagine the reac- tion of the French official when he realized the meaning of the situation! So he gave a speech, which was actually quite courageous, saying that the "living masters" of France were able to "escort [its] great departed mas- ters." Still, it was embarrassing for him to see that the person displaying the leading artists of France was a young American curator, and not the French official "commissaires." I found his speech in the archives of the Musée d'Orsay, and enjoyed once more the pleasure of discovering scat- tered elements and putting them in a meaningful context. So the story goes. The period of total domination of the American arts by the cumbersome European model continues until 1890. Then begins the period of emancipation, which lasts until World War I; this is fol- lowed by what I refer to as the period of autonominization, going from about 1915 to 1948. During the period of emancipation, American museums would be built in two huge waves: first, in neoclassical archi- tecture and second in modernist buildings. More than fifty museums were constructed in the United States between World War I and World War II, primarily modernist buildings. However, when did France estab- lish its first modern art museum? In 1948, with the Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The seeds of modernist and postimpressionist art were planted, nourished, and raised in the soil of Paris between 1900 and 1915. During this extraordinary epoch, Paris was the center for foreign artists around the world with l'Ecole de Paris, and the art would be bought primarily by foreign collectors and taken out of France. This growth took root in America in an extraordinary way. In Paint- ing American, I identify some of its most dynamic actors: for example, the duo formed by two photographers and art dealers, Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz. Edward Steichen was in Milwaukee at the age of nineteen when he saw in a magazine that in Paris Rodin had had a fight with officials: commissioned to create a sculpture of Balzac, he created a work that was not at all conventional-an enormous Balzac wearing a bathrobe, basically something outrageous, and it had been refused. Hav- ing read this article, Steichen was filled with romantic notions of coming to Paris to see the birthplace of modern art. He visited the Universal Exposition of 1900, where Rodin had his own pavilion; there he approached the artist and asked to make a portrait of him in his studio. He would produce an amazing photograph, the profile of Rodin facing his Penseur with his "Victor Hugo" in the background. By superimpos- ing the two negatives, one on top of the other, he depicted Rodin as a === Page 20 === 178 PARTISAN REVIEW genius in the same way that Rodin had done for Balzac. By producing this portrait, Steichen, at a very young age, stepped into the closed circle of the Paris geniuses. And he ended up being the one to promote Rodin’s Balzac because Rodin would ask him—ten years later—to photograph it in the moonlight. Steichen did so, even if sometimes the shot took more than an hour. Rodin thought it was beautiful, and likened it to Christ walking the desert; and through Steichen’s pictures, the Balzac of Rodin became known all over the world. This anecdote demonstrates the vital- ity of this relationship between contrasts: a young artist and an older one, an American and a Frenchman, a sculptor and a photographer. Steichen would not only create the photographs of Balzac, but he would also send Rodin’s erotic drawings to Alfred Stieglitz in New York. As you can imag- ine, they shocked a lot of people. He also sent drawings by Matisse and Picasso. 291, Stieglitz’s gallery, functioned as a showplace for modernism. Another group which plays a capital role in our story is the Stein fam- ily: Gertrude Stein, Leo Stein, and Michael and Sarah Stein. Gertrude and Leo arrived in Paris in 1903, with Michael and his wife Sarah join- ing them the following year. Leo Stein, who had traveled all over the world, wanted to study painting at the Académie Julien, although it was not exactly his greatest talent. In Paris, however, he began intensely col- lecting postimpressionists’ paintings and elaborating interesting themes about them. The Steins soon established their Salon, and quickly assem- bled Paris’s largest and most interesting collection of works by Matisse, Cézanne, and Picasso. Sarah Stein, Michael’s wife, opened an academy with Matisse which trained a large number of young American painters. So in the Stein family, Leo was the collector and theoretician, Michael the financier, Gertrude the social force, and Sarah the practicioner. It was, in fact, a real “American Academy in Paris.” Every Saturday evening Leo and Gertrude would invite their friends to dinner, among them Matisse and Picasso; later in the evening they would admit young American painters who were studying in Paris, who would be able to see the collection, hear about the works, and meet with the artists. You can imagine these American artists, who had for years been driven to the classical school of official art at the École des Beaux-Arts, suddenly meeting Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne. Guests such as Patrick Henry Bruce, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Morgan Russell, and Max Weber were later exhibited at Stieglitz’s gallery; it was they who would bring modernism to the United States and found movements such as Synchronism. World War I played a huge role in terms of the emancipation of Amer- ican art from the French model and the discovery of America by French === Page 21 === ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL 179 artists. Actually, it would reverse the flow. Marcel Duchamp played a key part in this process. Although his nude was the main shock for the audience at the Armory Show, Duchamp himself arrived two years later. In an unpublished archive of his military files I discovered that he refused to go to war, and didn’t want his brothers to know that he was leaving the country. He wasn’t very proud of himself. He couldn’t yet speak English, and he was working as a librarian in Paris. When he came to New York, he was welcomed by the Arensbergs, once again worked as a librarian, and taught French to the Stettheimers. The Duchamp fam- ily has so many brilliant artists: Raymond Duchamp-Villon, the cubist sculptor; Marcel Duchamp; as well as the two sisters. For me, the Duchamp family is an allegory of France during World War I: they would lose Raymond Duchamp-Villon to the war in 1918 and Marcel to America, where he would influence so many Americans painters, even today. The way the Armory Show was brought into this country is yet another story, not the beautiful one we usually hear, but a rather pathetic one. Modernism seems to me to have arrived in the United States in a very odd way: it was not brought by the kind of didactic exhibitions that Roger Fry used to organize in London, but brutally, as a “coup,” chaot- ically. This explains a lot of things about modernism in America. Another important moment has to do with the creation of the Museum of Modern Art, which to my mind combined three elements that belong totally to American culture. First, the women from republi- can families, Abby Rockefeller, Lillie Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan, whose modernist tastes differed widely from their backgrounds. They consulted the advisor Paul Sachs, from the Goldman-Sachs family, Ger- man Jews who immigrated to this country. Paul Sachs taught a famous museum course at Harvard, which trained generations of American museum directors for thirty years, the last being Bill Lieberman from the Metropolitan Museum. These women asked Paul Sachs whom he would recommend as director of their new museum. He asked them whether the age was a handicap. They did not see why it would be, so Sachs came up with his best student, the twenty-seven-year-old son of a Bap- tist priest, Alfred H. Barr. It was the support of republican women, the expertise of a German Jew with Ivy League credentials, and the energy of a young Harvard cadet which made modern art possible in America. Alfred Barr was asked by Abby Rockefeller to meet her at her estate in July 1929. Five months later the first show took place, complete with paintings by Cézanne, Matisse, and Van Gogh, among others. Alfred Barr had traveled through Europe two years before that. He had seen the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Italy, France, Germany, and === Page 22 === 180 PARTISAN REVIEW Holland, and had brought back the best of everything he found there to the United States. He borrowed the idea of the Dutch architects, the conception of the Bauhaus museum in Dessau, which was integrating design, art, architecture, and cinema to the more conventional sections of a traditional museum. He had the ability, talent, and access to finan- cial support to pull it all together. I'll now return to the person who trained me in American art, Leo Castelli. When Leo arrived in New York in 1941, he said that the collec- tion Alfred Barr had gathered at the Museum of Modern Art was an ency- clopedia of European art that no European country could have created at the time, integrating the German Expressionists, Russian Futurists, and French Surrealists. No European country could have been able to assem- ble such a collection, simply because they were at war, and nobody knew what was going on in other countries. Leo told me that for him the Museum of Modern Art was already functioning as an integrated Europe (and we are all aware of the extraordinary amount of emphasis put on education in American museums). The theater designer Lee Simonson argued that a museum should "generate culture rather than simply pre- serve it." The idea of museums generating culture, questioning, challeng- ing, and educating the public, is very strong and very American. The federal government's involvement in the art world through the WPA program represents another extremely important part of the story. Roosevelt enacted the WPA program from 1933 to 1943 on the advice of his friend, George Biddle. It was modeled on the Mexican revolution, and commissioned artists to produce works of art for public spaces, such as frescos and sculptures. This was the only time in American history that the federal government became directly involved in the creation of works of art. This period saw the development of Realist art, with painters such as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood; but above all, the creation of cultural centers and art communities across the country. It inspired Americans to believe that art is an essential part of their soci- ety. And, as Dore Ashton puts it, it built a specific community which did not exist before in the United States, connecting the artists to the public. So there definitely are indigenous reasons for the establishment of New York as a world center after World War II. But there are also exter- nal reasons, which have to do with the European wars that forced so many European artists to come to this country, for example, Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann. From France they came in waves-Matisse, Leger, Hélion, Matta, Breton, Masson. As Edith mentioned in her intro- duction, the French title of my book derives from a remark Matisse made when he arrived here in 1933, invited by Albert Barnes to paint a === Page 23 === ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL 181 large fresco at the Barnes Foundation. "Someday they will have painters in America," he said, because it's not possible in such a country not to have painters one day. It's strange to hear that sentence today, but it does give you the French perspective of America at that time. Edith Kurzweil: Thank you, Annie. Since you've agreed to take ques- tions, we'll take them now. Joan Schwartz: You must have come across many references to litera- ture, music, and dance. Did it parallel what you described here? Annie Cohen-Solal: I think that examining the performing arts in this way is more complicated, but very interesting. And I'm puzzled: should I now start work on the next installment of Painting American, on American art between the years 1948 and 1998? Or should I start work- ing, as you're suggesting, on Dancing American, or Acting American, and so on? I don't know. But here is a related question which is extremely compelling: why did the United States have so many great writers at the end of the nineteenth century-Hawthorne, Poe, Emer- son-but no great painters? It's a question I've asked myself many times. Why was this not a country for visual artists? Audience: But I think there were artists around then. . . . Annie Cohen-Solal: Of course there were. I just spoke at the Eakins show in Philadelphia last Friday evening. And many such artists are being reevaluated. For example, Frederic Church was discovered twenty-five years ago. There were great artists, but at that time they were not rated as the world's greatest artists. Karen Wilkin: Eakins and Church certainly were. Annie Cohen-Solal: Yes, but Eakins was banned from the Philadelphia Museum. Karen Wilkin: That was for having a nude model with women students. It wasn't his art that was banned. Annie Cohen-Solal: Nonetheless, he was not given the credit he deserved. The Gross Clinic was very shocking for the American audience. Karen Wilkin: It's still shocking. === Page 24 === 182 PARTISAN REVIEW Annie Cohen-Solal: That's true. Did you see the show in Philadelphia? What did you think? Karen Wilkin: I think it's a fascinating show. It has a lot to do with the new cache of photographs they found and the relationship of photogra- phy to Eakins's work. It's a very well chosen show. Joanna Rose: The photography was known, too; it was just not shown. Bryn Mawr College was given a lot of photographs by local collectors. But they were not evaluated by the public; they were not publicized in the way that the art world now treats everything as a major event. Annie Cohen-Solal: It's fascinating to observe how cultural models are translated into other cultures and how societies sometimes fail to recog- nize their own artists. For example, the French Impressionists were banned by the French officials but took root here, and Eakins imported the French tradition from Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris. He also went to Spain to learn about realism, which did not catch on here. At the time, it was not the right context, and he might not have used the right strategies. Or he may not have properly conducted his dispute with the Pennsylva- nia Academy. But it's really interesting to see how it malfunctioned. We have to wait a few years, a few decades, in order to get the full impact. I am convinced that Eakins is a great artist. How demanding he was! He was trained to notice everything, and he religiously asked Jean-Léon Gérôme to point out what was wrong in his work. So Jean-Léon Gérôme then would explain in detail that, in order to avoid the static element of his drawing, he had to show the beginning and end of the movement. And yet, generally speaking, he was rejected here and accepted there. It's a very important show. Next year we're going to have the show in Paris at the Musée d'Orsay. I think it's important for the French to understand Eakins's role in bringing European realism to the United States. He paved the way for Robert Henri and The Eight; they carried on a fight from Philadelphia with the Charcoal Club and all the illustrators who subsequently arrived in New York. Dorothea Straus: Don't you think it's the painters who provided the United States with their independence and their superiority to Europe at that moment? Until then we had writers and other things, but we still leaned very much on England. And on France. But there was a whole psychological change by the painters after World War II. === Page 25 === ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL 183 Annie Cohen-Solal: You're right. And I think it's ironic that painters were stigmatized in American society for so long. I have memories of a text by Thomas Hart Benton talking about his father, who was deeply suspicious of intellectuals and artists, and regarded them as "pimps." It is that painter who pulled up the United States over Europe after World War II. It's fascinating. Ruth Bowman: It was interesting that the American Abstract Artists had to picket the Museum of Modern Art because they were not repre- sented. Ad Reinhardt made flyers and handed them out with cartoons making fun of Alfred Barr. Annie Cohen-Solal: They attacked him for not giving enough credit to the local artists. Ruth Bowman: But the local artists loved going to the Museum of Mod- ern Art and looking at the art. Annie Cohen-Solal: Exactly. That is how Jackson Pollock got his train- ing in European art. By coming to New York in 1930. Jules Olitski: It is interesting that Barr integrated all of European paint- ing over here, even though the school of Paris had all of Europe there. Is the aspiration of the American writer to be European? In the corre- spondence between William James and Henry James, William James always complained to Henry, why do you live in Europe? Why do you write in what is considered a European manner rather than an Ameri- can one? Both Henry James and T. S. Eliot aspired to be Europeans first (they both ended up Englishmen), James living first in Italy and Eliot also much in French culture. But the main idea was to be European. Annie Cohen-Solal: That is very interesting. A similar example from the realm of the visual arts is James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Born in America and trained in London, he came to Paris and never returned to the United States. For me, Whistler is the epitome of the modernist American artist. Early on, he caught on to what an art market is, what promotion is, and so on. And he also had a thoroughly European char- acter, just like Henry James, who called him a cosmopolitan, educated European-a kind of American aristocrat, with Sargent, Mary Cassatt, and certain other expatriates. === Page 26 === 184 PARTISAN REVIEW Audience: Just a comment. There was a show on Mary Cassatt's mate- rial. And I don't know if it's in the archives or not, but they have a very funny letter to her parents. They had visited her in Paris and she had taken them to one of her studios where they bought a couple of Mon- ets. And in the letter she underlined, "Hang on to your Monets." Annie Cohen-Solal: In a speech Sartre made at Yale University in 1946, he mentioned how, in literature, cultures borrow from each other. He said, "The occupation heightened French intellectuals' fascination with American life, its violence, its excess, its mobility. The principal reason of the influence of the American novel comes from the revolution it brought to narrative techniques" -here, he is referring primarily to Dos Passos. He continues, "We did not seek tales of murder and rape out of moral delight, but for lessons in renewing the art of writing. Without being aware of it, we were crushed by the weight of our traditions and culture. And American novelists, without tradition and without assis- tance, forged ahead with barbaric brutality, which was an instrument of inestimable value. We have made us of this conscious and intellectual manner, which was the fruit of talent and of unconscious spontaneity. The first French novels written after the occupation will soon appear in the United States. We are going to reestablish the techniques that you lent to us. We will return them digested, intellectualized, less effective and less forceful, consciously adapted to French tastes. Due to this incessant exchange that leads nations to rediscover in others that which they invented and then rejected, you may well discover in these foreign books the eternal youth of the 'old' Faulkner." This has to do with lit- erature, but I think it's exactly what it is about in art as well. Sartre had written a wonderful piece on Dos Passos, about whom he gave his first speech as professor of philosophy, in 1930. Simone de Beauvoir had translated Manhattan Transfer for him-which I found out when she gave me that speech. They had really promoted each other. Jules Olitski: They preferred Faulkner before we did. Faulkner was much more famous in Paris in 1949 than here. France got its culture from Italy when the king, François I, invited the architect who built city hall. Annie Cohen-Solal: Yes, Pietro di Cortona. He was born in my village in Italy, Cortona. Audience: It's a pattern. The Romans got their culture from the Greeks and the Greeks got a lot of theirs from Egypt. === Page 27 === ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL 185 Annie Cohen-Solal: Yes, and from the Etruscans. But to go back to the collections in museums. We talked about the impressionists being brought here, but Napoleon brought back art from his campaigns in Egypt and Italy, Lord Elgin carried the Parthenon's marble to England from Greece, and Emperor William II brought Priam's treasure and the Temple of Zeus to Berlin from Pergamon. You're absolutely right that this pattern developed all over the world. Jules Olitski: Have you considered looking at the so-called journeymen in the early 1800s, late 1700s? They were not sophisticated, they had no connections. Their art is kind of harsh, simple. I'm always curious about them. Because they're rather charming and expressive and I don't think much has been said about them. Annie Cohen-Solal: You're talking about American artists? William Dunlap and the like? Who went from village to village to do portraits? Jules Olitski: Yes. Ruth Bowman: Isn't it interesting that Mrs. Rockefeller collected folk art? Annie Cohen-Solal: That is a tradition that goes back a long time. The daughter of Louis Havemeyer also collected folk art. Jules Olitski: They seemingly had no relationship to London or Paris. And yet they seemed to see something that they based their art on, espe- cially their religious paintings. Annie Cohen-Solal: Did you see these at the Met? Ruth Bowman: No, at the New York Historical Society and the Mar- itime Society. Jules Olitski: They did have a role in American art. Annie Cohen-Solal: Yes, they are influential cross-culturally. That is interesting. It is a field I should look into next. Edith Kurzweil: Thank you, Annie. If there are no more specific ques- tions, let's continue this discussion over dessert === Page 28 === Trivializing Tragedy: An Interview with Norman Manea Edward Kanterian: "Someday something terrible might happen," you wrote in your story "The Balls of Faded Yarn." It refers to the threat to mankind that conjures up the ubiquity of the apocalypse, an apocalypse that no longer allows a Kingdom of Heaven. The source of the threat, however, is never explicit, which reminds me of Kafka's narrative. Kafka, however, did not experience the Holocaust. What is this threat? Is it inescapable? Norman Manea: A sentence like "Everything could start over again, everything could become drastically different," found in my other story, "Tale of the Pig," is an even more explicit worry. Yet we are unaware of the danger. The change is sudden and total. It simply cancels all routine; a lurch into the abyss, without the slightest preparation. It's about obsessive memory, a child ripped from the bosom of his family: the moment of deportation. The "metamorphosis" begins here; those who experienced it and survived lost their innocence and in exchange received endless uncertainty. The worry, the suspicion of what is real, the suddenly surfacing fear of catastrophe—they all arise from the mistrust of reality. Everything could start over; everything could drastically change as it did before. To restart the machinery of evil became an expression that refers to something that's already happened, to the impossible that became possible. The biographical premise alone, however, is too narrow. The Roman- ian critic Lucian Raicu correctly noted that for me biographical deter- mination seems a "new constraint," even a totalitarian one, against which I employ art and literature. Kafka anticipated the "unthinkable" with uncanny precision. Gregor Samsa suddenly becomes that which he was to begin with: a human insect. In the end those around him dispose of him as a thing, an "it," since they can no longer find the former "you" in him that had just recently acted like a person, like all those around him who consider Editor's Note: Adapted from Lettre International 51, October 2000, and Neue Züricher Zeitung, November 10-11, 2001. === Page 29 === NORMAN MANEA 187 themselves human beings and whom others take to be human beings. It is a horrifying, absurd, fantastic, and also deeply human metamorphosis. As shocking as the disaster is, it changes everything. The people around him quickly become inhuman, while the protagonist becomes even more human. The metamorphosis proves to be a grisly, alienated reality, an already existing possibility-dubious, audacious, guilt-laden, and perverse. It is a premise for any individual, whether isolated or assimilated, that also underlies the nightmare of liberation, indeed of liberty: a human anthropomorphic separation. The fear is nourished not just by the malevolent forces of our environment, but also by our own divided being. We are, each of us, just another hypothesis-who knows how stable and irreversible-of the other. The humanistic rhetoric to which we always appeal does not seem to protect us from this abyss. Unfortunately, in our time, the question "For what are you prepared to die?" seems all too often to be replaced with the question "For what are you prepared to kill?" EK: Another of your persistent themes is survival. As precarious, as fragile as the victim is, it nevertheless manages to survive. It's like a timid light deep inside us that would, even after a cataclysmic hurricane, still flicker. I discern a faint glimmer of hope in your writing, an over- coming of the catastrophe through narrative. NM: In America, this land of pragmatism and productive energy, I often hear the Holocaust survivor referred to as a "hero of competition," a symbol of hardiness in times of disaster, but also of social success "after- wards." This implies that whoever has withstood the Holocaust should have the strength to win the social struggle in normal circumstances. We can see survivors of the concentration camps, for instance, at the top of the business world. But the work of the novelist demands a totally dif- ferent energy. To recreate the trauma of the Holocaust as literature, par- ticularly for the survivor, is an added burden and challenge. No wonder some authors dealing with this topic have ultimately committed suicide. Does writing offer recompense? legitimization of a fate? a glimmer of hope? I'm not inclined to entertain too many illusions about this diffi- cult and who-knows-how-useful craft. EK: The story "Weddings" seems to me a masterpiece. A boy who has survived a concentration camp is made to present the suffering he expe- rienced in speeches in front of mass rallies organized by the Communist Party. Ironically, it becomes the main attraction at weddings. His speech begins with the words "We, who haven't known the meaning of === Page 30 === 188 PARTISAN REVIEW childhood....” Through routine, unspeakable grief becomes meaning- less, even for the boy himself. Amidst the crowd he remains alone in his sadness and mistrust of an unsympathetic world. NM: The manipulation of truth, the caricature of ideals, the tyranny of “Utopia,” and all the grotesque consequences that follow are the essence of totalitarianism. It is seen through the eyes of a child, a sur- vivor who, having hardly escaped the Holocaust, suddenly becomes a tool for rhetoric and propaganda. The histrionic ideological staging even makes an abominable farce of everyday family life. The grotesque takes aim at proximity, the loved ones. The story also addresses the more general themes of our alienation from the multitude of selves inside us, the corruption of authenticity through the public act itself; the bizarre jumble that comprises the mush of everyday life. The text explores the strange “theatricality” of public production and the clownish aspects of the conventional, whether in public or in private. There is also an unpublished sequel describing the lectures of the story “Weddings” reenacted by their author-an asylum-seeker in the New World, our American stage. Ironically, the cliché of the “survivor,” this time “a victim of totalitarianisms, communism, and fascism,” as the American emcees put it, is no longer molded by ideology, but rather by marketing and melodrama. Human sorrow is once again corrupted through trivialization, draining of content, routine, and theatrics. Grief ends not in dark “absoluteness,” in all-erasing death, but rather in a non-absolute recompense: life itself. EK: Totalitarianism in Romania has until now been interpreted almost exclusively from the perspective of other “great” dictatorships—such as fascism and communism—and is regarded more as a marginal phenom- enon. Your collection of essays On Clowns (1992) moves in another direction: from your personal experiences in Romania, you construct an interpretive model of the relationship between power and culture. In doing so, you are the first author to construct a Romanian model. The title essay, with its portrait of Ceauşescu, presents both the dictator and the artist as circus figures, entangled in the inescapable tragicomic dis- course of dubious complicity and disastrous masquerades. To what extent is this interpretation applicable to other totalitarian regimes, or even to the modern capitalist world? A German reviewer stated that “the clown metaphor might distort social complexity through an anec- dotal abstraction.” How do you respond to that? === Page 31 === NORMAN MANEA 189 NM: That book wasn't meant as some kind of dissertation, nor as an exhaustive study of the social complexity of dictatorships. An ambitious didactic "model" was not intended. The tragicomic is found, I believe, in many forms of tyranny, and in human behavior generally. That's also why it rightly belongs to literature. Anyone who has lived under the disastrous spell of Great Authority is closer to the clown, the eternal ally of the unfortunate man. My ten- dency to sarcasm and absurdity was reinforced by the grotesque that has always had me under its spell, even before the publication of The Apprenticeship Years of Augustus the Fool (1979), a subversive collage of essays, letters, diary entries, and fragments from the socialist press. It presents history as a circus, the individual as a tragicomic being, human fate as burlesque synthesis. The clown, the childish knight of farce, hops over the graves in which so many futile illusions and sighs ferment. The human tragedy engulfs an even greater tragedy: comedy-the thick, grotesque mask; the light, idiotic laughter; the aggressive, diabolical laughter; and the wise laughter. Should Hitler's apparently irrational hatred of Jews be attributed to his irritation with Jewish laughter? Such an "anecdotal abstraction" is not to be dismissed, even if it simplifies the "social complexity" of National Socialism. We can easily imagine such a "key," among many others, to understanding the tragicomic of Hitler's psyche: the Great World Leader's fury at the horde of the "inferior race," his demonic ene- mies, clowns without a state, flag, or army, having only despair and irony! A handful of schlemiels who come together to undermine his authority? We can imagine a hysterical Hitler, obsessed by the image of Jews laughing at him, determined to avenge himself against their unbearable mockery and show them that "he who laughs last, laughs best," as Ron Rosenbaum argues in his book Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. Couldn't the frenetic joy over the bloody deed describe an essential aspect of the arrogant White Clown? It is impossible to forget Hitler's face, contorted by one last triumphant grin, impossible to forget the joy with which so many Nazis committed their crimes. And not just the Nazis. And not only in the twentieth century. As I have said, I believe that blasphemy and carnival have gone hand in hand throughout history. Under dictatorship, blasphemy is ubiquitous. In today's capitalistic consumer democracy, blasphemy loses its meaning, except in the wings. It enters the main stage only in the form of sudden car- nivalized scandal. In the global market of cacophony, only the scandalous garhers a hearing. But nothing is scandalous enough to be memorable. === Page 32 === 190 PARTISAN REVIEW EK: How were you confronted with anti-Semitism in Romania? How was it possible in a country where official policy, at least after 1946, was committed to the internationalism of Communist teachings? NM: It is a tiring subject. I would prefer that non-Jews discuss anti- Semitism. My less than amusing "initiation" to Romanian anti-Semitism was brutal and occurred at an early age. In October 1941, my family, along with the entire Jewish population of Bukovina, was deported to the Transnistria camp. When the survivors returned to Romania, the Antonescu regime had disappeared, the war was over, and racist legis- lation had been repealed. People had hopes for a new beginning. With its promise of a multiethnic, egalitarian society, the Communist regime lured large numbers of Jews into its trap. Since ethnic discrimi- nation was against the law, anti-Jewish resentment took on more hidden and encoded forms. Thus, it didn't disappear, but rather became more subtle, and even found new justification in the hate that many leading Jewish Stalinists drew upon themselves because they, not unlike their non-Jewish comrades, were blinded by the supposedly necessary brutal- ity of their "revolutionary" mission. Finally, the Party itself began to use and manipulate anti-Semitism as a popular form of diversion. It eliminated Jews from its leadership and instead of revolutionary internationalism adopted, as it were, a nationalist-socialist policy with picturesque, Byzantine coloring. The Jewish Communists took this sudden break with past ideals and the common struggle as an affront, since now they no longer shared the privileges of the new society. I felt rather relieved that they'd been divested of their complicity in the country's deteriorating situation. I even thought anti-Semitism would dissipate on its own, since Jews and non-Jews alike were suffering under the same idiotic dictatorship. To this day, it hasn't happened. Even now, whenever, for instance, Ana Pauker is mentioned, we are still reminded that her original name was Hanna Rabinsohn. As if "Pauker" would sound like "Patrascanu," "Gheorghiu-Dej," "Ceausescu," "Iliescu," and so on. The Party finally found a solution with threefold benefits: the "dis- posal," like waste, of Jews through emigration, which brought in foreign currency and a polished image of Romania. In fact, this wasn't exactly a new tactic; it had already been used by the "bourgeois" prewar parties. Anti-Semitism did not disappear in Eastern Europe, nor in the West- ern world. Romania is no exception. === Page 33 === NORMAN MANEA 191 EK: Some people now are speaking of the "red Holocaust." What do you think of that? NM: This genocide is certainly not the first in history, nor even the first in the twentieth century. There are others, all emblematic of horror in all of its variety and scope. I don't believe, however, that they should all be described as variations of one and the same expression, be it the "black Holocaust" (of African slaves in America), the "red Holocaust" (the Gulag), the "yellow Holocaust" (China under Mao's terror, Cam- bodia under Pol Pot), the "green Holocaust" (Rwanda), and so on. The word Gulag, for example, coined by Solzhenitsyn, expresses rather precisely the bureaucratically organized terror of the Soviet system, which also occurred in Eastern Europe. That doesn't mean that the Gulag, with its millions upon millions of victims and a bloody and macabre history, which even now has been incompletely examined, becomes more impor- tant as the "red Holocaust." For the sake of historical understanding and out of respect for the victims a certain specificity must be observed. It is inappropriate, I would say, to group all genocides under some far-reaching category that obscures the very distinctions. There are sim- ilarities and differences among these catastrophes, whose appalling real- ity must be acknowledged. Mass murders aren't in competition with one another. Their names can only be as specific as the events themselves. It's also not about the appropriation of suffering or a "monopoly" of suffering, as certain commentators using cheap political showmanship put it. Such rhetorical tricks rather show a complete indifference to the specificity of human tragedies. EK: "No one gets around Auschwitz. Auschwitz is the negative culmi- nation of our civilization; there is nothing that could surpass Auschwitz. Man will struggle over this dreadful event for a long time to come." So stated Imre Kertész in the Neue Züricher Zeitung. The Gulag also counts as a "dreadful event," another monstrosity of our century, perpetrated in the name of Marxist ideology. Some Eastern Europeans use the argument "One should also not forget the Gulag," only to fore- stall criticism of the pre-Communist fascist past. Such criticism of nationalism supposedly originated from an external Western conspiracy. NM: I'd rather not get into this awful subject; I prefer to have others answer, scientifically and objectively, whether Auschwitz was more hor- rible than other catastrophes of the twentieth century. Human tragedies are unique, all similarities to the contrary. Every human being is unique. === Page 34 === 192 PARTISAN REVIEW The Gulag recently became, as you rightly point out, a propagandistic excuse and not the subject of an honest analysis. It was an excuse not only to blame the West, but also to justify the usual moaning and groan- ing over the fate of the always-so-innocent, injustice-suffering, and ignored homeland. The debate around such a grave topic has been mauled with slogans in the day-to-day political arena. This also happened more than once with the Holocaust. Denying, withholding, commercialization, manipu- lation, trivialization, and boredom are without a doubt the stages of an only all-too-"human" shortness of memory. It wouldn't surprise me if the same fate will befall recent tragedies. In Romania, and perhaps in other European countries, the Gulag was often used in the last decade to silence examination of the Holocaust. In these absurd, "I'm the top victim" Olympiads, day-to-day politics and the xenophobic tradition go hand in hand. EK: The Gulag is far from having received a thorough analysis. NM: The examination of Communism (Gulag) is only seldom profound and ample. It's usually just a journalistic and political pretext for rhetoric. In this context, prewar slogans against the Jewish-Communist con- spiracy have risen from the dead, even in intellectual circles considering themselves highly democratic and pro-Western. The old clichés about Jewish Communism are dressed up anew as post-Communist orna- ments. A new, no less clever ploy is devised: "the Jewish monopolization of suffering." Although there are fewer and fewer Jews, they again take up the center stage in the soap opera. It turns out that the Jews only declared communism to be anti-fascist in order to conceal the fact that communism itself was a form of fascism that they themselves invented. They brought the communist misery onto the country. Once victims, they supposedly became pitiless executioners; and, naturally, they are not interested in an examination of the Gulag, only of the Holocaust, in order to secure themselves the "monopoly of suffering." Added to the worldwide financial and cultural Jewish monopolies, this new one is said to serve as a welcome and profitable boon. EK: How does this charge express itself? NM: The post-Communist Romanian press offers numerous examples. And I don't mean only in anti-foreigner and anti-Western publications like the weekly newspaper Romania Mara (Greater Romania), the === Page 35 === NORMAN MANEA 193 organ of the national party of the same name. More interesting to me, rather, is the pro-Western and pro-democratic press. Here one some- times finds unbelievable slips, complicity, and clichés, shocking echoes of a not always admirable tradition. As the political scientist Vladimir Tismaneanu correctly observed, "From fully unexpected quarters some- times come nationalistic back-stabs with unambiguous anti-Semitic con- notations, insolently revisionist acts." Indeed, one cannot overlook the dubious insensitivity, clichés, ambiguities, and even insults from other- wise esteemed publications. Let's take for example, the Romanian context of the "Garaudy debate." What are we talking about? In his book Les mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne (very much praised in the Muslim press) the French journalist Roger Garaudy questions the purpose and the extent of the Holocaust and "unmasks" its manipulation through the policies of Israel and other countries. With the adroitness of a party propagandist, he basically manipulates quotations from the Western and Israeli press, which, as is common in democracies, pick apart the ruling powers, but which only make sense in the context of the prevailing discourses. Garaudy's book was banned in France, Switzerland, and other Euro- pean countries. The Swiss tribunal's decision said the book questions or denies that the National Socialist leadership ever gave the order for extermination and said it contains deliberately violent expressions with the purpose of hurting the Jewish community. In his expert testimony in the appeal, Alain Finkielkraut places Garaudy's book and the known- to-be-fake Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion on the same level, as signs of anti-Semitic ideology. "If it is claimed that the 'Final Solution' may not be interpreted as a planned project," he said, "then it's being suggested that the Jews are liars, and that they possess the power to con- vince the entire world of their lies. Roger Garaudy does not counter facts with facts. He propagates the latest rendition of every argument in whose name the Jews were murdered. . . . Nothing is more damaging than to deny the survivors their tragedy and the dead their death." In the editorial "The Holocaust and the Gulag," the Bucharest liter- ary weekly Romania Literara stated, "Someone is afraid of losing the monopoly on the uncovering of crimes against humanity. One piece of evidence for such suspicion is the case against Garaudy in France. He didn't claim that there wasn't a Holocaust, rather that an extraordinary lobby has been constructed around this historical event. Now it is exactly the loss of this monopoly that appears to unsettle many people." Although Garaudy's book was banned in most of Europe, it was mar- keted with success in the Arab world and in Romania-in sovereign and === Page 36 === 194 PARTISAN REVIEW free countries, that is, which the prevailing lobby obviously doesn't intimidate in the least. The article in Romania Literara appears even stranger in light of this fact. Has Romania already so overcome all the problems of the transition that it can now devote itself to teaching France, the frivolous big sister, a better way? Garaudy's Romanian publisher, Alma Tip, also published The Proto- cols of the Learned Elders of Zion and a propagandistic pamphlet by the extreme Palestinian organization Hamas. In the epilogue to the Roman- ian version, Garaudy's contribution was put clearly: “Over fifty years after the war the historical lie of the gas chambers comes to light. In Nuremberg fully innocent people were convicted. The Stalinistic Nurem- berg show trial had the goal of manipulating the opinion of the entire world. The technical inspection of various structures at Auschwitz veri- fied that they were constructed after the war, in order to serve the propa- ganda purposes of the gangsters of Yalta.” Present-day France is seen by Garaudy's Romanian publisher as a “totalitarian, fascist, and racist coun- try” that “has found itself under Zionist control for over fifty years.” Romania Literara seemed to have opted-in the “subtle” style of a tasteful intellectual debate-for the right to market this not entirely sub- tle or objective book, not only in Romania, but also in pitiable France, whose judicial system, terrorized by said lobby, has ostensibly denied its own humanistic roots. Other Romanian publications also took part in the dialogue. Remarkably, the cultural weekly Revista 22 spoke out clearly against Romania Literara's point of view in the Garaudy debate. On the other hand, the high-circulation daily newspaper Adevarul dra- matically titled its protest against the French court's decision “Descartes Condemned.” From Garaudy to Descartes? No more and no less. EK: Let us go back to Kertész. NM: I would refer to another statement of his. Kertész mentions those survivors who later killed themselves (Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Jean Améry) and writes, “When I compare my fate with that of these writ- ers, I have come to think that a Stalinist ‘society' helped me survive the last four decades. It confirmed for me that after Auschwitz there could be no chance for freedom, liberation, catharsis." In the “free” West, the survivors experience their trauma ever more frequently and intensively, until the fatal end. In the East, on the other hand, life in the “prison society,” as Kertész calls it, seems to have forestalled the dilemma of “identity,” and with it the irreversible last free choice-suicide. === Page 37 === NORMAN MANEA 195 You can well understand why these lines have particular meaning for me. And why another quotation from this Hungarian writer touches me: "Now that the walls of the prison have fallen, one again hears amidst the racket and the ruins the caw of anti-Semitism after Auschwitz." I remember the evening I spent with Kertész some years ago in Budapest. He told me of his disappointment and concern over the new nationalism in the East. He saw many threatening signs around him, and spoke with restrained bitterness. This subject instantly connected us. EK: I wonder if in the other political camp there isn't a counterpart to this treatment of the Holocaust. Thus The Black Book of Communism, certainly no brilliant editorial or scientific achievement, met, particu- larly in France and Germany, with vehement criticism. The true prob- lem, however, was neglected: the horror of the Gulag and all the other acts of terror in the twentieth century that found justification in Com- munist ideology, in its sheer, sly utopia. NM: The Gulag on the one hand offers a new and immanent legit- imization of democracy (as though one were still necessary), and on the other offers the Left the chance to complete a final and clear break with Communism. The Left's assignment now should consist of liberating humanistic "mythology" from tyranny and the illusion of utopia and lend substance again to rationalism and pragmatism, freedom and icon- oclasm, and legal and social ideals. The Communist failure means millions of victims. It remains decisive for any critical analysis of the last century, the history of the Left included. Those who for a long time have lived somewhat bored in the democracy of postwar capitalism—giving in to its cynical competition— seemed to prefer concentrating on the more obvious reasons for dissat- isfaction. Does nostalgia for utopia, for the great project of universal happiness, still exist? I rather think indifference is at work, the solid and lasting indifference of the human being who loves himself more than his neighbor and loves the neighbor more than a stranger. After all, the Gulag took place far away and a long time ago. EK: But the Holocaust also initially faced indifference. NM: Possibly therein lies the solution. The reappraisal of Communism and the pathology of terror that resulted in the Gulag belongs first and foremost to the East. Neither the washed-out West, nor American impe- rialism, nor the diabolical Jewish international oligarchy, nor the === Page 38 === 196 PARTISAN REVIEW French, German, or Swedish Left today can prevent the East from crit- ically investigating this tragedy. This means opening archives, subjecting decades of Communist rule to an objective assessment, analyzing the ambiguity and “advantages” that made life possible under the dema- gogic one-party system. A well-documented and penetrating analysis of "real socialism” would be the appropriate answer to the suffering of the East and the indifference of the West. Why this is not happening is no big mystery. There is possibly some- thing more pressing in East European societies: too many accomplices, if not the actual guilty, hold the stage or the wings. The case of National Socialism was no different. "Denazification" and the conviction of the guilty were steps in a slow and not-at-all exemplary process. Germany lost the war, and the victors required the country to examine its own past and struggle for moral convalescence. The reaction of the younger generation was admirable, though not until the sixties. Communism, mind you, was not defeated in a war-like conflict. The victors and the defeated belonged to the same peoples. Therefore, for- merly Communist countries have to work out their pasts themselves. I'm in no way certain whether that is such a simple task. The older gen- eration, with all its "goods” and "evils," is fading away. I doubt that in the East or the West a new "Generation of '68" will arise that will be interested in historical catharsis, in the boring Communist “story” that happened in the Stone Age and seems completely absurd. And even if it were to be debated, trivialization, commercialization, and denial seem unavoidable—as was true of the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, human nature provides us again and again with a full range of contradictions and paradoxes; a magical improvement cannot be expected. EK: Let's stay on the topic of Leftist ideology: many followers of Com- munism believe that the Stalinist Terror was "bad,” but that this in no way detracts from the "good" of Marxist teachings. They argue that, in theory, Communism is good, but has been carried out badly: that means it could also be carried out well. Can we afford any more experiments to test this argument? NM: The Marxist critique of capitalism could perhaps still offer some arguments, even if they need to be revised and fitted to today's complex society. It could also focus on the alarming differences between affluent and underdeveloped countries, between the all-too-rich and the extremely poor. Yet Communism is a naïve and dangerous simplifica- tion of human existence and fatally requires that man must fit himself === Page 39 === NORMAN MANEA 197 into dogma, not the other way around. The exploitation of man by the state in place of exploitation of man by man did not lead to positive results. The absorption of private property by the state led not only to economic disaster, but to people becoming the property of the state. In place of banal political demagoguery between parties, we had absolute demagoguery of the one-party system. The cultural chaos of the free- market economy, the vulgarity, cacophony, and commerce, was replaced by the ideological censor, the schizophrenia of taboos and enforced complicity. And the abolition of selfish competition through the intro- duction of the Party Book led to pathological perversion that in the end ruined the entire structure of society. To call the terror "bad" is an understatement. It was brutal, bloody, crazy, grotesque. Not just the Stalinist terror with its nightmarish Gulag, not just the crimes in China and Cambodia or in the "Marxist" African states, but the everyday terror of surveillance and suspicion protected by a legislation serving only the party authority, never the individual. The understandable discontent many have today with advanced cap- italism—with all its contradictions and conflicts, repulsive cynicism, and total domination by capital—should never lead to another Com- munist experiment. There are, I still dare hope, more sensible ways to change than that which transforms the bad into the worst. EK: What is your relationship with present-day Germany? NM: With the Holocaust, Germany became inextricably chained to the fate of the Jews. I can't answer that question simply as an individual, as I always like to do. The Holocaust came at the end of an intensive cultural Germaniza- tion of the Jews stretching back over centuries. Heine believed that Jews and Germans were the two "ethical peoples" of Europe, who together would construct the spiritual citadel of the continent. There is no trace of his otherwise ever-present irony when he claims that old Palestine itself had been a "Germany of the Orient." In the Hitler years, Leo Baeck, the last great German rabbi before the catastrophe, changed his habit of reading a passage from a Greek tragedy after his morning prayer into one in which he recited passages from texts of biblical prophets alongside Kant, Goethe, and Schiller. How many Jewish intel- lectuals didn't see a perfect harmony between Kant and Judaism? German culture seemed to be on the path to Germanness, and even the perfection of Judaism. Thus, all the more shocking was the National Socialist catastrophe. Understandably, then, the survivors of the Holo- === Page 40 === 198 PARTISAN REVIEW caust did not want to visit Germany. Death remained for them a master from Germany, as Celan put it. How could one forget such a trauma? And still, despite the apocalyptic horror, the German-Jewish rela- tionship found no "Final Solution," even after the Holocaust. Three weeks before Hitler's seizure of power, Hannah Arendt wrote to Karl Jaspers that no position on the Jewish question, be it assimilationist, Zionist, or anti-Semitic, could solve the problem. Twenty years later, though, after the Holocaust, she was to explain to Jaspers that she still remained "German" and was not willing to construct for herself a false Jewish or American past. These oddities exist not only in the case of an intellectual with so def- inite a German background as Arendt's. A year after their return from the camp at Transnistria, my parents hired a private German language teacher for me! We lived in Radauti, a picturesque Bukovinian town in which the Jewish population, as many of them as were still left, spoke German, just like educated Romanians. Our deportation to Transnistria had been committed by Romanian authorities, but the parents who so quickly engaged a German teacher for their son knew only too well who had set the infernal machinery of genocide in motion. I belong to those who took upon themselves the encounter with post- war Germany. I hoped that National Socialism didn't affect the "entire" German history. I rather thought that Nazism didn't reduce it to a com- mon denominator, but I also knew that it was not completely extrinsic to the German "nation," as the Communists claimed. Contrary to Mar- tin Walser, I think the consciousness of guilt doesn't have only negative effects. I see the German question in a larger context, that of the human. In no way does this imply an optimistic vision, rather the contrary. I often recall Mark Twain's words: "I am quite sure that I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can't be any worse." EK: You left Romania in 1987 and went to West Berlin. How did your encounter with the democratic, postwar Germany play out? NM: A great monster by the name of Berlin plagued the fantasies of my childhood. At the age of five, on my way to the camp, the war-like word "Berlin" brutally crushed my innocence. At the age of fifty, the aggres- sive Berlin meant to me the jump over the wall of the socialist camp. After the Holocaust and Communist totalitarianism, West Berlin marked the beginning of a complementary experience: exile. In a free === Page 41 === NORMAN MANEA 199 city, surrounded by the penal colony that called itself the German Democratic Republic, my memory struggled against internal and exter- nal walls. It was a year of worry, exultation, and anguish-the begin- ning of a difficult rebirth out of the ashes. Every morning the thick crown of the tree in front of my window reminded me of the passing time and the indifference of nature. I looked to the sky, then to the clock, waiting for my loyal friend, the mailman. The gentle command "Schreib mal weider!" ("Write again!") written on the yellow car was of particular meaning precisely because my own writing was faltering. As a symbol not for the capital Berlin, but rather for the hope of a promising locus, I would choose my friend's plain mailbag. Such a gift is to be found on every meridian of expelled dreamers. EK: Berlin and West Germany naturally were infinitely far removed from the Nazi Reich. The intellectual scene was more leftist, the coun- try, compared to today, more generous in its policies concerning refugees and exiles. NM: There were many oddities. I recall one experience in particular. One Sunday evening in June the editor of Stern magazine introduced to a select Jewish audience his latest book-a scandal-laden and successful revelation of his father, General Franek, the former Nazi governor of the Polish "protectorate." My wife Cella and I were among the guests. The speaker's careless bohemian appearance was more a declaration of his political principles, namely those of the Left, than an expression of his financial situation. The audience, comprised of Holocaust survivors who had established themselves in Germany after the war, wore elegant clothing and were prosperous-to judge by the jewels of the extremely well-dressed ladies. The author read several moving passages: how as a small child he had had masturbated, full of triumph, when the news came of his father's execution by the Allies; how by subtle, bogus financial transactions, underground organizations got the brood of the former Nazi elite into the best English schools. Questions and discussion followed. The audi- ence was visibly indignant over the practically pornographic candor of many of the book's details and treated Franck's son with skepticism. They were the last ones ready to profit from the repulsive betrayal of a father-even such a father. === Page 42 === 200 PARTISAN REVIEW Mr. Franck, serious and composed, justified the portrayal of the crit- icized episodes. He tried to depict his personal drama as the son of a prominent Nazi within the context of the sinister Germany of Hitler and the postwar period. He contended that de-Nazified Germany was infused with meanness and cowardice. The hostility of his listeners no longer surprised him; he had met with similar Jewish responses in Vienna and elsewhere. Many of the survivors told of their own sufferings under General Franck. The discussion became heated, and the Stern editor vehemently repeated his charge against present-day Germany: a country incapable of real change. To him, Germany was the heiress of National Socialism, cynically aglitter with riches it had built up with wretched, amoral capitalism—a capitalism that was no stranger to the old Teutonic, power-hungry, totalitarian spirit. The audience was foaming at the mouth. The new German citizens, probably financially compensated for their lost years and living symbols of the successful entrepreneurship of the postwar period, would not tol- erate slander of their new home. They had recognized the author's tirade as an implicit criticism of their new social status. As much as Franck's leftist attack on postwar Germany surprised me, the furious defense of the Federal Republic by Jewish Holocaust sur- vivors seemed still more unbelievable! The critical mind with which they had received the book about General Franck had completely disap- peared when postwar Germany came up for debate. In the provincial and closed East from which I came, one could talk about neither the Holocaust nor its far-reaching, disastrous implications. Nor, of course, about the "compensating consequences." I still had much to learn about the normality of surprises, about the right to be wrong. We should probably not deny anybody the right to imperfection. EK: And yet the great German guilt cannot be reduced to imperfection. NM: Of course. During my sojourn in Berlin I spoke with many locals about German guilt, about sincerely examining it. For the Jewish (and not only the Jewish) consciousness, Germany remains inextricably chained to Auschwitz. We can't forget it, even when we are considering the dynamic and open Germany of today. But we also cannot let our- selves be blinded by fiery, bloody tragedies of history; we ought not always hold to the primacy of the collective over the individual. We must, I believe, as much as possible, distinguish between the social, eth- nic, political, religious, sexual identity and the singular, inner entity. === Page 43 === NORMAN MANEA 201 In 1944, as the German troops were pulling out of Moghilev, the Ukrainian city to which we'd been deported, a German officer saved my father's life. My father was being threatened by two Ukrainians belong- ing to a notorious troop of Nazi volunteers who found it fun to murder Jews. Having become completely hysterical over their imminent defeat in a war in which they'd been complicit with the Germans, their bestial anti-Semitic deeds increased during the retreat of the Wehrmacht. After driving off these shrieking "volunteers," the German officer shared some biscuits with us. Exhausted and depressed, he seemed relieved over the defeat of his army. One German officer doesn't thereby undo Auschwitz, but I should not forget him when I speak about Germany. For half a century Germany was fascinated by the "conservative," nationalistic, anti-modern revolution. During the Cold War, half of the country stood under the red flag of internationalism that called itself proletarian, while the other half gradually integrated itself into the democratic Western Europe. After reunification, the Germans discov- ered that one can dislike not only foreigners, but also one's own people, despite the shared cultural tradition. Today's Germany stands under the symbol of a new universalism, that of computers and postmodern globalization, an unexpected and welcome irony of history. One more reason to direct our gaze to Ger- many, a gaze burdened with memories that fail to heal. EK: Now, let's talk about the most recent events. How did you experi- ence September 11, 2001? NM: That morning I was at Bard College, about one and a half hours from New York City. I was preparing my afternoon seminar, "Exile and Estrangement in Modern Fiction." I only heard about the brutal attack on America towards noon. Most professors cancelled their classes. I asked my students whether we should go ahead as planned with Nabokov's novel Pnin, call off the class, or discuss the event rather than the book. Their presence showed that they didn't want to be alone, and I assumed that the theme of exile would allow for a wide-ranging dis- cussion of today's world—a world in which estranged people, and not only they, are obsessively looking for a lost center, even reacting hyster- ically to their own tensions, trauma, and mystifications. "You are sixteen students, an even number," I said. "If half of you decide one way and the other the opposite, you may also need my vote. However I would vote, some of you would not be happy. They could === Page 44 === 202 PARTISAN REVIEW still join the discussion, accepting the dialogue as a compromise. They could also leave the room and even blow up the building." EK: What did the students decide? NM: A prolonged, tense silence followed. The majority of them were still in shock. Finally, they chose dialogue. For some of them, it was indeed a compromise. This seemingly trivial situation mirrored the global alternative, the essential choice: democracy or war against it. Democracy is, in fact, an often tedious search for compromise, a complicated enterprise in domesticating aggressiveness. Compromise is not acceptable for everybody, as the nihilistic "messengers" proved that morning. Their answer was crime, the urge to blast the world apart. Democracy is not a utopian project; even religious fanatics locate paradise in Heaven, not on earth. It's not at all surprising that one of the obvious results of democracy is incoherence-a form of freedom, prob- ably. For some it scorns an important achievement, for many others it acts as a disturbing reality with which they cannot cope. The unavoid- able contradictions and conflicts, the inequalities and frustrations of democracy, of freedom, as well as the widespread resentment against the "demonic" and much-envied America may explain, at least partially, that terrible September 11 event. Religious, as well as many non-religious, militants keep reciting Amer- ica's shortcomings and the disaster of future "globalization." For better or for worse, globalization is already part of our everyday life, through television, computers, antibiotics, exotic travel. In many underdeveloped and poor countries, or in countries with authoritarian, oppressive rule, quite often the resentment seems not against globalization, but against the lack of it. Globalization doesn't mean ethnic, ideological, or political unification, but a metageographical network with all its promises and risks. It would be useful and important to debate such issues, not to blindly reject the concept itself with simple-minded militancy. EK: Can we not get around globalization? NM: In their own way, the fundamentalists are also suggesting a kind of globalization. Not a democratic one, of course, but a totalitarian one. The real question remains of what kind of "globalization" might be offered as an alternative. The mystical, totalitarian patriarchy of the Mid- dle Ages that negates dialogue, difference, dissidence? The "holy" war for the restoration of obsolete, collectivist traditions is not only part of Islam, === Page 45 === NORMAN MANEA 203 but also of Christian, Jewish, and other religious fundamentalism. Due to the large number of Muslims and the role of the mosque as a guide for many illiterate believers, the danger in the Muslim world seems greater. Yet, I think we should avoid the idea of an irreconcilable battle between the Christian-Jewish tradition that celebrates human life, with all its ideals and warts, and the Muslim fanatics, to whom death appears the holiest fulfillment. We should hope, rather, for a structural change in the Muslim world, for a gradual and essential modernization of its social landscape, and do our best to accelerate such a change. The cult of death is not strictly a Muslim phenomenon. Extremists of the European Right celebrated it before 1945. We are now as familiar with the reactionary nationalistic revolution of fascism and Nazism as with the Communist one, known as “progressive” and internationalist. It isn't difficult to imagine where the return to such projects may lead. The question about Islam is still more puzzling: do we really know Islam? I suggested to my students that they start a dialogue with their Mus- lim colleagues. It is important, I think, that Muslims themselves, not fol- lowers of other faiths or atheists, explain whether the belief in Allah implies an apocalyptic war against all “infidels” or the terrorists' clever use of religious slogans is an excuse for their criminal undertaking. EK: How did you view New York after the disaster? NM: On these horrible days, New York was damaged, shocked, trau- matized. They were days of siege and emergency. But the citizens and institutions of this great city remained courageous, and the incompara- ble metropolis gradually began to pulsate, to return to its old rhythm. I truly felt American, even more so than when I was granted citizenship, and I truly felt like a New Yorker, deeply connected to the daily life and the symbols of my new domicile. This modern Babylon-with a large Chinatown, with large Russian, Jewish, Italian, and Indian enclaves- symbolizes not only America and its ideals, but the entire modern world. It is not accidental that people from eighty countries died in the World Trade Center. EK: Many commentators saw the brutal attack of September 11 as an answer to America's hegemony of the world. NM: More than a few, whether in America or elsewhere, are demand- ing that America submit itself to the strongest criticism for its sins and disasters, its arrogance and superficiality, its materialism, vulgarity, and === Page 46 === 204 PARTISAN REVIEW wealth. Basically, self-scrutiny and self-criticism are a matter of course for every sound nation. But whoever believes that “America” consists of a horde of arrogant and domineering “patriots” does not understand that at every moment it is made up of uncountable Americas. Its unyielding diversity often confuses strangers, and even Americans, forc- ing them to adopt a childish reductionism. To use simplistic “emblems” of anti-Americanism means to ignore the great American scientific, cul- tural, economic, and social achievements and its past and present indis- pensable contributions to world democracy. Would our planet be better without America? I doubt it. I rather hope that in the near future the American Muslim population may become the point of reference for the Muslim world, as happened with Jews, Latin Americans, Koreans, and many others in this country. I sometimes recall a writers’ conference in Amsterdam, at the begin- ning of the 1990s. Since I was the only participant from the United States, I was taken for a “Yankee,” although then I did not even have American residency. After mentioning a few incidents of discrimination against his fellows in America, a renowned Arab author from Israel turned to me, after my speech, and asked in front of the audience, “Is that a democracy, sir?” I was tempted to ask him, in turn, with what he was comparing America. With Arab states, for instance, these corrupt monarchies or brutal dictatorships? I instantly renounced such futile questions and only told him that I was speaking for myself, as always, not for any group or country. “Yes, I think America is a real, often triv- ial, always essential democracy,” I said. “A popular, dynamic democracy that forever reinvents itself. But it is not a perfect country.” And I added, “I spent most of my life in a faraway country in a society that claimed to be perfect. I would prefer never again to share such a privilege. I am glad to live in a country that is as imperfect as its citizens.” When I fin- ished, I suddenly remembered that the one American novelty I really was enthusiastic about from the start was the absence of identity cards. America has, of course, more than a few disturbing sides, but in the history of world powers America doesn't find itself in too bad a place. A comparison with the Ottoman Empire, the Tsarist Empire, the Soviet Union, or the Third Reich suffices. Certainly, America provokes frus- tration, envy, and even hatred. But its principles are deeply humanistic, supported by a sort of religion of dialogue and pragmatic compromise. The American spirit furthers competition, often tough competition— but it asks that the victor not allow the loser to sink too low. America has helped many peoples and countries, even former enemies. Hopefully === Page 47 === NORMAN MANEA 205 this will happen in Afghanistan, as well, to speed up drastic social and political change. So many people who try to understand and accept the terrible habits and deeds of closed societies in faraway countries and civilizations should also try to understand the contradictions and conflicts, the errors and disasters of a free society. It would also mean, in the end, under- standing the unsettling potential of human beings-not only elsewhere, but here, in our proximity, at the core of modernity. EK: What about America's so-called guilt? NM: Political errors and new options should be discussed more and more in the near future in relation to the premise, cause, and consequences of the September 11 terrorist attacks. This must be an open and self-critical discourse of a sort that is unthinkable in the terrorists' countries of origin. An American military victory alone would mean another huge diver- sion. The events of September 11 should force us all to rethink major questions about ourselves and the national and international social- political environment. As much as I hope for a serious debate on this matter, I must confess that I sometimes find myself stupefied by the scandalously frivolous old/new anti-capitalist and anti-American slogans. They seem to say, "The attacker is always perfect." The victim, in this case America, has taken the guilt upon itself, has done regrettably bad things, so we should blame it for its imperfections. We should not forget that we are under attack by the brutality and barbarism of a deluded enemy, for whom human life does not count and who can rely on fellow believers and other extremist ideologies. The threats from the centers of the fanatic, mystic, murderous hate are a serious danger to the entire free world. This is a fact we should no longer allow ourselves to ignore. I would hope, as I already said, for much more than an American mil- itary victory. What we all expect is a more secure and open world, a change for the better-which means a lawful and fair society-in some of the Islamic and underdeveloped countries, an enhanced democracy in many other places as well as here at home. America should do its best in this direction. I do hope this will be the case. Otherwise this unusual battle may result, in the end, in another trivialization of tragedy. Translated from the German by Eric Grunwald and Edward Kanterian === Page 48 === SANFORD PINSKER Cynthia Ozick, Aesthete IN ROUGHLY THE SAME WAY that a playful Benjamin Franklin signed himself “Benjamin Franklin, Printer” and William Faulkner tried to put off his overly solemn critics by dubbing himself “William Faulkner, Farmer,” I mean to talk about Cynthia Ozick as “Aesthete.” I do this largely because many of Ozick’s critics have done her work a considerable disservice by so emphasizing her Jewishness that she often comes off as a rabbi without seminary portfolio, or, worse, by regard- ing her fiction as little more than an extension of her literary essays. In their defense, this is hardly the first case in which an author’s pro- nouncements are regarded as a road map to interpretation. Henry James’s “Prefaces,” James Joyce’s schema for Ulysses, and Malcolm Lowry’s similar effort for Under the Volcano spring to mind as docu- ments that are ignored at a critic’s peril, as are the interviews that many contemporary writers grant to journals such as The Paris Review. In Ozick’s case, the liabilities are compounded because she writes about fiction—hers as well as that of others—with such passionate elo- quence and deep understanding that a paraphrase here, an extended citation there, makes good critical sense. The rub is that everything that makes fiction . . . well, fiction often gets lost in the process. At their clumsiest, Ozick’s critics reduce her fictions to a set of attitudes and orthodoxies, but even when they are more skillful, Ozick’s playful, richly textured imagination ends up sounding more formulaic than it is. By emphasizing Ozick’s aestheticism, I have in mind aspects of the modernist tradition, with all the ambivalence and ambiguity that sur- rounds writers such as Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence. Of this large grouping of disparate temperaments, Ozick’s high regard for James and Eliot is well known. That there is at least as much repulsion as attraction to these literary giants has not always been included in the stories critics tell about “influence.” What follows, then, are a series of glimpses into Ozick’s fiction that concentrate on structure; the shape-and-ring of its well-crafted sen- tences; the ways that complexity inextricably leads to qualified, often ironic, closures; and, perhaps most of all, the insistence that stories === Page 49 === We couldn't transcribe this content due to usage restrictions. === Page 50 === 208 PARTISAN REVIEW To his credit, Singer wasn't rattled. "It cost me thirty dollars in taxi fare to get here," he told them, "and it will also cost me thirty dollars to get home. A clear loss of sixty dollars." (This from a notorious penny-pincher.) "I am now going to give your treasurer forty dollars so that he can run out and buy notepads and ballpoint pens for each of you. Go home and write a story. Then, at your next meeting, you'll hear exactly the stories you want. Don't call me." When I relate the anecdote to professional critics who pride themselves, above all else, on their sophistication, they laugh-without quite realizing that they are often as narrow-minded as the folks Singer encountered in Brooklyn. My point is as simple as it is crucial: preconceptions of any sort are the enemies of an engaged reading, and of art. In Ozick's case, she has been spared the ignominy of spits (although one of her novels was the object of an ugly lawsuit), but not the peculiar adulation that talks about an Ozick story in one breath and her "theology" in another. Granted, Ozick has brought much of this grief onto herself, because she has hardly been shy about publishing manifestoes on behalf of "New Yiddish" or liturgi- cal fiction. These essays constitute a paper trail of some importance. The rub is that Ozick has a nasty habit of changing her mind or, put more charitably, of moving into some new imaginative territory just at the point when her critics like to feel that they have a handle on the ele- ments that make her, and her stories, tick. What remains constant, however, is the artfulness of her art. What- ever else fiction might be, it is not life, even when, at its most accom- plished, it provides the illusion of life. Put a slightly different way, serious fiction happens when the real is transmogrified into the Real. How this happens is a question neither writers nor their critics can answer with anything like precision; but at its vital center is surely the imagination—ungendered, classless, and willfully ignorant of every- thing that makes for op-ed opinions rather than stories. Ozick's best fic- tion strikes us as a case of the imagination freed from the voices, even the Commandments, that govern her life as wife, mother, citizen, defender of Israel, and cultural conservative. In the world her imagina- tion creates, aesthetic principles dictate the endless array of choices a writer must make to end up with characters who are credible and sto- ries that are satisfying. Still, worries about the interpenetrations of Art and Life continue, especially for those, like Ozick, who cut their teeth on literary mod- ernism. As a New York University undergraduate, Ozick avidly read Partisan Review and dreamed of the day when she, too, might be counted among its contributors. Odd as this sounds now, at a time when === Page 51 === We couldn't transcribe this content due to usage restrictions. === Page 52 === 210 PARTISAN REVIEW that most mattered to him were as old as the hills on which they were first posed: Why were we born and why must we die? How can God allow us to suffer? And perhaps most important of all, why is humankind often so barbarous, so bloodthirsty? Art, rather than philosophy and certainly rather than politics, was the best way to explore such riddles, but only if Singer believed himself in the grip of a story only he could tell. In very different ways, Ozick also feels that essential grip, even as she also knows the matter is infinitely more complicated than it probably was for Singer. One wonders which side Ozick might take on the hypothetical question that so separated Howe from Singer. It is easy to imagine her sharing Howe's moral stance, just as it is equally easy to imagine her siding with Singer. Or she might simply duck the issue altogether, claiming that hypotheticals, like parlor games, don't interest her. In 1948, however, there was nothing hypothetical about Pound's nomination for that year's Bollingen Prize. Not surprisingly, the New Critic Allen Tate made an eloquent case for poetic accomplishment as the prize's sole criterion while another committee member, Karl Shapiro, fairly boiled with indignation. To reward a fascist sympathizer/traitor— and a vicious anti-Semite in the bargain—was more than Shapiro could bear, especially since the very poems that Tate so admired contained a heavy share of Jew baiting. Howe sided with Shapiro, arguing that the wounds of the Holocaust were too raw, too heart cracking, for him to read Pound's anti-Semitic ravings with the disinterest that modernist writer-critics regarded as a badge of honor. Tate responded to the flap by feeling that his honor had been besmirched, and that chivalry demanded that he act. In George Steiner's memoir, Errata, he tells of being summoned to Tate's apartment and then being asked what the Jewish position on dueling might be—this because Tate was planning to challenge Shapiro to pistols at forty paces. The conflict between literature and politics still abides, albeit without the clear prose that once characterized literary debate. In this regard, Ozick's essays are an important counterexample, a way of demonstrat- ing that passion need not express itself in heavy-water theory or pre- tentiousness. But it is her fiction that is at issue here, and three examples are particularly revealing where her practical choices and aesthetic sen- sibility are concerned. The passages I've chosen cover a relatively early story ("Envy; or, Yiddish in America," 1969), a novel from what might be called her middle period (The Cannibal Galaxy, 1983), and The Put- termesser Papers (1997), a recent work that cobbles a number of === Page 53 === SANFORD PINSKER 211 free-standing stories about protagonist Ruth Puttermesser into the look and feel of a novel. I begin with "Envy; or, Yiddish in America," a story that has lived a controversial life long after it's appearance in the pages of Commentary and then between the hard covers of The Pagan Rabbi and Other Sto- ries (1969). Understandably, many critics could not help but feel that the story, poised as it was between eulogies and celebrations about Yid- dish, was, at bottom, something of a roman à clef. After all, Yankel Ostrover, the fabulously successful—and much celebrated-Yiddish sto- ryteller, is clearly based on the public facts of I. B. Singer's carefully cul- tivated persona. And as for Hershele Edelshtein, Ostrover's unrelenting critic, hadn't Ozick based him on Jacob Glatstein, the great Yiddish poet who made no secret of how incompetent and uncharacteristic he thought Singer's Yiddish stories were? Mrs. Glatstein shared her late husband's views and, as keeper of the flame, never forgave Ozick for what she regarded as a spiteful portrait and for the damage she felt it did to his public reputation. Admittedly, the names of character and real-life poet are suspiciously close, and one cannot easily yank Ozick off the hook by pointing out that she was probably far more interested in the linguistic play of "Edelshtein" (in its English translation "refined stone") than she was in making a devastat- ing point about Jacob Glatstein. Ozick, after all, had lovingly translated many of Glatstein's poems and regards him, despite the egos that her story presumably bruised, as arguably the greatest poet that the Yiddish language produced. His fate was to be a major poet in a minor lan- guage, a writer (as Glatstein himself liked to quip) who had to know the work of W. H. Auden while also realizing full well that Auden didn't have to know about him. The Edelshtein in Ozick's story is more accu- rately seen as a composite drawn from dozens upon dozens of aging, virtually unknown Yiddish poets. But even this conjecture is, at best, only half the story, because what one aspect of "Envy" seeks to measure is a poet well short of Glatstein's greatness and yet much better than your average Yiddish hack. At the heart of the story is Edelshtein's poetry rather than his endless fulminations about the decline and fall of Yiddish. For a satirist of Ozick's considerable skill, it is relatively easy to create a character who insists, for example, that so-called Jewish-American writers are ignora- muses: "What do they know," he rails, "I mean of knowledge . . . Yid- dish! One word here, one word there. Shickseh on one page, putz on the other, and that's the whole vocabulary. . . . They know ten words for, excuse me, penis, and when it comes to a word for learning, they're === Page 54 === 212 PARTISAN REVIEW impotent." What must have been much more difficult was tempering Edelshtein's rages (many rendered with more than a few hints of Ozick's approval) against the concrete evidence of Edelshtein's art. It is one thing to have a Yiddish poet claim that he would be universally acknowledged as a great poet if only he had a translator, and quite another to have readers come to the same conclusion based on the actual lines of his poetry. If Edelshtein's poetry were truly remarkable, the effect would tip the story too far in one direction; conversely, if it were so much junk, that, too, would disturb the delicate aesthetic bal- ance of "Envy." Ozick hits Edelshtein's middle-range talent squarely on the head: At the edge of the village a little river, Herons tip into it pecking at their images when the waders pass whistling like Gentiles. The herons hang, hammocks above the sweet summer-water. Their skulls are full of secrets, their feathers scented. The village is so little it fits into my nostril. The roof's shimmer tar, the sun licks thick as a cow. No one knows what will come. How crowded with mushrooms the forest's dark floor. The result asks us to balance the Edelshtein who has made the recov- ery-or at least the recognition of Yiddish his "project" against the frustrated poet who craves the public adulation that, in his view, has unfairly fallen into Ostrover's lap. While Ozick has more than a little sympathy for Yiddish, the story also makes it clear that those who con- fuse fame with art not only delude themselves but also debase the cre- ative process. Ostrover knows the pitfalls of both, and in ways that an Edelshtein never will-not even after he sits in Manhattan's 92nd Street YMHA and listens as his nemesis spins out a wicked parable about a would-be writer who, by magic, becomes instantly fluent in one major language after another, only to fail miserably in each of them. Ostrover is hard, very hard, on his pathetic rival, but that is because he has little patience for the world's distractions, whether they come as partisan politics or a thick texture of rationalization. What Edelshtein lacks, in a word, is a first-rate imagination, and about this unhappy fact, he can rail at the universe, plunge into despair or, as "Envy" dramatizes, so seamlessly combine the two that readers are not quite sure what to make of him. Is he martyr or shameless manipulator, a writer more === Page 55 === SANFORD PINSKER 213 sinned against than sinning, or simply a local instance of a universal phenomenon-namely, a will to power that has little to do with the making of art and everything to do with becoming a famous artist? The Cannibal Galaxy is a richly textured exploration of the mish- mash that Jewish pedagogy (however well-meaning) can become in an age of small minds and large gestures toward assimilation. As such, the novel is a sustained exercise in satire, one that began its imaginative life as a New Yorker story ("The Laughter of Akiva," 1980) and then found itself generating even more controversy than that which surrounded "Envy." Soon after "The Laughter of Akiva" was published, Ozick got an unexpected-and surely unwelcome-introduction to our legal sys- tem as it currently operates when somebody feels that he or she has been libeled. In the case at hand, a real-life person saw himself reflected in the unflattering character of Joseph Brill and he was, as they say, not amused. So the offended party sued. If the scenario that subsequently unfolded were not so grim from Ozick's perspective-at once financially costly and emotionally draining-it might have been nearly as funny as the story itself. But being dragged through the courts was clearly no laughing matter. Nonetheless, Ozick's critics could not help but feel the heavy hand of unintended irony as the sad business of legal action against a Jewish-American writer played itself out. They could easily imagine this happening to the Philip Roth who had been hammered in the Jewish press and from synagogue pulpits ever since the days of Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Portnoy's Complaint (1969), but to Ozick? Unthinkable! After all, hadn't she, almost single-handedly, moved Jewish-American literature from the easy indulgences of ethnic- ity to something deeper, more profound, more authentically Jewish? What these assumptions omit, however, is virtually everything that gives Ozick's fiction its remarkable aesthetic punch. True enough, one cannot ignore the allusions that gave "The Laughter of Akiva"-and, later, The Cannibal Galaxy-their richly complicated texture of ideas. In this sense, Ozick remains true to her upbringing as a literary mod- ernist. But what radiates at the very core of her fictions about the hap- less Joseph Brill are the ways that brilliance is often overlooked by conventional teachers, whether they happen to work in yeshivas, Jewish day schools, or, indeed, anywhere else. Edward Alexander's book about Irving Howe (Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew) makes it clear that he was a collector of lost causes: democratic socialism, secular Jewishness, and finally what once proudly passed as humanistic criticism. About Ozick, one might say that she is also a collector of sorts, albeit of those moments in her life when she was ignored, underappreciated, jilted, or === Page 56 === 214 PARTISAN REVIEW otherwise disappointed. Satire, thus, becomes a way of tonguing a sore tooth, just as it temporarily relieves that suffering in the sheer joy of crafting sentences crackling with revenge. Too often, Ozick's solemn (rather than serious) critics miss this cru- cial point. Instead, they look at The Cannibal Galaxy as if it were a Jew- ish self-help manual rather than a novel. Granted, it would be a good thing if Ozick's readers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, were better able navigate their way through her demanding textures, but I would argue that Ozick's fiction stands on its own feet; all one really needs to read The Cannibal Galaxy with both pleasure and profit is to pay attention as her characters announce themselves as candidates for our approval or condemnation. In its original form, “The Laughter of Akiva” was closer to caricature than to fully rounded characterization, but when Ozick (who had by that time fallen in love with the twin stories of Joseph Brill and Hester Lilt-despite the legal grief these characters had caused her) widened the canvas, the result was an astonishingly complex novel. I do not intend to do its sub-themes and side-plots full justice here. Let me concentrate, instead, on what I regard as the novel's central metaphor, and the implications it has for my sense of Ozick's art. Not surprisingly, I have in mind the scene in which Hester retells the story of Rabbi Akiva's reaction to the destruction of the Temple. When other rabbis see a little fox running in and out of the ruined temple, they are reduced to tears. The response is appropriate, and surely understand- able. But it is not necessarily the view that a more aesthetically minded temperament would take. And, indeed, Akiva's laughter is a striking instance of an artistic sensibility in action. Because he was able to move past the prophecy of Uriah ("Zion shall be ploughed as a field and Jerusalem shall become heaps") to the more uplifting one of Zechariah ("Yet again shall the streets of Jerusalem be filled with boys and girls playing"), Akiva's laughter is at once a recognition of the hope that always lies hidden in the folds of despair and an expression of joy as he thinks about the children who will one day be in his classroom. Like Akiva, Hester Lilt regards pedagogy as a form of salvation, especially if one is able to look past (or beneath) the obvious and to see potential where others see only ruin. As her midrash would have it, pedagogy must learn to predict not from the first text, but from the second. Not from the earliest evidence, but from the latest. To laugh out loud in that very interval which to every reasonable judgment looks to be the most inappropriate. Granted, Hester is talking as much about her unfairly beleaguered daughter, Beulah, as she is about Rabbi Akiva. Moreover, the novel === Page 57 === SANFORD PINSKER 215 itself is a better predictor of where the clash between the pedagogies of art and certain brands of religious education ultimately end up. Beulah survives the best (as well as the worst) of Brill's Dual Curriculum—a yoking of Jewish instruction and secular learning that does little justice to either—and even manages to find a measure of success, of apprecia- tion, if you will, that had eluded her in America. That this happens through art and in the Paris that had formed the thick-headed Brill is to pack irony upon satirical irony. Invention is what the imagination, at its best, specializes in; and I would argue that nowhere has Ozick been more inventive, more play- ful, than in her stories about Ruth Puttermesser. In a recent Internet chat session, something Ozick must have regarded with more than her usual amount of trepidation, she was asked who her favorite, or most detested, icons might be—this, because of a New York Times Magazine special issue, “Heroine Worship: The Age of the Female Icon,” in which Ozick had written about Gertrude Stein. Her answer was instructive, especially if one keeps Puttermesser in mind: I’m not going to answer that by naming names but by naming types. Among writers, I most detest those who turn writing into an instrument rather than an end in itself. For instance, writers whose chief goal is power of one sort or another. Whether it’s power of a political sort or simply the intoxicating power of fame. The kind of writer I most admire is someone who dedicates a life to the art of writing and one day is discovered to be quietly immense. She went on to cite Chekhov as one example; she might well have men- tioned her own career as another, for her remarks about writing that ulti- mately matters go straight to the heart of what aesthetics is, and does. In this regard, the (comic) case of Ruth Puttermesser is instructive. The collection’s opening story—“Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife”—introduces us to Ruth Puttermesser, a thirty- four-year-old lawyer with a long history of academic overachievement and a considerably shorter one of successful romantic involvements. In addition, we learn that she has a Jewish face and a modicum of Ameri- can distrust of it. She resembles no poster she has ever seen. She hates the Breck shampoo girl, so blond and bland and pale-mouthed; she boy- cots Breck because of the golden-haired posters, all crudely idealized, an American wet dream, in the subway. Puttermesser’s hair comes in bouncing scallops—layered waves from scalp to tip, like imbrcated roofing tile. It is nearly black and has a way of sometimes sticking === Page 58 === 216 PARTISAN REVIEW straight out. Her nose has thick, well-haired, uneven nostrils, the right one noticeably wider than the left. We quickly get the idea: Puttermesser (whose name, in Yiddish, means “butter knife”) is something of an American misfit. Not to worry, however, for what Puttermesser might lack in terms of mainstream credentials, she more than makes up for with her Judaic ones: In bed she studied Hebrew grammar. The permutations of the triple-lettered root elated her: how was it possible that a whole lan- guage, hence a whole literature, a civilization even, should rest on the pure presence of three letters of the alphabet? The Hebrew verb, a stunning mechanism: three letters, whichever fated three, could command all possibility simply by a change in their pronun- ciation, or the addition of a wing-letter fore and aft. Every con- ceivable utterance blossomed from this trinity. Including (we learn in “Puttermesser and Xanthippe”) the possibility of creating a golem who both aids and complicates her life when she— improbably—becomes New York City’s mayor. For those who rightly associate Ozick with moral seriousness—and, wrongly, with a certain pinch-facedness—the Puttermesser stories reveal her penchant for the comic, even the anarchistic. Puttermesser is born from Ozick’s itch to cut loose, to let the imagination take her where it will. Not since the “Nighttown” section of James Joyce’s Ulysses has there been such sheer delight in the unbridled, playful imagination. In Joyce’s case, his schlemielish protagonist, Leopold Bloom, alternates between fantasies of power (at one point he becomes Mayor of the New Bloomusalem) and equally vivid reveries of being exposed, humiliated, utterly pulled down. In a similar vein, Ozick’s story turns the conventional scenario of the golem-as-defender into a golem as comical as Frankenstein’s mon- ster: a character with a will, and sex life, of its own. Puttermesser’s new- found power—as mayor she wants to turn New York City into a socially progressive paradise—is spoiled by the very creature she created to make this happen. Granted, Puttermesser is a long-suffering bureaucrat rather than a writer, but the same tendencies that so upset Ozick when she thinks about icons good and bad also apply to her mercurial character. Is there perhaps a certain amount of self-abnegation here? My hunch is that Puttermesser bears more than a few correspondences to Ozick, espe- cially when we learn how Puttermesser was once fatally attracted to a === Page 59 === SANFORD PINSKER 217 twenty-two-year-old philosophy student who passionately argued the following proposition: Once the God of the Jews forbade art in religion, then art was released—released forever—to follow its own spoor. Once art was exempted from idol-making, from religious duty, it could see what it wished, it could record what it liked, it could play and cavort and distort—what it pleased! And all without obligation to sanctity. Pious obeisance was dismissed—unwanted! Excluded! Art was free to be free! One does not normally think of Ozick as the sort of writer who would easily sign her name to such a manifesto; but I would argue that the freedom of literary artists to go wherever the imagination takes them and to think of the life of Art as the only life that truly matters has become much more attractive to Ozick. As with everything about Ozick and her work, one must allow ample room for nuance, and this is cer- tainly true for the contention that, in the final analysis, she is most accu- rately written down as an aesthete. Because the term carries a good deal of cultural baggage, Ozick might well prefer the plainer, less trouble- making word "writer." What matters, however, is that her critics dampen their enthusiasm for making facile connections between the pronouncements occasioned by the life she leads as public citizen and committed Jew and the fiction she produces. With regard to the former, one can argue with Ozick's public positions as one will, agreeing (or dis- agreeing) with her about Israeli politics, certain aspects of contemporary feminism, or the potential danger of much that passes as multicultural- ism. However, to twist the title of a Raymond Carver story, what we talk about when we talk about Ozick's fiction is simply the artful ways that her stories and novels are constructed, the rhythms of her sen- tences, and how their cumulative effects change our lives—not so much because they give us new intellectual positions (although that can hap- pen), but because they give us continuing pleasures. Art cannot promise, or achieve, more than this. But for the right sort of reader, that is entirely sufficient. === Page 60 === KUTUMBA RAO The Job T O WORK in the Saraswati Publishing Company has been my desire for four years. You mustn't think that I'm begging for food in the streets. I bring home a hundred and fifty rupees a month from the bookstore, even though I regularly nod off to sleep there. My wife, children, and I eat a full meal and a snack every day so we are not completely starving. Every day we walk to a beach that is a mile away, and, like Zamindars, enjoy the coastal scenery and breeze. When the vendors shove their baskets in our faces, we look away and sometimes, if necessary, warn our children about the vendors with a glare. When we feel that familiar discomfort in our stomachs, we get up and leave for home, eat a small snack, and fall asleep without disturbing the contents of our stomachs. You mustn't think that I'm finding fault with the bookstore job. Not at all. It's an excellent job. Besides that, it's the Patalum Branch shop. Well-to-do people come in only once in a while. Except on the days when school or college is open, there's not much work. Sometimes, somebody comes to buy a book of slokas or prose, then leaves. After- wards we sit and chat with each other. Some people are crazy about going to see entertainment-movies, plays, concerts from time to time, exhibitions every so often, circuses . . . Why do we need these things? They're such a waste of money. In the city, there's a lot of things to do without spending a penny. Go to the park and look at the trees. Walk along the road and you see beautiful houses with lovely gardens in front. In what movie will you see that? You could spend months thinking about how much fun it would be to live in some of those houses. When I go alone in the evening and stand near "Dare House," it's like watching an English movie. Buses come, buses go, the people, the electric trains traveling far distances . . . what hustle and bustle. How many races of people! How many types of cloth- ing! How many hairstyles! I'm not talking about the people who go to the temple at Tirupati and shave their heads; I'm talking about ladies. Have you ever seen this spectacle? A few years ago, we used to criticize movies-that they show houses, clothes, and styles that can't be found === Page 61 === KUTUMBA RAO 219 anywhere. But movie settings and fashions can't compare with the houses and fashions I see now. So please don't think that I want to join Saraswati Publishing Com- pany only for the money-although money is not such a bad thing. With another fifty or hundred rupees coming in, we'll eat a full dinner for our second meal, too, and can stop having snack food every evening. "Saraswati Company" is a famous name in publishing. It is not like my bookstore, which no one has heard about. At Saraswati Publishing Company, they print books every day. Not just one type of book: women's books, men's books, elderly people's books, children's books, teenage girls' books, teenage boys' books; there are books with pictures, books without pictures; poetry, prose, fables, mystery, philosophy; best- sellers and worst sellers-they print them all. Writers visit daily, as if on pilgrimage. The offices are as busy as the Reserve Bank of India: the production section, design section, proof- reading section, paper store, composing section, printing section, bind- ing section, sales section. They have a Publicity Officer and a Printing Specialist-it's not possible to describe everything. If I landed a job there, I wouldn't need to worry about the future anymore. A monthly salary would be guaranteed to fall into my pocket just as surely as Rs 300,000 falls monthly into Lord Venkateshwaraswami's donation box. And with those hardworking people, nobody would feel jealous, so the evil eye wouldn't touch me. Me? I'll do anything. I'll correct proofs. I'll send dispatches. I'll type letters. If you tell me to, I'll wear khaki slacks and a khaki hat and run scampering here, there, and everywhere. Whatever work you give me, I'll do with loyalty. THAT'S WHAT I WROTE to Saraswati Publishing. "I will be indebted to you for many lifetimes if you offer me a small position at your esteemed corporation," I wrote. "If you assist me and my family in this manner, I will focus on your business, putting aside my family's troubles and my own difficulties." I sent three applications. But I didn't receive a reply to any of them. I posted the first application without showing it to anyone. I didn't get a response to it, so I thought I might as well show the second one to Chandram. "Why are you announcing to them that you're poor?" he asked. "Write and tell them that if they give you a position, you'll increase their profit in a thousand ways. Then you'll get an answer." === Page 62 === 220 PARTISAN REVIEW Chandram's brother-in-law, who was there at the time, said, "Even now they might not be able to pay taxes! It's the socialist way of life, isn't it? The rich capitalists won't let a middle-class person live. They let a lower- class person die. If the small- and middle-class capitalists join together, then only capitalists remain. After that, the socialist way!” he said. He thinks of himself as an intelligent person, but he talks nonsense. He doesn’t understand what he's saying and no one else does either. I looked angrily at Chandram’s brother-in-law. I wanted Chandram's advice, not his brother-in-law's nonsense. “But what you call—this application—is out of date,” Chandram said. “This piece of paper has no value. To get anything in life, someone must recommend you. Then you'll get what you want.” But who will recommend me? I thought. I don’t know anyone at Saraswati Publishing. I recognize one or two people’s faces, but what good is that? What will they accomplish? Why would they do anything for me? Without telling Chandram, I posted the application. I waited for the reply for three months. Meanwhile, I heard that Saraswati Publishing had hired three new people. In the third application, I was even more obliging. I thought it would be a good idea to show it to an elderly, experienced person, Mr. Trivikrama Rao, who lives across the street from us. When I gave him the letter, he struggled up from his chair and found his glasses. First he read the beginning and the end. Then he read the middle sentences. Finally, he read the remaining sentences. Slowly taking off his specta- cles, he gave the paper back to me and rubbed his eyes. “That’s a mis- take,” he said. My heart fell. “Isn’t the application all right, sir?” I asked. He lifted his hand and waved it two or three times. The handwave could have meant that my application was no good. Perhaps it meant that I was to keep quiet. Or maybe he wasn't thinking about my appli- cation at all. Whatever its meaning, speaking would have been a waste. That’s why I shut up and just stared at him. With my body language I said, “Give me permission to leave.” “Capitalism means investment,” Mr. Trivikrama Rao said in a heavy tone, then stopped. I didn’t say a thing. “The first principle of it is—” he said, more heavily. “He who gives the job is a free agent; he who takes the job is a free agent. Why? The power of your labor—that means you sell your work to another person === Page 63 === KUTUMBA RAO 221 for money. He buys it. If what he pays is not acceptable to you, then you refuse and go your own way." "I wouldn't go on my way, sir. However much they pay me, I would make sure that was enough money for me. If we had to, we would eat two meals of snack food daily. How could I get around it? Even King Hari Chandradu couldn't avoid it," I said. Mr. Trivikrama Rao grimaced as if he were in a lot of pain and, like a guard at the railway station waving a green flag, shook his hand very fast. But I reacted as if it were a red flag and stopped talking. "If you ask for a salary that seems too high, they won't give you the job." "Even if I say I don't want any salary, these people won't give me a job," I said. While his hand was still waving I stopped talking and acted as if I wouldn't speak again. "That's why I say it's inappropriate to have these expressions of grat- itude in the application." "Let's say you're right. But when only one person can provide a job, and ten thousand people need a job, can both parties really be free agents?" I asked. He seemed to grow angry. "If that's the way you see it, do what you like," he said. If his living room were an office, and he had a call bell next to him, he would ring the bell, call the servant, point to me and say, "Send this man out." I felt as if that was exactly what happened, so I stood up and asked for permission to leave. I crossed the road, went home, and posted the application that day. One month passed. A response didn't come. But I didn't really expect one, anyway. EARLY IN THE MORNING, when a taxi stopped in front of the house, I was confused. No one comes to our house. And they never come in a taxi. I thought it was somebody who was searching for another address. When my tall cousin, Parvatheesam, got out of the taxi, I was even more surprised. Parvatheesam is my mother's older sister's son. It's been ten years since I saw him; I don't even know where he lives or what he does. He must be making enough money to travel in a taxi. But enough-that must be very nice. "Well, friend," I said, coming out to the street. "When did you arrive?" "Three days ago," he said. Parvatheesam said something to the taxi driver, then he came inside. === Page 64 === 222 PARTISAN REVIEW “Why didn’t you stay with me?” I asked. “Why make your wife work so hard? I’m staying at the Dasprakash Hotel. I’m flying back home this evening.” So, not only does he travel in taxis, he roams around in airplanes. How about that? I didn’t ask him what he was doing, and he didn’t tell me. He asked me what I did for work and how much I was paid. I told him without hiding a thing. He didn’t speak. He looked at my house. He met my children. When my wife offered him some coffee, he excused himself by saying he had just had some, and got out of having to drink any. (There was no coffee and probably no milk in the house anyway. How did she think she could serve him any? I don’t understand these women’s games.) She told him to stay for a meal and then go—that was a good way to scare him. “I eat around one o’clock,” he said. “In the meantime, there are ten places I have to go.” For half an hour we chatted about things that happened ten years ago. Afterwards, when he was trying to leave, he said, “Get dressed. We’ll roam around together for a bit.” Without asking him why or where, I buttoned a shirt over the under- shirt I was already wearing. “Ready,” I said. I was a person who trav- eled in cars and planes—never mind that he was my very own aunt’s son. If he told me to jump in the river, I would jump. If I went with him, it would only be a half day of playing hooky from the bookshop. That doesn’t even count; the store would still be there tomorrow. But Par- vatheesam would be back on his plane that night. The taxi was waiting outside. When I climbed inside and sat down, I saw that there were five rupees on the meter. More than my daily wage! If that taxi hadn’t gone straight to the house of the proprietor of Saraswati Publishing Company, then Parvatheesam wouldn’t have appeared in this story. My story isn’t wandering around without any sense of direction—Parvatheesam has entered it for a good reason. The son-in-law of the proprietor of Saraswati Company and Par- vatheesam were good friends. They had both flown in on the same air- plane and were leaving on the same flight, too. As soon as we arrived, Parvatheesam introduced me to the son-in-law, who introduced me to the father-in-law. “He’s a very close relative of mine, sir,” Parvatheesam said. “He’s keeping everyone honest at some bookstore. Is there an opportunity available at your institution for a person like this? His father operated a press, and he should know that type of work very well. Maybe that’s half the reason he began working at the bookstore. The smell of the === Page 65 === KUTUMBA RAO 223 press is in his blood." Everyone laughed, as if it were a joke. But I also laughed! I can't say why. Whenever the proprietor laughed, I also felt like laughing. "Why wouldn't there be an opportunity? If there's not one, we will create it," the proprietor said. I could imagine what Demon King Haranyakasipu felt like when Lord Brahma appeared to him. I don't have to repeat all the details of what happened after that. The propri- etor of Saraswati Publishing Company took my address. That afternoon at Dasprakash Hotel, I had a lunch that cost two and a half rupees. That day I didn't go near my office. That office-you know which one, the bookshop-I imagined had long ago disappeared. I didn't think that I would even go there again to buy books. That evening, Par- vatheesam went back home on the airplane. But the next morning, when I went to work as usual, what had hap- pened the day before seemed like a movie or a dream. Just because I wrote my address on a piece of paper, would the proprietor of Saraswati Publishing Company give me a job? That same address was on my pre- vious three applications, too. The proprietor was just trying to mollify Parvatheesam. I kept telling myself that Saraswati Publishing was only a myth, but the bookstore was real. I was mistaken. A week after I began to believe I'd made it all up, the letter came. It said that I could start work at Saraswati Company when- ever I wanted. I had been unfair to the proprietor. The letter was dated the day after Parvatheesam left, but for some reason, it hadn't been posted immediately. It's a big company, after all. Looks like they allow a letter to sit for a few days before they send it. The very next day I visited the offices of Saraswati Publishing. I walked, took a bus, and walked again to get there. The gatekeeper looked at me very suspiciously and asked, "Where are you going? What business do you have? And with whom?" I showed him the letter with the proprietor's signature, and he waved me towards the receptionist's room. The receptionist smiled at me like a savior. "What can I do for you, sir?" he asked in English; I thought he was a Christian. I showed him the letter with the proprietor's name on it. "Won't you please take a seat?" he said, dialing a number on the tele- phone. He spoke with someone on the line. "He's not in his office at the moment," he said to me, again in English. After that, the receptionist completely lost interest in me. I sat there for almost a quarter of an hour. The telephone kept ring- ing. He would answer, either talking furiously like a tiger or purring === Page 66 === 224 PARTISAN REVIEW meekly like a cat. He never spoke with both confidence and politeness. All of a sudden, he looked at me and said, "You're still here? You'd bet- ter go in, I think!" I felt like killing him. If he could have sent me into the office when- ever he wanted, why did he keep me there for fifteen minutes? In our bookshop, no one behaves in such a meaningless way. I was angry enough to complain about him to the proprietor. I went inside to the main offices. One by one, somebody or other stopped me and asked with whom I had business. I kept showing them the letter-it was like Lord Brahma's arrow-that I had in my posses- sion. But none of them seemed intimidated by it. One person took me to another person, who took me to another person. That man looked like a railway station booking clerk. I knew it was not the proprietor of Saraswati Company—I had met him. When he saw me, the booking clerk nodded his head the way he would if he had asked "What?" As if he were doing very important work, he lifted the telephone receiver and was about to dial, stopped, then put down the receiver, moved the notepad in front of him, took a pen out of his pocket, took off its cap, touched the pen tip to the paper, replaced the pen cap, and put the pen away in his pocket. Then he lifted the magazine lying on his right side, put it on his left side with a loud noise, and lifted his head to look at me. "What do you want? What business do you have?" he asked, mumbling. I suspected that the booking clerk was a mental case. Until then, I had been standing quietly. "I need to see the proprietor please," I said. The booking clerk's face turned red as a khanda root. With fire and smoke coming out of his ears and his whole body shaking, he spat out the words, "If the proprietor has to meet all these good-for-nothing peo- ple face to face, why are we here? If you tell me what this very impor- tant business of yours is, then I will look into it. Further, for your information, the proprietor is not in town. He's gone to Utee. He won't be back for another fifteen days." "That's fine, I'm not in a hurry," I said. "After fifteen days I'll tele- phone and come again." "Even if he's in town, why do you think he's going to take care of your business himself? He would send you to us," the booking clerk said. To us, I thought. I didn't know if someone had joined him, or whether he believed himself to be equal to ten people. I stopped listen- ing and walked away. === Page 67 === KUTUMBA RAO 225 As soon as I stepped outside, a man wearing eyeglasses saw me and stopped. I don't know why, but as I soon as I saw him, I felt like putting my Lord Brahma's arrow in his hand. "Is the proprietor not in town?" I asked, giving him the letter. The eyeglasses man read it. "It doesn't matter if he's not here," he said. "Come this way, please." He led me to a room nearby. Until we entered, the room had been empty, but on the ceiling a fan turned at full speed. The eyeglasses man sat behind a desk and asked me to take a seat in front of him. "There are no vacancies at the moment." He sounded very worried. "What type of work can you do?" I had to start all over again. I didn't mind—if he had wanted me to work as the proprietor himself, I would have. But I didn't know if this eyeglasses fellow had the authority to offer me a position, even as a gatekeeper. "Whatever work you give me to do, I will do," I said. "I don't know what position the proprietor had in mind for me." "That's the problem. The proprietor never has anything in his mind. We have to work out all the details," the eyeglasses man said. He also used we. There must be a special club of people who do chores for the proprietor, I thought. I didn't respond. "Look, sir, there's a vacancy in one of the proofreader positions," the eyeglasses man said. "The previous proofreader left to take a cashier position with Turnips Company. Would you take that job? Just until the proprietor comes?" I'm not that intelligent a person, but I felt that the brains I did have were melting away. A minute before, he had said there were no job openings, now he said there was an opening as a proofreader. And what about the old proofreader that left, who was now working somewhere else as an accountant? Why would someone who is capable of accountant-type responsibilities work as a proofreader? Would an edi- tor leave this place to become a film director? Is life this crazy? Anyway, did he expect me to decide whether or not I wanted to work as a proofreader? I doubted that the eyeglasses man even had the authority to give me a job as an errand boy. "Okay, you can give me that position," I said. "All right," he said. He picked up the telephone and lifted his finger to dial. "What do you want for a salary?" he asked. === Page 68 === 226 PARTISAN REVIEW You can throw one thousand rupees at me, I felt like saying. But I didn't have the courage. "How do I know how much you pay proofreaders!" I said. "How much do you get in your present job?" the eyeglasses man asked. I told him. I told him the truth. "We don't pay such low salaries around here. When the proprietor comes, we can decide that issue then," he said. But I was frightened that I would lose both jobs. "That's all right, sir," I said, and got up. "I'm not in a hurry. After the proprietor comes, I'll join the company." "As you wish," the eyeglasses man said. I LET A WEEK GO BY, then every day I phoned Saraswati. "Did the proprietor return?" "From where?" "I don't know. I heard he left town?" "What town?" I hung up the telephone. Then another time "Has the proprietor arrived in town?" "Who are you? What business do you have? Is this a job-related issue? We're not allowed to talk about job-related issues on the tele- phone, sir." This time the person on the other side hung up the phone. The next time "When will the proprietor come, sir?" "I don't know. He left today for Hyderabad." "When did he return from Utee?" "Sir, as far as I know, he has not gone to Utee, Kodai Kanal, Dar- jeeling, or any other cold mountain resort." Then I heard him talk to someone else. "Some poor journalist is on the line!" I put the telephone down. One day a bald man came into my shop. "Do you have Radhika San- thyanga, Vaijanthi Vilasanga, or some other book of that type?" he asked. I threw a half dozen pornographic books on the table in front of him. Like a fly that immediately knows the location of wounds on a body, he turned to the juicy parts of the books and with smoldering eyes began to read them. I knew he wouldn't buy any of them. "Sir, where do you work?" I asked. === Page 69 === KUTUMBA RAO 227 "Uh?" the bald man said absently. "Nothing. Just that I feel like I've seen you somewhere." He forced himself to look up. "Me? In Saraswati Publishing," he said, and immediately immersed himself again in his book. A light went off in my head. "If you want, you can take those books home and read them and bring them back after two days," I said. "But tell me one thing. What do you do at Saraswati Company?" This proved to be a better topic than sex. He said goodbye to Rad- hika Santhyanga and looked at me with a funny smile. "What do I not do at Saraswati is a better question. There is nothing that I don't do there. People from all departments call me-they kill me sometimes." He remembered something and laughed loudly. "One time, something funny happened. My general manager telephoned ten places looking for me. I wasn't anywhere. He wrote a long complaint about me and sent it to the proprietor. All that time, I was in the proprietor's office, talking about a very important issue. 'Don't make silly complaints; G. K. was with me all the time,' my proprietor scolded him hard in English over the telephone. 'G. K. was with me all the time!' Ha ha ha ha! 'All the time!''' said the bald man. He was enjoying himself very much-much more than with Radhika Santhyanga. "So look, friend," I said. "Is the proprietor in town?" "Why? What's your story?" I took out my Lord Brahma's arrow. By this time, some dust from the shop was on it. After a little more time, I would have to sell it for recycling. The bald man (a.k.a. G. K.) examined the watermark. "Racoon drafted this. Racoon is his nickname-his real name is Rambadran. What kind of letter is this? What a bad draft! He never listens to what the proprietor says. If he does listen, he doesn't understand it and won't bother to have the issue clarified. The proprietor would have told him to find an opening and give you that job. But Rambadran drafted a let- ter without a head or tail, without even informing you of a salary. For this type of performance, he gets the company car! His children go to school, his wife goes to her ladies' gatherings, all of them go to the tem- ple at Tirupati in the company car. Nobody crosses the threshold of their house except to get in the company car," he said. Then he told me many other things. I stopped the flow of his words by asking a question. "What should I do now?" "Let me think a little," he said, and tapped his nose five or six times with his index finger. Most people tap their forehead. But this man === Page 70 === 228 PARTISAN REVIEW seemed to have his forehead where his nose should be. "There's not an opening in production, in the sales section, or in the proofreader sec- tion," he started saying. "I heard there was an opening in the proofreading section," I said. "Last week a man with an MA and LLB filled that seat," he said. "But a junior clerk is needed! That seat will be open soon." I was interested. "Where is the man going who had that job?" "He's going to be Deputy Manager at the Nilgiri Tea Estate." Just as I thought. He told me a lot more things. People at the company do very well for themselves. The warehouse keeper gets a hundred rupees. But those who leave the company do even better. Some earn more than a thousand rupees a month. I asked him how this was possible. "Many people don't know how to check inventory, right? There are at least twenty-five thousand fewer books than there should be. Who goes into that warehouse? How can anyone check anything in that ocean of books?" While he was leaving, the bald-headed man said to come to his office to see him between eleven and twelve o'clock tomorrow. I said I would. By the time I got to Saraswati the following day, it was approximately twelve o'clock. Then-as if God had appeared-I saw the proprietor talking with two gentlemen near the gate. He saw me, but by the time I lifted my hands to say namaskar he had turned away. He didn't seem to recognize me. I was wearing a plaid shirt, not the white shirt I wore last time-that must have been why. As the two gentlemen said goodbye, I approached the proprietor and greeted him. He smiled a little. "May I know who you are?" he asked. "Parvatheesam is my aunt's son, sir," I said. He still didn't see the connection. "Which Parvatheesam? Our binder?" he asked. "No, sir. Your son-in-law's colleague. We came to see you that day. You said you would give me a job. This letter came from your office. It's been a long time since I received it." I took out the Lord Brahma's arrow that was so tightly folded that it was about to tear. "It looks like Rambadan wrote this." He saw a guy with a khaki hat standing nearby. "Eh! Take him to Rambadan," he said, entrusting me to the errand boy. The proprietor walked away slowly. As he left, all the workers who saw him gathered around and escorted him away. === Page 71 === KUTUMBA RAO 229 Ramabadran, nicknamed Racoon, was a new person in my life. He saw me and curled his upper lip with distaste. He saw Lord Brahma's arrow and curled his lip again. "There are no openings anywhere." He curled his lip. "This letter was written so long ago! What were you doing all these years?" While curling his lip he lifted the telephone and dialed a number and spoke with someone. Then he dialed another number and spoke with someone else, again curling his lip. "Give me your address before you go," he said. At this rate, the only thing in their files would be my address. But what did I have to lose? I gave him the address and left. That's it. After that, nothing happened. May I take your leave? Translated from the Telugu by Rishi Reddi POEMS BY ED OCHESTER THE LAND OF COCKAIGNE Storyline Press Presents: The Land of Cockaigne by Ed Ochester $12.00 paper "By turns ironic, humorous, defiant, contemplative, and compassionate, Ed Ochester's faceted, decep- tively easy to read poems remind me of why we wait for a mature poet who has tested his heart, life-long, against the merciless truths...." ~Toi Derricotte "Ochester's poems are gorgeous, brilliant, heartbreaking and formally wise. He has turned into one of our very best poets." ~Gerald Stern SLP Story Line Press Three Oaks Farm • PO Box 1240 • Ashland, OR • 97520-0055 tel: 541-512-8792 • fax: 541-512-8793 • www.storylinepress.com Also available through Consortium Book Sales & Distribution === Page 72 === POEMS VÉNUS KHOURY-GHATA A star A star is a flame's invention A spark's whim the opinion of a lamp longing for eternity one of God's secret maneuvers revealed by the dictionaries We explained We explained our despair to the thorn bush and the juniper our only cousins in a foreign language we wept on the shoulder of the pomegranate tree which bled every month on our doorstep We asked the forest to grant us audience and we provided the testimony of two blackbirds who watched us writing "goat" forwards and backwards we conquered the alphabet Our cobbler spoke Sanskrit the priest and the brook spoke Latin We were scolded for our ignorance of ornithology yet we knew the name of each star and its precise punctuation on the page of the sky. === Page 73 === Clouds Clouds played no part in this story their shadows on the roofs brought nothing to the unities of time and space they were just compass points to someone teaching algebra to the nightingales The village was so threadbare you could reach it by placing a ladder against a panel of sky Threadbare the poplar will it be the same tree translated into French will it answer to a name which might not suit its boughs accustomed to speak with an Arab wind which held off autumn for a week to let them finish balancing the accounts of their leaves. Don't turn Don't turn the pages upside down my mother would say backwards words get dizzy the troubled ink curdles like bad milk The pages we leafed through came from the forest that watched us read from the cry of the bark which spread out beneath the pages' skin We read in August's dimness when the cosmos jettisoned its overload of stars when the night without margins dilated all the way into night. Translated from the French by Rosanna Warren === Page 74 === MARIO LUZI Faithful to Life The city on Sunday quite late when there's peace except a radio drones out of the bowels of the dark wharves and for him who enters the wide slit of a street cut clean through the quay it goes swimmingly till the spasm: a human being flattened among drains and half-constructed buildings. Respite, yes, but over there on the asphalt someone is dying among a few strangers who stop and gather round the accident, and we are here by fate or chance together, you and I, companions of a few hours on this mad globe beneath the two-edged sword of judgment or remission, life faithful to life, all that's grown in your breast— where is it leading, I wonder, does it descend or rise in starts towards its beginning . . . though no matter, it's our life, that's all. Homecoming And now the holiday leads him to the heart of his old city agog on a weekday. === Page 75 === And he feels lost -is it still me?- from one to the other of those astonishing streets drawn into a net of real and imagined sufferings he recalls-some he sees again with bated breath between memory and sense- people with whom he kindled life in those high houses and brought death there and put eternity in those rooms. Time he feels in his flesh full and emptied of them in him all is equal yet he does not exclude them, glories in all that transiency and humbly glorifies it. City. Towers. Translated from the Italian by Thomas Day PATRICK GILMORE The Invention of the Parachute One day Lenormand showed his design with two parasols: as he leapt from a tree two girls, sunstruck, looked on. One asked if one might snag on a sprig as, steering from his beech lair, he felt air pucker and pummel into his intricate canopies. He held them so closely, their flounces lapped === Page 76 === then slowed as he fell, so he could watch not the sisters—with dresses like sheets— but beyond, perhaps: cow and calf, a meadow nearing, a butterfly's teeter under the air-plump silk. So the parasols that once had formed a floating raft were given back to each girl, as if a secret might be better kept by being halved. KATIE FORD On Taking the Body Off the Cross The moon seems close, the docks are saturated, a small boat rocking like a light seed caught by the torn thread of a web, its catching noticed only as what has not been heard, like delay, rain on snow, the hiding of an envelope beneath ground. There are night-moths over the water. Their shadow of pieces hovers in the instinct of what mass might be. Loose logs thud up in the dock—wet wood on wet wood, like a falling horse, its thin legs tangled, its belly a brown sack that hits ground first, the freight of a sandbag we lift and throw so we can go on living here. === Page 77 === DOROTHEA TANNING A Life of Crime: St. Julien l'Hospitalier In awe and transport what pregnant queen would not hold dear the augur's words, "Your son will be a saint."? She told no one. The boy galloped his horse beside his father. "Some day you will be king," Kneeling on Sunday after Sunday in chapel, watching the mouse by his hole in the wall and bored, bored; idly, with his little sword he severed its nose and the drop of blood was a drunken ocean, red without anger, red without even lust, a blindness of dawn to scarlet sunset, a birth of death fluttering down with the castle's birds to moat and muck, a kind of childish prologue to the man's arrows dards knives javelins aimed at everything that moved and would move no more in forest and desert. What breathlessness, what sluicing ecstasy in the red flowing from feather from fur from skin from eye-socket! Did he taste the red salt in his own red gullet? Did the martyred beast and plummeted bird ravish his austere will? Each time, oh, each time with each convulsion it was as if he slavered like a Cerberus obeying an implacable master of carnage in The Peaceable Kingdom, felled one by one with their death throes, their agonies. Until the black stag, === Page 78 === an arrow quivering between his eyes, cried out: "Accursed one. You will murder your mother and your father." Shaken, trembling a little he fled, traveled far. Such a curse was not to be taken lightly even by an assassin though for a time slaughter was human: a needful expediant to fulfill the promise of kingship, and long enough for the old blood-craze to stain the way into the last prophecy: one of those bedroom spasms of domestic confusion. From pink-nosed mouse to murder of mother and father, a tapestry of death strewn in between, was far enough in depravity to announce not royal grandeur but time for heavenly judgment. He reversed the situation by dressing for holiness. Ah, it is too bad, Flaubert, even in deadpan irony, that you should speak of penitence, lampoon the cowl. And you, Julien, your travesty of grace—another prideful posture, though bloodless this time; or more truly a ploy—your show of tears, your eyes revulsed, your sores your filth your empty begging bowl. Warm the leper. Embrace him, mouth to mouth. Now reveal the deal, the plea bargain you made with God. === Page 79 === TODD HEARON Caliban in After-Life Prospero, what hollow art makes human humane? Excepting one, I can accept the other. Neither a deity nor its dog sits court upon a question of this sort. So answer, Sorcerer. Conqueror, I wait. Wordless as I was when you washed up heaving brine, in ignorance of pity I pited you, thin thing the salt had scoured. Dry, you wept then slept the ocean out of mind. When it returned, I nested you, laid you in my lair. So was it there, sequestered, out of thirst your tongue put forth my first- heard word? Water What sun could sear, what sea-roar will erase its acid from my ear? Your daughter's laughter as I played the pup, lapping berries from her open fist? — that, Master, was the best relish I had had since Mother's milk. And last. For it, too, found a word in your dire lexicon: lubricous. Admonished, === Page 80 === Miranda wandered off. The dog days ceased. All moon I went on wanting. Prospero, before you the lagoon wombed me. Reedy light sifted me, in dreams I lay unnamed, alluvial sprite. Beside the tidepools I’d bask in the unasked, unconscious Question, fathomless in spite of worlds turned upwards underhand— that now turn all against me: my face at every surface surfeits on its own, grown over-monstrous, even my moon half-man. My bellow crawls through cliffs, outchoirs the sea’s echo CALIBAN CANIBAL. I gnaw myself, I know. If you can hear me, Master, mustering music on this crust of land, this isle I’ll always lie alien on now, float home, my sometime father, some grain of grace to scour this skull of ill, its misery, my memory. One ounce of the old art, Alchemist, one phial’s drop to prosper O- blivion in Caliban in language languishing. You drowned your book and sailed. Your chief achieve remains my curse: You worded me; I can’t recant my life. === Page 81 === STEVEN CRAMER Throw Yourself Like Seed after Miguel de Unamuno Defeat? Shake it off, take yourself back. Lying in bed, sheet over your eyes, you'll miss the wheel that grazes your heel as it passes by, turning- whoever wants to live has some life left. Right now, you're just feeding yourself with a mortal pain that spins its web inside you; life equals work, and work is the single lasting thing; get started; turn back to the work. Throw yourself like seed as you walk your field, don't turn this way or that; that's turning toward death; don't let what happened slow you. What's alive in the furrow, let it live; what's inside you, let die. Nobody's life drifts by like a landscape with clouds; the day you collect yourself is the day you work. COMING IN PARTISAN REVIEW: • Bruce Bawer on Tolerating Intolerance • John Patrick Diggins on the Enlightenment • Lawrence Langer on Holocaust Memoirs • Cushing Strout on Fictionalizing History • Vladimir Tismaneanu on Lenin's Century • Robert Wistrich on Austrian Legacies and more . . . === Page 82 === DAVID SIDORSKY Post-Mortems of the Sixties: Deep Structure Specters and Walking Zombies I nterpretation of the 1960s has become a primary instrument of polit- ical self-definition by both Liberals and Conservatives. The differing perspectives of that decade have taken on a function analogous to the decisive role played by the French Revolution in determining the identity of the Left and Right in nineteenth-century politics and the way in which support for the Russian Revolution became the dividing line between radical political culture and its critics throughout most of the twentieth century. There are three major views of what the 1960s have wrought, each representing an interpretation of the past which can be used to criticize or to defend current political and cultural values. The historical memory of Liberalism, shared in part by the Left, has idealized the decade as a version of "Camelot." For Liberals, it was the last great period of American progressive vision and pragmatic energy, symbolized by the aura of a vigorous Jack Kennedy and characterized by the civil rights movement and the Great Society legislation, before the reversal represented by the Nixon and Reagan presidencies. (The Republican party seemed to partly adopt this version when it advanced the youthful, handsome, and liberal New York mayor, John Lindsay.) After the sixties, Watergate may have served as an emotional resuscitata- tion for politically disappointed Liberals. Yet neither the Carter nor the Clinton presidencies have restored the lost promise. The Liberal politi- cal vision that was pursued during the 1960s continues to be enshrined and defended, even as the agenda of Liberalism within the Democratic Party has receded over the past decades. For the Left, the 1960s was a period of transformative activism. A New Left considered itself to have revitalized the tired and rigid ideolo- gies of the Old Left, even while accepting its basic tenets. It felt itself to be moving toward a genuine revolution, or at least an apocalypse. Fred- eric Jameson, the Marxist literary critic, has recalled the widely shared belief in the imminent coming of "universal liberation." In the formed historical memory of the Left, this revolutionary enthusiasm was smoth- ered by the established institutions of corporate and consumerist society. === Page 83 === DAVID SIDORSKY 241 From the Conservative perspective, whether it is drawn from free market economics, religious traditionalism, or a Burkean view of his- tory, American values were threatened during the 1960s. The disruption of cultural norms, even more than the actual physical losses caused by the wave of riots in major American cities, marked a time of deep crisis for American institutions. For many of these Conservatives, the politi- cal and economic regression of the apocalyptic 1960s may have been reversed in the ensuing political victories of such diverse leaders as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush. Yet for other Conservatives, the cultural decline which was initiated during that period-particularly in the university, museum, concert hall, theater, and media-has deepened to the point of irreversibility. Conventional historical wisdom tends to accept the posthumously cultivated image of the Kennedy Administration as vigorous and dynamic, bypassing the need for any significant accounting of its actual successes and failures. Similarly, there is a consensus that the civil rights movement contributed dramatically to the improvement of the condi- tion of the black minority in American society, avoiding any analysis of the emergent positive trends in race relations during the 1950s. This avoidance is accompanied by a denial of the possible negative impact of new leadership in the black community for the cause of racial integra- tion, as well as of the unanticipated and counterproductive conse- quences of so much of the Great Society legislation. However, despite the widespread acceptance of the Liberal view of the Kennedy Administration and the civil rights movement, most Americans do not share the nostalgia for Camelot, just as they have no regrets about the failure of the revolution that was the hope of the New Left. At the same time, the majority view does not identify with the pessimistic prognoses advanced by Conservatives about the future of established American institutions. For the American majority, the 1960s represent a shudder of excess in a controversial period of political turmoil. Since the violent events of that decade-such as the Vietnam War, urban riots, and campus sit-ins-no longer occupy the headlines, the majority has moved on. The sixties have been absorbed into "history," which may safely be forgotten. In this placid or optimistic American amnesia, "Sixtyism" and all of its passions can be considered a phase of America's adolescence. Even within the Liberal historical memory, there have been signs of revisionism. No less a figure than Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who served as the court intellectual of the Kennedy Administration, has placed the 1960s within the context of periodic cycles. In a Partisan Review forum of the early 1990s, Schlesinger hypothesized that American history could === Page 84 === 242 PARTISAN REVIEW be characterized by alternating cycles of liberal thrust and conservative retraction. According to this thesis, the first decade of the twentieth cen- tury was a progressive era that was countered by the conservative ten- dencies of the 1920s. American radicalism experienced its greatest decade in the thirties only to be followed, after the war, by the dominant conservatism of the Eisenhower period. From this perspective, the sixties represented the perennial liberal tendency within American society, which was reversed by the Reaganite counterrevolution of the 1980s. Schlesinger expressed the hope that with the Clinton presidency the nineties would be a Liberal decade. This hope was dashed by the unex- pected Republican Congressional triumph of 1994. The Clinton Admin- istration, which had on occasion claimed the legacy of the Kennedy White House, moved adroitly to the center. However, the conservative Congres- sional majority proved unable to consolidate its temporary triumph, resulting in continuous oscillation between Left and Right. By the end of the decade, the Bush formulation of "compassionate Conservatism" seemed to represent the softening, if not the end, of ideology and to her- ald the rhetoric of bipartisan political Centrism as the wave of the future. A significant implication of this Centrism is that the agendas of the 1960s have been consigned to the past and have left no permanent imprint on American society. The convergent Centrist argument is that the ideological positions of both Left and Right have been undermined by changing reality. American Conservatism had never achieved an ideological coherence, but represented an overlapping consensus among diverse constituencies. These included religious groups who supported the expression of fam- ily values in the public sphere, joined with partisans of economic free- dom who advocated free markets and the role of private enterprise, and augmented by Burkean conservatives who saw themselves as defenders of traditional standards. In 1989, after the fall of the Soviet Union, this coalition of groups was deprived of its unifying theme, the defeat of Communism, which had been expressed in the postwar electoral victo- ries of Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. With the collapse of the Socialist economies, the Left has also been shorn of much of its ideological foundation. It no longer seeks to pro- vide a systematic economic theory against free market principles in the United States or in the developing world. Similarly, it no longer believes in the feasibility of a utopian transformation of the human condition. Such utopianism used to permeate many Liberal reformist programs, from schools which practiced progressive education, to penal institu- === Page 85 === DAVID SIDORSKY 243 tions whose primary focus was on individual rehabilitation, to urban renewal projects which were directed toward group regeneration. In the Centrist consensus, the ideological options that divided the Left from the Right in the 1960s have been transcended. The result is that the dramatic events of the sixties that constitute, as it were, the controversial phenomena of Sixtyism, are rendered irrelevant for the American future. AGAINST THE GRAIN of this emergent conciliatory Centrism, two recent studies of the 1960s have developed comprehensive interpretations of the ongoing burden of that decade. These two post-mortems, written in very different styles and from opposite methodological approaches, argue that Sixtyism survives to the present day. Moreover, this survival is not merely in the form of echoing historical memory that occasionally troubles the present, such as the recent parole hearings for sixties-era Weatherinen like Catherine Boudin. Rather, according to both of these works, the achievements of the sixties are dominating factors within contemporary society. Consequently, the possibility of a reversal of the trends initiated by Sixtyism is the central question that determines the future of the United States and perhaps of humankind. Francis Fukuyama's sociological account, The Great Disruption, argues that the surface phenomena on display in the 1960s uncovered the deeper fault lines of Western society and culture. Just as an earthquake informs us that the tectonic plates are shifting, so the televised portrayals of student sit-ins at Berkeley or Paris and protest riots in Detroit or Berlin revealed more fundamental aspects of social pathology. Fukuyama's data, which indicate sharp rises in rates of divorce, illegitimate births, crime, and alienation from social groups in all Western societies, demonstrate the breakdown of a stable family structure and of inherited social roles. In Fukuyama's social-scientific analysis, these underlying social changes are caused by the economic transformation from an industrial economy to a postindustrial or information economy. One feature of this transforma- tion is the changing role of women, who can now undertake the careers which were previously reserved for men. Moreover, the introduction of effective fertility control enables unprecedented numbers of women to enter the work force. The consequent change in the traditional family structure is, for Fukuyama, not the result of an ideological choice or rev- olutionary feminist activism, but the product of irreversible technological and economic transformations throughout the developed world. The neg- ative impact of these factors on the traditional nuclear family can only marginally be influenced by the Conservative rhetoric of religious tradition or cultural ideology. The significant rise in crime rates of the 1960s is addi- === Page 86 === 244 PARTISAN REVIEW tional evidence of the root causes of the Great Disruption. Fukuyama argues that this is not an American phenomenon related to a permissive era in political attitudes and judicial practice, but one that reflects deeper issues of changing social structure in a postindustrial economy. Fukuyama's account presses even further. The change in family struc- ture is part of a great loss of "social capital," that is, of the body of inherited norms which characterizes a stable society. The depletion of social capital signals a fundamental crisis of moral authority and polit- ical legitimacy. The religious beliefs that accompanied moral norms in all Western societies were weakened-a weakness which was strongly evident in the Woodstock or "Dionysian" aspects of Sixtyism. Similarly, the consensus on political authority, which emerged with the birth of the modern state and the doctrines of the Enlightenment, were challenged in the 1960s. In sum, Fukuyama considers the fundamental definition of Sixtyism to be a crisis of societal order-both moral and political. Consequently, the significance of the 1960s is not to be caught in the graphic television images of Vietnam protests or urban riots in the United States. As he writes, "If the same phenomena occur in a broad range of countries, then we can rule out explanations specific to one sin- gle country." Fukuyama argues that the lack of social capital, demon- strated in the social pathology of family breakdown, crime rates, and personal anomie, is common to all developed countries of the West. According to Fukuyama, this deep, pervasive crisis probes the foun- dational bases of the capacity of human beings in technologically advanced cultures to achieve norms of social order. Therefore, he under- takes an extensive theoretical analysis of the sources for societal norms and political authority. These include a discussion of the basis in the neurobiology of the human species for moral and social norms, as well as an analysis of the functional utility of norms in the process of human evolution. These investigations lead Fukuyama to conclude that human beings are very successful at creating norms and adapting to diverse societal challenges. Accordingly, unless the Great Disruption is an eschatological event, it is most likely that some remedy will be found for the restructuring of human family, political authority, and moral norms. Yet in terms of a historical narrative of the recent past, Fukuyama provides little empirical basis for his optimistic projections. On the con- trary, the empirical studies he cites provide graphic details of the bank- ruptcy of "social capital." The theoretical inquiries he reviews suggest the possibility of a "Great Reconstruction." Yet Fukuyama's argument demonstrates only the theoretical possibility of a reconstruction while tracking the realities of the Great Disruption. === Page 87 === DAVID SIDORSKY 245 WHILE NOT DISAGREEING with the substantive elements of Fukuyama's account of the 1960s, Roger Kimball's method of analysis in The Long March sets a sharp contrast. Kimball guides the reader through an extended tour of the cultural icons of those provocative times. He does not seek any coherent set of root causes or historical substructure for the phenomena he inspects, surveys, and reviews. Yet each portrait speaks for itself in a harrowing gallery of cultural change and decline. For Kimball the 1960s marked a revolution that was characterized by continual erosion of the capacity or will of major cultural institutions to assert literary merit, artistic standards, or critical and scholarly truth. Kimball's opening sketches represent the anticipations of Sixtyism in what he refers to as the "Beat triumvirate" of the 1950s: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. For Kimball, the poetry of Ginsberg and the fiction of Kerouac are the initial evidence of literary breakdown in their disintegration of the formal structure generally con- sidered essential to artistic achievement. This conclusion is reinforced by his review of Burroughs's writings. Kimball argues that the "primary claim" of Burroughs's Naked Lunch is "not literary but ethical or moral," that is, a "defiant challenge to prevailing moral standards," achieved through the "depiction of sexual torture and heroin-induced dementia." Thus Kimball concludes that the writings of the Beat move- ment are not works of literary merit, but that they gained their notori- ety because of their role in expanding freedom of expression. In this context, Kimball notes the connection often made in the 1960s between artistic freedom and the freedom to use drugs. Kimball proceeds to dissect Norman Mailer's writings as evidence of cultural decline accelerating throughout the 1960s. He documents this thesis by citing the great distance between Mailer's own literary heroes, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, and the deterioration of Mailer's writing in his later novels. In Mailer, Kimball finds an ideolog- ical basis for Sixtyism. Thus he believes that Mailer, in The White Negro, "articulated an ethic that underlies not only his own view of the world in all his later writings, but also the view that would inform the cultural revolution of the 1960s." It is an ethic that supports an arbi- trary existential commitment to moral nihilism, with its celebration of the violence of the psychopath as one who breaks the bonds of the total- itarian American society. Thus, when asked to explain the cowardly acts of criminals against weak victims in street crime and store robberies, Mailer responded that "the hoodlum is daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act, it is not altogether cowardly." === Page 88 === 246 PARTISAN REVIEW In Kimball's portraits, nihilism was accompanied by the rejection of standards in aesthetic criticism. Kimball identifies the writings of Susan Sontag as symbolic of 1960s culture. Sontag moved beyond the celebra- tion of camp, or the adoption of a highbrow tone in praise of lowbrow works, in order to arrive at a theory of aesthetics which denied any dis- tinction among works of art. “Her great trick was not merely to endorse lowbrow tastes, but to create the illusion that for the truly sophisticated all intellectual, artistic, and moral distinctions of merit were infra dig, dispensable, de trop.” Kimball finds confirmation of Sontag's place in the aesthetic nihilism of the 1960s in her defense of pornographic literature. Kimball's conclusions emerge only after a dialectical development derived from a close reading of his subjects' major texts. Yet he places them coherently in a “long march” toward a revolution in the culture of the United States. One significant milestone on that road to revolu- tion has been the decline of humanistic studies, as conceived by Matthew Arnold, with their concentration upon the greatest works of the greatest minds of past cultures. Kimball chronicles that decline in the following assessment: When Sontag began writing, in the early 1960s, the kind of pro- grammatic contempt she exhibited for the Arnoldian humanistic tra- dition was still a fringe phenomenon. Although warning signs were beginning to flash, the major cultural institutions in America had not yet caught up with the “new sensibility” she both embodied and pro- claimed: a sensibility that rejected seriousness while embracing amoralism and histrionic political radicalism. . . . Within a very few years, “the Matthew Arnold idea of culture” was everywhere in rout. A climactic episode for Kimball's narrative of this rout was the “capitulation” of the universities during the student riots of the late 1960s. Kimball's sketch of those events focuses upon the lack of moral principle shown by many of the country's educational leaders and dis- tinguished faculty. He confronts the view that justifies the capitulation as an expedient policy. According to that view, since the universities were unprepared to resist unprecedented violence, their practical option was limited to temporary appeasement. This justification argues that appeasement was followed by a successful restoration of campus tran- quillity with the possibilities of educational renewal. From Kimball's perspective, however, the capitulation opened the door to the successive erosion of standards. The heights of humanistic scholarship have been leveled by pressure for politicized studies of des- === Page 89 === DAVID SIDORSKY 247 ignated victim groups. These curricular changes have hastened the aban- donment of critical standards in the humanities. The portraits of Mailer's extravagant self-advertisements, and of Son- tag's literary criticism, are framed within the revival of both neo-Marx- ist and neo-Freudian ideologies. In the 1960s, Marxist theories in the New Left combined with diverse movements for expressive liberation vaguely related to Freudian or Reichian sexual theory. Accordingly, figures like Herbert Marcuse, a Marxist of the original Frankfurt school of the 1930s, whose stock was rejuvenated during the 1960s, became a representative icon of Sixtvism who exercised a crucial function in the long march. Marcuse's combination of Marxist and Freudian themes restructured revolutionary activity in new directions. The revolution was not to be carried out against its traditional target, that is, the dominating, exploitative class that tyrannizes the workers. Rather, its energies could be directed against a liberal democratic soci- ety whose tolerance was dialectically analyzed as "repressive," since its consumerist seductions manipulated and limited choice and even, mirabile dictu, channeled human eros. The union between Marxism and Freudianism is a recurrent feature of the ideological tendencies that dominated the 1960s. Kimball's account exhibits the tensions between these two sources. While Mar- cuse's synthesis may have been in favor of Marx, the writings of the popular critic Norman O. Brown were in favor of a variant reading of Freud. Brown recognized that the revolt against repression was to be carried out through social action, but his stress was upon the ways in which liberation could be achieved through the practice of polymor- phous sex and by the transcendence of rational inhibitions. These explorations of academic and high culture are paralleled by similar themes in popular culture. To a degree, Kimball traces such phe- nomena as Woodstock, the rock-and-roll scene, and the new hippie enclaves, whether in rural communes or urban neighborhoods. Throughout this series of moral indictments, however, Kimball's prose sustains a literary elegance; its tone is modulated and its arguments are nuanced. The cutting edge emerges from careful interpretation of literary evidence. The strength of Kimball's criticism often reflects his readiness to bring into sharp focus dimly remembered episodes of the cultural scene of the 1960s, including those which its protagonists would prefer to forget. Thus, Kimball quotes some of the adulation that greeted Charles Reich's The Greening of America. Kimball reports on Reich's construc- tion of a dialectical interpretation of American history-from the condi- tions of nineteenth-century agrarian society with its poverty and work === Page 90 === 248 PARTISAN REVIEW ethic; through the affluence of later industrial, corporate culture; to the postindustrial economy, which provides greater opportunity for envi- ronmental beneficence and human liberation. Kimball cites the admitted analogy between Reich’s dialectical history and his biographical devel- opment—from the virginity of his striving youth and hard-working mid- dle age to heterosexual abundance in his forties and the subsequent freedom of polymorphous sensuality and the homosexual lifestyle. One illuminating sidelight takes the form of a comedy of manners, by two cultural idols of the sixties, Eldridge Cleaver and Timothy Leary. Both shared a period of exile in Algeria. Kimball notes the great praise of contemporaneous critics for the writings of Eldridge Cleaver, and quotes Cleaver’s prose at length in all its raving. Cleaver, the leader of the Black Panthers and the candidate for president of the Peace and Freedom party, was the host for Dr. Leary, the onetime Harvard professor of psychology who gained fame for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. Kimball records Leary’s initial enthusiasm: “The Panthers are the hope of the world. Socialism works here. . . . Eldridge is a genial genius. Brilliant! Turned on too!” However, later Leary complains that the Panthers have “kidnapped us at gunpoint, held us in ‘jail’ in various apartments around town, issued press releases announcing our ‘arrest’ for lack of discipline, and searched our apartment vainly for documents proving we were CIA operatives.” The conjunction of two different worlds in the Leary-Cleaver exile is characteristic of other radical happenings that punctuated the 1960s. Kimball explores this aspect of the decade primarily through an essay on *The New York Review of Books*, which was christened by Tom Wolfe as “the chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic.” He traces its ori- gins to the early 1960s, when a newspaper strike in New York shut down the functional book reviews and heightened awareness of the need for a better forum for the written word. He records the high hopes for a sophisticated and knowledgeable review that would strengthen elite cultural standards. Kimball contrasts this cultural elitism with the crudenness of the *Review’s* revolutionary zeal, including, during the urban riots, a cover drawing of a Molotov cocktail, complete with instructions for its composition. The meeting of the “radical” and “chic” universes of discourse throughout the sixties serves Kimball as an unfailing source of ironic commentary in a literary tradition which goes back to Henry James’s portrait of Princess Casamassima. One ironic post-sixties variation of this theme is found in an anecdote related by the founding father of *The New York Review of Books*, Jason Epstein. Epstein had been both a friend and colleague of Vladimir Nabokov until the 1960s. With Epstein’s radical opposition to the Viet- === Page 91 === DAVID SIDORSKY 249 nam War and Nabokov's staunch anti-Communism, their ways separated. On a Fourth of July holiday in the early 1970s, Epstein went in search of cigars to the Hotel Ritz in Paris and encountered Nabokov celebrating in the bar. Their reunion that night at dinner, joined by Nabokov's wife, Vera, was friendly. Epstein offered a toast to the company of three who shared this moment of exile on America's national birthday. Nabokov responded by offering a toast to then-president Richard Nixon, the anath- ema of radical chic. Epstein informs us that under the circumstances, he felt obliged to drink to the health of Richard Nixon, for it would have been gauche and certainly unchic to decline a toast proffered by Nabokov, a literary figure who characteristically combined a sense of elegance with a penchant for testing the limits of form and experience. Despite its various episodes of humor and irony, Kimball's narrative is ultimately not a comic tale. One of the decade's central accomplish- ments, according to Kimball, was its delegitimation of America's sense of its own value. Kimball shows how the utopianism of the Left was combined with the indictment of American actions in the Vietnam War to delegitimate major aspects of American society. He writes: As the sixties evolved, it became increasingly clear that what was at stake was not only the war. The real issue was our way of life: what used to be called without apology "the American way of life," with its social and political institutions, its moral assumptions, its un- ken confidences about what mattered. One measure of the change wrought by this cultural offensive is the fact that even now, thirty or more years on, it is nearly impossible for anyone with a college education to speak of "the American way of life" without irony. Thus Kimball's portraits draw him to the issue of the permanent weakening of the fabric of American society. KIMBALL'S INTERPRETATION of the sixties as a historical narrative pro- vides a challenge to Fukuyama's sociological method. On the one hand, Fukuyama's faith in sociology would indicate a belief that there can be a predictive science of history derived from the evidence of social structures. More particularly, Fukuyama seeks to identify the underlying causes of social events and to connect them with the development of human nature so as to predict the reversibility of the Great Disruption. Yet Fukuyama is himself aware that the recognized failure of Hegelian or Marxist histori- === Page 92 === 250 PARTISAN REVIEW cism over the past century generally has undermined the possibility that reductive sociology can function as a predictive science of history. On the other hand, Fukuyama is maintaining, more modestly, that these causal factors condition, but do not determine, historical out- comes. There is general agreement that knowledge of any complex his- torical period like the 1960s can be enriched by statistical evidence and data about societal institutions. Yet the historical narrative reflects con- tingent and chance events which may be more significant for the deter- mination of actual historical outcomes. Thus, the sixties would have evolved differently in many ways had it not been for the chance result of Oswald's assassination of Kennedy, especially since it occurred barely three weeks after Kennedy's decision to overthrow the government of Ngo Dinh Diem in Southern Vietnam. This decision, which American- ized the war in Vietnam, left his successor to confront a newly changed and unanticipated overseas war without any strategic plan. For Presi- dent Johnson, the development of an effective war strategy represented an impediment to his own ambitious domestic priorities. Consequently, the most prominent and frequently noted feature of the history of the 1960s, that is, a continuing state of war with unremitting casualty lists combined with an unprecedented agenda of legislative social change in domestic affairs, largely was the product of contingent factors that were not determined by the deep structures of American society. Further, Fukuyama's attempt to uncover the causal factor that explains "the same phenomena in different countries," such as student sit-ins in Korea, France, and the United States, may ignore an ambiguity in the cri- teria for what constitutes the same phenomenon. It may be conceded that student riots in Paris, Berkeley, or Seoul reflect similar underlying struc- tural factors of postindustrial affluence, weakness of authority, and inher- ited ideological traditions of the Left. Yet the American student protest was linked to the Vietnam War, with the result that it strengthened Con- gressional opposition to the war in a way that has no parallel in France or Korea. Thus, American student protest was different, as demonstrated by the pattern of its consequences in subsequent presidential actions and in actually affecting the outcome of the war in Vietnam and the Cambo- dian genocide. Similarly, an increase in out-of-wedlock births in both Swe- den and the United States may reflect the erosion of religious tradition in both countries. Yet the phenomena are not the same if measured by the absence of a father for the child. If history without sociology is shallow, as Fukuyama implicitly contends, then sociology without history does not cope with the actual surface reality of what is taking place. === Page 93 === DAVID SIDORSKY 251 In the concluding part of his book, Fukuyama effectively recognizes the need to connect his sociological structures with a historical narra- tive. He cites statistics of the 1990s that indicate some reversal in the rise of illegitimate births as well as a decline in crime as evidence for his prediction of the coming “Great Reconstruction.” Fukuyama does not insist that the decline in crime is attributable to underlying societal fac- tors, for he is prepared to accept the view that it may have been the result of a change in public policy which led to the incarceration of repeat offenders. He argues that “any number of other signs suggest that culturally, the period of ever-expanding individualism is coming to an end, and that at least some of the norms swept away during the Great Disruption are being restored.” These other signs, which Fukuyama considers straws in the wind, on occasion give his argument the appear- ance of grasping at straws. His signs of restoration, for example, include his observation that Dr. Laura Schlessinger's moralizing tone and atti- tude helped propel her to the top of radio talk shows and that Far- rakhan's Million Man March stressed the responsibility of the male parent. Fukuyama's claim that at the end of the 1990s America was in the process of “renorming,” that is, undergoing a restoration of tradi- tional moral norms, does not find strong confirmation in the piquant aspects of the Clinton presidency during those years, which rather sug- gest an equivocal meaning for “renorming.” Fukuyama's overall assessment, however, is that the post-mortem of the sixties as a period of Great Disruption can be consistently conjoined with a series of theoretical arguments and impressionistic observations that lead to the conclusion of its eventual reversibility. It is as if the deep structures that determine the sixties survive only as haunting specters of the past that are being exorcised. WHILE KIMBALL'S series of portraits, in contrast, entail no explicit pre- diction about the American cultural future, the metaphor of the "long march" suggests that the damage has been cumulative and probably irreparable. Without such an implicit prediction, his gallery of the Grand Guignol could be compared with transitory phases of decadence in other periods. The manifestoes of Dadaism in the twenties may well match the aesthetic nihilism of the 1960s; the conformism to left-wing ideology in the literature and journalism of the thirties, which had a sig- nificant part in what W. H. Auden called that "low, dishonest decade," may have exceeded similar trends in the 1960s; and high cultural status was given to the pornographic oeuvres of such literary figures as Anaïs Nin or Henry Miller long before the theories of Norman O. Brown or === Page 94 === 252 PARTISAN REVIEW the criticism of Susan Sontag. Kimball's implicit reference to the future is confirmed by an even more striking metaphor which he provides for the cultural decline of the United States. In his introduction, Kimball retells the true story of Phineas P. Gage, who was the victim of an accidental explosion during which "a metal rod went hurting through his skull." Surprisingly, Gage survived this blow and "his intellectual powers were apparently unimpaired." Yet after the accident, he became an untrustworthy person. His moral cen- ter had been destroyed. This metaphor demonstrates that while our cul- ture remains apparently intact, the sixties have left it "afloat but rudderless, its 'moral center' a shambles." By coincidence, a similar metaphor is employed by Kenneth Minogue, the political philosopher, in an essay that appeared recently in The New Criterion, whose managing editor is Roger Kimball. Minogue's metaphor is that of the meticulous executioner who is so skilled at severing the head from the body that no one is aware that the victim is dead immediately after the process. It is realized only subse- quently that the apparently whole person has actually been decapitated and lost the ability to function as a human being. Minogue believes that this metaphor applies to the civilization of the West, paralleling Kim- ball's view of the loss of America's moral center. Minogue attributes this death to the implications of the radical femi- nist movement, a theme which is not central for Kimball or Fukuyama. Kimball has not included a portrait of the feminist writers of the 1960s and Fukuyama's treatment of feminism as a phenomenon of a postin- dustrial economy contains little reference to radical feminist ideology. Minogue, however, considers radical feminism a variant form of internal subversion directed against the great institutions of Western civilization that were created by "dead white males." Minogue's critique of feminism involves two familiar arguments and one unprecedented conjecture. Minogue contends that the feminization of the military represents one latent possibility of societal decapitation. This experiment can appear viable under favorable technological conditions with the current unthreat- ening balance of power. Yet at some turn of events, the basis for military catastrophe has been laid in the egalitarian fantasy that women can func- tion as combat infantry against hostile troops in conditions of warfare. Further, Minogue's review of the historical relationship between the sexes indicates that the radical feminist drive for equality in the work- place has brought with it heavy and uncalculated costs for women in their other roles. The favored status of women in courtship and the security of women as wives and mothers may have been undermined for === Page 95 === DAVID SIDORSKY 253 the sake of equality in the labor force. The latent consequences of the changes in women's status as matriarchs may yet involve deleterious consequences for the social order. Minogue's extreme conjecture is that the feminization of the culture may emasculate male creativity to such a degree that it will have a neg- ative impact on the capacity of Western civilization to maintain the progress in the sciences that is necessary for its survival. Yet predictions of the future are not entailed by any post-mortem, no matter how severe, of the decade of the 1960s. This is evident in the historical record of the past three decades. And there is no evidence, despite Minogue's conjecture on the implications of radical feminism, that there has been a weakening of the institutional capacity for scientific and technological innovation in Western civilization since the 1960s. Similarly, foreign policy supported by radical political movements of the 1960s did not seem to affect subsequent U.S. foreign policy. Reagan's policy in the 1980s of strengthened confrontation against Soviet power, including the rhetoric of "the evil empire," does not only mark a reversal of Sixtysim, but may have contributed successfully to the collapse of the Soviet Union in ways which were more effective than the extension of Eisenhower's containment strategy of the 1950s or the Nixonian detente. The collapse of the Soviet Union has had dramatic consequences for the dominance of free market economics. It is not only the post-sixties shift from Socialism to free markets in countries as diverse as China, Vietnam, Tanzania, Indonesia, or Chile. Even when leaders of European Socialist parties affirm rhetorical policies that are continuous with the ideals of the Left in the 1960s, their practice tends toward a quest for capital invest- ment and the global expansion of free trade. The dominance of free mar- kets is a reversal of economic theory, ideology, and practice in the 1960s. FUKUYAMA CONTENDS that the depletion of social capital that took place in the 1960s will be reversed, while Kimball's portraits of the decline of the academy and of literary standards during that decade suggest a con- tinuity of further decline. Yet both Fukuyama and Kimball recognize that analytical post-mortems of a past decade do not bring with them the gift of prophecy. The unpredictability of the American future, however, does not negate the ways in which these have contributed to the under- standing of all future historians of the American past. The most dramatically unpredicted event of recent American history was the act of terrorism carried out in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on September 11. This inevitably raises the question of the correctness of Fukuyama's or Kimball's cultural and societal prognoses. === Page 96 === 254 PARTISAN REVIEW In one sense, the widespread patriotic response supports Fukuyama's thesis of the reversibility of Sixtyism. It would appear that Secretary Rums- feld's administration of the American military operations in Afghanistan has laid to rest the ghosts of Secretary McNamara's micro-management of the Vietnam War. Yet there remains a great distance between the resur- gence of patriotic solidarity and the reconstruction of social norms that is required, in Fukuyama's view, to repair the "Great Disruption." Kimball's argument that the appreciation of the American way of life had been eroded by the culture of the 1960s appears to have been eclipsed by the many deeply felt expressions of regret over the losses to that way of life which have been sustained as a result of the events of 9/11. Yet the rejoinder in defense of Kimball's thesis would be the recognition that the intellectual and cultural elite groups which he has portrayed reject par- ticipation in the majoritarian culture of the new patriotism. In a striking assessment of the cultural impact of 9/11, the Canadian critic Mark Steyn has focused on the various ways in which Western media and religious and political leadership have laid the blame for ter- rorist acts upon the West's historical record of poverty, racism, colonial- ism, and insensitivity to the aspirations of others. Steyn suggests that this "syndrome—the vague sense that the West's success must somehow be responsible for the rest's failure—is a far slyer virus than the toxic effu- sions of the Chomsky-Sontag set, and it has seeped far deeper into the cultural bloodstream." Yet it could be argued that the fact that Steyn's conclusion has reached beyond the intellectual figures of the culture and academy which Kimball has surveyed and into public expression by political and religious figures of the Establishment represents a confir- mation rather than a departure from the thesis of The Long March. The Long March and The Great Disruption provide far richer inter- pretations of the 1960s than competing presentations. Nostalgia for "Camelot" may survive, as shown by the large crowds that turned out for the New York Metropolitan Museum's exhibition of Jacqueline Onassis haute couture. Former activists will retain a sentimental rhetor- ical view that the "good" that the sixties did in the civil rights move- ment and the war on poverty lives after them while the evil, violence, and riots have long been interred with other skeletons of the past. Yet Fukuyama and Kimball have etched the darker side of the period and given us a deeper account. In doing so, despite their different approaches, each of their works represents an attempt to seize the high ground in the ongoing struggle to interpret America's "usable past" on behalf of those who support historical standards of excellence in culture and the need for traditional moral norms in society. === Page 97 === HARVEY SACHS Leaving Italy S EVERAL YEARS AGO, I visited a small exhibition of sixteenth-century Sienese paintings at Siena's Palazzo Chigi Saracini. There were sev- eral fine works on display, but II Sodoma's “Allegory of Heavenly Love" was in a class by itself. It struck me as such a magnificent lie that I bought a small poster of it to tack to the wall near my desk. In it, a young woman is holding a pitcher in her right hand, dousing the flames that burn atop an altar dedicated to earthly love (“Stinsi terrenas" says the motto—"I extinguished the earthly"), while, with a kindling-stick in her left hand, she lights the fire of heavenly love on a higher altar (“Celestes"). But the only details that lend even a touch of determina- tion to the woman's general aspect are her straight, Roman legionary's nose and her Minerva-style helmet. Everything else seems calculated to awaken thoughts of decidedly non-religious love: the honey-colored hair falling over the lovely, bare shoulder; the soft, exposed little breast; the beautifully molded left thigh, discernible through a veil-like wrap and ready to curl itself around someone else's thigh; the small, sensual mouth; the long, gentle fingers, created for caressing. . . . Surely all of these features were meant to make viewers long to do what the painting was officially intended to persuade them to renounce. The allegorical lady may believe that she wants to give up the life of the senses-she may declare that she will give it up-but she can't, won't, mustn't. The painting's message is flagrantly ambiguous (even the broken altar in the middle distance might refer to the fate of a previous resolution of the same sort), and the ambiguity doesn't end with the painting. II Sodoma, whose real name was Giovannantonio Bazzi, was homosexual and possibly also an animal lover, in the more unconventional sense of the term. "Having always around him boys and beardless youths, whom he loved boundlessly, he acquired the nickname of the Sodomite," according to Vasari, who knew him. "He delighted, fur- thermore, in having the strangest sorts of animals in his house." Far from resenting his nickname, however, Giovannantonio "gloried in it, making verses and poems on it." Thus, the "Allegory of Heavenly Love" was either a remarkable piece of wishful thinking or a commis- === Page 98 === 256 PARTISAN REVIEW sioned lie, if not both. Maybe the painter was sincerely trying to save his soul. Maybe, like his allegorical lady, he believed that he wanted to extinguish his appetites, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Or maybe he was making fun of the right-thinking Tuscan burghers who were paying him to paint works that expressed the proper, publicly con- doned ideals of a society that unofficially accepted just about every- thing, including the doings of Il Sodoma himself. More than a piece of Catholic iconography, the “Allegory” seems to me a symbol of the land in which it was produced. It's not that Italian attitudes on these matters are more mendacious than corresponding attitudes in other countries; it's the brazen smile on the face of Italian mendacity that makes so many earnest foreigners angry with themselves for loving Italy, for belonging to that hopelessly unrealistic bunch of Northerners—the descendants of Winckelmann, Goethe, and even the otherwise realistic Stendhal—who feel drawn toward the Italian version of Mediterranean civilization and toward the set of virtues and vices that it so unabashedly represents. Unfortunately, nearly all non-native Italy-watchers, even the bright and sophisticated ones, fall sooner or later into the trap of quintessen- tializing. They proceed, either nonchalantly or with alarming ignorance, from the specific to the general, and the results are predictably superfi- cial. One of them sees a well-dressed businessman stop his shiny Mer- cedes in the emergency lane on the Autostrada del Sole, get out, and unconcernedly take a piss as hundreds of passersby look on, and trans- forms him into The Modern Italian Man Who Has Maintained His Frank Mediterranean Attitude Toward The Body. Another writer's mag- netic telephone card gets stuck in a pay phone in an Italian city, and— conveniently forgetting that similar annoyances happen much more often in London or Paris than in Rome or Milan—he decides that Part Of Italy's Charm Is That Nothing Works. I admit that the temptation to quintessentialize is great, above all because so many Italians love to speak about their country and their fellow-citizens in exaggeratedly generic (and for the most part negative) terms, especially when they're talking to foreigners. It makes good theater. And the foreigners tend to soak up and expand on what they've been told. One morning, for instance, in the mid-1990s, while I was shopping for groceries in the Central Italian village in which I then lived, I was harangued by two local guys who were forever explaining Italy to me. First Enzo, the florist, stopped me and inveighed against Nazi skin- heads, fascists, Berlusconi, and mafiosi, and added that he was ready to go back into la macchia, the bush, where he had fought as a young === Page 99 === HARVEY SACHS 257 partisan during the war. If people tried to tell him how to vote, he’d kill them, he said. I sympathized with his apprehensions and, to a great extent, with his political views, but I had the impression that he rather fancied the idea of ending his adulthood as he began it, in the outback, free to put bullets into people he disliked. Two doors down, I was buttonholed by bilious, contemptuous Dr. Uvetta, a retired bank manager who used to work in Turin but had returned home to spend his declining years. He imprecated against anti- Semitism—so far, so good—but then started in on his hatred of Mus- lims, who are all fundamentalists and cowardly assassins, determined to destroy poor little Israel and ready to stab anyone and everyone in the back. He said that he was proud of being more of a racist than the Nazis, as far as Muslims are concerned. Before I could reply, he started on the Left. His daughter, who had been second in the entire province on qualifying exams for teaching English and French, had to fight “without a shadow of a hope,” he said, against the “socialist- communist scum who ride along on the crest of the waves created by the post-1968 reforms. They all deserve to be shot!” Two men in their seventies, one Left, one Right, both ready to see people they disagree with die in droves—or so they said. What an opportunity for an outside observer to quintessentialize! But the banal truth is that, like many other Italian males of their generation, they were victims of their childhood disillusionment with the omniscient, strong, protecting, stern, wise father—Mussolini—who had proved to be wrong, weak, cowardly, cruel, and mad. As a foreigner who fell in love with Italy in his mid-twenties and who lived there for nearly a quarter-century, I try to avoid the pitfall of quin- tessentialization by avoiding the terrain altogether. My guess is that if one were to weigh all the positives against all the negatives, Italy would come out neither better nor worse than any other contemporary post- Christian world. When people ask why I industrial nation in the post-Christian world. When people ask why I lived in Italy for so many years, I usually explain that most of Italy’s positive and negative characteristics were congenial to my nature, and that I was willing to put up with those that weren’t. And yet, like other more or less voluntary expatriates all over the world, I often ask myself how and why I ended up where I did. I was thinking the other day, for instance, that in the beginning—in my begin- ning, years before I’d heard of Winckelmann, Goethe, and Stendhal— there were Mrs. Guarino, Miss Daponte, and Mrs. D’Arrigo. Mrs. Olimpia Guarino, gray-haired and plump, was my second grade teacher at Gracemount Elementary School in Cleveland, back in 1953–54. === Page 100 === 258 PARTISAN REVIEW Parents of kids in her classes often described her as "sensitive" and "imaginative," and it's true that one day, after I had sung her a verbally garbled but heartfelt rendition of "Eh, Cumpare," a then-current Julius LaRosa hit that I'd often heard on the radio, she phoned my parents and told them that I was musical and ought to have piano lessons. Nearly everything that has happened in my life since then has in some way been affected by her suggestion. But one October morning Mrs. Guarino scolded me for drawing, at the top of an assignment, a cheerful, pipe- smoking, top-hatted face on the first letter of the month's name. The scolding was so unexpected—I hadn't done anything disruptive, after all—that it made me cry. Mrs. Guarino made me cry two or three other times that year, for similar reasons, and all in all she seemed to me less sensitive and imaginative than was generally believed. So I don't think I spent twenty-three years in Italy because of any subliminal message that Mrs. Guarino transmitted to me. Tiny, iron-gray-haired Miss Antonia Daponte taught our experimen- tal conversational French course in fourth and fifth grades. She was a phenomenally entertaining gossip: in plain English, she would hint broadly at problems in the private lives of other faculty members, thereby awakening us to the alarming fact that teachers existed before and after school hours. I think I had assumed, for instance, that dry, harsh Miss Kleinzack, my fourth grade teacher, lay down on the spent ventilator in Room 206 every afternoon at 3:35, folded her hands under her not-very-motherly breast, and slept soundly until the first bell rang at 8:45 the next morning. But Miss Daponte let on that Miss Kleinzack had a boyfriend. I sensed that Miss Daponte was lonely, and sometimes, when I walked home from school, I would try to keep her company by tagging after her as far as her bus stop. (I have a strong visual memory of moving through snow drifts with her.) En deux, however, she talked less than in the classroom, and in fact seemed rather gloomy. Years later, when I first saw David's "Bonaparte Crossing Mount St. Bernard," I recognized Miss Daponte's strong, bony facial structure and remote expression in that of the First Consul. But I don't suppose that Miss Daponte ignited my Italophilia any more than Mrs. Guarino did. Maybe Mrs. Juliet D'Arrigo, a next-door neighbor during my junior high school years, was the one who threw off the spark. Mine was one of only four Jewish families on a predo- minantly Catholic block (as a child, I thought that the term goyim referred only to Protestants), but the D'Arrigos were part of a tiny Italian minor- ity that lived uncomfortably cheek by jowl with substantial numbers of Irish, Slavic, and Hungarian Catholics. Mrs. D'Arrigo, a former === Page 101 === HARVEY SACHS 259 hairdresser, had a lot in common with my mother: both were short and small-boned, full of fun, and outspoken. Her husband, like my father, was a working man and a World War II veteran, gentle in aspect and manner. I admired the D'Arrigo kids' talents-manual, domestic, con- crete, and utterly unlike my sister Paula's and mine, which were abstract and apparently useless. Mary Louise, a year younger than I, was beau- tiful, dreamy, and mysterious; Joey, her younger brother, was wild but warmhearted; and Laura, their little sister, was a tomboy. My family ate sliced brisket, whereas the D'Arrigos ate a funny kind of sliced ham, dif- ferent from the pork products that were dietary mainstays of the Mal- ones, Brouceks, and other Catholic neighbors. The D'Arrigos were accustomed to devouring large quantities of fresh-cooked legumes and exotic leafy vegetables, whereas we were essentially root vegetable eaters. And for lunch, Paula and I liked nothing better than boiled pota- toes drowned in sour cream (borscht without the borscht), the very idea of which turned the D'Arrigos' stomachs. But the similarities between the two families were clear to me even then. In particular, the D'Arrigo kids' grandparents and great-aunts and -uncles, who came from paesini in Sicily, spread thick layers of foreign- ness over our neighborhood when they visited on Sundays, as did my older relatives, who came from shtetls in the Minsk and Vilna districts. The decibel level of extended-family conversations in both homes was decidedly un-suburban and possibly downright un-American. And Mrs. D'Arrigo-unlike all the other Catholics I knew but very much like my grandparents and most of their siblings-spoke disparagingly of orga- nized religion. (With few exceptions, those members of my family who did not speak disparagingly of religion did not speak of religion at all.) Although she attended Mass from time to time, she took pleasure in reminding the predominantly Irish clergy at St. Henry's that their job was to officiate at religious functions, not to tell people how to live. As I think back on her from my present perspective, Mrs. D'Arrigo seems to have seen the Church of Rome as a sort of global opera ensemble that repeats the same repertoire in the same sequence, year after year. She may also have taken it to be simply a reminder that there are things to consider in life beyond earning one's bread and similar daily preoccupations. Not many years later I discovered that her attitude is widespread in Italy, and that it extends to the political system. Italy is technically a par- liamentary republic but really an agnostic theocracy: the president is pope, inasmuch as he enunciates unattainable principles and generic moral outrage; the government is the college of cardinals, ultimate dis- penser of benefices; the legislators are the lower clergy, who walk a === Page 102 === 260 PARTISAN REVIEW tightrope between the unattainable principles and the benefices; the cit- izens are parishioners who await miracles that never happen, and that they don't seriously expect to happen; taxes are tithes (you always give far less than you could); and the ballot-box is the ostensorium, pro- tected by those overgrown altar boys, the Carabinieri. Not long after the D'Arrigos and my family had moved to different neighborhoods, I began to discover Italian music, art, and literature, all of which helped to prepare me for the impact of Italy. But it was the cus- toms inspector at Rome Airport at the end of June 1970, when I arrived in Italy for the first time, who made me begin to understand the coun- try. My wife and I had picked up our luggage and were walking toward the exit when I noticed a counter marked "Dogana/Douane/Cus- toms/Zoll." Unbidden, we conscientiously brought our bags over and set them on the counter, behind which sat a man who wore glasses with tinted lenses; his chair was tilted back almost to the wall, and he was cushioning his head with his hands. He remained motionless for a few seconds, then leaned forward, muttered "Ma che cazzo volete da me?" ("What the fuck do you want from me?"), picked up a piece of chalk, wrote the letter C (for Controllato-Checked) on our unopened suit- cases, flicked his wrist to indicate that we were to move on, and leaned back again. My immediate reaction was to laugh, but as I sat, jet-lagged, on the bus that was carrying me to the center of the Eternal City, I suddenly realized the importance of what I had just witnessed. "We all know that this business is a farce," the customs inspector had seemed to say, "so why should I pretend that by sifting through your neatly packed under- wear I'd be doing something useful for humanity? We might just as well pretend that I've sifted through the underwear, so that you can catch the first bus into town and I can doze off again." It was a moment of illu- mination, a flaming cross on the road to Damascus, for a young Jewish Anglophone—also a Vietnam War draft-resister, living in Canada at the time-who had been raised to believe in the honesty and utility of all legitimate forms of labor. The memory of it later helped me to under- stand Italy's insanely bulky and largely useless bureaucracy, whose mul- titudinous employees are simultaneously beneficiaries and victims of the brilliantly programmed non-functioning of an entire nation. From the young North American musician who discovered and fell in love with Italy in 1970 and moved there five years later to the middle- aged writer who left Italy in 2001, a mental quantum leap is required— on my part, at any rate. I spent most of the late twentieth century in the country of my dreams-happily, on the whole-but last year, when === Page 103 === HARVEY SACHS 261 circumstances required me to move elsewhere, I realized to my surprise that I felt little regret about leaving. Was this a result of age and disillu- sionment? Was the cause disgust with a country that had elected its main media magnate, a man under indictment for fraud, as prime min- ister, and the leader of the neo-fascist National Alliance as deputy prime minister? Or was I simply glad not to have to observe the acceleration of Italy's insertion into the global economy—a process that, for all its material advantages to the upper and middle classes, inevitably com- prises the gradual disintegration of the highly individualistic culture that had attracted me to Italy in the first place? I am still too close to the event to be able to answer my own ques- tions. I'm no Frances Mayes or Peter Mayle, ready and willing to char- acterize (caricature?) everything I see. I was not first attracted to a Mediterranean country by its climate and cuisine, although I enjoy both. I was interested in Italian history and culture as early as my mid- teens—long before I set foot in Italy—and my first Italian residence was not an ancient farmhouse on an expensive piece of property in the warm, hilly Tuscan countryside but a cheap, box-like, postwar one- bedroom apartment in a smoggy, drug-infested, working-class Milan suburb. I spent three years observing La Scala's production system and working on my first book; then, after a three-year hiatus in London, my wife and I purchased a modest apartment in a village in what used to be an unfashionable part of Tuscany, where I lived for fifteen years. From 1997 to 2001, my second wife and I lived in a rented house in the same part of Tuscany. Both of my children were born nearby. But "my" Tus- cany is now nearly as overrun with foreigners as the Chianti area. When one sits in front of the cafés in my former village's piazza, one hears almost as much English and German as Italian, since most of the for- eigners who move to the area seek each other out and learn only enough Italian to deal, ungrammatically, with daily shopping. (A by-product of this state of affairs is the twenty-fold increase in property values in as many years, with easily imaginable effects on local people whose salaries have not even doubled during the same period.) What is taking place is not an inevitable (let alone natural) evolution of a culture. It is an invasion that spills no blood but is more deadly, in the long run, than the military kind. As the first foreigner to move into my village, I could be accused of having been a forerunner or at least an omen of the invasion. But what I had in mind when I moved there in 1981—and what I think I accomplished—was to insert myself quietly into the environment and way of life, master the subtleties of the lan- guage, and contribute whatever I could to local life without pretending === Page 104 === 262 PARTISAN REVIEW to be anything but the guy from Cleveland (plus New York, Toronto, Milan, and London) that I was. I did not want Italy either to accom- modate me or to be exotic; I wanted to live and get on with my work in a part of the world where I felt at home—and not at home—enough to satisfy my peculiar psychological needs. I detest the stereotype of an o-sole-mio Italy, frozen in time, an anachronism within the European Union. Italy is one of the world’s great economic powers, has the lowest birthrate in the world, and is a leader not only in the worlds of fashion and race cars but also in the arts and sciences. It must now modernize its bureaucracy, social services, and salary system. The problem is that the Italians—whom I admire not least of all because they are the most naturally unpatriotic, anti- nationalistic people on the face of the earth (I am speaking of attitudes toward politics, not way of life; and I know that I am quintessentializ- ing)—are enthusiastic about the EU for reasons that are not entirely in good faith. Federico Fellini said that fascism was able to take root in Italy not because people believed in its rhetoric but because the regime absolved them of having to make decisions. The Duce and the party want to run things? So much the better for everyone else! Nothing that happens from now on is anyone’s fault but “theirs.” And in this sense, what Mussolini was to Italy seventy years ago the EU is today. Social justice, environmental laws, economic planning: to have all such matters decided in Strasbourg or Brussels or Frankfurt rather than in Rome is the declared or secret hope of many Italians. The process will cost them cold cash, but the problems won’t demand constant attention at home. Italians will then be able to carry on doing as Il Sodoma did—putting on a proper, serious front, but behaving as they please. To tell you the truth, I hope that they’ll succeed. WE MOURN THE PASSING OF ROBERT NOZICK 1938-2002 A FRIEND === Page 105 === DMITRY SHLAPENTOKH The New Anti-Americanism: America as an Orwellian Society I N 1999, NATO CELEBRATED its fiftieth anniversary with a victory in the Serbian War. It was also the year the alliance added countries from the now-defunct Warsaw Pact. While it seemed that NATO was at the peak of its might, some new, perplexing trends had begun to emerge. These trends have not been altered much by the events of September 11. Both Americans and Europeans are starting to see some fundamental problems in their geopolitical relationship, namely curious anti-Ameri- canism by members of the alliance, in which America is perceived as the embodiment of a totalitarian society, a carbon copy of the U.S.S.R. This perception has also spread outside of the alliance to places like Russia. While it is difficult to evaluate the strength of these anti- American feelings and the implication they have relating to NATO, those who attempt to evaluate the alliance's future need to regard them seriously. This is especially true while the U.S. fights the current war. It would be naïve and inaccurate to say that Americans and Euro- peans are on a collision course. After all, they both continue to regard each other as important allies. Furthermore, both view NATO as the cornerstone of global security, thus understanding the organization's eastward expansion. The unity between Europe and the United States is confirmed in Article 5 of NATO's charter, which states that an attack on one member of the alliance implies an attack on all members. American influence in the geopolitical sphere continues to be strong. As Vladimir Putin has declared with his country's complete support of America's war effort in Afghanistan, even Russia's anti-Americanism is fading. Ameri- can influence is also reflected by the fact that English has become the virtual lingua franca from Tokyo to Moscow. Yet it would be foolhardy to ignore the rise of anti-American feelings in Europe. They are evident even during this time of absolute solidarity. In Britain (America's staunchest ally), barely weeks after the war in Afghanistan began, demonstrators marched in protest of U.S. bombing raids. And despite external signs of support, not one European country has sent troops or fighter planes to Afghanistan (the United Kingdom === Page 106 === 264 PARTISAN REVIEW was the only exception). This concealed anti-Americanism might easily turn into open manifestations, such as President Bush witnessed at the beginning of his presidency. Anti-Americanism is understandable in post-Soviet Russia, where it is related, among other things, to the disappointing developments since the end of the Soviet era and the Russian elite's lingering nationalistic ambitions. But in Western Europe, anti-American sentiment is relatively new. Yes, the European Left has been at it for years, but never has it been accompanied by outright disagreement with any American presi- dent among his strongest European allies. This cooling cannot be attrib- uted to President Bush's personal characteristics, nor to the fact that he represents the Republican Party. Neither the Americans nor the Euro- peans need each other as much as they did during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union posed a real threat. Today, Russia no longer poses the danger it once did. Instead, to the American establishment, China has become the “evil empire” of the twenty-first century. The other chief threat is international terrorism, at the moment of Islamic origin. Because of these shifts and ever-changing relationships, European allies have lost a degree of importance, so that some among the American elite regard Europe as just another economic competitor. At the same time, our European allies no longer appreciate or need the United States as much as they did during the Cold War. The end of World War II left behind a devastated Europe. With a weakened economy and the reality of the Soviet threat, Europeans accepted American hegemony. Even France, which has always been somewhat anti-American, became more open to America's European presence after the U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan. But with the end of the Cold War, European nations began to create a military force to make them less dependent on NATO. The proverbial last straw came with the American missile shield project that would protect only the United States from nuclear attack. Europeans viewed this as proof that Amer- ica had little regard for its allies. Post-Soviet Russia, with its peculiar, twisted semi-criminal feudalism that tightly connects possessions and power, is drastically different from the rest of Europe. Russia still wants to be one of the leaders in the European community and could hardly accept being relegated to yet another Poland. But there remains the threat of negative change, such as a nationalistic dictatorship or even total disintegration and chaos. And Russia's size and geographic location make it more of an Asian than a European country, preventing a smooth integration into the rest of === Page 107 === DMITRY SHLAPENTOKH 265 Europe. Therefore, Russia's desire to be part of an integrated Europe and an equal partner cannot soon be fulfilled. Yet despite its potential problems, post-Soviet Russia could never be the same threat as the U.S.S.R. This is not because post-Soviet Russia has professed adherence to democratic principles or because the country's leaders state that Russia is part of Europe. Most Europeans have no fear that someday they might wake up to find the Russian Army in their midst, as they did during the war with Napoleon at the beginning of the nineteenth century and with Nazi Germany between 1944 and 1945. Instead, Russia's anti-Westernism—which has evolved into anti- Americanism—may even be pleasing to some Europeans. To some extent, Europe holds the option of using Russia as a pawn in disagree- ments with the U.S. Thus, in the new geopolitical arrangement, the desire for divorce comes not just from Americans but also from Europeans. Anti-Americanism in Europe has a long history. (Of course, any pow- erful nation gives rise to both positive and negative stereotypes.) Amer- icans, both on the Left and Right, have long been aware that the country is often viewed as imperialistic, too individualistic, and imbued with a large dose of crass materialism and promiscuity. This negative image of the United States is still very much alive. Since the Reagan presidency, cartoons in the European press have represented America as a wild cow- boy who fires his gun without concern for anyone or anything. This image of America has been preserved in Russia, where the United States continues to be presented as an individualistic and aggressive predator. At the same time Russians have also maintained an image of the West in general, and America in particular, that is not related to aggression against other countries, but to hedonistic obsession, to a total drive for pleasure that pushes individuals to forsake all social and moral restraints. During a recent trip to Moscow, as I walked with a friend down Novyi Arbat, one of the city's main boulevards, one of the build- ings had a large billboard that prominently displayed a gorgeous blond, seductively dressed. Underneath, the caption read, "American Club." In that club, my friend explained, Moscow's high society indulges in friv- olous entertainment. That in America one can brazenly pursue erotic pleasures may be regarded as positive or negative—where the erotic pleasures of life are the privilege of the rich and depraved. This highly negative view of the United States and of American values still exists, in Russia as well as elsewhere. Most Americans would be surprised to learn that many traits they most revere, such as individualism and multiculturalism, can be pre- sented in a negative light. America can be seen as a society of uninformed === Page 108 === 266 PARTISAN REVIEW citizens, who cannot seem to grasp that individuals are closely watched and that their behavior, including the most intimate acts, is minutely reg- ulated. In America, critics say, even the slightest departure from pre- scribed rules is punished. In this interpretation, America is an Orwellian, totalitarian barrack—a carbon copy of the former Soviet Union. This new brand of anti-Americanism has not developed due to a lack of knowledge about the true nature of the country, but because of the stereotypes emerging in response to evolving political trends. During a visit to a NATO-sponsored conference in Bled, Slovenia, even those who were supposedly benefiting from the American presence sported this new anti-Americanism. The differing interpretations of NATO's role in regard to Russia among members of small, Balkan nations came as no surprise. What was surprising, however, was the nature of the sentiments. Historically, Europeans, especially the French, have resented Americans for their military might and for what they per- ceive as America's desire to dominate Europe. (In a sense, Europeans approach America in the same manner Eastern Europeans perceived the U.S.S.R. at the time of the Warsaw Pact.) For example, there are com- plaints that American culture is cheap and shallow and is slowly replac- ing ancient, sophisticated European cultural traditions. After all, de Gaulle already sought to reinvent Europe, but Europeans never ques- tioned that both continents belonged to the same Western civilization. America might have been perceived as a rather provincial part of that civilization, but a member nonetheless. And non-Americans regarded America as a free country, albeit one without inhibitions. The stereotype juxtaposed individualistic, rude, and promiscuous America to prudish, regimented, and restrained Europe. However, some believe that the United States is not a truly free soci- ety because of the way in which democracy evolves and changes. The notion that democracy can lead to restraints on individual liberty was not on the minds of the majority of European intellectuals at the time of the American Revolution, which is often regarded as the ideological inspiration for the French Revolution, at least in its liberal stage. Yet by the beginning of the nineteenth century, a new vision of America had begun to emerge. And the same Frenchman who had been fascinated with American democracy a few generations earlier espoused it. Alexis de Tocqueville already stated that the development of full democracy in America had led to a state where personal freedom was compromised by the power of the majority. This theory was echoed by the seminal Russian intellectual dissident, Alexander Herzen, who had managed to escape the brutal authoritarian regime of Nicholas I. He === Page 109 === DMITRY SHLAPENTOKH 267 was Tocqueville's contemporary and spent most of his life in exile in France. Herzen shared Tocqueville's vision of America and added that while in Imperial Russia the Secret Police (Third Section) watched over you, in America, society itself took on the role of the Secret Police. Sev- eral generations after Herzen, Carl G. Jung arrived in America. Although celebrated as the guru from Switzerland who enlightened Americans about "archetypes" and the "collective subconscious," Jung, upon his return to Europe, noted that he hardly found traces of the much-celebrated American individualism, and that Americans dissolved personalities to reflect the group they belonged to. The idea that Americans were actually anti-individualistic and mem- bers of an overly controlling society was not popular throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, twentieth-century Amer- ica was seen as the embodiment of the West and of individuality. The U.S. was often opposed to the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany, the U.S.S.R., and China-where the state played the role of "Big Brother" who controlled political and personal life. The notion that America was a country of uninhibited individualism was not seriously challenged even in the 1960s, when a new generation of French philosophers began to question the belief that modern capitalism leads to a free society. Michel Foucault, one of the most popular French philosophers in the 1960s, was often cited by those in favor of the sexual revolution. He argued that the nature of a society and the relationships of people in it were defined by what he called the "episteme," whose essential aspect in modern Western society was restrictiveness. In fact, Foucault saw modern Western civilization as a dictatorship. He located the essence of freedom not in political life but in daily life, including the way one could engage in sex: society legitimized only one form of sex-the procreative activities of married couples. He noted that sex as an enjoyable activity in its own right had disappeared altogether. Despite his anti-capitalist barbs and his conclusion that the contem- porary West was nothing but a circular prison where the inmates' daily lives were watched and regulated, Foucault maintained some positive views of the U.S. To be sure, he readily took American imperialism to task, but he never railed at Americans. In fact, he and his fellow leftists had an admiring public in the United States. As to sexual freedom, he found America more relaxed than Europe. Here, he could enjoy his homosexuality without recrimination. By the end of the Cold War, the European Left maintained that the restrictiveness and controlling aspects of capitalism as a political and economic system were not only attributes of capitalism, but also of the === Page 110 === 268 PARTISAN REVIEW United States as a country. According to this new interpretation, the United States was a separate civilization, different not only from East- ern Europe but also from Western Europe. In effect, America was recast in the mold of its vanquished enemy-the U.S.S.R. Trends in American life provide foreign observers with ammunition for such type-casting. For example, the number of high-profile sexual harassment cases which are well-publicized in the media are interpreted as prudery. "Multiculturalism" and its related principle "affirmative action" are interpreted as thought control. For many Europeans, what they see as the country's puritanical attitudes, its obsession with sexual harassment and racism, create an environment in which the state con- trols both action and thought. "Big Brother" has triumphed and has de- sexualized American society. Now they juxtapose a totalitarian America to a free Europe. Intellectuals who hold this view have begun to question the idea of an "Atlantic civilization" as the basis for transatlantic unity. At the NATO conference in Bled, official presentations emphasized the political unity between Americans and Europeans. Oddly, some of the presentations were almost identical to the speeches I had endured during my Soviet youth, when officials made a point of stressing the unity among the nations of the Warsaw Pact (and the different ethnic groups in the U.S.S.R.). However, some of the official presentations did point to signs of impending discord between Americans and Europeans. Some people stated that Americans had wanted to shift actual combat missions to Europeans while maintaining control of strategic weapons. Others pointed out that Americans and Europeans disagreed on what they thought the role of NATO should be, but these differences were not fully elaborated. Instead, problems were marginalized. But in private conversations, opinions emerged, especially after a few drinks. The French led the criticism of America. One erudite Frenchman, who could converse easily about philosophy and literature, had visited Amer- ica several times and focused on the "lack of freedom." "It is absolute nonsense to believe that Americans live in a free country," he asserted. When asked for an explanation, he noted that one has to follow the rules of the majority, play the same game as everybody else, and approach minorities with a prescribed point of view; that everything bad has to be ascribed to white people, and if you see things differently, you are a racist. He continued by saying, "Any joke that has a sexual connotation is absolutely taboo. And, of course, any flirting with a woman, no matter how innocent, is absolutely out of the question. This is dictatorship, pure and simple." Later, he said that only American "idiots" could still be fascinated with Foucault. === Page 111 === DMITRY SHLAPENTOKH 269 We then proceeded to discuss American feminism. They ultimately concluded that the American Left had begun with attacks on the restric- tiveness of American culture, and had ended up espousing a philosophy that places more restrictions on sexual behavior than the previous one, so that sexual harassment has emerged as one of the major threats for male members of academia, government, and big business. Many East Europeans from new member countries or from countries seeking membership in the alliance supported the West Europeans' vision of America as a repressive society. A Romanian delegate remarked that American men had become so timid that they couldn't even give a bou- quet of flowers to a girl for fear of being accused of sexual harassment. We stopped talking when one of the conference organizers stood up and proclaimed that Croatia had finally joined NATO. "This is like the first kiss," he said. "There is no way back." At that moment a young Croat and his girlfriend joined our table. He responded to the announce- ment defiantly, "You know, we in the Balkans are politically incorrect. That is why I could never live in America. Political incorrectness is in our blood. We beat our wives." His girlfriend smiled beatifically. My Croat friend in many ways conveyed the ideas of other Euro- peans at the conference. "Yes," they seemed to be saying, "We Euro- peans are part of NATO. Yes, we accept American leadership because the United States is just too powerful to ignore. Yet this does not mean that Americans can control us completely. You Americans can live in a culture wherein its members are spying on each other and controlling people's private lives. You can make 'sexual harassment' a cardinal crime which will drive people mad. You can enjoy creating committees to explore the nature of 'eye contact' between professors and students and divine the appropriate scholarly teaching gaze from the inappropri- ate lust-ridden gaze. You Americans can do all of this and make your country an Orwellian world comparable to Stalinist Russia. You can even call yourselves free. Yet, we Europeans will never follow you, even though we listen to your music and wear your blue jeans." In the minds of my Bled acquaintances America had a Messianic drive, a wish to transform Europe into another edition of the United States and to deprive Europeans of their essential liberties. Most conference participants were still apprehensive about Russia, especially those from small countries in its immediate proximity, which historically have had a bad relationship with it. But this image did not predominate, because Russia is now weak. Like its European counterparts, the country was found to have positive characteristics the Russian people were really "free." The difference, === Page 112 === 270 PARTISAN REVIEW of course, was that Russians, unlike Europeans, had carried their new freedoms too far. Foucault's vision of America as a "circular prison" is even more pop- ular in Russia. In a broader context, post-Soviet Russians believe that America is repeating the follies of the Communist regime. In the Soviet era, America had been the embodiment of liberty of all sorts, including uninhibited sexuality. Then, America's uninhibited individualism and brazen eroticisation of life, as Soviet propaganda fancied it, was the rea- son for the negative image of the West and of America. Now, the image of America has been recast, and not only on sexual matters. Many Russian intellectuals believe that Americans' propensity for spy- ing and informing on their neighbors is greater than it ever was in Soviet Russia. According to this view, during the last years of the U.S.S.R., "Big Brother" had become nearsighted, and spying and informing on friends had become a tasteless crime committed only by fools-even though offi- cial propaganda still praised Pavlik Morozov, the youngster who had delivered his parents to the Secret Police in the 1930s. Towards the end of the Communist regime, Soviet citizens spied on friends and relatives only when under direct pressure from the KGB, and then felt the torment of conscience. According to Russian critics, nothing of this sort could be seen in the United States. This willingness to inform on others was alleged to come not from external pressure but from some internal call to duty. In this view, America totalitarianism has achieved absolute perfec- tion, because it is not imposed from above but is intrinsic to America as a nation. Americans cannot reach the "end of history," as Francis Fukuyama elaborated in his famous essay, because there is no history in America's experience. As a matter of fact, they argue that American civ- ilization has not much changed since the Pilgrim era. The lack of a his- tory sets it apart from the rest of the world. My Russian friend, who has always been a staunch liberal, is today a strong proponent of the new, post-Soviet Russia. He and his late father were among the crowd on that day in 1991 when hardliners prepared to attack Yeltsin's government in the White House. His hatred of the so- called "Red-to-Brown" movement-that is, the nationalistically minded Communists-is so strong that he even ran from the room when his mother told him that his grandfather had been on the side of the Red during the Civil War after the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet his views on America are similar to those of his political opponents. Still, when I attended a meeting called the "Russian Project," some prominent nationalists and members of other fascist groups that con- === Page 113 === DMITRY SHLAPENTOKH 271 tinue to be popular in the country were present. During the event, sev- eral speakers elaborated on Russia's problems. According to one of them, the most serious problem is Russia's declin- ing population. The birthrate is dismally low, he stated, and believed it to be part of a malicious plot from the West-mostly from the U.S. The Americans, he said, were lusting for Russian territory, but they understood that they could not take it by force, hence they planned to depopulate it. He maintained that American sexual culture had been exported to Russia for precisely this goal. America, he stated, due to the domination of homosexuals and similar perverts, has ceased to be a country with a normal sexuality. Allegedly, these groups hate normal sex and children, and promote condoms and abortion. They had found converts among Russians, especially doctors. The representatives of the medical profes- sion were said to be central to their philippics, for it was American doc- tors who promoted condoms and homosexuality, and who had made abnormality normal and prevented childbirth. Russian doctors, having been bought and paid for by the West, were following the American trend. Due to their efforts, Russia's population decline was paving the way for the country's final conquest. Russian nationalists were encour- aged to fight these sex- and baby-haters. There were two ways, he said, to fight the insidious plot. First, and evidently the preferred way, was the extermination of certain doctors. (Here an effigy of an American doctor was publicly destroyed.) Second, Russians should be more sexually active. (A grand striptease sponsored by the Party was announced at the end of the meeting, and all in atten- dance were welcome. The stripteasers' intention was to encourage females and males to engage in procreative sex.) Listening to this, I thought once again of Comrade Stalin, who had been responsible for the deaths of millions of his countrymen. Now that had truly been depopulation. On the bus to the airport, I watched the lush hills and old churches of Bled disappear. At that moment I realized that I did not want to leave Europe: partly because I long for historical tradition, but also because only in Europe do I feel truly free, in the deepest existential meaning of the term. At the same time I loath anti-Americanism. Its more extreme forms remain a marginal fringe and are largely ignored by the main- stream European press. But, then, the Bolsheviks were mostly ignored before 1917. (The London Times did not even mention Lenin's name then.) In any event, most of these views will depend on the success of America's war effort, and on the state of the economy. === Page 114 === AL SUNDEL Heartaches and Limitations: Isaac Bashevis Singer FIRST MET ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER shortly before he was mugged. He was then known as an ethnic writer only to a rather small circle of readers; the grand scheme of his writings was not yet apparent. He lived on Central Park West just above 100th Street, where the avenue starts a downscale dip. He entered his lobby elevator behind a black woman. As the door closed, a man inside put a gun to Singer's head, speaking in a dialect muddled by drugs. The woman lifted Singer's wal- let only to find a few dollars. The man pushed the muzzle in Singer's face, demanding more. He was flying so high his trigger hand trembled. In his own thick accent, Singer told him he didn't have any more. It sounds comical, accents and all, but it was extremely life-threatening to a rare man who would, in time, win a Nobel Prize. The gun did not go off. Singer left the elevator in his usual shuffling style and the elevator door closed. The next day Singer shopped for a new apartment. He resettled on West 72nd Street, less than a block and a half from where John Lennon would live and be killed. It was from this 72nd Street apartment that Singer came to know a wider interna- tional audience for his uniquely Jewish writings. The young Isaac Bashevis Singer began as both Hasid and modern- day Bruegel the Elder who gave us panoramic verbal folk tales. Entire communities came alive on his typewriter, mainly of a forgotten people. Rural Hasids were not simply second-class citizens of Poland; in the gloom of their medieval caftans they were often looked down upon by more worldly Jews. The young Singer became a Hasidic vox populi, per- haps more than any predecessor. He wrote in his mother tongue, Yid- dish. Once in America, Singer knew he was writing about an obscure culture in a dying language. Yet his daily grind kept piling up more realms of fiction than Dickens or Dostoyevsky. He badly needed trans- lators, even amateurs. Good ones in Yiddish were scarce, and there was no money even to pay for indifferent ones. To begin with, translating Singer into English was akin to entry-level archaeology without boots. Book publishers often helped with his numerous novels. But in order to sell his voluminous short stories (well === Page 115 === AL SUNDEL 273 over one hundred), Singer had to draw on young admirers willing to put in the time. A friend of mine briefly took it on. He asked me to come along because his Yiddish was poor and he struggled with metaphorical flights. The three of us hunched over a first-draft translation. Singer would explain what he meant by a paragraph troubling the translator. Then we shaped it into better English. Multiple visits were needed to put a story to bed, while his wife Alma served coffee. As I didn't know Yid- dish and could not make all the necessary visits, I shot film and gave Singer blowups in order to pay my way. The young Singer, who came from a Hasidic rabbinic background, was familiar with both the backward countryside and the booming city of Warsaw. The Hasidic movement reached its apogee in Poland in the eighteenth century, a time when roving Cossack armies raided defense- less Jewish villages with the vilest savagery. Why didn't the Poles do more to stop them? Behind the hype of nationalistic Poles, who like to say that Poland is the Christ among nations, stands Christian anti- Semitism (for example, the horrors of Jedwabne, where in 1941 half a Polish town murdered the other half for being Jewish). Shtetl Jews were caught between the heinous crimes of Cossacks, the express hostility of Poles, and the disdain of worldly Jews. Rural Hasidic sects were characterized by clannish fundamentalism, a deep strain of mysticism, and often medieval apparel. In 1772, the Judaic sect was excommunicated as too sidestream. But as pogroms continued to decimate secular Jews while Hasidic numbers exploded, the ban had to be lifted. Singer ignored the ideological schism. He chronicled the transition of rural seventeenth-century Hasids, through the generations, to urban positions of wealth and power in twentieth-century Warsaw. His own life would come to exemplify the varied transitional stages from shtetl insularity in Poland to displaced person on bustling 72nd Street. Early on, Singer wrote in Hebrew, then switched to Yiddish. He obvi- ously also spoke Polish in Warsaw. In his twenties, he knew Western cul- ture and German well enough to translate Nobelist Knut Hamsun and future Nobelist Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain, no less) into Yid- dish. English appears to be his fifth language. At first the young Singer told tales of the shtetls. Medieval times came to an end in Western Europe around 1492. Eastern Europe stagnated in superstition, especially in the outlying villages. It remained Bruegelian well into the twentieth century, as large parts of the world remain today; that is, eat, drink, fornicate, and be superstitious. In Warsaw, the Jewish ghetto was more porous to the advances of Western culture. In his shtetl stories, Singer juggled grassroots superstitions. He was not === Page 116 === 274 PARTISAN REVIEW pushing his own occult beliefs, but was reporting what the country folk believed. He abandoned the supernatural and leaned more to transi- tional Jews whose mojo was rising in Western culture. This trend increased in his American stories, set in modern New York, Tel Aviv, Miami Beach-about uprooted East European Jews living banal middle- class lives without Cossacks, Poles, or Nazis savagely attacking them. Singer's American stories remained far removed from the norms of American Jewish fiction. He did not write about the immigration expe- rience (as Henry Roth) or the assimilated Jew whose vestigial Jewishness resembled the human coccyx (as Saul Bellow), a tail that had lost its tail- ness. He wrote about Jews who were displaced in rural Poland, in New York City, in Miami Beach. When they got to the big city, especially in America, they metamorphosed. Singer's characters were descended from biblical heroes. But they had shlepped their kitchen problems and heartaches with them, in displace- ments from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan, and Judea, and had lost much of their heritage along the way. Though half the planet has read the Hebrew Bible, are there even thirty-six sages who truly understand the long view of four thousand years of displacement? THE SHEER AMOUNT of lonely sitting a prolific writer must put in is beyond most people's endurance. Aside from two Partisan Review stal- warts-Saul Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld-each of whom translated a story, Singer was the most isolated of writers, a Yiddish Napoleon at Elba. He had little contact with fellow writers. His folk past was his most trusted companion. While writing, Singer sometimes conversed with his wife as his fingers flicked over the keys. When several young people visited him, he might get a little giddy coming out of his self-imposed isolation. Yet he was formal. He preferred to be called "Mr. Singer." He usually wore a funereal dark suit, shiny from overuse, and a dull tie. On sultry summer evenings, if someone asked to remove a jacket, he rose and said, "We will all remove our jackets." He had to know you well to receive you in his shirtsleeves. At his suggestion, Singer and I began to meet for lunch. He suggested I read Knut Hamsun, even though Hamsun was a Nazi sympathizer during World War II. We generally took brisk walks to a busy cafeteria on Broad- way in the 80s or else lunched in a coffee shop on 72nd Street. Here, amid fork-and-knife clatter, over matzoth briar, he might open up a little. ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER had been burnt by having too much sensibility and not enough taste of life, love, or money. He feared he might one day === Page 117 === AL SUNDEL 275 grovel like Hamsun's character in Hunger, eating his own shoe leather while a woman's image faded from the retina of his imagination. His concept of dread was to suffer the fate of Poe. His main earnings came from the Jewish Daily Forward, which published his briefs and fiction to an ever-dwindling Yiddish readership. His wife worked in a department store. While he later claimed she didn't need to work, I suspected she did when I first met them. They were comfortable, but not yet secure. For his first forty years, Singer lived in the long shadow of his older brother, Isadore Joshua Singer. Isaac Bashevis Singer (born Yitzak Hersh Singer) was the third child behind a sister, Esther (who also wrote fic- tion), and he had a younger brother, Moses. In the early thirties, I. J. Singer became known locally as a natural talent that flowed like the Vis- tula. He was discovered by the Jewish Daily Forward, who brought him to America. To this day, some readers prefer I. J. to I. B. I. J. Singer was published by both Liveright and Knopf, then the two most prestigious American publishers. He wrote socially conscious novels about what life was really like behind ghetto and shtetl walls, tales that Sholom Aleichem was too Broadway and schmaltzy to handle. Here was a different voice than Yiddish literature had heard before. I. J. Singer wrote with bite and spoke in the detailed and humane-conscience tone of Dreiser, an American Catholic. Both I. J. and Dreiser tied in to the prophetic tra- dition of Judaism, borrowing a little from Jeremiah, but in softened tones of muted outrage. He dug deep into the psychic vein of characters and society. His vision was Tolstoyian (though he preferred Stendhal). Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote more like a rational mystic, in itself a con- tradiction. The two sides warred in him. He was deeply intelligent yet avoided showing it, preferring a humble voice and simple characters. Yet he could peer over the precipice and see the murk below. He leaned a lit- tle toward the black humor of the regional champion, Gogol. (Take for example, Gogol's short story, "The Nose," where a man wakes up one morning, discovers his nose missing, and goes looking for it, to find it parading about the streets in the man's cloak with the bluster of a VIP.) Above all, Isaac Bashevis Singer's fiction teemed with characters harried by the myriad slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, including life's many deceits. (A man climbs in a woman's window late at night, con- vinces her he is a ghost who should not be disturbed, gets into bed with her, then leaves—to return on an as-needed basis.) His rural characters seemed to float willy nilly in a timeless stream that included the ether around them. Did it make any difference whether they lived in Bruegel's era or in today's Miami Beach? Not really. Only after his death could we fully appreciate what Isaac Bashevis Singer was doing: chronicling the === Page 118 === 276 PARTISAN REVIEW Hasidic saga inside the Wild West (East) of Christendom. In doing so, he rendered the chicken fat of the worldwide human heart. "THE MANUSCRIPT," his story about a female survivor of the Nazi entrance into Warsaw, focuses not on a huge historical moment, the inva- sion, but on a single human betrayal between lovers as the jackboots advance. The woman's paramour, Menashe, is a rake of an aspiring writer. The couple flee to the Russian zone, noting how Jewish men in flight all seem to be carrying rolls of unpublished manuscripts. Once the couple feel safe, Menashe discovers he has unwittingly packed the title page of his own best manuscript atop an acquaintance's script he had promised to read. His girlfriend bravely goes back and retrieves his masterwork, in spite of incredible danger. When she catches up to Menashe, clutching the manuscript she saved, she finds him in bed with an ugly woman-and bad poet. I. J. Singer would not have told this kind of story. Where I. J. was socially critical, digging ever deeper into mind and society, I. B. Singer zeroed in on what people do in the constant fender benders to multiple- car pileups of their lives. He claimed that after the Ten Commandments it was superfluous for any writer to send a message to mankind. In his fiction, Isaac Bashevis Singer would never ask the penultimate question: Why did Christianity (and Islam) need to degrade Jews and lock them up at night in ghettoes for hundreds of years? Yet he and his brother came from one of the grimmest in Europe, the pre-World War II Warsaw Ghetto. They lived on grungy Krochmalna Street, which he once equated with New York's Delancey Street in its mad Jewish flux and din. I. J. SINGER CAME TO AMERICA in 1933 on a wave of praise in the Yid- dish press that spurred translation into English of Yoshe Kalb (The Sin- ner). In essence, he had turned away from the Hasidic insularity of his rabbinical father and embraced the transitional. He wrote as a modernist with great integrity about his people and Poles, about the individual per- plexities of Hasids as human beings behind their medieval villages, always set within, and affecting, a community. Isaac Bashevis Singer fol- lowed his brother to America two years later. By then, he had published a remarkable first novel set in seventeenth-century rural Poland. Satan in Goray is about a Jewish community's struggle to recover from the blood- iest of Cossack pogroms by embracing a self-proclaimed messiah in an orgasm of hope. They went like lemmings over a cliff. Isaac Bashevis Singer floundered after arriving in New York. Disori- ented, he could not write. With his brother's help, he found his footing in the Jewish Daily Forward and Knopf. His writing was more expres- === Page 119 === AL SUNDEL 277 sionistic than I. J.'s, with a slyer avenue of black humor. He also appeared to be more mystical about an imagined stir of invisible crea- tures in the air of the medieval countryside. Yes, he was reporting, but he sometimes did so better than a believer. If he repeated any theme, it was to build on the natural rural shrewdness of the country folk, which could pierce the veil of eschatology and see the mischievous workings of the supernatural clearer than organized religion could. Where the clergy warned, "Look out for Satan," shtetl folk saw imps, goblins, omens, portents. They retained a child's fear of the dark, while being subject to disturbing if not exploding passions, whether they were smart or dumb, big banana or little onion. Young Bashevis Singer's shtetl characters functioned in an habitual Judaic context. But their Judaism was more like a permutation writ into the skin, like a clan tattoo, than a fully comprehended faith. They were connected by DNA to the giants of the Old Testament and even the New. They mouthed Mount Sinai. But they really hearkened to medieval superstitions and incomprehensible inner drives-as in Chris- tianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and the beliefs of Australian abo- rigines. Indeed, medieval Christianity and medieval Judaism seemed to play Ping-Pong with like-minded superstitions. I once interviewed a leading American psychiatrist who lived in Bal- timore, Dr. Frank Ayd. He was also a general physician to the Vatican, making annual visits to Rome to check the physical health of the clergy, who disrobed for him. He told me how a cleric came before him loaded with a host of necklaced crosses, plus a Neapolitan symbol to ward off the evil eye. "You don't take any chances, do you?" Ayd ribbed him. For what did all these charms mean but a lack of intrinsic faith? Singer's shtetl Jews were like that. They were cousins to Ignazio Silone's peas- ants of the Italian Abruzzi, who saved counterfeit coins to give to the visiting priest when he came on muleback to collect for charity. This was an important religious ritual for them. They had a deeper faith in the dodges of their simple folk wisdom than in the fine print of city-slicker theology as found in compendium footnotes to the Oxford Bible. Flannery O'Connor wrote of the American South in a similar vein. When one of her characters tells another, "Jesus died for you," the second gives a shirking country-rut answer, "I never asked him." The young Singer and Flannery O'Connor saw religion among backwater folk in clear black-humor terms, as too often epidermal. Singer's shtetl characters live their lives with religion everywhere around them but in their souls. It was ever on the tips of their tongues, in their social gath- erings, part of their mass hysteria masquerading as awe. But when === Page 120 === 278 PARTISAN REVIEW ambition or passion or greed slipped into overdrive, and primal urges welled up, their religion often proved to have a hole in the dike. Yet, by the same token, when light fell from a seventeenth-century shtetl lamp, Singer did not describe it as ordinary light. Through his medieval lens, it might be an unusually energetic light Einstein had overlooked in his famous equation, animistic, with a life of its own. IN HIS WARSAW PERIOD, a Westernized Singer wrote of transitional Jews who, like nuns who jump over the wall, cast off their categorical strait- jackets. The more urban his Hasids became, the more they blended in with worldly Jews and Christians. Singer's sequential epic novels, The Manor and The Estate, tell of transitional Jews pouring their energies into the throbbing engine of boomtown Warsaw. The middle-aged- Singer novels are filled with urban Jews we might recognize today for their modern humanity, their absence of medievalism, their zest for life. With different names, they could pass for French or Italians or Swedes. They swam in the larger fish bowl of a major world city, worldly to a far greater degree than insular Hasidism would ever allow. By contrast, the later Singer characters were often survivors of the Holocaust with tales to tell. They spoke not of the Holocaust, not of faith, but of a rotten lover or a strange American experience pressing on their minds. They were more absorbed with their immediate problems in the modern world than with the incomprehensibility of four thou- sand years. Yet Singer could revisit medievalism from 72nd Street with his novel The Slave. Set in the seventeenth century, its characters strive to recover from the horror of vicious Cossack massacres, as in Satan in Goray. Here the protagonist moves in the direction of growth of his humanity over and above his faith or circumstance. He does this through simplicity of heart and a kind of corresponding dim-wittedness rather than through a sort of Kantian philosophy. He has unwittingly become Western. THE MORE HE MATURED as a writer, the more Isaac Bashevis Singer defied classification. In America he became a multicultural hybrid. Can we call him an American writer? In ethnic terms, Singer was both a shtetl Hasid and a New York-Miami condo-loving Jew. He seemed to speak to secular, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform Jews, and also to cul- tured non-Jews, to the world if it would listen. Not from the synagogue dais, but from the doorstep, street corner, cafeteria, subway strap. The writers of the Hebrew Bible were Jews who put factionalism on a back burner. So did Singer in his lifelong song of songs. === Page 121 === AL SUNDEL 279 The only time I ever heard him espousing religion was in denying evo- lution. He upheld creation, and gave a peculiar twist to the word "secu- lar." He used it to describe Nazis, Communists, evolutionists. I don't think he realized, in the larger sense, how much he himself and the urban characters of his American tales had become secular. He had read deeply into Western culture, including Cervantes, Proust, and Schopenhauer. To a large extent, he was a citizen of the world, with the severe handicap of a Yiddish accent as marked as Chico Marx's Italian. All the while, three hundred years of Polish-Jewish dark history weighed heavily on his mind. How was his writing going over? From Singer's shtetl stories, some readers pigeonholed him as a mystic or a dead writer from long ago. Yet he was riding the IRT, watching TV news, commenting on daily events. The American Catholic press gave him better reviews than the American Jewish press, who seemed less sure what to make of him. The supernat- uralism of rural Hasids seemed to correlate more to the concept of dread in medieval Christianity than to mainstream Judaic beliefs. Why the absence of good old schmaltz? How could nostalgic Jews identify with him when no Yiddish words peppered his books to tickle their memories? SINGER MILDLY COMPLAINED about professional aggravations. Knopf had asked him to cut his Tolstoyan novel, The Family Moskat, when it was about to be published alongside a second Jewish novel expected to sell by the truckload, John Hersey's The Wall. It still troubled him, many years later. He complained of the entry-level advances he was getting, $5,000 per book, while green-at-the-gills unknowns and flashes in the pan were raking in six figures. When I suggested he ask for more, he shook me off. He didn't want a book to bomb and lay a load of guilt upon him. Singer also complained that Commentary, the main Jewish- oriented magazine, wouldn't publish his stories. He loved to flirt with the idea of getting an agent, especially when I told him I knew Candida Donadio, a true literary agent in a field turning rabid with greed. But he never called her. I think he feared she might antagonize Cecil Hemley, his new publisher at Noonday Press. When Noonday became part of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the Hemleys translated some of the piles of manuscripts in Singer's drawers. It was a major turning point for him. ALMOST OVERNIGHT, Singer was more widely accepted, though much of his work was now in second-rate translations-not just in the U.S., but in places like Spain, where he was even being read by Basques. One day he received an unsolicited letter inviting him to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship. He told me he wouldn't do it; he was "not a beggar." I tried === Page 122 === 280 PARTISAN REVIEW to convince him it wasn't begging but an honor. He became bullish. "If they want to give it to me, fine. But I won't apply." I believe he was put out that he had to hustle up references. The people who revered his writ- ing were the unknowns who kept giving him help with translations (including young Cynthia Ozick) and, of course, the invaluable Hemleys. One day I told him I had the opportunity to make good money as a writer on the cutting edge of medicine and psychiatry. It would divert me from serious literary writing, where I was getting beaten up with rejections anyway. Singer urged me to take the job. He said he would not recommend a literary pursuit to anyone. The pressure of money was now much on his mind, even as his royalty streams grew by sheer num- ber of books published. I reluctantly seized my opportunity, or rather it seized me. I had little contact with him then. Years passed. I ran three taped seminars for psy- chiatrists on "Shakespeare and Psychiatry," which received a brief tout in The New Yorker as collector's items. I did another on Dostoyevsky. These went over so well, all around, that I proposed one on Kafka, the ultimate outsider, and thought of inviting Singer. He had bought into a high-rise condo in Miami Beach, a building with pistol-packing rednecks as round- the-clock guards. He now had a higher opinion of his own literary stature, yet was not sure where he rightfully belonged on the world scene. For the recording, I pitted Singer against Dr. Alexander Lowen, a maverick psychiatrist. Lowen, an excellent communicator, wrote numer- ous popular books on his neo-Reichian views. But, alas, Lowen's sharp insights were less appreciated than they might have been ten to fifteen years earlier. Singer sounded off on some of his own quandaries, such as the increase in female promiscuity, which both obsessed and beguiled him. For this was a man who kept writing instead of going forth to find new emotional adventures in his life, though he yearned for them. "Kafka believed every human being is on trial," he said, in a free-flow- ing discussion. Kafka's character in The Trial, Josef K, has sex, he went on, but does not love anybody. He is unable to commit himself, as if he suffered from a stasis, or impotence, of the heart. What happened to his ability to love? Is man becoming a beetle instead of being able to love? If a modern writer says, "He loved the girl," Singer asked, what does he mean? In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov loves Sonya, who prosti- tutes herself to support her family, but has no overt sexual relations with Raskolnikov, who loves and respects her for her inner qualities. The way we love reveals our character, our inner qualities, just as our fingerprints are different, he said. Modern money writers ignore all this. They write of sex without revealing character. They remove the soul and the spirit === Page 123 === AL SUNDEL 281 from love. This speaks of a contemporary hollowness of the heart greater than Josef K's. Kafka was saying that man has no higher court to go to for justice about his lack of love. He is in a sponsorless Inquisition of modern times that can rise to a heart-stabbing intensity. He is us. SINGER'S YIDDISH ACCENT troubled, if not horrified, the backers of the seminar for psychiatrists. They killed the Kafka recording. Not long after, Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He became an interna- tional celebrity. He was kissed by Hollywood when Barbra Streisand made a smash movie from one of his stories, "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy." Another film followed, starring Ron Silver and Angelica Houston, from Singer's pithy American novel, Enemies: A Love Story. Then came a TV documentary on Singer's early years in America, sans his long discom- bobulation, his own inability to commit to a woman in his most lost and bewildered phase. New theater is presently in the works. The Nobel Prize, frequent publication, and films secured Singer and Alma in their old age. He was making good money, aided by a string of patently Jewish juveniles out of Hasidic lore. Magazines that had rejected him when he was down now sought him out. In merciless book tours, he gave boilerplate lectures and signed copies by the thousands. Was it to collect his autograph or to read his books that people lined up? Somehow Singer remained vaguely obscure even in his newfound fame. Many occasional readers still believed he was a dead European writer from centuries past who had been newly resuscitated into English. IT HAS BEEN SAID of Dostoyevsky that if he were born in the Trobriand Islands, he would have been as different from those around him as he was in Russia. Isaac Bashevis Singer stood at an even further remove. He did not brood upon his transformations by Western culture so much as remember the deep rural plunge of his roots. Singer had learned to express intimacy best on a Yiddish typewriter through the heartbreak and limitations of the common folk. "We are all smugglers," he once told me as he shook ketchup onto his French fries like an American teenager, "smuggling ourselves through life." He had reported on three hundred years of Jewish history on inhospitable Polish soil, going sparingly on the blood, concentrating on the magic and mys- tery of the élan vital in the heart and the ether, and the fleeting feet of time. He had reported on ambient light, and Jedwabne darkness too, not from astrophysics, but from metaphysics, which he did not lay on his readers. In the end, he escaped the fate of Poe. He died at eighty-six in 1991, respected and rich, his own kind of Jew and post-biblical narrator. === Page 124 === NICHOLAS X. RIZOPOULOS The Autumn of Our Discontent VER THIS PAST THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY, following an absence of several years, I paid a brief visit to London where I reconnected with a number of old British (and other European) friends. Not surprisingly, the first and principal topic of conversation was "Septem- ber 11." Yet after some initial expressions of sympathy-and even horror-at what had transpired in New York and Washington, I was astounded to discover that far too many of my interlocutors, all of whom were echt cosmopolitan and professed to be "pro-American," quickly switched into another gear: if not actual schadenfreude, then certainly a sort of smug satisfaction in not-so-gently lecturing me, inter alia, about America's "imperial arrogance," its "sinfulness" in support- ing the "murderous Israelis" all these years, and its "callousness" and "cruelty" in bombing "innocent civilian targets"-first in Iraq, then in the former Yugoslavia, and now in Afghanistan. Perhaps I should have known better and not been so surprised. But I was. And to this day I do not begin to understand how any reasonable person, let alone putative friends of the United States, could find any jus- tification whatsoever for Osama bin Laden's doings or pretend to be shocked by America's allegedly "disproportionate" response in declaring war against al Qaeda and the Taliban. This is not to say that I am so naive as to be oblivious to the many, though (in my book) mostly bad, reasons "why the world loves to hate America" (to borrow from the title of a recent article by Moises Naim that appeared in the Financial Times); but it is certainly a situation where to understand all is not also to forgive- or to pass over in silence moral relativism masquerading as realpolitik. Once back in New York, I soon found myself absorbed in reading the sort of publication that normally makes a book reviewer's heart sink: a multi-author volume of essays dealing with time-sensitive issues, and revolving around a "hot" topic already analyzed to death by the media and assorted academic pundits. Not the least, then, of the merits of the two dozen articles quickly commissioned and ably edited by James F. Hoge, Jr. and Gideon Rose (respectively, Editor and Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs) is the more than short-term usefulness of the majority === Page 125 === NICHOLAS X. RIZOPOULOS 283 of pieces included in How Did This Happen?: Terrorism and the New War—a three-hundred-page paperback volume which appeared in early December. It was also wise on the editors' part to emphasize the "how" in the title as least as much as the "why" or the "what next," making this rather thorough initial autopsy of 9/11 more useful for the general reader than any number of shorter collections, published at about the same time, that focused on the "lessons of history," or on questions of future American strategy in the face of this new "Age of Terror" (the title of the small volume edited by Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda, with contributions primarily from Yale faculty members). How Did This Happen? sticks in large measure to commonsensical analyses of developments in the Middle East (and Islamic societies out- side the Arab world) since the end of the Gulf War; and, without by any means disregarding the burden of earlier history, the peculiar antecedents of Islamic terrorism, or the less-than-perfect track record of American power politics and diplomacy in the Cold War era, stays clear of too much theoretical speculation or counterfactual musings. Better yet, there is a dearth of ex cathedra pronouncements on such favorite subjects of recent academic debates as the "clash of civilizations" or the "perils of globalization." To be sure, the occasional essay does venture too far afield from the actual topic at hand; and a few authors with axes to grind muddy the waters without adding to our understanding of recent events. But, on the whole, most of the volume's contributors adhere to the sensible line laid down in the editors' brief but extremely helpful introduction. For Hoge and Rose, "the short answer" to How Did This Happen? is clearly this: "Because some very determined people . . . driven by a perverse interpretation of one of the world's great religions, and by hatred of the United States and all that it stood for . . . wanted to make it happen and were able to outwit the defenses erected against them." In effect, "a new kind of terrorist, driven by fanaticism and hatred rather than limited political objectives . . . managed to evade the search- ing eyes of American intelligence agencies and slip through a porous domestic security system." This is not to say that Osama bin Laden and his cohorts did not (in theory at least) espouse a specific political agenda (itself an outgrowth of the perceived "long history of Western humilia- tions of the Muslim world" and of "American support of Israel")—to wit, "to oust the Americans from the Middle East, overthrow so-called moderate Arab governments, and create a unified Muslim nation based on a puritanically oppressive theology." Therefore, the meticulously === Page 126 === 284 PARTISAN REVIEW planned and almost perfectly executed attacks in New York and Wash- ington, which were meant (literally) to terrorize the American public, humiliate the U.S. government, expose the vulnerability of America’s financial infrastructure, and (presumably) ignite a global insurrection against American political, economic, and cultural “imperialism.” The editors have no truck with euphemisms. “America is at war,” they declare, properly assuming that their readers are able to distinguish between different kinds of war without the need for semantic nitpick- ings (pace Michael Howard, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs). Equally on point is their insistence that the war on terrorism will now also force this country (a) to confront more methodically and energeti- cally the related question of how best “to prevent and respond to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction”; (b) to accept with greater equanimity “the need for the cooperation and support of part- ners abroad”; and (c) “to reconsider whether the close relations it main- tains with repressive authoritarian regimes to assure regional stability in the short term truly serve [U.S.] interests in the long term.” So HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? To begin with, Brian M. Jenkins (“Anatomy of a Terrorist Attack”) is correct to point out that “the terrorists’ secret weapon on September 11 was not high technology but human resolve”—and, I would add, fanatical dedication to an evil cause, which (pace Anatol Lieven, and Susan Sontag earlier) is not quite the same thing as bravery. What cause? The always eloquent Fouad Ajami minces no words: “Xenophobia of a murderous kind . . . dressed up in religious garb.” To be sure—again to quote from Ajami’s “Pax Americana in the Middle East”—the decades-old “American imperialism in the Arab- Muslim world [had] hatched a monster.” But was it a monster entirely of America’s own doing, whatever the pros and cons of U.S. miscalcu- lation (if that’s what it was) in supporting the Shahs and the Sadats and the Mubaraaks of this world, in opposing the Saddam s and Qaddafis, or in refusing to embrace enthusiastically the Palestinians’ cause? Not quite. “Long before the second intifada,” writes Ajami, “there was a deadly trail of anti-American terror.” Moreover, as Michael Scott Doran states in the very next essay (“Somebody Else’s Civil War”), “bin Laden’s primary goal [was] furthering the cause of Islamic revolution within the Islamic world itself,” through a jihad that would do away with the “polluted” and “idolatrous” Islam allegedly practiced by far too many Muslims today. And so “the devoted members of al Qaeda display an unsettling willingness to martyr themselves because they feel that . . . they are locked in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of === Page 127 === NICHOLAS X. RIZOPOULOS 285 unbelief that threaten from all sides," while "Western civilization . . . spread[s] idolatry around the world in the form of secularism." This may be a fair representation of certain aspects of what Doran describes as the ongoing and "profoundly serious civil war over Arab and Muslim identity in the modern world." That said, the fact that the anti-modernist forces in this civil war have found it convenient to adopt a hysterical brand of anti-Americanism (and anti-Zionism) as part of their propaganda arsenal by no means guarantees, as Doran apparently believes, that if only "the United States were to effect the removal of Israeli settlements from the West Bank and alleviate the suffering of the Iraqi people some of that outrage would certainly subside." Nor, I'm afraid, would that "outrage" disappear if Karen Armstrong had her way-so that the (according to her, utterly mistaken) notion "that Islam is an essentially violent and fanatical faith [no longer per- sisted as] one of the tenets of the West." It may, or may not, be entirely true that "the reality of Islam... has always been very different from the Western stereotype [and] . . . certainly not addicted to violence and warfare" (my emphasis). More problematical is her comment to the effect that "although Muslims later [i.e., after the Arab conquests of the early medieval period] put an Islamic gloss on these wars . . . they had no religious significance . . . [and Muslims] had no dreams of world con- quest" (my emphasis). It may also be true that "basically, the Koran's view of warfare is very similar to the Western theory of the 'just war'; . . . [that] aggressive warfare is always forbidden; . . . [and that] until the twentieth century Islam had a far better record of religious tolerance than did Western Christianity" (my emphasis). Suppose Armstrong is also right in arguing that most Westerners, even highly educated ones, are hopelessly untutored when it comes to Islamic history, culture, or Muslim notions on the separation of church and state; that Americans are largely mistaken about the "true" nature of Wahhabism (or other reform movements); that we were sadly confused when we thought we saw evidence of factional religious fanaticism, and hate, in the horrific unfolding of the Iran-Iraq War; and that bin Laden-and his "extremist cohorts"-quite simply "hijacked . . . one of the world's great reli- gions." Yet the question remains: how did this "hijacking" come about, and (better yet) why did it succeed? Are we really so totally mistaken in seeing some connection between bin Laden's political appeal to the "Arab Street" and his religious message, "hijacked" or not? Better, per- haps, to listen to that wisest of Western historians of Islam, Bernard Lewis, cogently arguing (in the January issue of the Atlantic Monthly) that "underlying much of the Muslim world's travail may be a simple === Page 128 === 286 PARTISAN REVIEW lack of freedom-freedom of the mind from constraint and indoctrina- tion, to question and inquire and speak; . . . freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny.” That other Wise Old Man, Walter Laqueur (in “The Changing Face of Terror”), accurately and succinctly defines terrorism as “the substate application of violence, or the threat of violence, to sow panic and bring about political change” (my emphasis); while also reminding us that “radical religious groups have been . . . particularly prone to turn vio- lent in the Muslim world”; that “the bloodiest conflicts have occurred not between Muslim groups or states and the West but within the Mus- lim world itself”; and that “the recent rise of Islamist radicalism can more usefully be explained as the result of the . . . emergence of an intel- lectual and spiritual vacuum waiting to be filled.” NOT SURPRISINGLY, those chapters trying, within a brief compass, to combine crash courses in regional histories (Afghanistan, Central and South Asia, Saudi Arabia) with current event updates proved the most vulnerable to fast-paced developments since the September attacks— such as the Taliban's ignominious collapse. But all of them contain nuggets of useful factual information; and in the Saudi case Gregory Gause explains the perennial conundrum facing Washington: we still need (no doubt more than we should) Saudi oil; stability in the region remains a key U.S. interest; and we can push the Saudi royals only so far either to democratize their government and society or to implement the type of economic reforms that, some argue, would take the wind out of bin Laden sympathizers’ sails. More helpful are the essays, grouped in the middle section of the vol- ume, attempting both to explain the “technical” side of the tragic events of September 11 and to recommend what the U.S. government can do in the short-to-medium run so as to prevent a recurrence of catastrophic terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. In “Targeting al Qaeda's Finances,” William F. Wechsler offers a long list of commonsensical suggestions for “strangling the Hydra,” while bemoaning the fact that, in the past, “Washington has often been stymied by a lack of political will on the part of key states [and ostensi- ble U.S. allies] in the Middle East and South Asia.” More disconcerting is Richard K. Betts's essay on the “Intelligence Test”—which struck me as being simultaneously Panglossian and fatal- istic. The author dismisses the conventional wisdom (“the CIA was asleep at the switch!”), asserting “the [U.S.] intelligence community has worked much better than [its critics] assume” and that the CIA “and === Page 129 === NICHOLAS X. RIZOPOULOS 287 associated services, have generally done very well at protecting the country." He also claims that its "great successes in thwarting previous terrorist attacks are too easily forgotten." I, for one, remain highly skep- tical of the CIA's vaunted efficacy. (True enough, the FBI's own recent track record has been even more alarming.) Nor do I find Betts's "vari- ation on a theme by Roberta Wohlstetter" -the old saw about crucial information regarding the impending attack on Pearl Harbor "getting lost in a crescendo of 'noise'" -particularly convincing in this instance. Now Betts is nobody's fool. To the contrary, he has for many years been one of the most sensible and best informed academic commenta- tors on national security issues. And, sure enough, much of his general argument, about intelligence "reforms that should have been made long ago," is sound-even if unexceptional. Don't assume, he says, that throwing more money in the CIA's lap will by itself do the trick. "Mar- ginal improvements" are the best one should hope for. Besides, the "way to improve intelligence is to do better at collecting important informa- tion." "Human intelligence is key. . . . More and better spies will help." Better and deeper analysis of collected information is also badly needed. So, too, is institutional reorganization-in Washington and Langley- involving "the integration of information technologies, management systems, and information sharing." And so on. And so forth. But what does any of this really mean? Does Betts actually believe that any of these reforms will actually come about in the near future? I suspect he does not. And yet we are encouraged to conclude that all is well in this best of all CIA worlds. On the other hand, Gregg Easterbrook pulls no punches in dissecting the state of U.S. airport and airline (non-) security prior to September 11: "Every element of the U.S. airline industry was designed to maxi- mize passenger miles and minimize costs. . . . Flight safety. . . . was taken seriously. . . . Security was an afterthought." Worse yet, "complacency [had] also set in. . . . More generally. . . a theory had arisen that ter- rorist organizations had lost interest in attacking airliners." Yet, writes the author, it need not prove impossible to devise much better security measures, both on the ground and in the air, if money were no object. Among the measures recommended: on the ground, better trained per- sonnel at check-in stations, more efficient machines inspecting all lug- gage, better cooperation and coordination with well-armed police units; on the airplanes, transponders that cannot be turned off, impregnable cockpit doors, armed sky marshals on all flights (following the El Al model). Since we are talking about about 25,000 flights taking off each day just within the United States, sky-marshaling "could cost several billion === Page 130 === 288 PARTISAN REVIEW dollars annually. But that’s still only a few [additional] dollars per [pas- senger] ticket.” Of course, complacency was not a monopoly of the airline industry. As Stephen E. Flynn recounts in his eye-popping chapter, “The Unguarded Homeland,” “most of the physical plant, telecommunica- tions, power, water supply, and transportation infrastructure on U.S. territory lies unprotected or is equipped with security sufficient to deter only amateur vandals, thieves, or hackers.” His chapter is chock-full of hair-raising statistics—not least about cross-border cargo movement from Canada, where there are still “only 700 customs inspectors cur- rently assigned to that border—200 fewer than worked the border 20 years ago[!]” although U.S. trade with Canada jumped from roughly $120 billion worth of goods in 1985 to over $400 billion in 2000. Yet, as the author also points out, “what is most surprising is that the United States had managed to dodge the catastrophic terrorism bullet for so long.” It is imperative, therefore, that we try harder to develop a proper (though, again, by no means fail-safe) homeland security strategy: (a) by “building a regime that can reliably identify the people, goods and con- veyances that are legitimate”; and (b) by developing, for people, “uni- versal biometric travel identification cards,” and, for cargo, tighter security practices to prevent unauthorized entry into loading docks and theft-resistant mechanical seals for containers. It is these types of concrete (and predictably costly) measures that, as Joseph S. Nye, Jr. himself argues in “Government’s Challenge: Getting Serious About Terrorism,” can make a difference down the road. What we need, says Nye, is not yet another federal department or a “czar” (as in “drug czar” or “poverty czar”). Instead, “[Tom] Ridge’s office should be supported by one or more specially created, federally funded research-and-development corporations . . . [and] it should be organized to think systematically and comprehensively about terrorism, starting with intelligence and warning, then moving through deterrence and prevention, crisis and consequence management, and postevent retalia- tion and system repair.” Nye is also right to insist that “suppressing terrorism is very different from a [normal] military campaign.” For one thing, the process is never- ending; there is no grand, final battle—a Salamis or a Waterloo. For another, even “as we succeed in battening down the cockpits . . . ter- rorists will be exploring vulnerabilities in our open society and investi- gating [the possible use] of even more devastating weapons.” But, adds the author, “fortunately, nuclear and biological weapons are not as easy to make as popular fiction suggests.” === Page 131 === NICHOLAS X. RIZOPOULOS 289 This is of small comfort to Laurie Garrett ("Countering Terrorism") or William J. Perry ("Prevention, Deterrence, Defense"); and even less so to Richard Butler, armed with firsthand experience (in his U.N. days) with Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program. Butler forcefully argues (in "Germ Wars") that not just the use but even the manufacture and possession of chemical and biological weapons should be consid- ered "without qualification... crimes against humanity." Moreover, "if the international community were to agree" on this-to be sure, a big "if" then enforcement action could be taken immediately to remove the offending facilities or laboratories involved." Butler's "envoi" predictably serves as a sharp slap in the reader's face: suddenly, we are once again back in the real world of difficult political decisions. Whatever Saddam's actual role (direct or indirect) in 9/11, can anyone honestly pretend that he does not pose a real and constant danger to the United States and its allies in the region? How can there be a "war on terrorism" that does not include Iraq? How can there even be any fruitful debate-over means and ends in such a war-that inten- tionally disregards the passionate arguments aired, day in and day out in the U.S. media, by spokesmen for the so-called hawks (Paul Wol- fowitz & Co.) and doves (Colin Powell and friends)? It is too bad that the editors of this volume essentially chose to bypass this explosive sub- ject-though perhaps wisely, in order to keep the collection from spilling over into the five-hundred-page range. Still, there is a small sec- tion that deals with a number of related subjects. General Wesley K. Clark, fresh from his (not altogether happy) Yugoslav experiences, discusses briefly "What's Next for the U.S. Armed Forces"-but without benefit of post facto knowledge of the successful conclusion of the anti-Taliban campaign. He argues that "the war against terrorism is not a war that can be won from the skies; it will require troops on the ground in many different roles," including "forward recon- naissance elements" and "special teams of commando forces." Michael Mandelbaum is very much in his element in a short but arresting essay on "Diplomacy in Wartime." The title of the piece may in fact be somewhat misleading; for he is less concerned with "new pri- orities and alignments" in U.S. foreign policy and far more preoccupied with possible, indeed (for him) desirable, regime changes in states with a long record of sponsoring terrorism. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, the Pales- tinian Authority, and Afghanistan are all mentioned by name. "Regime change seems... an unavoidable aim of the war against terrorism," he writes, adding: "In no case is the task of dislodging these regimes an overwhelming one." But Mandelbaum stops short of advocating === Page 132 === 290 PARTISAN REVIEW “actual invasion” by U.S. forces—except in Afghanistan—speculating instead that “military pressure, . . . smothering economic embargoes, and perhaps the example of at least one terrorist-harboring government brought down by direct attack could conceivably create sufficient inter- nal resistance to topple several other[s].” Mandelbaum is far more direct in dismissing out of hand two of the so-called root causes of the September 11 attacks—both favorites of bien- pensant commentators: to wit, “poverty and Israel.” Worthy as these goals may be in the eyes of some, the results of “trying to eliminate poverty in the countries that breed terrorism” or of “pressuring Israel to make [further] concessions to Yasir Arafat” are “entirely predictable,” writes the author. “The first will be futile, the second counterproductive.” Although, in the past, Mandelbaum has occasionally sounded a bit frivolous when decrying “foreign policy as social work” or when criti- cizing American attempts at humanitarian intervention (for example, in the former Yugoslavia), there is nothing frivolous in his tone here. He may be too easily dismissive of legitimate Palestinian complaints and aspirations. But he is, I am sure, correct not only in questioning the fea- sibility of any sort of unilateral (American) global “war on poverty” but also the assertion that such an initiative would stop terrorism dead in its tracks. As for his discussion of the Israeli “root cause,” Mandelbaum correctly suggests that what critics often describe as Israeli intransigence is just as often a convenient excuse for explaining away Islamist terror- ism. But he goes further (and will no doubt annoy many readers by his outspokenness) when he writes: “There is no credible evidence that Arafat is seeking a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and all too much evidence that his goal is a Palestinian state instead of Israel.” Anatol Lieven (“The Cold War Is Finally Over”) is one contributor who would presumably take strong exception to Mandelbaum’s con- clusions. Lieven’s is, at any rate, an uneven essay that ranges over too many topics in too little space. Obviously, the author is quite uncom- fortable with what he perceives to be the foreign policy and security pri- orities of the Bush administration—"still rooted in Cold War attitudes and structures,” he says, including “the attempt to cast Russia and China as major threats to vital U.S. interests.” Lieven also believes that “with the exception of certain Middle Eastern states”—unfortunately, unlike Ko-Ko in The Mikado, he does not provide us with a “little list”—“the real threat to the world order comes not from states, but from below, from alienated populations.” Again, I have my doubts. Per- haps Fareed Zakaria—in the concluding essay of this volume—comes closer to the truth when he writes: “Radical Islam . . . festers in societies === Page 133 === NICHOLAS X. RIZOPOULOS 291 where contact with the West has produced more chaos than growth .... It is, in a sense, the result of failed and incomplete modernization." IF THERE IS A CONSENSUS among the volume's contributors, it is that America is in for the long haul in this war against terrorism, whether we like it or not. There is no "quick fix" in sight; nor can we do all that much to make ourselves suddenly more "popular" abroad, or less resented, envied, and misunderstood. Closer to home, the full extent of the economic repercussions of 9/11 is still difficult to gauge. Martin N. Baily ("Stirred But Not Shaken") is rather upbeat, arguing that "the terrorist attacks exacerbated economic problems that were already apparent," but that "the fundamentals of the U.S. economy are very strong." He is probably right. On the other hand, Baily does zero in on the danger of soaring insurance premiums, seeing this development as a worrisome "obstacle to invigorating the economy." He recommends that we take a leaf out of the British gov- ernment's book (and its painful experience in dealing with IRA terror- ism for more than thirty years): Washington should run "a risk pool to provide payments in the event of large economic losses from terrorism. ... Everyone pays into the pool, and if future losses are not great, there is enough money in the pool to pay all claims. If there is a massive claim, the government steps in and supplements the pool." An imaginative and worthwhile suggestion. Also closer to home, in discussing how American society will respond to this new kind of war, Alan Wolfe ("The Home Front") rightly predicts that, whatever extraordinary measures the Justice Department and the FBI may be forced to take in order to improve domestic security, "we are unlikely to see substantial encroachments on freedom as we mobilize for a response to terror." This is a healthy corrective to the fuss being made by civil libertarians who-putting aside whatever concerns many of us might well have about the proper workings of any military tribunals set up specifically to try foreign terrorists-automatically harbor suspicions about the federal government, especially under a conservative Republi- can president, at times imagining it to be but one small step removed from subverting the Constitution. Such alarm is misplaced: this country's democratic institutions and legal fabric are not endangered. Still, as Fareed Zakaria cogently argues in the concluding essay ("The Return of History"), "one change that is likely to endure is the renewed power of government. The state is back, and, for the oldest reason in the book: the provision of security." So, too, "counterterrorism will move from the realm of law enforcement to that of national security." And "if === Page 134 === 292 PARTISAN REVIEW civil liberties will take a backseat at home, human rights will do the same abroad. The return of the state implies the return of realpolitik." A mixed blessing, that; though there may be a silver lining in the sense that (again according to Zakaria) "realpolitik also implies respect for and attention to other governments." Especially, I would add, paying closer attention to our relations with those Western governments whose basic values we share, whose cooperation we will always need, but whose leaders (like de Gaulle not so long ago) refuse simply to play-in perpetuity-second fiddle to Washington's concertmaster. In the final analysis, Zakaria is also right to distinguish between the specific acts of terrorism of the past two decades, aimed directly at the United States, and the more general "cultural backlash against the West . . . [which though] wrongheaded, destructive, and futile . . . is no affectation." What is an affectation is the high moral tone, with all its anti- American condescension, adopted by some of our European friends. The proper riposte was provided by Mark Steyn (writing in the Decem- ber 22 issue of the London Spectator): "September 11 was a call to moral seriousness. You cannot compromise with a shark. You cannot negotiate with a suicide bomber. And if you can't see that, you must have rocks in your head; and it wasn't the Afghans who put 'em there." FINE ARTS WORK CENTER IN PROVINCETOWN SUMMER 2002 WORKSHOPS Week-long and weekend courses in poetry, fiction, memoir, playwriting, web writing, nonfiction, and visual arts. Sampling of courses & instructors: Dean Albarelli Fiction Robin Becker Poetry & Prosody Amy Bloom Writing Fiction Olga Broumas The Willing Ear Rafael Campo Poetry Michael Collier Poetry Mark Doty Poetry Forrest Gander Poetry Marie Howe Poetry Gish Jen Chewing the Fat: Fiction Wendy Kesselman Playwriting Michael Klein Short Poem Elizabeth McCracken Short Fiction Eileen Myles Poet's Novel Andrew Sullivan Web Writing Jacqueline Woodson Writing for Children C.D. Wright Writing Against the Grain John Yau The Prose Poem For information about any of our programs call: 508.487.9960 email: info@fawc.org write to: FAWC, 24 Pearl Street, Provincetown, MA 02657 or visit: WWW.FAWC.ORG === Page 135 === BOOKS Intellectuals or Pundits? PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS: A STUDY OF DECLINE. By Richard A. Posner. Harvard University Press. $29.95. UNTIL ABOUT THIRTY YEARS AGO, sociology was a budding social science discipline, which gradually lost its attraction and its way, whereas eco- nomics then was rather peripheral and in the interim has turned into an academic growth industry. Richard A. Posner, Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, has enhanced the status of economics even fur- ther, by stating that he pays more heed to the market forces underlying his court cases than to legal precedent. In Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Posner notes that “public intellectuals” are also subject to the market. Unfortunately, he relies on crude sociological methods as he argues that academics with narrow expertise often opine on political and policy questions. Jean Bethke Elshstain’s quip, that “the problem with being a public intellectual is you get more and more public and less and less intellectual,” is apt. Posner counts the number of “hits” on Lexis-Nexis’s databases—along with mentions in newspaper articles and scholarly journals—to rank the importance of public figures, which most sociologists would dismiss as garbage in, garbage out. This is not to say that ranking such an amor- phous group is easy, or even possible. Posner’s approach leads him to include such dead writers as George Orwell, John Dewey, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, Max Weber, Arthur Koestler, and Edmund Wil- son, and leaves out many deserving living individuals. It also makes questionable distinctions between scholarly and media personalities. Julien Benda, in The Treason of the Intellectuals (1928), and Ray- mond Aron, in The Opium of Intellectuals (1957), had trouble differ- entiating clearly among academics and political figures, journalists who teach and writers who don’t, even though Aron classified poets, novel- ists, painters, sculptors, and philosophers as a higher species, an “inner circle.” In today’s culture, of course, Posner could not get away with such a qualitative, “elitist” judgment. Instead, he diagnoses, correctly, their declining trustworthiness. === Page 136 === 294 PARTISAN REVIEW Neither Benda nor Aron defined intellectuals in terms of their visibil- ity in the public realm: to them, the concept of "public intellectual" was an oxymoron. Of course, Aron wrote regularly for Paris's Le Figaro, and thus figures among Posner's university professors for whom public appearances offer "a part-time career." But Aron rather disliked his celebrity, whereas the reviewers of Posner's book who "made" his lists, (including Posner himself) are somewhat touchy about their own rank- ings. (The late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu dubbed them all Fast Talkers-whether or not they made the cut of Posner's "Top 100" or the original list of "Top 546.") Indeed, the competition for celebrity is fierce, though unacknowledged. Media appearances beget media appearances, and with these come recognition, mention by columnists, and monetary advantages. Indolent gatekeepers, states Posner, "prefer having a celebrity intel- lectual opine outside the area of his expertise to searching for a partic- ular expert on a particular topic." Thereby, "academics of modest distinction who accidentally acquire sufficient name recognition become sought-after commentators on current events." And no one keeps track of their pronouncements, so that they may contradict themselves from one appearance to another. For the most part, Posner "neither finds them very prescient nor very influential" and often "careless with facts and rash in predictions." Both the media and the public are failing to keep better score, due to people's short attention spans, philistinism, and embrace of "sound bites." Audiences like their news anchors to be attractive and their information spiked with entertainment. Posner chooses his examples from both the Right and the Left. For instance, he cites Chomsky's absurd anti-Americanism, his defense of America's enemies, and his claim that "the United States is officially committed to terrorism"-even before his outrageous statements after September 11. Chomsky's equivalent in the sciences is the biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who "wears his politics on his sleeve," ever since publishing his bestseller, The Mismeasure of Man (1981). Gould denies that his acknowledged Marxism has influenced his scientific works, or his criticism (in 1996) of Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve as "a manifesto of conservative ideology." He "mischarac- terizes their book," states Posner, since their actual differences about concept of "general intelligence" are negligible. Camille Paglia does not fare much better. After publishing Sexual Personae (1990), she was found "relentless in self-promotion, and lack- ing any verbal restraint, . . . [and] became one of the best-known intel- lectuals in the United States." She is one of Posner's "academics [who] === Page 137 === BOOKS 295 tend to think of themselves as being on holiday when they are writing for the general public." Posner also zeroes in on the Clinton hearings, to point out intellectuals' irresponsible contradictions from one day to the next, and the reductio ad absurdum of their open-letter writing. Legal scholars, such as Bruce Ackerman, Ronald Dworkin, Sean Wilentz, and Cass Sunstein, who were prominent in opposing Clinton's impeachment, had no business denying their political partisanship and then signing an advertisement that supported Al Gore's post-election presidential quest. Posner claims not to fault the signatories for their wish to bring about a victory for the Democratic Party, but for breach- ing academic objectivity and declaring a "crisis." Posner also focuses on the controversies between Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty-both academicians "well to the left of the center of the Democratic Party,... [who] deplore the frivolity of the cultural Left." But whereas Nussbaum reaches back to Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and Kant to bolster her views of sexual harassment (and to oppose Catharine MacKinnon), Rorty's quest for social justice tends to follow John Rawls's search to "get rid of the conviction common to Plato and Marx... that there must be a large theoretical way... to end injus- tice." Both Rorty and Nussbaum look to literature as a way out. But lit- erary criticism (Posner's college major) per se has declined, and approaches such as "new historicism, postcolonial studies, queer theory, multiculturalism, radical feminism, deconstruction, reception theory, and post-structuralism"-all of them outposts of the cultural Left- have taken over. Political satire, such as Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley's Brave New World, Posner notes, could only be written in a time of independence-that is, when intellectuals did not yet have to look over their shoulders to university colleagues and administrators. But far from criticizing only "dumb left-wing ideas and their cultural manifestation," Posner also goes after, for instance, Gertrude Himmel- farb's conservatism, which blames the "counterculture" of the 1960s for the decline in morals-advocacy of abortion, divorce, single mother- hood, and the loss of an idealist past. And he chides Robert Bork's han- dling of moral issues in his (aborted) confirmation hearings for a seat on the Supreme Court. (Himmelfarb pays him back, point by point, in the February 2002 issue of Commentary.) During times of real crisis, from the Depression through the Cold War, Posner reminds us, intellectuals were heeded. I should add, how- ever, that there were many fewer of them, and they were consumed by political and personal passions rather than by the wish to bask in the limelight. William Phillips, one of the two founders of Partisan Review, === Page 138 === 296 PARTISAN REVIEW for instance, recalls that when Albert Camus first visited the United States immediately after World War II, Phillips threw a party for about forty people. Camus then asked to meet New York’s intellectuals. “They’re all in this room,” Phillips informed him. Moreover, with the exception of Lionel Trilling, none of them were academics. Because of legal questions evolving from expanded civil rights and privacy legislation, and from freedom of information—related laws, psy- chologists and philosophers are being called as expert witnesses ever more frequently. Thus ideology, “temperament, life experiences, moral principles, party politics, and religious belief or non-belief” are bound to play a role. But postmodern academics, for whom truth is relative, do not think they are lying when they slant their testimonies under oath. Posner recounts, for instance, that the brouhahas caused by Nussbaum’s “evidence” that Greek philosophers approved of homosexuality; by James Mohr’s brief on the history of abortion that contradicted his own findings; and by Alice Kessler-Harris’s argument that the allocation of gender roles in the workplace had nothing to do with women’s interests but exclusively with employer discrimination. However, false testimony that is refuted in academic enclaves ends up without penalties in the public realm. Posner is most emphatic and incensed by Ronald Dworkin’s relentless spin, self-contradictions, and partisanship that far exceeds Nussbaum’s and Rorty’s public advocacy—in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and in (false) accusations against Posner himself as violating judicial ethics. In sum, just as there is a German saying that shoemakers ought to stick to their lasts, Posner convincingly demonstrates that academics had better stick to their jobs and talk publicly only about what they really know. He is absolutely correct, also, in placing the onus on American universities, for providing safe (though underpaid) jobs that give the go- ahead to professors who moonlight in the public realm—“selling” low- quality goods and accountable to no one in their ascent to celebrity. Still, Posner—one of our most informed and erudite intellectuals—could have reached these conclusions without relying on naïve statistics. Edith Kurzweil === Page 139 === BOOKS 297 From Bildungsroman to Family Saga THE SWEETEST DREAM. By Doris Lessing. HarperCollins. $26.95. IN HER LONG CAREER, Doris Lessing has used many genres and has never left them as she found them. The first three volumes of Children of Vio- lence resemble other twentieth-century bildungsroman in their social realism. In the fourth volume, Landlocked, Zambesia exists only in Martha's consciousness, and in The Four-Gated City, the final volume, consciousness is as little to be depended upon as memory. Psychological breakdowns preface the future history that ends the novel with a global catastrophe which destroys the nations of Europe and North America. Her latest novel, The Sweetest Dream, is a family saga, a genre that Doris Lessing has not written in before. Characteristically, the novel is as much about the fluidity of the arbitrary relationships that create the family as it is about the certainties of family despite the changing world to which each generation has to adapt. The fixed point in The Sweetest Dream is the Lennox home, a many-storied house in Hampstead. There is a literal family, the Lennoxes, but several of the people that belong to the house are Lennoxes neither by blood nor by marriage. Phillip Lennox, of the first generation, works for the Foreign Office, but the glamour of diplomatic postings is denied him because Julia, whom he marries just after the First World War, is German. Phillip dies shortly after the end of the Second World War, and until her death in the mid-1980s Julia owns the house, living on the top floor, surrounded by beautiful furniture and trying to ignore what she regards as the disorder on the floors below. Their son becomes a Communist at Eton and runs away to fight Franco. Although he never gets further than the East End of London, he exploits his reputation as a hero of the Spanish Civil War in order to become a person of considerable consequence in the British Left. His first wife, Frances, is the closest the novel has to a central char- acter. Her children and their friends make up the third generation, and the children of her lover the nucleus of the fourth. Actor and journalist, she also presides over the kitchen and its huge table, at which she feeds anyone in the house. Frances's meals become a secular form of the Eucharist, a grateful confirmation of the possibility of communion in a society where identity and alienation seem inseparable and self- awareness is rooted in self-indulgence. Lessing's fine sense of irony sets the living community of the Lennox === Page 140 === 298 PARTISAN REVIEW against a future Communist world, one of the dreams that compete to be the sweetest dream of the title. Long after Comrade Johnny and Frances have divorced-and he has remarried and divorced yet again- he and his progressive friends expect and are given a place at the table. But Johnny never recognizes Frances and his mother as a source of com- munity. Only the Soviet Union has that gift at its disposal; the changing group around the table is just another audience that endures his mono- logues about the coming revolution, which will allow him and his mates to "rebuild the world in their image." The unpleasant people who at various times live in the final layer of the house, the basement apartment beneath the kitchen, suggest something of what a world modeled on such an image would be like. Rose Trimble is one of these people who claims rights without any corresponding responsibilities. As a school girl she encounters Andrew Lennox at a Marxist weekend seminar and remains involved with the family until the third generation are well into their forties. Instinctively clever but without intelligence, Rose has a deep mistrust for the Lennoxes' culture of intellectual curiosity and liberal understanding. By the end of the novel she is a successful journalist attacking the Lennoxes as "fascists," appropriate heirs to Julia who, as a German, is considered a Nazi. Her journalism is in demand by those London papers that expect their writers to be committed to nothing but the current moral certainty the paper is promoting. In The Four-Gated City, Lessing uses the floors of a London house to represent different states of consciousness. By contrast, the floors of the Lennox house are layers of history, and within the symbolism of the novel the interaction between floors is an interaction between present, past, and future. Julia is labeled a "witch" by her grandchildren's generation-an absurd anachronism belonging to a world that thankfully is irrecover- able. For her part, she chooses finely tailored clothes that proclaim her difference from a present that, she believes, is without form. From the perspective of subsequent generations, her clothes serve to cage her. Yet it is Julia who uses the authority and moral certainties of her class and gen- eration to save the life of Sylvia, the anorexic stepdaughter of Johnny. Sylvia, in turn, provides the link between the Lennox house and an African country that is the setting for much of the last third of the novel. The Sweetest Dream addresses beliefs, faiths, and the communities that depend on them and considers how these change with each gener- ation. Marxism is only one of several systems that people have used to define themselves during the past sixty years. If nationalism was an unstated assumption of Phillip Lennox's generation, the scattering of === Page 141 === BOOKS 299 Americans fleeing the Vietnam War draft are part of a restless genera- tion that resents, often justifiably, the demands that family and nation make on their loyalties. They join young European men and women who move from country to country and family to family, forming a new global community as they go. Some attach themselves for weeks and months to the Lennox house, and to the familiar issues of progressive politics are added astrology, auras, and the I-Ching. Sylvia greets this mishmash of spirituality with the eagerness possible only in someone raised in the complacent rationality of a secular world. When these first stirrings of New Age spirituality become too shallow for her, she con- verts to Catholicism. Throughout the first half of the novel, Africa is one of several back- grounds for the ideological confrontations of the Cold War; the conti- nent's first substantial presence in the novel is through Johnny's comrades, representatives of the numerous liberation movements in col- onized Africa. By the end of the novel, colonization has made way for the often dubious freedom of Africa's new nation-states, sometimes led by people who sat at Frances's table. That Lessing once again has used an African country as the setting of a novel is not surprising. A previous book, African Laughter, records her trips to Zimbabwe in the 1980s, and the first volume of her autobiography is largely about the thirty years she spent in Rhodesia. Yet it is unexpected that we experience the fictitious Zimlia through the naïveté of Sylvia, newly qualified as a doctor, and the African place we get to know best is the Catholic mission at Kwadere. By the late 1980s Africa's destiny is no longer manipulated by Soviet and Western rivalries, and were it not for the international aid agencies, it would have disappeared from international agendas. If the second generation knows Africa through Marxist solidarity groups, the third encounters it through the public philanthropy of Europe and North America. At a conference in Senga, the capital of Zimlia, the represen- tatives of organizations with names like Global Money and Caring International resume "conversations that might have been interrupted in Bogota or Benares." Several of the delegates are Lennoxes-or some- how associated with the family. The conference is on "The Ethics of International Aid," and Andrew Lennox, the star of Caring Interna- tional, does not hear the sardonic remark of Sister Molly, a nun who has worked for many years in Zimlia. "They get paid to travel to some beauty spot and talk nonsense you'd not believe," she says. "[A]nd I don't think that they notice that the land is perishing from the drought." That global visions blind people to what has a significant existence only in the local is a seminal idea in the novel. Johnny's certainty of the === Page 142 === 300 PARTISAN REVIEW inevitable directions world history will take make it impossible for him to understand what the people around him desire, or indeed are. Andrew Lennox disburses millions of dollars to worthy projects, but when he vis- its Sylvia at the dirt-poor mission at Kwadere, he does not recognize as a hospital the huddle of thatched huts to which she proudly leads him and which have been built because she has concentrated her love and commitment on one place. Here people are cured or, since there are often no drugs, shown that they matter. By contrast, the government hospital is an ambitious project that once dreamt of bringing the latest medical technology to Kwadere. Like Conrad’s Kurtz, all the nations of Europe went to its making, but the funds were stolen and building stopped when the walls were waist-high. Dust and bush are once again taking posses- sion of the clearing where another dream has faded. Lessing knows Africa well enough to understand that "Africa" signi- fies a concept as much as a geographical location, and as a concept it can obscure strengths and weaknesses that reveal themselves only in a local context. When Sylvia, briefly in London to get supplies for Kwadere, asks Andrew’s brother to “do something for Africa,” she really means Zimlia, for it is Zimlia and its specific needs that she understands. As a concept, Africa joins the other causes in the novel that have no practical existence outside the theory that constructed them. The novel refuses to be entirely pessimistic. "|O]rganisations with small budgets," writes Lessing, "sometimes funded by single individuals . . . accomplish more with their money than Caring International or Global Money could dream of." And Zimlia is proof of this. Black and white Zim- lians and "ex-pats" form "a layer of energetic optimism." Such people hardly talk about politics, because in a country like Zimlia, “politics are the enemy of commonsense.” These people harbor no illusions about Zim- lia and therefore cannot be disillusioned. They are "a layer or web of sane people." "Layer" hearkens back to the floors in the Hampstead house, specifically Frances's kitchen and the community she made possible. Lessing has written with some hostility about Catholicism; her time as a child boarding at the Salisbury convent was a source of nightmares for many years. Because she is a Catholic convert, Lessing regards war- ily the psychotherapist whom she writes about in Walking in the Shade and who is the original for Mother Sugar in The Golden Notebook. The Sweetest Dream shows several different faces of Catholicism. In London Sylvia is drawn to the austere certainties of the priest who instructs her in the faith and sublime liturgies of Westminster Cathedral. Behind both is Roman dogma, resembling in its moral certainties the faith that Comrade Johnny preaches and as universal in its claims as the teleology === Page 143 === BOOKS 301 of Marxism. In Zimlia, on the other hand, Sister Molly speaks of the Vatican and the aid agencies with the same impatience. As a Catholic nun in Zimlia, she is one of the sane people who imagine possibilities and provide hope. At Kwadere, Sylvia thinks less and less of a commu- nity guaranteed by hierarchy and more of a community that draws its energy from the diversity of particular human needs. She rediscovers the community of Frances's table. If the traditional family in England is assuming new shapes, the tradi- tional family in Zimlia is literally being destroyed. AIDS has left no one at Kwadere untouched, and orphaned children return to grandparents who are unable to cope. Twenty years of independence has been long enough for the emergence of a new class of politicians and officials who demand respect for position rather than achievement. Lessing traces this class formation, notes the easy contempt with which the apparatchiks treat the mass of people outside the circle of privilege, and then identifies in AIDS the great leveler. On one occasion, Sylvia has to tell a senior offi- cial in the Ministry of Education that his wife is dying, and for the first time he becomes transformed from a person accustomed to exercising arrogant power to a man confronting the terror of his mortality. Lessing has never shied away from controversy, but the ending of The Sweetest Dream may prove as controversial as anything she has written. In a final twist to the family saga, Sylvia is deported from Zimlia and returns to the Hampstead house, bringing with her from Kwadere two boys whose parents have died and whom she intends to educate in Eng- land. They will become part of the fourth generation. Such an ending affronts the belief that identities derive from race and nation, a belief that is still enthusiastically promoted in parts of Africa. The children will die unless they are taken from Zimlia to England, and the novel implies that if to take them is cultural or racial murder then so be it. But it is not only the children who benefit from being taken away from their home. By their presence, the Kwadere children confirm, if further confirmation were needed, that the family is more than a shared genetic inheritance. The Lennox family has been, throughout the novel, a voluntary com- munity. That is one of its strengths. As a trope, the Lennox family is placed in opposition to meta-narratives of social determinism, whether these are Marxism, Pan-Africanism or one or other of the many versions of globalization. The family survives because its modest scale does not allow it to claim too much for itself. The measure of its success is how well it accommodates the humanity of the people who constitute it. Anthony Chennells === Page 144 === 302 PARTISAN REVIEW T. S. Eliot's Achievements WORDS ALONE: THE POET T. S. ELIOT. By Denis Donoghue. Yale Uni- versity Press. $26.95. DENIS DONOGHUE's Words Alone, which he says is "partly a memoir, partly a study of [T. S.] Eliot's poetry," recounts Donoghue's young manhood in Dublin, mainly insofar as it was an educational/literary encounter with Eliot's poems. And yet, although that's about all we learn of the young Donoghue, there is an air of bildungsroman about the book, because its aim is to "describe the process by which a young student tries to gain access, however limited, to a book of poems. What is entailed in submitting oneself to a writer?" This is a great, neglected, and (one fears) anachronistic subject: a young person's encounter with literature as an experience of awe, of dazzling discovery-something along the lines of Hazlitt's "My First Acquaintance With Poets." It would once have been common for higher education to be seen as an engagement, at worst illuminating and at best transformative, with books. In the U.S., this engagement would have been significantly literary. Today you can go through an entire course in college composition, which may be the only English course you take, without reading a single piece of literature. For this very reason, Donoghue's autobiographical approach to Eliot's poetry is especially apt. For at least two or three decades, up to roughly the mid-1960s, Eliot was the figure with whom you began your "serious" education, and in relation to whom you measured your intel- lectual growth. You read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in freshman English. There was a kind of appropriate progression, not so much chronological as existential, from "Prufrock" to The Waste Land and later to Four Quartets, the poems read at different stages of one's college years. That first encounter with "Prufrock," though, was the most stun- ning, was what knocked you back and buckled your knees. This was finally it. Just as it was for Donoghue, whose account of his first read- ing of Eliot is especially good. It is the music, Donoghue says, that drew him into Eliot's poetry, the music and his way with words, the displace- ment of words from their simple roles as signifiers into some other authority when rendered within a poem, an authority derived in part from sound. "Eliot's genius took the form of the auditory more than the visual imagination," Donoghue writes. === Page 145 === BOOKS 303 I, too, recall vividly that on first reading "Prufrock" one indeed had the sense of entering a sort of word-world, a world whose internal rela- tions and cadences, whose quality of diction (rather than its referents) and incantatory music, were what one knew. I certainly did not know what the poem was about—its meaning. How many of us, in our fresh- man classrooms, could have said just what it meant to "wear the bot- toms of [your] trousers rolled"? Or explained these lines: "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floor of silent seas"? But this was when one's education began. Donoghue shrewdly poses the question of what "submitting" oneself to a writer entails. In encountering Eliot for the first time you were so taken with the sensuous quality of this word- world that it came as an unexpected moral dilemma to ask whether you ought to submit to it, knowing that you could not hope to grasp the poem if you didn't. So you immediately faced the odd prospect, which Donoghue forefronts as a crucial aperture into Eliot's deeper purposes, that understanding might not always be gained in the usual intellectual ways, the ways of ratiocination. (It's the music, stupid, says Donoghue.) It was, of course, not until much later that it dawned on you how thor- oughly that early, seductive reading experience—the experience of stum- bling and chanting through "Prufrock"—foreshadowed Eliot's later, developed, religious conviction that reality depends upon faith. When I first read "Prufrock" I had never read a word of Dante. I had not read Hamlet, either—or Baudelaire, John Webster, Ovid, Verlaine, Marvell, or Froude. Whatever else, following Eliot's allusions was a marvelous education in itself, even if you didn't follow each allusion to the whole work from which it was taken. Donoghue has exceptionally sensible and level-headed things to say about Eliot's allusions, which hardly seem to have given him any pause. But even for those of us who were less formidable students than Donoghue, following Eliot to his sources was also a marvelous education for two powerful reasons. First, Eliot's allusions established a coherent anthology that served as a dialec- tical reflection on the nature of civilization. Second, Eliot persuaded you that he was in deadly earnest, and that therefore the dilemmas posed through his anthology of allusions were themselves deadly serious. Donoghue is very good at delineating the implications and quandaries entailed by Eliot's reading, with its revealing glimpses of Eliot's religious quest. I remember this as being fairly intimidating: if you were not your- self on a religious quest, you felt, you were not a serious person. Here, of course, is where the trouble starts. Donoghue's excellent lit- tle book, by beginning with music and by emphasizing Eliot's auditory mode of composition, hopes the reader can be moved along by the sheer === Page 146 === 304 PARTISAN REVIEW force of Eliot's sounds—past Eliot's beliefs to appreciation of the poetry as poetry. It succeeds, at least in part. Even so, Donoghue feels he can- not help but take up the vexed questions of Eliot's anti-Semitism and his Christianity. Donoghue, clearly at home with the literary and intellectual terrain of most of the book, seems uncomfortable, or at least less engaging, in his role as apologist for Eliot. He assumes this role self-consciously against the grain of contemporary opinion, which Donoghue sees as wrong-headed and intolerant. Donoghue thinks Eliot is not anti-Semitic and has been badly misread. And he believes Eliot's effort to imagine a Christian society is reasonable and serious, and has been dismissed for shallow reasons. For me, these are the weakest parts of this otherwise very fine book. Most of the time, Donoghue proceeds by applying the common sense of a learned and formidable intelligence to the poetry, and to the ideas within and around the poetry. He draws on an exceptionally wide set of references and does not lapse into pedantry. Hence he frequently settles for "Something along these lines is enough . . ."; and he does not shy away from saying, "I wish I knew more securely what Eliot means by . . . ." We welcome these apparently lax confessions because they are said by a widely read, even-handed, and distinguished reader. But in a few places the admirably relaxed Donoghue, on whom learning rests easily and who can sensibly take us through famously dense intellectual thickets, suddenly vanishes, and we find ourselves reading some other Donoghue, this one extremely picky and abruptly rigid. This other Donoghue, for example, wants us to think that transfer- ring "The rats are underneath the piles./The Jew is underneath the lot./Money in furs." from Eliot to Burbank would adequately rebut the charge of anti-Semitism. Or that the passage about "free-thinking Jews" in After Strange Gods should be understood as just a special case of the category "free thinkers." Donoghue's ear is usually acute, but this is not so when he says "I appreciate the fact that, since the Holocaust, Jews must be treated with particular tenderness." My point is that Eliot's ref- erences to Jews are offensive not because of some overt race-hatred on Eliot's part but because of both his tone and his blind use of Jews as examples of reprehensible behaviors or beliefs. I don't think this can be easily explained away. But neither can we damn everything Eliot ever wrote on this account alone, as if it were the very core of Eliot's writing. Eliot's ideas about a Christian society, however, bear much more cen- trally on the poetry, especially his later poetry. According to Donoghue, Eliot objects to free-thinking Jews within a Christian society because any === Page 147 === BOOKS 305 form of thought that affirms negatives, such as liberalism, rather than a particular end, in this case Salvation as Christians understand it, is rep- rehensible and divisive. Eliot valued cultural coherence and could not see that culture might be realized absent religion. Donoghue is certainly right to stress that this latter view deserves serious attention, and that it has been too easily dismissed and denigrated; but why people might not be wild about finding themselves once more the citizens of a Christian society surely is not obscure. The terrible weight of historical faith in ends has fallen brutally on those of other faiths, or of little faith, or with- out faith. Most of us are profoundly relieved, and grateful, to be able to live in a secular society—free of the despotism of absolute religious ends. Eliot’s religion—as Donoghue emphasizes—arises from and centers on his overwhelming dread of the void. It is his hypersensitivity in this respect, I think, that accounts for his lugubrious authority over so much literary judgment for so long, for his fixation on vulgarity, and for his disgust with life. I find it curious that those, like Eliot, who are over- whelmed by dread of the void never seem to consider that their hyper- sensitivity may be an unreliable guide to religious conviction, might itself lead them to sin or, in a lesser vein, intellectual error. Instead it is taken without scruple as token of one’s superiority of sensibility and intellectual rigor. Though Eliot’s immense overemphasis on the void may make him a poor religious mentor, it’s unquestionably a driving power in his poetry, the origin of his best and most moving writing. “The poetry,” as Donoghue elegantly puts it, “does not depend upon a doctrine professed but upon a doctrine felt.” And this is as true for Donoghue—and for me—in Four Quartets as in The Waste Land. The religious struggle of the poet is not, in these last poems, abstracted, but enacted through a form that Donoghue aptly speaks about in terms of music—that is, through a medium in which pattern and thought, feeling and meaning, are fused. Many readers have found these poems to be out of touch with flesh and earth, a disconnected ivory-tower kind of writing. Donoghue is responsive to this point of view, but argues ably against it. The poems take the form of a struggle between, as he puts it, ignorance and pur- pose. He conveys with delicacy and care the shifts and vagaries of this struggle—a struggle that, as he shows, takes a rugged, difficult route and ends with daunting renunciations. In Donoghue’s account, the poems say that against the grip of meaninglessness or the moment’s ecstatic glimpse of divinity we are all equally ill-equipped. Language—our best instrument of meaning-making—isn’t up to the task, and yet has to do. What it can do, and does beautifully, makes its inadequacy all the more === Page 148 === 306 PARTISAN REVIEW poignant. Here, at the penultimate moment, as it were, Donoghue's book-long tracking of the seductions and meanings of Eliot's music, with its comprehensive dependence on language and its equally comprehen- sive straining against language, pays off. The charge that the Quatets are abstract is refuted by the intense sensuousness of the language, a quality whose characteristics and meanings Donoghue has schooled us in for the whole book. And the charge, made by no less formidable a fig- ure than Geoffrey Hill, that Eliot condescends to his readers in these poems is refuted by the palpable emotional cost of Eliot's ultimate aban- donment of language, which for him is all. In the end, Donoghue dwells on Eliot's Christianity not for the sake of ideas, but for the sake of poetry. For those readers who do not share Eliot's beliefs, the poems "live," Donoghue says, alluding to a passage in William James, "by giv- ing the sense of an existence with character and texture and power." In this way Donoghue ends strongly where he began, with the assertion that "submitting" to a writer is not a matter of agreeing with some line of argument or being overtaken by a particular philosophical statement, although these matter. Rather, he says the poems should be read as such. The point is far from trivial, and its significance is the animating motif of the book, carefully titled Words Alone. Igor Webb Advice from an Elder Statesman DOES AMERICA NEED A FOREIGN POLICY?: TOWARD A DIPLOMACY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY. By Henry Kissinger. Simon & Schuster. $30.00. NO FORMER AMERICAN STATESMAN alive today receives as much abuse as Henry Kissinger. Radical critics of the historical thrust of American foreign policy pronounce him guilty of all sorts of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" during his stint as National Security Advisor and, later, as Secretary of State, as if he is personally accountable for all of the alleged damage wrought by American foreign policy, particularly in Southeast Asia and Central America, from the late 1960s through the middle 1970s. Smarmy gasbags like Christopher Hitchens, who has written a recent book in precisely this vein, seem utterly obsessed with "proving" that Kissinger is evil incarnate. Their "scholarship"-indeed, in Hitchens's case, it is possible to read a great deal about the history of === Page 149 === BOOKS 307 American foreign policy without ever running across his name—is as poor as it is politically tainted. Lost in all of this relentless bashing is any appreciation of the notion that Henry Kissinger must be counted among the more effective states- men in American history, certainly in the post-World War II era. That does not mean, of course, that all of his policies are beyond reproach from either a realist or an idealist perspective. Like every influential statesman of every great power throughout recorded history, Kissinger made his share of mistakes and had his share of moral lapses. Serious diplomatic historians have noted these shortcomings time and again with regard to American foreign policy in Southeast Asia, Latin Amer- ica, and the Middle East. But to characterize Kissinger's Weltanschau- ung as either muddled or amoral on this basis is grossly unfair. While his policies were intended, first and foremost, to advance American national interests as he defined them, he was not unmindful of the moral implications of his decisions. That same combination of stern realism and softer idealism is clearly evident in his new book on American foreign policy in the twenty-first century. In a series of well-written and provocative chapters, he traces not only the American encounter with every region of the world during the Cold War, but also the current situation within each region itself. Of particular interest here is his ability to bring a historical perspective to current affairs by using his voluminous knowledge of diplomacy over the centuries and to draw insightful parallels between the past and the present. He notes, for example, how the nature of conflicts in the mod- ern Middle East bears a striking resemblance to the nature of conflicts in pre-Renaissance Europe, especially in terms of their ideological over- tones. In the final chapters of the book, he tackles the controversial issue of globalization in both its economic and political senses, nicely round- ing out his thoughts on the direction in which he believes American for- eign policy should head in the coming decades. Kissinger begins with two unassailable premises: the international system, now, is in a period of profound and unsettling transformation and the United States, as the world's only superpower, must take the lead in managing this change. The challenge for American foreign pol- icy, he avers, will be to navigate the rocky shoals of this "New World Order" to promote both America's and the world's welfare. "Enlight- ened self-interest," though with an unabashed realist's emphasis on the latter, is his mantra. Kissinger does not simply stick to vague generalities on the direction American foreign policy ought to take, but instead offers rather specific === Page 150 === 308 PARTISAN REVIEW recommendations. A short review cannot do justice to the richness of his remarks, but they can be summarized in brief. In the realm of Euro- pean affairs, he notes that the demise of the Soviet Union, the rise of a united Germany, and the growth of European integration are all tend- ing to push the United States and Europe in different directions. The goal of American foreign policy, he argues, should be to keep the "Atlantic partnership" focused on Russia, helping that state to mod- ernize and democratize while countering any expansionist designs that it may harbor. Because of his emphasis on the continuing threat posed by Russia, he is dismayed by the way in which NATO has evolved from an alliance with a well-defined purpose-to contain the threat from the East-into a collective security organ searching for a new mandate. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that he harshly criticizes NATO's role in the Balkans. In Latin America, he asserts, the United States should make sure that the enduring peace among the states of the area is not disturbed. It should also create a NAFTA-like trade organization for the economic benefit of all. Under no circumstances, however, should the United States involve itself directly in the long-standing and severe inter- nal disputes that plague many of these states. His prescriptions for Asia, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa reflect the more turbulent conditions of these regions. The object of American foreign policy in Asia, he claims, should be twofold: to pre- serve the American-Japanese alliance and to prevent the emergence of a regional hegemon. Still, he argues that the United States should not try to inhibit China's rise to the status of a great power so long as China does not threaten American national interests. In the Middle East, according to Kissinger, the American goal should be to promote peace- ful co-existence between Israel and the Arab world as well as among the Arab states themselves. Secular and religious ideologies in the Arab world, he astutely contends, rule out a liberal-democratic, or "warm," peace for the indefinite future. Finally, he convincingly affirms that the United States has no genuine national interests at stake in Sub-Saharan Africa; hence, its primary task in this region is to ameliorate conditions after the terrible natural and man-made disasters that have blighted the African continent over the past half century. Kissinger's attitude toward the phenomenon of globalization is decid- edly schizophrenic. On the one hand, he is a firm proponent of economic globalization, believing that the spread of free-market capitalism is the quickest and most efficient way to raise standards of living around the world. With respect to those groups and states less able to benefit from economic globalization, he suggests that they be cushioned against any === Page 151 === BOOKS 309 dislocating blows by the policies of international economic organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Indeed, he condemns these organizations for not being attentive enough to the needs of the less fortunate in the past. On the other hand, Kissinger is very wary of the process of political globalization. In contrast to the "peace and justice" crowd, he is highly critical of trends that threaten to under- mine the concept of national sovereignty. He is not, it must be stressed, against "humanitarian intervention" or "universal (legal) jurisdiction" in undeniable cases of massive human rights abuses or genocide; however, he rightly fears that noble principles can and will be twisted to serve ignoble agendas. He also shrewdly points out that these principles are in fundamental opposition to democratic norms of governance. To sum up, Kissinger has written an important and engaging book. While some observers may disagree with his particular recommenda- tions for American foreign policy in this or that region, and while other observers may consider his view too alarmist, he offers a consistent and practical plan to guide America's future foreign policy decisions-a plan that strikes an eminently reasonable balance between the pursuit of national self-interest and the furtherance of international benevolence. Whatever his or her personal feelings about Kissinger's past, no policy- maker in Washington can afford to ignore his ideas. David Rodman Clement Greenberg CLEMENT GREENBERG: A CRITIC'S COLLECTION. By Karen Wilkin and Bruce Guenther. Princeton University Press. $49.95. CLEMENT GREENBERG NEVER BOUGHT a painting. He acquired his col- lection not by purchases but as gifts from artists. Artists trade with their kind partially as an act of kindred respect. Greenberg participated in the gift economy that sustains the amorphous tribe called the art world. The collection was sold posthumously to the Portland Art Museum; but Greenberg during his lifetime sold major works by Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, David Smith, and Morris Louis, considerably weakening his legacy. Pollock's cata- logue raisonné lists six works once owned by Greenberg, indicating that Greenberg sold all but one, a drawing Pollock gave Greenberg for his === Page 152 === 310 PARTISAN REVIEW birthday in 1951. The collection of Pollock's chief promoter is therefore lacking conspicuous evidence of Pollock. Greenberg's writing, sold to small magazines like Partisan Review and the Nation, might be considered as much a voluntary "contribu- tion" as a product with a price tag. During his thirty-year tenure as a "working critic," Greenberg acquired several hundred paintings, works on paper, and sculpture, mostly from the milieu he championed in New York in the forties, fifties, and sixties. He lived surrounded by art. Like an artist, driven to produce out of a necessity to have one's narcissism respected, Greenberg conducted his own education in public. Even when he erred, as he did with a negative assessment of Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie, the critic's error became the portal of further discovery: "My memory played tricks on me last week when I discussed the new Mondrian at the Museum of Modern Art. The painting has no orange, purple, or impure colors. . . . But I have the feeling that this after-effect legitimately belongs to one's first sight of the painting." As surely as Kant postulated the noumenon, the thing in itself, Greenberg believed in the authority of his first glance at a visual work. Greenberg knew the artists personally, following their work for a life- time through the cyclical phases of doubt and faith that mark major careers: "Unless the artist dies to the successes of his old work he cannot live in his new." Here he articulated a distinction between a compulsion and an addiction, placing originality where repetition was. Tirelessly, however he complained, Greenberg climbed creaking stairs to reach drafty studios, where the numbing chill yet was full of heady, invigorat- ing oxygen. He sat and looked and talked, hating paintings that were "unventilated." Artists learned to value Greenberg's informal visits; his casual remarks were aimed uncannily at the passage of paint where the artist most struggled. Still working at the end of a long week, Greenberg attended the chic Friday gallery openings, setting the standard for perti- nent discourse about painting and about the culture in which painting flourished. Such a critic was the thinking man's equivalent of the farm laborer or Marxist proletariat, living by his pen rather than his pitchfork. An exhibition catalogue gives legs to an event; the Portland collec- tion, as a body of work, remains ambulant via documentation in the Princeton publication. This monograph, conceived as an homage, pro- duced as a festschrift, offers superb color reproductions of one hundred fifty-nine works by fifty-eight artists from nine countries. Included are writings by Anthony Caro, the British sculptor who relished Green- berg's studio visits; Bruce Guenther, the curator who organized the exhi- bition; Janice Van Horne, Greenberg's widow who relinquished private === Page 153 === OWNERSHIP SO THAT THE COLLECTION WOULD REMAIN WHOLE; AND KAREN WILKIN, A STUDENT OF GREENBERG'S, WHOSE LIVELY ESSAY, AFFECTIONATE AND DETAILED, WILL REMAIN A VALUABLE RESOURCE. THE BOOK'S VISUAL DESIGN SHIFTS BETWEEN PRESENTATIONS OF THE FULL WORK AND PHOTOGRAPHS OF A DETAIL. THE DETAIL, OR CLOSE-UP, IS SUDDENLY ENOR- MOUS, EMPHASIZING THE VERY ATTENTION TO SURFACE AND TEXTURE THAT WAS ESSENTIAL TO GREENBERG'S OWN SCRUTINY. THERE ARE TWENTY-THREE WORKS BY KENNETH NOLAND AND TWELVE BY JULES OLITSKI, THE COLOR-FIELD PAINTERS WHO PURSUED A GREENBERGIAN FORMALISM IN THE EARLY SIXTIES AS POP AND CONCEPTUAL ART ROSE IN ASCENDANCE. AFTER THE EXPECTED AMERICANS- JACKSON POLLOCK, DAVID SMITH, AND OTHERS IN THE NEW YORK SCHOOL, WITH OTHERS NOTABLE FOR THEIR ABSENCE, ESPECIALLY MOTHERWELL AND DE KOON- ING-CANADIANS ARE BEST REPRESENTED WITH NINE ARTISTS, INCLUDING JACK BUSH AND DARRYL HUGHTO. THE CANADIANS-HOMELAND OF THE AUTHOR WHO WROTE HOW NEW YORK STOLE THE IDEA OF MODERN ART-SUGGEST A BRANCH- ING OUT FROM URBAN DENSITY TOWARD LARGE, AIRY LANDSCAPES. GREENBERG'S COLLECTION SHOWS ALSO HOW HE DISCOUNTED THE FIGURATIVE BASE THAT UNDER- LIES ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM, IGNORING THE LESSONS LEARNED BY THE ARTISTS WHO PASSED THROUGH THE MOVEMENT. THE FACT IS THAT THESE ARTISTS RETURNED TO THE FIGURE WITH RENEWED UNDERSTANDING OF THE RESOURCES OF PAINT TO EXPRESS, NOT SIMPLY THE FIGURE, BUT THE FEELING OF THE FIGURE. LIVING IN PROVINCETOWN IN THE WINTER OF 1950, BEGINNING TO RECORD REFLECTIONS THAT WOULD BECOME A BOOK-LENGTH JOURNAL, MYRON STOUT QUOTED THUCYDIDES: "AND BE NOT CONTENTED WITH IDEAS DERIVED ONLY FROM WORDS." STOUT WAS IRRITATED BY GREENBERG'S ASSESSMENT OF EXACTLY THE KIND OF WORK STOUT VALUED. HE REASONED THAT GREENBERG SPUN HIS GOOD THINKING TOWARD AN IMPOSSIBLE CONCLUSION. HE WROTE, SUCH PAINTERS AS THE INTRASUBJECTIVES, WITH GREENBERG AS THEIR SPOKESMAN, WHEN THEY SAY THE SUBJECT MATTER OF PAINTING IS THE MATERIAL ITSELF, SEEM TO BE ILLOGICALLY AND WILLFULLY ERECTING A FALSE THEORETICAL STRUCTURE TO EXPLAIN WHAT THEY ARE DOING. THE MATERIAL, THE PAINT ITSELF, OR ITS ARRANGEMENT ON THE CANVAS CAN NEVER BE ANY- THING BUT A PHYSICAL, TANGIBLE THING. IT IS ONLY AS A MEANS THAT IT HAS ANY VALUE TO THE PAINTER. IF THE PAINT IS THE SUBJECT MATTER THEN IT CAN ONLY BE AS A SCIENTIST THAT THEY ARE USING IT-AS A SUBJECT FOR SCIEN- TIFIC INVESTIGATION. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONFORMATION OF THE COLORS TAKES ON MEANING THAT CAN BE EXPLORED. MODERNISM AND ABSTRACTION ARE NOT NECESSARILY THE SAME THINGS. FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF ABSTRACT REDUCTION, THERE MAY BE MORE CONSEQUENCE === Page 154 === 312 PARTISAN REVIEW in drawing ordinary letterforms than in the study of anatomy or leaf forms. Greenberg absorbed this distinction between modernism and abstraction via collage rather than a feeling for the fluid calligraphy implicit in surrealist automatic drawing. Reviewing a collage exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948, Greenberg responded to col- lage's sources in cubism: "The fictive depths of the picture were drained, and its action brought forward and identified with the immediate, phys- ical surface of the canvas, board, or paper. By pasting a piece of news- paper lettering on the canvas one called attention to the physical reality of the work of art and made that reality the same as the art." Abstraction is virtually a synonym for the creative process. To abstract is to reduce to essentials, striking the bull's eye of the target. If artists keep looking up the word "abstract" in a dictionary, it is because they keep forgetting what it means. Some prefer the definition as the structure of pure thinking, like a dynamically balanced mathematical equation. The isolation of the problem as subject matter, distinguished from the subject matter of the object, creates another problem: painting itself becomes recognized as more about painting than writing about painting. Greenberg assumed that abstraction, to be "disposed of," must be "assimilated," instead of being left on the margin. He saw how the Renaissance painters, copying the pre-Renaissance painters, invented themselves. Picasso, Matisse, Klee, and Miró showed that the ideals of Western civilization could co-exist with equal dignity with the art of Africa and Mesopotamia, the American Indians and the Egyptians. Each culture presents a clear sense of the hierarchy of proportion through a sophisticated play of intervals. In place of the object the abstract artist asserted his inheritance of old-world techniques that he was incapable of using to the fullest power. The beautiful accident, automatic drawing, and improvisation are modern inspirations in art as momentous as the discovery of oil paint. Greenberg worried that the pursuit of a purely abstract art might result at last in work that is arid, decorative, and dehumanized. He per- ceived the genesis, the turning point, through which the abstract became manifest: "In turning his attention away from subject matter of com- mon experience, the poet or artist turns it upon the medium of his own craft." This focus would insure that the avant-garde would lose a mid- dle-class popularity contest. Greenberg focussed on distinguishing art from not-art as absolutely separate categories. The worst of the best would always triumph over the best of the worst: "If the avant-garde imitates the processes of art, kitsch imitates its effects." Greenberg pack- aged his anxiety in the concept of kitsch, experienced as a virulent type === Page 155 === BOOKS 313 of capitalist terrorism, subtle and deceptive like a new virus not yet understood enough to control. In making a verbal picture of a visual process the art writer functions like the literary critic. William Phillips, looking back from the perspec- tive of fifty years, told Karen Wilkin in 1990: “Art criticism is way tougher than literary criticism. When it comes to literature, you can quote. You can point to what you're talking about, and you can mix the subject up with the form. With visual art, you can't bring the subject up.” Abstraction insists that the connection between feeling and form is not representational. The artist, representing his or her self, does not represent his or her visage. As Robert Motherwell remarked, "How I look is not how I feel." Certain problems of expression cannot be solved by representational means. If the American Abstract Artists, as a group, made the case for pure abstraction, they cast it as a political opposition between art and not-art. Immediately authenticity appears in the work of Hofmann, Pollock, and others, while the emphatically pristine efforts of artists associated with the non-objective goal seem driven by ideas to outdistance themselves. Matisse only appeared as a great artist to the Hofmann people. Greenberg's collection is skewed, instructively, toward the conse- quence of a relentless formalism. He was interested in the tondo and several appear in the collection. Besides numerous shaped canvases, many circles appear within rectangles. Greenberg's formalism is finally reduced to the geometry of the object. The circle offered the escape from the rectangle. The outstanding painting in Greenberg's collection is Ken- neth Noland's first circle painting. Here the logic of formalism comes full circle, except a way out is left open. The circle is not closed. Christopher Busa === Page 156 === 314 PARTISAN REVIEW Living by the Word I Remain: VOICES OF THE HUNGARIAN POETS FROM TRANSYLVANIA. Edited by Gyöngyvér Harkó. Translated by Paul Sohár. Pro-Print. $13.00. Show me the poets you read, and I’ll tell you who you are Show me the poets you rally around, and I’ll tell you what will become of you. —"The Voice," Aladár Lászlóffy IT IS IRONIC THAT ONLY AFTER the fall of the Berlin Wall, the retreat of the Soviets from the Eastern Bloc, and the atrocities of Bosnia and Kosovo did the term "ethnic cleansing" begin to ring familiar to Amer- ican ears. A famous poem of Gyula Illyés's published in 1965, "While the Record Plays," chronicles in terms both metaphoric and literal Romania's much earlier program of ethnic cleansing of the Hungarian minorities in Transylvania for much of this century. In verse bald as news reports, Illyés's poem recounts the abduction and public execution, car- ried out with chilling deliberateness and efficiency, of a group of Hun- garian villagers. Not depicting any particular documented incident, but imaginatively reconstructing a pattern of atrocities against Hungarians, the poem shows how the wrath of the powers that be is roused by triv- ial differences of custom—"the women did not cook nor make beds as theirs did. . . . men did not greet one another as they did." The selected victims are hauled off to the marketplace by henchmen who —because of blah-blah-blah and moreover quack-quack-quack and likewise quack-blah-quack —would beat and behead them, of historical necessity—because of twaddle-twiddle and twiddle-diddle. ... The phonograph record of the poem’s title, blasted over loudspeakers during the executions in mockery of the dead, refers to the illusion of nor- malcy maintained by the West, especially during the Ceausescu regime, in === Page 157 === BOOKS 315 willful oblivion of the iniquities going on next door. Illyés depicts the horrors of both genocide and apathy in terms of the disintegration of lan- guage; the discourses of history, diplomacy, politics, whatever the cir- cumstances seem to call for, devolve into quack-quack-quack and twaddle-twiddle. The gibberish itself is ultimately replaced by the totally dehumanized scratching of the record that overtakes the end of the poem. While blatant brutalities against Hungarians have ebbed in the past decade, as recently as 1987 a Resolution of the U.S. Congress noted that the "government of the Socialist Republic of Romania and its regional and local authorities pursue a policy of denationalization toward the Hungarians and people of other nationalities in Transylvania by mea- sures approximating ethnocide." These measures included the elimina- tion of Hungarian schools; the prohibition of public use of the Hungarian language; restrictions on the publication of Hungarian books and journals; the desecration of Hungarian cemeteries, churches, and synagogues; and discrimination against Hungarians in employment, education, housing, and so on. One of the few barbarities well publi- cized in the United States was Ceausescu's Village Razing Plan of 1989, which, while never completed, sought to bulldoze thirteen thousand vil- lages in the interests of "territorial systematization" and to make way for agro-industrial complexes. Against this background of ethnic oppression, the poets represented in I Remain: Voices of the Hungarian Poets from Transylvania practice their craft. Translated and edited by an expatriot Transylvanian and an expatriot Hungarian, this bilingual volume is cause for celebration. Without aid from the hermetic, mostly academic poetry cabal or the corporate book publishing industry, I Remain is the miraculous product of two poetry lovers' selfless efforts: Paul Sohár, a chemist who has maintained a lifelong devotion to literary pursuits, and his sister-in-law, Gyöngyvér Harkó, a teacher of writing. The manuscript was printed and published in Transylvania. The ten poets represented in the collection are all well established in Central Europe but relatively unknown in this country. As a group, they revive a collective passion for signification, for voicing the unvoicable, for identifying the particulars of their experience as members of an eth- nic minority. Just how seriously these poets take their craft is exempli- fied in Aladár Lászlóffy's "The Voice": Through the ghost-sharp starry nights streaks a voice over the stagnant gold of whisperings, touching each and all: show me the poets you read, === Page 158 === 316 PARTISAN REVIEW and I'll tell you who you are. Show me the poets you respect, and I'll tell you where you're coming from. Our grandfathers' gaunt figures I see in unbearable times when our parks withered and we only had our books to tide us over the winter, Show me the poets you rally around, and I'll tell you what will become of you. Reading this poem, an American reader may feel a bit caught out. Who would have thought reading poetry could be such serious business. In the face of such zeal one feels as though one had fallen into another cen- tury—one in which ideas, verbally expressed, can create furor, incite revolutions, or get you beheaded. Not that these poems smack of any- thing but the late twentieth century in their variety of form and expres- sion. But the gravity with which they regard a poem can only emerge under terrible social and historical pressures. In a culture enervated by ceaseless, pointless reflexive irony as its primary mode of expression, to experience the barbs of those whose words actually have life-and-death import is both shaming and deeply stirring. A notable number of poems in this volume take on the subject of poetry itself—not in the navel-gazing manner of American poems- about-poetry, but in open interrogation of the craft's cultural role and efficacy under pressure. Domokos Szilágyi asks, for example, "What Can the Poet Do?" and answers by enumerating the ways in which poets can pinch-hit in times when others—scientists, celestial bodies— fall down on the job: What indeed can the poet do? He can fill the sky by scribbling stars all over it while the astronomers are asleep. He can fill the garden by scribbling roses in it while May is asleep. He can fill the beach by scribbling sunshine on it while the sun is asleep. Oh, he can find one hundred and one ways to get around the procrastinators! He can scribble hope to fill === Page 159 === BOOKS 317 time in rapid flight while the people are asleep. Transylvanian poets function as secret transmitters of hope, common experience, and empathy. Thus, it is not surprising that one Transyl- vanian poet has chosen to pay tribute to a black American blues singer, while another invokes Native Americans as brothers-in-colonization. "Blues," by István Ferenczes, invokes Louis Armstrong in its lament for all those deprived of a homeland and who make art out of their personal suffering and displacement: Ladies and gentlemen the man in whose blood they pan for gold Louis Armstrong now sings for you- Gcza Szőcs's "Indian Words on the Radio" is dedicated to the Native American writer William Least Heat Moon. As the note accompanying the poem explains, Moon was a member of the U.S. delegation to the 1985 session of the Cultural Forum in Budapest. There, he spoke on behalf of Szőcs, then under house arrest in Transylvania, presumably for incendiary writings since "the policeman watching the [Szőcs's] house [had] orders to tear the paper out of the typewriter if the poet should ever sit down to it." Moon appealed to the Romanian government to honor its poets, and to all participants of the conference to make pub- lic the names of silenced poets worldwide. Szőcs's gratitude emerges in a serio-comic poem mimicking drumbeat rhythms and showing Indians in a cavalry-to-the-rescue role blazing across Siberia. Throughout the volume poems seethe with anxiety over the role of a poet writing in a little-known and increasingly devalued tongue in a global environment in which all language grows slippery and meaning- less as it is increasingly put in the service of insidious forces-of the market or of political mendacity. Béla Markó's metaphor for poetry's potential futility is a "Blind Man's Mirror": Will I be superfluous, wiped clean like a blind man's mirror for the lack of real use and hang around for the blind to wave at so that I wave back === Page 160 === 318 PARTISAN REVIEW as he sticks his tongue out, makes a face, hurries to get ready, shaves and sings, turning this way and that changing while all around him change a hundred things? But my lines will be vain if no one will be there to whom I can recite, I will shine in vain there if unheard; brutally sharp is the image no one sees, what I am, what the other's like. Will a blind man's mirror be the word? The force of faith placed or misplaced in the power of language astonishes. Sándor Kányádi's “Into Noah's Ark” herds language aboard the famous ark of salvation along with the two-by-twos, as if saving an endangered species: “We must gather, round up everything./Even words. Not a single word,/nor expression, should be left behind.” For once the waters ebb, asserts the poet, words will give back the world itself, and all the nourishment required to live in it: from the well-preserved well-guarded words we'll re-create the first wheat kernel of our own, when we can no longer live by the word alone. To read the poems in I Remain as a group is to be reminded what a luxury it is for Americans to dwell in a relentlessly ahistorical, asocial consciousness. Not all the poems are overtly political; in fact, the anthology offers a rich amalgam of nature poems and love poems, sur- realist riffs and imagist gems, scraps of pretty ditties and extended com- plex odes, like Domokos Szilágyi's "Bartok in America" or Sándor Kányádi's mini-epic "All Soul's Day in Vienna." But the contexts of society and history, the tug of closely packed humanity with all its dis- parate desires, animosities, and traditions is everpresent. "Europe," to the poets in this volume, is what Europe was to, say, T. S. Eliot or Henry James so much earlier in our own century: an entity to contend with, a force of value and irrevocable historic events whose tendrils continue to twine one's limbs, press at one's windpipe. === Page 161 === BOOKS 319 Often, the most effecting poems are the ones that enfold the political message in figuration, as in Árpád Farkas's beautiful prose poem, "Dur- ing the Ablutions of Old Men." In the homiest trope imaginable— men bathing—the poem conveys the tenacity of the grime accumulated by the century's horrors, and the abiding need for purification. Playing on images of men washing both in public baths and in the privacy of their own yards or homes, the language, like the water it mimics, flows torrentially without pause and little punctuation to depict "the old men with their legs spread, with john-the-baptist dignity bending over the tin-plated wash bowl, that's how they wash up, as if it were for the last time they were washing up." The poet's eye pans lovingly across details of "shriveled-up palms"; the water "glistens in the gullies of their faces"; and "they don't bother wrapping a towel around their waists, the water sprays on their trousers." The middle of the poem begins to superimpose a second set of images: from behind the curtain of falling rinse water the images of their bending so often over three-quarters of a century emerge, bending to pick up a stick from the ground, to scoop up some drinking water from a brook, that's how they bent over the brook standing on the shores of Irtyish or Tisza, with the bayoneted rifles leaning against a bush, when stumbling bent over in a headlong chase of the enemy or else on the run away from it, scorching the earth, and sniffing it as they wiped off the blood The poems in I Remain bring to American eyes important, politically astute, and aesthetically adroit work that's existed too long in the halflight of political oppression. Aside from their verbal felicities, the works edify by inviting the reader to participate in a consciousness gen- erous enough to identify the individual with the century, wise enough to find home in the ground beneath one's feet. Györgyi Voros === Page 162 === LETTERS To the Editor: Herbert Lottman begins his review of my book Émigré New York by stating that "a reviewer must resist the temptation to blame the author for not having written the book he or she hoped to read." And denial, as the New York wag put it, is not just a river in Egypt. As if to confirm the pertinence of that give, Mr. Lottman, before long, tells us he is in fact "speaking of Mehlman's book as rewritten by Lottman." As to what Mr. Lottman would rather I had written, it would appear to be a book about "real men," not "ethereal beings." And the ideal type of the "real man," we are told, is André Breton at his most pugilistic. Unfortunately for him there are no known instances of punch-outs involving the "pope" of Surrealism on Fifth Avenue. So the reviewer is reduced to grumbling dismissively about the mere fact that I had decided to write about the likes of Simone Weil and the octogenarian Maurice Maeterlinck, who is dismissed, despite the numerous plays he wrote in New York, as irrelevant. As though the drama of irrelevance were not both that of many a Maeterlinck protagonist and that par excellence of the émigré. Mr. Lottman, I suspect, was aware of the unfairness (not to say irrelevance) of his review. For which reason he takes the odd step of envisaging the possibility that his comments may be nothing but "bloodthirsty." For my part, I was, I admit, more interested in the sig- nificance of the books written by my cast of characters than in the spectacle of them "punching lapels" (punching lapels?), Mr. Lottman's stated preference. Yet he has my sympathy: if his thoughts on the subject are pursued at the level of subtlety evidenced by his review, surely somewhere down the line he will discover to his cha- grin that "real men," as he calls them, don't even speak French. Jeffrey Mehlman Boston University Herbert Lottman replies: Yet I thought that my position was very clear. Few of Professor Mehlman's personae are compelling examples of "French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan," to employ his subtitle. My point was to ques- tion his odd choices, and his seem- ing reluctance to deal with others for whom the adjective "wartime" would have true significance. The author's irritation is excus- able, but not his failure to recognize the reviewer's sense of humor. He needn't have reported the barroom brawls. But there was a Vichy clan, and a Gaullist group, and a good many others committed to neither faction. The title of Mehlman's book leads us to believe there will be more interaction in it, if not action. === Page 163 === HARD BREAD PEG BOYERS "Boyers has written the poetry of another person, an opera- tion requiring the paired gifts of ventriloquist and vampire. The explicit wisdom and the mysterious reticence of 'Natalia Ginzburg' constitutes, for all Peg Boyers' modesty of address, the most original debut in my experience of contemporary American poetry." -Richard Howard "Boyers inhabits the soul of Natalia Ginzburg and, in poems of rare power, illuminates the inner lives of Ginzburg's intimates, those who wrote their way through the horrors of fascism, imprisonment and survival...a masterpiece of lyric dramatic art." -Carolyn Forché "The creation of the voice in this book-stoic, resigned, insistent on truth-is a brilliant achievement ... Read Peg Boyers' book and you will never forget it." -Frank Bidart "This is true poetry, giving voice with unforgettable specificity to the woe, comedy and heroism of a twentieth-century life." -Robert Pinsky Paper $14.00 PHOENIX POETS AVAILABLE IN BOOKSTORES. The University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu === Page 164 === PARTISAN REVIEW PRESENTS Our Country, Our Culture The Changing Role of Intellectuals, Artists, and Scientists in America, 1952-2002 MAY 10 AND 11, 2002 at BOSTON UNIVERSITY Introduction Jon Westling Edith Kurzweil The Media and Our Country's Agenda Hilton Kramer Michael Meyers Edward Rothstein Intellectuals and Writers Then and Now Norman Podhoretz Sanford Pinsker John Patrick Diggins What Happened to the Arts? Jules Olitski Robert Brustein Cynthia Ozick The Ascendance of Science and Technology Raymond Kurzweil Gerald Weissmann James Collins European/American Relations: Who Leads? David Pryce-Jones Liah Greenfeld Walter Laqueur Boston University George Sherman Union 775 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts The public is invited to attend free of charge. Open discussions will follow each session. For more information, call or write: Partisan Review, 236 Bay State Rd., Boston MA 02215 (tel) 617-353-4260, (fax) 617-353-7444 partisan@bu.edu; www.partisanreview.org This conference is made possible by funding from the Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Fund.