=== Page 1 === 1 2003 $7.00 $8.50 Canada LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI On Collective Identity Partisan Review REVIEWS Lawrence Langer Walter Laqueur Stephen Whitfield Paul Hollander Eugene Goodheart Sanford Pinsker Todd Hearon POETRY Sophie Cabot Black John Bensko Gardner McFall C. P. Cavafy (tr. Aliki Barnstone) Millicent Bell Peg Boyers Ted Genoways Jessica Goodheart Jessica Greenbaum Carol Ann Duffy William Logan Gregory A. Ryan Stephen Sandy FICTION Leslie Epstein Jiri Wyatt T THE GALLERIES Karen Wilkin JUDITH GOLDSTEIN The Myth of Anne Frank EMIL DRAITSER No Kith, No Kin STEPHEN MILLER Inside Radio Free Europe EDITH KURZWEIL An Interview with Eda Kriseova CUSHING STROUT Fictionalizing History ALBERT KEITH WHITAKER Teaching Lincoln 74851 64907 7 34> === Page 2 === A critical journal of literature and the arts edited by Hilton Kramer The New Criterion December 2000 A monthly review edited by Hilton Kramer Notes & Comments, 1 Plutarch & the issue of character by Roger K Longfellow & the fate of modern poetry by John Derbyshire, 12 Nelson Mandela by Sarah Ruden, 21 Umberto Saba by Eric Ormsby, 25 Gérard de Nerval's "Chimeras," translated & introduced by Daniel Mark E "As a critical periodical TERION is e consistently g than any ne in English." ERARY SUPPLEMENT A Cultural Review for the Rest of Us! It's honest. It's independent. 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No responsibility is assumed for their loss or injury. === Page 6 === PR WINTER 2003 Volume LXX, Number 1 CONTENTS CONTRIBUTORS 6 ARTICLES LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI On Collective Identity 7 JUDITH GOLDSTEIN Anne Frank: The Redemptive Myth 16 EMIL DRAITSER No Kith, No Kin 24 STEPHEN MILLER Inside Radio Free Europe 74 EDITH KURZWEIL An Interview with Eda Kriseova 85 CUSHING STROUT Fictionalizing History 93 KEITH WHITAKER Teaching Lincoln 106 FICTION LESLIE EPSTEIN Desert 34 JIRI WYATT Now That They Are Dead 61 FEATURES KAREN WILKIN At the Galleries 113 POETRY Sophie Cabot Black C. P. Cavafy 63 John Bensko (tr. Aliki Barnstone) Gardner McFall Millicent Bell === Page 7 === Peg Boyers Ted Genoways Jessica Goodheart Jessica Greenbaum BOOKS LAWRENCE L. LANGER Versions of an Unmastered Past 125 The Fragility of Goodness by Tzvetan Todorov. Translated by Arthur Denner The Algeria Hotel by Adam Nossiter The House of Returned Echoes by Arnošt Lustig. Translated by Josef Lustig The Bitter Smell of Almonds: Selected Fiction by Arnošt Lustig. Translated by Vera Bokovec, et al. WALTER LAQUEUR The Case of Victor Serge Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope by Susan Weissman Victor Serge, Mémoires d'un révolutionnaire et autres écrits politiques Edited by Robert Laffont STEPHEN WHITFIELD Intimacies and Mysteries Confessions of a Secular Jew: A Memoir by Eugene Goodheart PAUL HOLLANDER Special Wretchedness Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass by Theodore Dalrymple EUGENE GOODHEART Whose Rock? The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem by Kanan Makiya SANFORD PINSKER Pooh-Poohing the Postmodernists Postmodern Pooh by Frederick Crews TODD HEARON Corpse in the Kitchen, Poem in the Hole Essays of Four Decades by Allen Tate. Introduction by Louise Cowan The Lighthouse Keeper: Essays on the Poetry of Eleanor Ross Taylor Edited by Jean Valentine Carol Ann Duffy William Logan Gregory A. Ryan Stephen Sandy 133 138 142 146 150 154 === Page 8 === CONTRIBUTORS LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI's My Correct Views on Everything, edited by Zbigniew Janowski, is forthcoming from St. Augustine's Press. . . . JUDITH GOLDSTEIN is Founder and Executive Director of Humanity in Action. . . . Professor of Russian at Hunter College, EMIL DRAITSER is at work on his tenth book, Shush! Growing up in Odessa. . . . LESLIE EPSTEIN's ninth book of fiction, San Remo Drive, will be published this spring. . . . JIRI WYATT is the author of the memoir Against Capitulation. . . . SOPHIE CABOT BLACK currently teaches at Columbia University. . . . JOHN BENSKO's story collection, Sea Dogs, is due from Graywolf Press in 2004. . . . GARDNER MCFALL has published The Pilot's Daughter, a collection of poems. . . . One of the most important modern poets, C. P. CAVAFY (1863-1933) influenced T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and many others. . . . ALIKI BARNSTONE's most recent books of poems are Wild With It and Madly in Love. . . . MILLICENT BELL's latest book is Shakespeare's Tragic Skepticism. . . . PEG BOYERS is Executive Editor of Salmagundi and author of Hard Bread. . . . TED GENOWAYS's Bullroarer: A Sequence won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and many others. . . . JESSICA GOODHEART has published poems in Salamander, Cider Press Review, and other journals. . . . JESSICA GREENBAUM's first book, Inventing Difficulty, won the Gerald Cable Prize from Silverfish Review Press. . . . CAROL ANN DUFFY's Feminine Gospels will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. . . . WILLIAM LOGAN's new book of poetry, Macbeth in Venice, will be published this summer. . . . GREGORY A. RYAN has had poetry in Agni, Seneca Review, Green Mountains Review, and other journals. . . . STEPHEN SANDY's "Two for Tu Mu" will appear in his forthcoming collection, Attic Nights. . . . STEPHEN MILLER's latest book is Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought. . . . EDA KRISEOVA's work was banned in Czechoslovakia until 1989. Her only published book in the U.S. is Václav Havel: The Authorized Biography. . . . EDITH KURZWEIL, Editor of Partisan Review, has most recently written about Nietzsche and Freud. . . . CUSHING STOUT, Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies, Emeritus, at Cornell University, has written widely on American history and literature. . . . ALBERT KEITH WHITAKER's A Journey into Platonic Politics: Plato's Laws is forthcoming from University Press of America. . . . KAREN WILKIN is the curator of Vincent Barré's exhibition at the New York Studio School gallery. . . . LAWRENCE L. LANGER is Strassler Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. . . . WALTER LAQUEUR's most recent book is Generation Exodus. . . . STEPHEN WHITFIELD is the author of In Search of American Jewish Culture. . . . PAUL HOLLANDER's latest book, Discontents: Postmodern and Postcommunist, was published by Transaction Publishers. . . . Confessions of a Secular Jew is EUGENE GOODHEART's most recent book. . . . SANFORD PINSKER is a frequent contributor to Partisan Review. . . . TODD HEARON is the 2002-2003 J. Frank Dobie Paisano Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. === Page 9 === LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI On Collective Identity W HEN WE CONSIDER THE QUESTION of the identity of human collective bodies (keeping in mind the obvious caveat that all definitions of non-mathematical objects will inevitably be shaky and imprecise), we observe that it is analogous to the time-hal- lowed problem of personal identity discussed by Locke, Hume, and many contemporary philosophers. Conversely, certain aspects of per- sonal identity have their equivalents in collective identity. In short, it is impossible to talk of one without considering the other. Of the aspects common to both personal and collective identity, the first is substance, or soul—the non-material aspect of personality—and the problem of its connection with the body. This connection has been defined in a variety of ways, depending on the metaphysical doctrine one chooses to adopt—Platonic, Thomist, Augustinian, or Cartesian. For as long as the concept of substance (whether considered to be a sep- arate entity or, as in Aquinas, a composite of body and its form, i.e., the soul) retained its unquestioned legitimacy in philosophical discourse and was accepted as the immutable seat of mental life, the thing that preserves its ipseitas through all changes, personal identity was easily defined by reference to it. But once empiricist critique had undermined and dethroned it, pointing out that its presence could not be established, either directly or indirectly, substance was demoted from the status of empirical fact to that of metaphysical presupposition. Of course, the dogmas of empiricism are themselves hardly immune from criticism, in particular from the (frequently made) charge of being arbitrary. How- ever, even if we abandon the idea of substance, we are still left with the problem of how to define the experience of self—the "I" at the root of personal identity. The experience of the continuous "I" presupposes memory. Memory is the second element inherent in the idea of personal identity, and it is an essential one. There would be no continuity of identity if the entire memory of a person were erased; there can be no personal identity Editor's Note: Excerpted from My Correct Views on Everything (St. Augustine's Press). === Page 10 === 8 PARTISAN REVIEW without the memory which makes it conscious-in other words, without the consciousness of one's history. Christian theologians maintain that God is both a person and a timeless being. Such a statement may be meaningfully uttered, but we lack both the conceptual and the empirical tools to understand such a being or gain any insight into its existence. Personal identity requires not only the consciousness of one's past but also, and in equal measure, an attitude with regard to the future: a con- scious anticipation, usually tinged with a variety of emotions like hope, fear, uncertainty, joy, or despair. Anticipation is a feature of human exis- tence which a variety of philosophers, usually those of an existentialist bent, have attempted to describe, and it is the third element of identity. The fourth element is body. The body is an essential part of the very idea of personality, but this claim does not settle the question of whether disembodied human life is possible, and is logically independent from it. We have no reliable empirical access to disembodied persons. Bodily identity has been a subject of controversy at least since the paradox of Theseus's ship: if we gradually replace every part of a ship with a new one until all its original parts have been replaced, is it still (assuming that neither its structure nor its appearance has changed) the same ship? The problem with the human body seems similar, but there are important differences. First, the human body is a conscious thing, and we cannot consider its identity over time without considering the contribution of memory to that identity. I remember my body as being my own: it is always the same body, my body, no matter how much it has changed since I was born. Second, each of us has, as we now know, a unique and immutable genetic make-up which defines the identity of our body, not only during our lifetime but even after death. The fact that we are conscious of only a fraction of the processes that take place in our bodies does not alter the status of the (conscious) body as an essential part of identity. However large or small that fraction might be, we still experience the continuity of the organism to which we belong (or which belongs to us, if it seems more appropriate to put it that way-either way will do). The fact that our body's history is only partly remembered in no way affects the continuity of personal identity through memory. The fifth element of personal identity is the consciousness of an iden- tifiable beginning. We do not, and perhaps cannot, remember the first event of our lives-our own birth-but we know that it took place. This knowledge is so basic and so patently indisputable that it might seem unnecessary to mention it at all, but it is indispensable, for it is what allows me to utter with conviction the apparent tautology "I am I." If at some point I simply discovered myself as a conscious and thinking === Page 11 === LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI 9 being and had a Cartesian uncertainty about where I came from, the feeling that "I am I" would probably be impossible. I imagine that peo- ple who are uncertain about their origins in the weak, rather than Carte- sian sense-i.e., people who, although they know they must have been born somewhere, sometime, do not know who their parents were or where and when they were born-must have a seriously damaged sense of identity. Substance, memory, anticipation, body, and an identifiable begin- ning-these are the five elements (four if we set aside the first as empir- ically inaccessible) that together make up personal identity. But personality is, of course, a cultural as well as an existential phenome- non. My belonging to various collective entities is also part of what makes me a person (although this does not entail that I am no more than a part of these collective entities, nor that I am literally nothing if I do not belong to them). And human collectivities have identities of their own, which can be described in similar terms and categories. Collective identity is, even more than personal identity, a matter of degree. This is evident from the fact that we need a number of inde- dent criteria to describe it. The concept of collective identity is a legiti- mate one; its legitimacy is not undermined by the fact that both personal and collective beings are only "more or less" self-identical. Their iden- tity is no more suspect in this regard than that of physical objects. This becomes clear when we look at examples of collective entities such as ethnic communities and nations. It is an obvious truth that no nation can survive without a national consciousness. How strong that consciousness is depends on a variety of historical circumstances. When we speak of nations, we usually have in mind historically well-established ethnic communities, most often Euro- pean ones, and we are reluctant to use the term more widely-to apply it, for example, to African or Asian tribes or even to remote outposts of European civilization in North or South America or in Australia. States which lack ethnic homogeneity naturally have their own interests, and some of them may one day establish national identity on the basis of the common aspirations of their people, if these prove stronger than ethnic divisions. But when we consider peoples whose status as nations is not in doubt, as in the case of nearly all European states, we see that their collective identity is made up of the same five elements discussed above. The closest thing in collective identity to the metaphysical idea of substance is the vague idea of national spirit or Volksgeist, which finds its expression in cultural life and collective behavior, especially at times of crisis. The Volksgeist is supposed to be something that underlies cul- === Page 12 === 10 PARTISAN REVIEW tural phenomena but is not identical to them; unlike them, it is not an object of historical experience or a collection of facts, but a metaphy- sical entity (discovered by Hegel and the Romantics) with explanatory powers similar to those of the res cogitans. Like the res cogitans, it is a substance which is not reducible to the sum of its thought-acts, but is an essential condition for their occurrence. While the idea of the Volksgeist, like the idea of substance, is not empirical, and hence easily disposed of by empiricist philosophers, the other elements of collective identity are less problematic. No long proofs are needed to establish the obvious fact that national identity requires historical memory. It does not matter, for this purpose, how much of the content of that memory is true and how much half- true or altogether fictitious. What matters is the consciousness of a past: no nation can survive without the awareness that its present existence is the continuation of a past one—and the further awareness that the older those (real or imaginary) memories are, the deeper they reach back into the past, the more firmly its national identity is established. The past is preserved not only in historical knowledge but also in such things as symbols, idioms and other particularities of the language, old buildings, temples, tombs, and so on. These observations are all platitudes, so obvious that they hardly need saying. It is worth adding that what decides whether a nation is the same nation now as it was at any other point in its past is that nation's present collective consciousness. If contemporary Greeks, Italians, Indi- ans, Copts, or Chinese genuinely feel that they belong to the same con- tinuous ethnic community as their ancient forbears, then one cannot convince them otherwise. Some emerging nations have simply invented a past for themselves, ad hoc and without any genuine or verifiable his- torical reality. Such inventions are tolerated because they are necessary. National cultures change imperceptibly; we cannot pinpoint the exact moment of their metamorphosis. They evolve like languages, and like languages, eventually do evolve into what is clearly a different entity. We have no doubt, for instance, that the language of Montaigne is the same language as modern French, despite all the changes that have occurred since the sixteenth century, and we know that Latin is a different lan- guage. But a nation can lose its original language without losing the con- sciousness of its identity. (Ireland might be an example of this sad fate.) Anticipation is as essential to national identity as it is to personal identity. A nation, like an individual, thinks in terms of its future inter- ests. It worries about what might happen, tries to assure its survival, and takes measures to protect itself against possible adversity. There is, how- === Page 13 === LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI 11 ever, one important difference: a nation, unlike an individual, does not usually anticipate its own demise. The fourth aspect of collective national "personality" is body: the nation's territory, the natural particularities of its landscape, and the physical artifacts that have reshaped it. A counter-example which imme- diately springs to mind is the case of the Jews, who survived for so long without a land of their own. But they had their substitute for body: their religious identity. This was what ensured their distinctness throughout all the centuries of life in the diaspora. In the past, Jewish religious and eth- nic identities were virtually indistinguishable, and the Jews would surely not have survived as a distinct ethnic community without their religious identity, their laws and their rituals, to support and distinguish them. The fifth element essential to national identity is a nation's awareness of its origins of an identifiable beginning at some point in time. Every nation has myths that testify to this, legends about founding events or ancestral figures to which the origins of the nation can be traced. Some- times these events and figures cannot be precisely located in time, but this does not matter. It is enough that they represent an exordium tem- poris—a beginning of the nation's historical time. These five elements through which the collective "person" can iden- tify itself are also clearly visible in the way in which religious bodies define themselves. In no religious body is continuous identity so firmly established as in the Catholic Church. The same five elements which make up personal and collective identity are also present in its constitu- tion. This is partly because of its high degree of institutionalization, unequalled by any other religious community. In the case of the Catholic Church, the idea which most closely cor- responds to that of substance is the idea of the Church as a corpus mys- ticum—as the bride of Christ. Just as the idea of substance is not an empirical one, so this, too, is unverifiable: it is a question of faith. But it is essential to the preservation of the idea of the Church, the Ecclesia, as a charismatic body established by God and deriving its legitimacy directly from divine intervention in human history—an intervention more momentous than any except the act of Creation itself. And the church as a mystical body owes its unblemished purity and sanctity not to the impeccable moral conduct of its members, but to its divine origin and mission. This is why, for example, St. Augustine's battle against the Donatist heresy was so important; if the validity of the sacraments depended on the moral qualities of priests, or the perfection of the Church on the perfection of the faithful (as the Pelagians thought), the identity of the Church body would soon have been destroyed. The === Page 14 === 12 PARTISAN REVIEW Church's substance, the corpus mysticum, cannot be damaged or pol- luted by human sins or offenses. The collective memory of the Church is preserved not only in its sacred books, in historical records of its vicissitudes, in the lives of the saints, and in material monuments of faith such as temples and works of art; it is also embodied in the long tradition of Church dogmas, considered (along with Scripture) a source of doctrinal truth, and not merely as the product of the exegetical labors of theologians, popes, Council fathers, or the Holy Office. This tradition (when articulated in the official pro- nouncements of authorized bodies) is, of course, considered to be the true interpretation of Scripture, not the product of human thought: it is divine truth, not human opinion. It extends our understanding of the meaning of Revelation, but that meaning, although hidden, must already have been there if the dogmas are to be valid; it is discovered, not created. Here we touch upon the delicate question of the "evolution of dog- mas"-an idea developed in the modernist heresy, condemned by the Church, and revived by Bultmannist theologians. How far the matter really affects the Church's sense of identity depends on how one inter- prets this "evolution." It is obviously important for the continuous identity of the Church body that the basic tenets of faith be preserved forever as they are, untouchable, like the Apostolic symbols. It is equally obvious, however, that there is hardly a word in them that has not been the subject of theological and philosophical examination and dispute- beginning with the adjective "omnipotent" (apparently stronger and implying more than the Greek "pantokrator"). Both the scholastics and modern philosophers like Descartes and Leibniz have struggled with the perplexing questions to which this word gave rise. Can God reverse time and change the past? Do the truths of logic and mathematics depend on His will? And so on. The Church, understandabily, has always insisted on the absolute validity of the credo, regardless of all the hermeneutics and debates, and this insistence is one of the forms in which it asserts its doctrinal identity. Whether the (tacit or explicit) consensus of the com- munity of the faithful as to the meaning of this and countless other words has changed over the centuries is a matter for historians to inves- tigate; but it seems reasonable to suppose that there is a core of basic beliefs and thus a basic collective memory-which has withstood the efforts of theologians and philosophers to erode it. We may doubt the perfect consistency of all the proclamations issued by the Holy Office over the centuries, but the majority of the faithful is not much con- cerned with subtle theological distinctions, and the basic foundations are strong enough to allay the suspicion that they are "evolving" (in the === Page 15 === LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI 13 sense in which this verb is used in modernist heresy). Interpretations may change, and do, as do the liturgy and canon law, forms of organi- zation, and Church policy on various matters; but dogma, strictly speaking, does not, nor do the basic divine moral commandments. For a truth cannot cease to be a truth—a statement to which not only Catholics, but also many rationalists, would assent. The third element of the Church’s identity, corresponding to antici- pation, is its orientation towards the future. This, of course, remains as it has always been: the Church is the guide which will lead humanity to the harbor of salvation. But in the case of the Church there is an addi- tional significance to this element which is absent from, or at least not always present in, other kinds of collective identity: not just anticipation of the future and future interests, but also the consciousness of having an active mission. The idea of a mission can—but need not—be part of both a nation’s and individuals’ perceptions of themselves. Nations, and their ideologues, can, in addition to proclaiming the superiority of their culture, believe that they have a duty to propagate it, or that they have a special role to fulfill in world history. Individuals can believe that God’s will or destiny has entrusted them with a special mission, or they may believe that their calling in life is to serve others. But for the Church, its mission is an essential part, indeed the basic core, of its iden- tity, built into its very constitution. The fourth component of the Church’s continuous identity, corre- sponding to body, is the Apostolic Succession: the perfectly traceable and uninterrupted continuity in the handing down, over the centuries, from one generation of priests to another, of the gifts originally bestowed upon the Apostles. Individuals are born and die, but the body of the Church, in the form of this succession, retains its identity as the treasury of redemption. It is the Apostolic Succession that lends the Church a bodily identity that is stronger and clearer in its continuity than that of other col- lective organisms, such as states, political parties, corporations, or uni- versities. These may claim continuity over generations, as new members take over from those who have left or died, but there will always be an element of doubt (similar to the doubts about Theseus’s ship), whereas the Apostolic Succession provides the Church with clear criteria for the legitimacy of each new generation; it is always clear who may take his place in the collective body as the rightful successor of the Apostles, on what conditions, and on what grounds. In this very particular sense it is not a collection of physical persons that makes up the body of the Church, but the “spiritual body” which these persons together represent. === Page 16 === 14 PARTISAN REVIEW The fifth and last element of the Church's identity is its identifiable beginning. This, of course, is the birth and baptism of Christ, as well as the miracles he performed, his teachings, his transfiguration, his pas- sion, and his resurrection. In this context it need not be established when, precisely, the ultimate separation of the Christian community from the Jewish temple took place; the question is irrelevant here, and it is not one I am competent to discuss. What matters is the beginning as perceived and accepted by the Church for centuries. For all these reasons the Catholic Church retains, in spite of all the changes it has undergone, a clearer, stronger, and better attested contin- uous identity than any other collective body. The fact that all the ele- ments of its identity are strengthened by or dependent upon the power of faith is immaterial; self-perception is an essential element of continuous identity, just as in the case of personal identity. I will not go into the ques- tion of how and to what extent these criteria apply to other religious bodies, Christian and non-Christian; none has such a well-grounded identity. The position of Christian communities which broke away from the Church of Rome in the sixteenth century or later is shakier with regard to their apostolic legitimacy. Although their history from the moment of the split is well known, they have often been accused of breaking the continuity that is essential to the Catholic Church, for they abolished the sacrament of the priesthood and denied the validity of tra- dition as a separate source of doctrinal authority. The Jewish religious identity does not meet all five of the criteria discussed above, but this is compensated for by an insistence on the immutability of divine law, which in Jewish religious communities is handed down uninterruptedly from generation to generation. The great Oriental religions have their sacred books, of course, but none of them has a well-defined body of scripture endowed with the status of divine revelation, as in the case of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Here, too, identity is a matter of degree. It is worth noting that the Church's recent expansion of ecumenical spirit and increasing openness towards other traditions is perceived by many as an erosion of its identity. And it is true that this trend to open- ness (of which the Church's decision to stop condemning heresies is also part), however laudable, might blur the borderline which makes the Catholic Church distinct from other churches. But acceptance of toler- ance and religious freedom can coexist with the Church's persistent will to assert its distinctness and its unique place in the world. Since the Devil, as theologians used to teach, is the ape of God, there is nothing astonishing in the fact that some more recent, secular ideo- logical bodies also appeal to similar criteria of identity. The communist === Page 17 === LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI 15 movement had an analogous attitude to its sacred texts (memory), which could be reinterpreted and applied in new conditions without undermining the eternal validity of the originals. The movement was supposed to be embedded in the great plan of History, and its aim was to further the realization of this plan; thus, it acquired both its univer- sal meaning (substance) and its mission (future-directedness, i.e., antic- ipation). It had a hierarchy and a supreme authority, whose members were empowered to pass judgment on the validity of its particular ele- ments (body). It considered itself appointed by History as the carrier of truth and the leader of mankind on its march to ultimate salvation, but it could also point to a well-defined origin in time (an identifiable begin- ning), namely the birth of the collective Messiah. Similarly with the clas- sical Freudian movement, where we can observe a fairly exact parallel with the Apostolic Succession: the healing art may be practiced only by those who have been anointed by another who has been similarly anointed, and so on down to the initial, self-anointed Founder (the only one who could, and did, apply the liberating therapy of psychoanalysis to himself; no one after him was able to repeat this feat). Both ideological movements and religious bodies consider themselves to be the bearers of truth; the claim to truth is inscribed into the very meaning of their existence. Such a claim is not among the criteria of identity which can be applied to other continuous entities, nations or individuals. But such entities do make a claim which may be considered roughly analogous, namely a claim to legitimacy. Both persons and nations claim legitimacy by the very fact of their existence: they are there, so they are legitimate. Moreover, they are there necessarily, not contingently: both persons and nations, in their act of self-assertion, assert the necessity of their existence, for they cannot conceive of a world from which they are absent. There is one more thing that should be mentioned. The assertion of self-identity, whether by an individual, by an ethnic group, or by a reli- gious body, always involves a danger: a desire to dominate others. In defending his legitimacy, an individual may easily come to feel that he must affirm it by expanding his power; a nation will protect its identity by hostility to other nations, by conquest and domination; a religious body, as the bearer of truth par excellence, is easily tempted to believe that its right and its duty is to destroy the enemies of truth, i.e., other religious communities and forms of faith. Even if we admit that the desire to assert one's identity by hostile expansion is by no means always and everywhere inevitable, the truth remains (however Nietzschean it may sound) that it is ultimately the stuff of which most of the world's history is made. === Page 18 === JUDITH GOLDSTEIN Anne Frank: The Redemptive Myth F OR MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, Anne Frank's history has come to sym- bolize one of Europe's deadliest conflagrations—a time when one nation set fire to its democratic government, ravaged countries all over the continent, destroyed Jewish life in Eastern Europe, and irreparably damaged Jewish existence in many Western European coun- tries, as well. The outlines of Anne Frank's history are clear: the escape with her family from Germany and resettlement in 1933 in Amsterdam, where her father Otto Frank had a business; German occupation of the Netherlands in May, 1940; and the family's flight in 1942 into hiding in the attic above Otto Frank's office. Then betrayal and capture in August 1944; imprisonment in Westerbork, a transit camp; deportation to Auschwitz in September 1944; and death in Bergen-Belsen a few weeks before liberation in March 1945. Otto Frank's return as the sole surviv- ing member of the family led to publication, in the early 1950s, of the diary found by Miep Gies after the police arrested the Franks and to posthumous fame for Anne and her family. The Diary of Anne Frank and derivative theatrical productions have made a unique impact on children and adults throughout the world. The writing bespeaks courage, misery, persecution, and resistance. Anne Frank has come to represent the child, in her mid-teens, struggling to maintain hope and faith in mankind, if not in her own future. The most famous quote from her diary is, "In spite of everything I still believe people are good at heart." Sudden capture stopped the testimony of inner thoughts. An aura of sweet optimism and faith surrounds the Diary. Unfortu- nately, the sentiments are misapplied. Cynthia Ozick's critique is closer to the truth. She described the Diary as a "chronicle of trepidation, tur- moil, alarm. . . Betrayal and arrest always threaten. Anxiety and immobility rule. It is a story of fear." People know that Anne, her sister, and her mother were exterminated, but for many readers Anne's story ends with the hope that "people are really good at heart." These words, I believe, are the key to understanding the conversion of her diary and persona into a redemptive myth. === Page 19 === JUDITH GOLDSTEIN 17 Ian Buruma wrote that Anne Frank has "become a Jewish Saint Ursula, a Dutch Joan of Arc, a female Christ." He concluded, "Anne is a ready-made icon for those who have turned the Holocaust into a kind of secular religion." I would take the comparisons even further. Despite the evolution of Europe's postwar secular spirit, the myth derives much of its force from a deeply ingrained Christian template. Anne's story con- verges on elements of Christian belief and symbolism: a hidden child, a virgin, a betrayal, the Holocaust as Hell, a form of resurrection through words. The redemptive tale seems tragically simple, but the real history is complex and convoluted. It is part of a national tragedy in a country of contradictions. The German occupation exacerbated passive political and social habits that affected the individual and collective life of the Dutch. The Anne Frank legend has further blurred the history of Dutch Jews and the Dutch nation during the War. A sorting out is long overdue. In an essay published in early 1981, the American historian Simon Schama highlighted some of those Dutch paradoxes in regard to the Jews. Schama was writing about Rembrandt's time, when Jews were welcomed in Amsterdam but also subject to restrictions in terms of occupation, membership in guilds, political rights, and religious expres- sion. In his introduction to an exhibition of Rembrandt's images of Jews in the Netherlands, Schama wrote, "The relationship of the host culture to its Jewish immigrants was . . . clouded with ambiguities." He con- tinued, "Compared with other seventeenth century options, it cannot be overstressed, the Dutch Republic was a paradise of toleration and secu- rity." He described Amsterdam in the seventeenth century as a "rela- tively benevolent milieu" for Jews-one in which they could develop an identity in the Dutch context. For its sheer regularity, the undisturbed ordinariness, with which Amsterdam Jews went about marrying, raising their young, bury- ing their dead, cleaning their houses before Pesach, gathering together in their splendid temples for the Sabbath and the solemn feasts and fasts-that testifies most eloquently to the emergence of an authentic Dutch Jewish culture. In some ways Amsterdam, with its hectic oscillation between mass piety and mass hedonism, was an odd habitat for this Great Calming Down to occur. . . . Despite the golden crown on the spire of the Westerkerk, it wasn't really Jerusalem. But then it wasn't Babylon, either. With this remarkable advance in acceptance by a European country, the Jewish population in the Netherlands continued to expand and con- === Page 20 === 18 PARTISAN REVIEW fidently regarded itself as part of the Dutch nation. In Rembrandt's time, the Jewish population was 10,000. Two centuries later, it was 140,000. By 1940, many Jews had attained high levels of prosperity, recognition, and acceptance in Dutch life, although not to the degree characteristic of German Jews before the rise of Hitler. Forty percent of the Jewish population lived in small villages, towns, or cities such as the Hague. The other 60 percent lived in Amsterdam. A large number of them were poor. Through the 1930s, Dutch Jews focused on internal issues of assimilation, integration, and the well-being of the Jewish community despite the fact that Nazi rule in Germany compelled thousands of Jews, such as Otto Frank, to seek refuge in the Netherlands. The Dutch haven appeared secure until the spring of 1940, when Germany conquered the Netherlands. The Dutch fought for five days and then capitulated. The Queen and government fled to London, estab- lished a resistance government in exile, and urged the Dutch at home to oppose the Germans. The presence of thousands of Germans-as administrators, police, and soldiers-the acquiescent Dutch civil service, and the active support of Dutch Nazis quickly turned the Netherlands into a subject state. The government in Berlin put the Dutch under the control of Seyss-Inquart, an accomplished Nazi fresh from anti-Semitic conquests in Austria. From that point on, Amsterdam was neither Jerusalem nor Babylon. It was hell. It didn't take long for the Germans to differentiate Jews from other Dutch citizens through anti-Jewish decrees and administrative acts: first, prohibition against Jewish civil servants and teachers; then, in 1941, violent assaults against Jews in the Jewish Quarter in Amsterdam. The Germans insisted that the Jews form a Jewish Council to make their community respond to increasingly punitive German demands. Jews were separated from the rest of Dutch society when their rights to prop- erty, education, work, and mobility were taken away. Jews were not allowed to use trams or bicycles, enter parks or swimming pools, go to movie houses, or use beaches. Children's schools were segregated, uni- versities were closed to Jewish professors and students, and Jewish musicians and actors were no longer allowed to perform. Shopping was only allowed in narrow time slots. These were the same kinds of restric- tions that the Germans imposed upon their own Jews in the 1930s. Initially, German policies of disenfranchisement and persecution infu- riated the Dutch. In February 1941, they launched a general strike, which closed down the docks, the transportation system, and industry. This great spasm of opposition to the Germans-and outrage against the treatment of the Jews-lasted three days. The punitive German === Page 21 === JUDITH GOLDSTEIN 19 response pushed the Dutch back into acquiescence and did nothing to stop the increasing physical isolation of the Jews, their economic ruina- tion, and the eventual roundups and deportations. Resistance flared again in the spring of 1942, when every Dutch Jew was ordered to buy and wear a yellow star with “Jew” written on it. Many Dutch non-Jews wore the yellow star or a yellow flower in solidarity. It made a strong impression on Miep Gies, protector of the Frank family. “The yellow stars and yellow flowers those first few days were so common,” she wrote in her book Anne Frank Remembered, “that our River Quarter was known as the Milky Way. . . . A surge of pride and solidarity swelled briefly until the Germans started cracking heads and making arrests. A threat was delivered to the population at large: anyone assist- ing Jews in any way would be sent to prison and possibly executed.” Life for Jews in the Netherlands ground down to a devastating pat- tern of anxiety and violent roundups for Jews, their protectors, and those in the resistance movement. Unlike the Jews in Denmark who could escape to Sweden, the Dutch Jews had nowhere to go. Some, such as the Franks, withdrew into hiding. They were totally dependent on their Dutch protectors who resisted the Germans by housing, feeding, clothing, and caring for Jews. Of the 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands in 1940, about 20,000 went into hiding. Approximately 7,000 of them were discovered. They shared the fate of the majority of Dutch Jews: removal to the Westerbork camp and then deportation to Sobibor and Auschwitz in the East. By the time the process was complete, 110,000 Dutch Jews had been killed. The German occupation sorely challenged traditional Dutch atti- tudes, built upon a seemingly strong façade of tolerance and compro- mise. The political and social acceptance of differences obscured the fateful gulf between tolerance, on the one hand, and disinterest and dis- engagement, on the other. In regard to national cohesion and separate ethnic, religious, and political identities, the war tested the viability of the so-called Dutch pillar society, based upon separate realms of alle- giance among Protestant, Catholic, Socialist, and Liberal groups. With insidious understanding of these affiliations and, above all else, the Dutch yearning for order, the Germans surgically removed the Jews from Dutch life. And so the Jews disappeared from the realm of moral concern. Despite the humiliation and anxiety of occupation, only in the last year of the war did the non-Jewish Dutch—principally those in the large northern cities—suffer acutely from the depletion of goods and the dan- gers of forced labor in Germany. The German defeat finally came to the === Page 22 === 20 PARTISAN REVIEW northern part of the country on May 4, 1945. When the Germans finally surrendered, the Dutch celebrated in the streets for days. The Queen returned. "People who had been in hiding came out onto the streets," Miep Gies wrote. "Jews came out of hiding places, rubbing eyes that were unused to sunlight, their faces yellow and pinched and distrustful. Church bells rang everywhere; streamers flew. . . . To wake up and go through a whole day without any sense of danger was amazing." And then came the questions and the counting—a new kind of reck- oning amid the decay of civilized life. Miep Gies recounted that she and her husband Henk and everyone else began waiting to see just who would be coming home to us. Shocking, unimaginable accounts circulated of the lib- eration of the German concentration camps. Pictures were printed in the first free newspaper; eyewitness information, too. Through the occupation we'd heard rumors of gassings, murder, brutality, poor living conditions in these camps, but none of us could have imagined such atrocities. The facts had far surpassed even our most pessimistic imaginings. . . . I needed to do everything I could to keep my optimism about our friends. It would have been unbear- able to think otherwise. Their friends included nine Jews who had been hiding above the offices where Gies had worked for Otto Frank's firm. Day after day she asked returning Jews if they had seen any of the Frank family. In June, Otto Frank returned to the Netherlands from Auschwitz with the news that his wife had died there. He was unsure about what had happened to his two children, Margot and Anne. Months later he got word from a nurse in Rotterdam that the daughters had not survived their impris- onment in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. The finality of all the deaths mixed into the tortured lives of those who survived. "I heard it said," Gies wrote in her book, "that where the Jews had looked like everyone else before [the war], after what they had endured, those who returned looked different. But people hardly noticed because everyone had been through so much misery that no one had much interest in the suffering of others." Despite the fact that Dutch Jewry lost nearly 75 percent of its population—the highest number of deaths in any Western European country under occupation—despite the fact that the Dutch Jews had lost everything, the few who came back were expected to make do with what they found, or did not find, of their former lives. === Page 23 === JUDITH GOLDSTEIN 21 Frieda Mencoo was fifteen when she returned from Auschwitz with her mother. They were the only survivors of their large family that had lived in the Netherlands for over three hundred years. "When we came back," she recalled, "we tried to tell people of our experiences. But nobody wanted to listen. The authorities considered us as a pain in the neck. A few who came back and wanted something." The survivors were told to be quiet-to keep their nightmares and losses to them- selves. A once thriving Jewish Dutch world of family, community, insti- tutions, and property was gone. The Dutch constructed effective bureaucratic remedies to bury Jewish claims to emotional and full finan- cial restitution. Many survivors retreated into silence as European coun- tries began to rebuild, to cleanse themselves, and to adjust to the development of the Iron Curtain. Amidst rebuilding civilized life in the postwar world, Europeans and Americans constructed comforting wartime myths, especially myths about resistance. This is particularly true about the Dutch, who sought to restore a viable nation after the trauma of occupation and the erosion of the pillar society. In a seminal essay, Matthijs Kronemeijer and Dar- ren Teshima described this process: [This new] identity was built upon the heroic stories of resistance in the Netherlands to the Nazi regime and the belief that Dutch society had stood by and protected its Jewish citizens. While indi- vidual acts of heroism and resistance certainly existed, the forma- tion of a national myth focused on these acts and extending this heroism to describe the entire Dutch nation obfuscated the truth of the war experience. The world thinks that the Franks were emblematic of what happened to the Jews in the Netherlands. From Anne's story, the international public has gained the impression that whole Jewish families could go into hiding together; that most could remain in one place for a few years; that numerous Christian friends or employees could sustain and succor them in hiding; and that the unfortunate hidden Jews were the ones betrayed by some unknown informer. And there was the final impression: that after the war Dutch Jews would be welcomed back to the country in which they had lived. In the Netherlands, as in all European countries, there were extremes of valor and decency along with villainy, greed, brutality, and cow- ardice. In the large middle ground there were bystanders who lived with fear and indifference to the threatened minority. At Yad Vashem in === Page 24 === 22 PARTISAN REVIEW Israel and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, thou- sands upon thousands of Dutch are honored as Righteous Gentiles, including Miep Gies. Risking their lives, they had to resist not only the Germans but their fellow citizens as well. Yet Dutch collaborators or Nazis—as well as rogues just desperate for money—hunted Jews down and turned them over to the authorities. In the official report on the Franks, the record simply states that someone was given the pitifully small amount of sixty guilders—seven guilders for each person he turned over in the Frank hideout. The history of Otto Frank and his family was unique in many ways. Most of the Dutch were too afraid of German terror and punishment to aid those in hiding and most couldn't be sure that their neighbors could be trusted. Most Jewish families were broken up, as children were sent away by themselves into hiding and people had to move from place to place to escape detection. Many Amsterdam Jewish families were too poor to pay for places to hide, although a considerable number of Dutch protected Jews without initially asking for payment. And then, after the war, most Dutch Jews came back to a society that was largely indiffer- ent or cruelly hostile to what the Jews had suffered. Otto Frank's wel- come was an exception. Miep Gies and her husband, who had protected and aided the Franks in hiding, received him warmly, brought him into their family for seven years, and helped him to rebuild his life. These exceptions never impinge on the myths. In the service of the redemptive legend of Anne Frank, there is a pattern of pilgrimage to 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. People go to Anne Frank's house to have contact with a consecrated space of suffering. The Dutch are somewhat appalled that the Anne Frank House is such an attraction for tourists— especially for Americans who pay homage to Holocaust remembrance. Nonetheless, this flood of attention is a convenience and a distraction for the Dutch—as well as a lucrative source of income. Tourists don't dig deeper into the history, and the Dutch don't push the matter. Few of the visitors explore what happened to the rest of Dutch Jewry and to the Dutch themselves. There are 800,000 visitors annually at the Anne Frank House, but only 19,000 visit the Hollandse Schouwburg, the for- mer theatre—now a museum and a monument—where the Germans processed many Dutch Jews for deportation. There is a clear irony here. The 1950s public, including the Dutch, welcomed Anne Frank's miraculously preserved diary. But had she her- self returned, few in the Netherlands would have wanted to learn about her suffering. Testimony was not in style. After enduring the occupation and the impoverishment of both the economy and public morale, the === Page 25 === JUDITH GOLDSTEIN 23 Dutch didn't want to hear about the orderly disappearance of 110,000 Jews between 1942 and 1944. There is, however, one place in Amsterdam, and maybe others as well, where the myth of Anne Frank does not flourish. This is in the social hall of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue. After attending a service in the sanctuary, one goes into an adjoining room to eat and socialize. On the central wall is a picture of Anne Frank at age twelve-one that we have all seen numerous times. There is no written explanation on the wall-no attempt at identification, just a remembrance. The Franks were members of the original Liberal Jewish Synagogue. No one in the congregation needs any explanation for what happened to her. In this place, there are no misconceptions concerning the symbolic and the real Anne. The burden of living with that past is hard enough. Living in today's somber shadows of Dutch tolerance, indifference, national victimization, and the Anne Frank myth may be almost as hard. Aufbau [ The Transatlantic Jewish Paper ] New York Bilingual (English / German) Insightful Controversial Berlin founded 1937 Free Trial Subscrltion: (212) 873 7400 or www.aufbauonline.com === Page 26 === EMIL DRAITSER No Kith, No Kin UGUST 1949. I'm twelve. I don't feel like going home. Empty, devastated, I roam the streets making wider and wider circles around my house. At first I go around our block. Trying not to raise my head, I go along Lanzheron Street, turn on Gavan Street, then on Deribas Street. From the newsstands on my right and my left, the headlines of Pravda, Izvestia, Literary Gazette, Soviet Ukraine, and the Black Sea Commune shout at me: "Cosmopolitanism's Ideology of Imperialist Bourgeoisie," "Love Our Motherland, Hate Cosmopolites," "Rootless Cosmopolitanism Serves Warmongers." Sometimes I manage to raise my head. But I wince every time I see a Jewish name in the headlines: "Anti-Patriot Brovman, Without Kith or Kin," "Geldfeinbein's Slanderous Writings," "Cosmopolite Kholtsman's Sabotage." "People without kith or kin," I repeat. I still don't fully understand its dark purpose. I get only its literal, bitter sense. The earth hasn't cooled down yet from the flames of the war. The bones of the slain haven't crumbled into dust yet, haven't vanished without a trace. My kin, my tribe, are nearby, under the very same soil I am treading with the soles of my imitation-leather sandals. To be without your kin, without roots, means knowing neither your grandfather, nor your great-grandfather. If I belong to the "rootless," I am not of the native population. Does that mean my roots are some- where far away? Or am I a human tumbleweed? In the autumn I had seen how large, prickly balls were swept by the wind across the naked fields. These gray freaks would jump up on lumps of dry soil, turning over so quickly as they moved that I could hardly see their crushed lit- tle roots. I share a long martyrology with many others of my generation. Only now, a half-century later, do I attempt to glue together the image of my never-seen grandfather. Who was Wolf Bendersky? Where did he come from? Where did he go? What happened to him in between? In 1949 I didn't want to know anything about my Jewish ancestors. In front of me, in the haze of time, my future fluttered, full of anxious, === Page 27 === EMIL DRAITSER 25 aggravated awareness of being an untouchable. I would be deprived of my people’s language, history, and culture. Without memory it’s not sur- prising that one is not a human being any more, but a trifle, a sifting. This feeling of inadequacy has stayed with me for many years. In the end, it often forced me to act against my own interests and common sense. It’s painful to admit it, but life is not a movie-you cannot stop it, rewind to the original reel, and run it again at its old speed. There was one more reason why I didn’t ask questions then. To dig into one’s memory is a luxury of leisure, of relaxation, of at least some inner comfort. None of us had it then. Although the war was over, the danger was still there-in every knock on the door, in every hostile passerby, in the reek of every drunkard who could say that Hitler had started his work, but hadn’t finished it. Besieged on all sides by leaden words, one’s head goes down between one’s shoulders, as mine had done in July and August of 1941, in the base- ment of our building, when the German bombs burst above our heads. Now, half a century later, I see myself as an unhappy boy, upset by malicious newspaper articles, wandering around his hometown. What did I know then about my roots, my grandfather, except that he hadn’t been around for a long time and he’d never be back? As an ancient Scythian vase can be recreated by fitting together the shards, can I recre- ate the image of my grandfather from the fragments of somebody else’s memory? No photos are left-they had all burned in the flames of war-but those who remembered him recall a wide, graying beard. I try to picture him with the features of his children. His older ones, my uncle Mitya and my aunt Clara, resembled each other, even in old age, in their noble beauty. Thick black eyebrows, dark eyes under long lashes, a dimpled chin, and the elegant oval of their faces. I know that my grandfather perished in Odessa, during the German (and Romanian) occupation. Before finding out how he died, I want to know how he lived. What kind of person was he? Mama used to say that he was a deeply religious scholar. He read a thick book. She showed with her hands how incredibly thick the book was. At that time War and Peace was the only thick book I knew. Only later did I guess that Mama had the Old Testament in mind. (I myself would see a Bible for the first time in a library in Rome many years later, in the first week after my arrival from my native land, which I had left forever.) My grandfather was a native of Uman, Ukraine. From there, in the early 1930s, Jewish families scattered all over the world, stirred up by the revolution, the Russian Civil War, pogroms, and post-revolutionary === Page 28 === 26 PARTISAN REVIEW tensions. Those who had relatives in America headed for New York or Baltimore. Others settled closer. With his newlywed wife Riva, the near- sighted daughter of a floor polisher, my grandfather's son Morris—we called him uncle Mitya—left for Minsk in the north. Grandfather's son Avrum, his daughters Clara and Soybel (my mother), set out for the south, lured by the warm, seething Black Sea and the promise of a bet- ter life. Only the oldest daughter, the beautiful Esther, stayed behind in Uman—her granite tombstone was too heavy for her to lift. The bloody year 1919 did not spare Uman. It rolled over the town with its iron harrow of pogroms. While fighting for an independent Ukraine, Petlyura's Cossacks gave their long-held anti-Semitism full rein. Day and night, for a whole year, cantors' voices at funeral services for the victims echoed around Uman. Their heads in their hands, the survivors wailed: “How could this happen here?” But you, Grandfather, would know how true the words of Ecclesj- astes were: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” You would know, Grandfather, it had happened before. And more than once. One hundred and seventy years before Petlyura, the Haydamaks, bands of Ukrainian rebels, had pounced on Uman. Casually, without dismounting, they cut off many Jewish heads with their swords, pierced women's breasts with their spears, set fire to the town. Twice more, in twenty-year intervals, as if letting a new generation grow up, the Hay- damaks returned. In 1768, as new unrest stirred in the land, Jews from the surrounding towns looked for protection in Uman, a garrison town by then. To the same green banks of the Umanka River, drunk with fury, Haydamaks came tearing along, waving their swords. They slashed to death all the Jews, the locals and the refugees. Garrison or no garrison, the troops did nothing to protect them. Twenty more years passed, and again Haydamaks' horses' hooves broke up the dry soil. The Cossack chieftain of the town's garrison, Ivan Gonta, met the leader of the rebels, Maxim Zheleznyak, at the town gates and proposed that Christian lives be spared in exchange for those of the "yids." So the Haydamaks burst into the town and, with their three-tailed lashes, rounded up the Jews in the town's square. The fierce Ironman was a great warrior, but, as if in mockery of his nickname, he had a little failing—he was born softhearted. The Ironman gave the mis- erable nonbelievers a chance to save their lives. He ordered the erection of a huge wooden cross in the middle of the square. And he announced === Page 29 === EMIL DRAITSER 27 that he wouldn't touch those who, of their own will, would come under the protection of the only true God, Jesus Christ, whom they had mur- dered. Those who, in their stupidity, would not appreciate the Iron- man's mercy, would have their throats cut at once. Once again, the Ironman would regret his soft heart. Far from rush- ing to save their lives in exchange for an alien faith, the Jews began to say farewell to one another and chant Shema Israel. Zheleznyak became annoyed. Instead of giving his Haydamaks the rest they deserved after many battles on the fields of Ukraine, he had to order them to work. Finishing off twenty thousand unarmed people was hard labor, too. They barely managed to complete the job in three days and three nights. Jewish blood forever soaked the dirt of the square. On June 18 (the fifth day of Tammuz), later generations of Jews would pray and fast in memory of this Uman massacre. To bring peace to the martyrs' souls thirty years after the massacre, Rabbi Nakhman, the famous tsadik (Talmud scholar) from Breslaw, his last hour approaching, came to Uman to die in their cemetery. To this day, every year, on the holy day of Rosh Hashanah, Hassidic Jews clothed in white robes arrive from all over the world to prostrate themselves on his grave, to read the prescribed Psalms and have their sins forgiven. On August 1, 1941, some twenty years after Petyura's raid, to con- firm the bloody prediction of Ecclesiastes, General Guderian's tanks would cross the shallow Umanka River. Their caterpillar tracks clank- ing, smashing the cobblestones, they rolled into the town's square. A month and a half passed, and on September 15 they gathered all Uman Jews and chased them toward the airport. There, on the square in front of it, trenches resembling pits for potato storage were dug. The soldiers put sacks of lime on the ground at regular intervals. One after another, undressing and neatly folding their clothes, as if before bathing, Uman Jews lined up in front of machine-gun muzzles. First, using the handles of their Parabellums-their pistols-the Germans smashed the chil- dren's heads as if they were coconuts. "Only after they inflicted on mothers the most horrifying pain would they shoot them, freeing them from unbearable torture. Grabbing the little legs, they threw the children's little bodies after them into the trenches," wrote one German army officer, Über-Leutnant Bingel, to his superiors. I read these lines in his report now and once again I wince, realizing the power of chance over our fate. If my mama hadn't left Uman just a few years earlier, if she had stayed in her native town, my still-soft skull would have been crushed as well. === Page 30 === 28 PARTISAN REVIEW During three years of occupation by the Wehrmacht troops, seven- teen thousand Jews in Uman would lie down under the bullets, filling the neighboring ravines and gullies with their bodies. Why would they calmly undress while the rifles were loaded? Why would they accept their death without murmur? Would they really come to realize the jus- tice of Ecclesiastes's words: "As he came forth of his mother's womb, naked shall he return to go as he came"? But I don't want to get ahead of myself. In the early thirties, life for my grandfather, as well as for other Jews in Uman, had become difficult. The ties of time came undone. The young scattered in all directions, attracted to the lights of big cities. Why survive the revolution, and Petlyura, and blood, and hunger, and still stay in the same place that had been prescribed by the tsar, the Pale of Settlements? Buoyant Russian songs rang out over the radio: "We have no barriers on the sea and on the earth!" The new generation openly laughed at their ancestors' faith. Synagogues were turned into ware- houses for turnips, potatoes, and beets. For the young, the old Jews dressed for prayer seemed like scarecrows at a country fair. Moscow was far away, in the north. You would need a lot of winter clothes up there. Grandfather Wolf's own people-his sister-in-law with her husband and their children-headed south, to the Russian Paris. They settled there and got acclimated. The city was large; there would be enough space for everyone. Odessa was a city of promise. The fact that she was open to the sea raised hopes that winds of freedom would blow down her streets-opportunity for another life, not quite clear, but limitless to the imagination. At their children's urging, Grandfather Wolf and his wife Khava left Uman. What happened next? I question those who might remember him. Subconsciously, I expect to meet in these stories not a living man, but a holy one. Remoteness in time makes a figure pristine. But what I hear catches me off guard. It makes me uncomfortable. Arriving in Odessa, my grandfather couldn't keep up with the "mighty step" of the times. He lagged behind. He brought his Uman with him. It kept beating under the pocket of his new city jacket. With its customary rhythm, it made its presence felt. "Do I remember your grandfather!" Uncle Misha says, his eyes wide open, as if I had asked him a very stupid question. "Do I remember him? Ha! I met him before you were born when I came from Minsk to Odessa for your parents' wedding." My uncle would have been no more than eleven then. === Page 31 === EMIL DRAITSER 29 "Maybe you won't be pleased to hear it," he says in tender mockery. He averts his eyes and raises his hand as if inviting someone from above to witness his love for truth. "But I'll tell you the way it was. No bull- shit. Your grandfather was lazy." I am taken aback. "What do you mean?" "Lazybones was his first name and lazybones was his patronymic! He didn't lift a finger!" "How did he survive?" "Your Grandmother Khava worked like a horse. And he read his books! He wasn't that old yet. He was ... wait, let me count. . . . He would have been about fifty-five . . . fifty-seven, no more." "He read books? What kind of books?" "What kind? What kind? It's clear what kind. His Bible . . . the Tal- mud. Well, it was time for him to realize! He was in Odessa, not in his bedraggled Uman! I understand that over there he was considered a sheiner Yid. Eidel, noble. Erlikher—honest and religious. A khokhem, a wise man, a great Talmud scholar. Three times a day he was off to his synagogue. Meeting him on the streets, everyone bowed. Reb Bender- sky, my respect to you. In the synagogue he occupied the place of honor, by the Eastern wall, close to the Torah gates. They gave him the most important passages to read aloud. They baked matzos for him first. They invited him to their homes and sat him at the head of the table, and he was the first to be served. They considered it a great honor when he held their children before bris. They were all crazy about learning." Uncle Misha shakes his head in disbelief. "Okay, I understand, in Uman he had a great ikhes, status, so to speak. I accept that; for a Jew with ikhes, working with his hands was a big misfortune. He had to devote all his life to the study of the Torah. Well, tell me what good was such learning? You can't even fry a potato with it. It would just burn. In Uman, it was your grandmother who toiled like a slave. Of course, over there, to take care of her khokhem of a husband brought her every- body's honor and respect. But she shouldn't have been so backward! Ikhes-shmikhes was left in Uman. You're in Odessa now! Reb Bender- sky, wake up! Come to your senses! Here you're gurnisht—a nobody, a small fry who thinks he's a big fish. You should work—not read your books! But no! The same old story! Your Grandma Khava's running to rich Jews' houses cooking for birthdays, circumcisions, bar mitzvahs, and weddings. And your Grandpa Wolf—may God forgive me such blasphemy, of course—the same old story! It's raining or snowing- three times a day he's off to Pushkin Street, to the city synagogue. Ah! It was unheard of! A woman supports a man! Shame and disgrace!" === Page 32 === 30 PARTISAN REVIEW I recall my cousin Eva’s story. Soon after the war, on Yom Kippur, she entered the synagogue with her mother, and one of the old men stood up and offered his place to her mother. She was surprised—an old man yielding his place to a young woman. He explained that he did it in memory of her father, Wolf: “He was a guter yid.” A good Jew, that is. Those who sat next to him nodded respectfully. A guter yid . . . Yikhes. . . As I grew up, I heard these words more than once. But I never bothered to figure out exactly what they meant. Only now do I recall Mama’s stories about my great-grandfather Mor- ris, Wolf Bendersky’s father. A legend spread among Uman Christians that he was “a holy Jew.” He worked as a manager for a Polish sugar- plant owner, a descendant of the famous magnate Count Potocki, the very same Potocki who, in the eighteenth century, rebuilt the town after the Haydamaks had burned it, built the Sofievka estate, and laid out a remarkable park. Morris Bendersky ran the business so skillfully that he not only got the owner out of the red, but he multiplied his wealth. The sugar-plant owner couldn’t be happier with his manager and generously rewarded him. What did my great-grandfather do with his money? Before the Sab- bath began, the tailor would make him a new suit from the best English wool. When the first stars broke out in the Uman sky it was time to sit around the table, to break chalah, the ritual bread sanctified with a prayer, and to pour wine into delicate goblets from the family set, splashing it over the edges a bit. Great-grandfather Morris, dressed in his brand-new suit, would walk down the streets of the town. There he would look for a pauper. He wouldn’t have to look for long. He would stop a passerby and, smiling, lead him back to his house. He’d seat him at the family table, treating him to good food and wine. When it was time for the guest to leave, he’d remove his brand-new jacket—and, if they were needed, his pants as well—and give them to the stranger. There wasn’t anything eccentric about this. Great-grandfather simply tried to be a good Jew, that is, the kind that the Torah prescribed. He did his mitzvah indiscriminately—it wasn’t important whether the man he met was a poor Jew, a Ukrainian peasant, or a drunken Polish cob- bler down on his luck. In 1919, when Petlyura’s whooping Cossacks poured into Uman streets, the town’s Christians came to the defense of Morris Bendersky. They talked the Cossacks into sparing his life, for he was “holy.” From all this I conclude that Grandfather Wolf’s status in the town was of the highest order. He had a double yikhes—his own, earned by his learning, and the inherited one, in memory of his father. === Page 33 === EMIL DRAITSER 31 Grandfather Wolf's further life in Odessa is a blank. What was on his mind at that time? It's known only that in 1935 he lost his wife. She had a bad heart. It's also known that he stayed in the city when the war broke out. He perished during the occupation. Why didn't he evacuate, as many oth- ers did? Did his children leave him behind for certain death? It couldn't be! Then what happened? I ask these questions of my second cousin Maya. In the prewar years, she was in her early teens. She could have remembered. Sipping her tea, she speaks somewhat timidly, it seems. She thinks she might hurt my feelings. She shrugs: "You see, for a year or a year and a half before the war, he became intimate with a woman. They lived together. She was ill and couldn't leave. When the war started, they got a steamship ticket for him. But he refused it. He stayed with her... with that woman." She tries to make the story as remote as possible. Some kind of woman... Wolf Bender- sky stayed with her. That is the whole explanation. As our relative, she thinks, he should have been a one-woman man devoted till the end to the memory of his deceased wife. What romantic rubbish! How unfair! And is it love, this immoral call for self-sacrifice? Or maybe, more likely, love is a voluntary self-denial in favor of the liv- ing other-"live, love, be my light"? My cousin didn't know what I've learned. "Some kind of woman" was my grandfather's wife. A religious Jew, he couldn't live in sin; he had to be married. Believing that his children disapproved, most likely he married that woman in a private ceremony, which explains my cousin's ignorance of it. He met this woman, nameless for me, with whom he spent the rest of his life. I don't know anything about her. What she was-young or old, beautiful or ugly-is not important. I know only one thing: for the sake of her, he consciously accepted death. Staying in Odessa, my grandfa- ther knew what was in store for him. There had been years of anti- fascist propaganda in the country. There was the film Professor Mam- lock, in which the Jewish protagonist's students beat him up and threw him out on the street. There were other anti-fascist films-The Oppen- heim Family, The Swamp Soldiers. The newspapers had already reported Kristallnacht. With Hitler's invasion of Poland, numerous Pol- ish Jewish refugees brought with them horror stories about German atrocities. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact could deceive only orthodox Communists; internationalists hooked on the idea of permanent world === Page 34 === 32 PARTISAN REVIEW revolution. For them, Hitler's enemies at the time-France and Eng- land-were first of all bulwarks of working-class oppression. The fact remains that Grandfather Wolf stayed in Odessa. He refused to leave behind a sick woman, with whom he'd lived little more than a year. I feel that by forsaking his own life for the sake of another person, my grandfather made a sacrifice that, on the scales of fate, outweighed everything else. Grandfather stayed with the woman, stayed till the end of his days, to the last nail in his coffin, as the expression goes. Coffins, though, were not in question then. Even to know in which common grave one's own person would lie was sheer luck. Two versions of how Grandfather perished have come down to me- one more horrifying than the other. My cousin Eva heard that the Germans tortured our grandfather the same way they tortured the captured Red Army's general Karbyshev. Soviet newspapers often described the general's suffering. The Nazis learned that he couldn't tolerate the cold. They took him out in severe frost, tied him to a tree, and poured cold water over him till he became one giant icicle. No matter how honorable such a death would have been for my grandfather-he would be likened, at least in suffering, to the famed Russian general-I doubt this version. It's difficult to believe that the Nazis would devote so much attention to a pious, totally civilian, old Jew. Why bother so much to kill one "lousy yid"? From what I know about how they finished off the Jews in Odessa, they rarely had to even spend their ammunition on such a trifling business. People perished from hunger, cold, typhus, diarrhea, gangrene, and pneumonia. With one strike of a rifle butt, the Germans would finish off those who fell and couldn't get up. Then there is Mama's story about how Grandfather Wolf met his last hour. It happened somewhere along the road to Lustdorf, the German colony near Odessa. The Romanian guards herded him, along with twenty-eight thousand other Jews, into artillery warehouses and set them on fire. The machine gunners surrounded it and waited till the last walls collapsed so that none of the women, children, and old men would be able to slip out. There were, however, many other possibilities. I read an eyewitness account of the fate of Odessa Jews by David Starodinsky. As a youth he went through all the circles of this hell and, by several miracles, man- aged to stay alive. Thanks to him, I can see clearly how my grandfather might have perished. Mostly likely, his fate was that of most Odessa Jews. Before the troops, mostly Romanian, sent them to the death camp, they === Page 35 === EMIL DRAITSER 33 were rounded up in a ghetto created in Slobodka, on the city's outskirts. The death camp, one of several in the region, was organized northeast of the city, near the banks of the Southern Bug river, in the village of Doman evka. In January 1942, they took the Jews by train to Berezovka station, forty miles away from Domanevka. From the station, they forced them to walk all the way to the camp. It was the harshest winter in the his- tory of the region. When they inhaled, their nostrils were glued together. They were up to their knees in snow. A blizzard howled. The German soldiers on the scene wanted to send some pictures to their wives and children but they had trouble focusing their Leica cameras; they were roaring with laughter at the old men, women, and children crawling helplessly over snowdrifts, falling topsy-turvy. The column of prisoners had to cross an area suddenly flooded when a dam was blown up. The prisoners stopped, shifting their feet to stay out of the water, but the convoy forced them ahead. Grandfather Wolf could have died just from cold and exhaustion. Not even aiming at him, a Romanian guard could have finished him off. To kill a yid with one shot meant to do him a favor-to spare him the torments of slow death in the bone-chilling winds of the icy steppe. Of the three thousand taken from Odessa, only a few reached Doman evka. It's hard to imagine that Grandfather Wolf, my vanished root, was one of them. As Starodinsky tells us, the road to the death camp was strewn with photos of the captives and their loved ones, thrown away in hope that someday someone would learn of their fate. Few could afford a camera. They took pictures for passports and weddings and other special occa- sions. It's possible that my grandfather had my first picture. In it, I'm four months old, lying on a bearskin, my plump leg raised slightly. I can imagine this picture, blown by the wind over the thin icy crust of the steppe, rolling away from the shoulder of the last road along which, whispering his Shema Israel, my Grandfather Wolf walked. === Page 36 === LESLIE EPSTEIN Desert I WILD RED BERRY REBOUNDED from the ropes and, though only half the size of his opponent, seized him by the leg and by the neck. With the strength of Hercules he lifted the wrestler over his head. “Uh-oh,” said Arthur, our butler. “That Gorgeous George in big trouble now.” Indeed, Wild Red threw down the heavy wrestler like a stevedore hurling a bale or a barrel into the hold. The tremendous thud rattled the speaker of our brand new Zenith, and dust rose from the canvas square on the screen. “Get up, Gorgeous! Get up!” My brother, Bartie, as blond as the fallen gladiator, was bouncing on the springs of the couch. How could he get up? The wiry Berry had thrown himself across his antagonist's chest. All you could see was the curl-covered head of the giant, along with his helplessly flailing legs. “Sure looks like the end this time,” said Arthur. “No, no, no!” wailed Bartie. “Don't say that! I'll kill you if you say that!” But fate in the form of the referee was already kneeling, preparing to slap the surface of the ring. “Why you let these boys watch your trash?” That was Mary, Arthur's wife, who had just opened the door. Her gold-rimmed glasses flashed as she walked in front of the set. “Move, Mary. I can’t see.” “You the one to move, Mister Barton. And your big brother too. Don't you have the sense you were born with?” That last was addressed to her husband, who, save for the white of his collar and the whites of his eyes, was nearly invisible in the darkened room. “These children got school tomorrow. I's the one to get them out of their beds. Do you know what time it is to be watching this show?” Barton: “Get out of the way! You fatty! He's escaped! I know!” Mary clicked off the TV. “You boys, you bet—" She did not have a chance to finish. Bartie was bounding across the den. “You big black Aunt Jemima!” He pushed the heavy woman aside === Page 37 === and pulled the knob of the set. "Didn't I tell you? Bartie knows. Bartie sees." What we all saw was that the fallen gladiator had not only escaped, Houdini-like, but had turned the tables. Now the head of Wild Red Berry protruded backward from the thighs of Gorgeous George, almost as if the big wrestler were in some fashion giving birth to the little one. "Watch out," warned Arthur. "Gorgeous George going to give him the pile driver." Which he did, dropping onto his buttocks with such force that the face of Wild Red Berry was smashed against the mat. "Oh," said Mary. "That poor man." "Kill him," cried Bartie. "Kill him, Gorgeous!" "Don't worry," I said to no one in particular. "It's fixed. It's all an act." But I was worried myself, since only a few weeks before I had hauled Wild Red's clubs around the back nine of the Riviera Country Club. If anything was an act, it was my imitation of a caddy. Berry, however, never said a word as I rattled the sticks in his bag or suggested an eight iron when, on the famed eighteenth hole, he had two hundred yards to the elevated green. I didn't need the twenty-dollar bill he pushed into my hand. I was trudging the course to build character. The minute the wrestler dropped his final putt I went to the clubhouse and put a thick chocolate malted, with whipped cream, onto my father's tab. "You aiming to stay up to the hour of midnight? Miss Lotte know, she'd whip me with that tongue of hers worse than those two men beat- ing each other." Mary wrapped her nightdress around her heavy body and once again bent to turn off the Zenith. My brother grabbed for the knob. "You don't know the rules. You're the servant. You obey Bartie." The two of them struggled for a moment. Mary fell back against the set, which unaccountably came on—not to the wrestling match, at least not the one in Santa Monica. Would you state your name for the record? a voice intoned. Even before our father could reply, Bartie said, "Look, it's Daddy." "Sure enough," said Arthur. "It's Mister Norman. On the television from Washington, D.C." Between them, I realized, Mary and Barton had changed the channel. This was the kinescope of that day's testimony before the House Com- mittee on Un-American Activities. Norman, in a dark suit, with his trademark handkerchief pouring from his suit pocket, sat behind a microphone. Our friend Stanley was beside him, whispering something LESUE EPSTEIN 35 === Page 38 === 36 PARTISAN REVIEW into his ear. I saw that Norman's hat was on the table. What was left of his hair looked damp, and was pressed against the tanned surface of his skull. “Would you spell that for us, sir? Is it Jacobi with an i or a y?” “Yes,” said our father. “It’s with an i. J-a-c-o-b-i.” I looked for Lotte, but everyone in the crowd behind the table was blurred. The same man, Mr. Walter according to the plaque on his high desk- top, leaned into the microphone. “Mister Jacobi, we hope to take only a few minutes of your time. It won’t be necessary to do anything more than repeat here the questions you agreed to answer in executive ses- sion. I assume that arrangement sits well with you?” My father nodded. Mr. Walter: “You understand that your employer, Mister Jack Warner, indicated that you were suspect in his eyes because, and I quote, ‘He is always on the side of the underdog.’ Do you wish to respond to that? Or do you wish to make a statement?” “No, I have no statement. I am ready to answer the questions.” “Mister Wood.” A second camera surveyed the congressmen in their leather chairs, including the one who was just now putting on a pair of reading glasses. “I have just one question for the witness,” he said, “though it comes in two parts. Have you ever been a member of a subversive organization? That’s part one. And part two is, If so, what is the name of that orga- nization? May we proceed with your answers?” It was like a movie. The four of us, the two sons, the two servants, watched entranced as the camera caught Norman in a medium close-up. He nodded again. “In response to the first part of your question, the answer is yes.” There was a gasp from the crowd, which was suddenly no longer out of focus. The camera panned through the committee room: there were the crouching reporters with their notepads, the photographers with their flashbulb reflectors, the tangle of dark cords on the floor; and there too were the rows of men and women, among whom, in a pillbox hat and with slightly smeared lipstick, sat our mother. She was arm in arm with Betty, her childhood friend. “That’s Lotte,” said Bartie, putting his finger on the glass of the screen. Then he put his lips there. “Here, Lotte. Here is a kiss for good luck.” Arthur said, “Best turn the machine off, Mary. No good coming from it.” === Page 39 === LESLIE EPSTEIN 37 Norman was already leaning forward again. His handkerchief, I thought, looked as white as a flower. “The answer to the second part of your question is Warner Brothers.” There was a pause, whether of puzzlement or shock I could not say. Then someone cried, “Oh, my God!” The next thing I heard was laugh- ter, ripples of it, then a roar of it. Mr. Walter was calling for silence, to no effect. Stanley had his hand cupped to Norman’s ear and was shout- ing something. Someone’s microphone was making a ringing sound. A policeman moved in front of the photographers, as if to block with the bulk of his body the rays from their flashing bulbs. I saw Betty with her head back, laughing. A veil, pocked with dark dots, had fallen over Lotte’s face, so that it was impossible to know if she were laughing too. “What’s subversive?” asked Barton. “Is it something funny?” A Mr. Frank Tavennner had the word Consul on his nameplate. He was the one banging the gavel. “Come to order! Come to order!” he shouted. “Come to order or we’ll clear the room!” The noise, if it did not stop, subsided. “Did you wish to say something, Mister Jackson?” Mr. Walter asked. “I just wanted to say that everyone knows Mister Norman Jacobi is a great humorist. I’ve had my share of fun at his films, too. But this is not the time for cut-ups, sir. The country is in danger. Do you wish to answer our questions or do you want to play the wiseacre? Because if he’s going to be a wiseacre, Mister Chairman, I’d just as soon dismiss the witness without further testimony.” That sobered the crowd. In the ensuing silence Norman said, “I am sorry, Congressman. It’s a flaw I have. You correctly bring attention to it—that even at the most inappropriate times I can’t resist. I’m afraid that what Chairman Walter said about Jack, about Mister Warner: well, I think he named everyone on the lot he couldn’t get under contract. I apologize. I let my feelings run away with me.” I felt, at those words, a hollow sensation in the pit of my stomach, as if Gorgeous George had butted it with his head. Apologize? To them? I could not believe it. I watched my father wipe his hands on the side of his pants and then, under the hot lights of the television cameras, use his handkerchief to wipe his brow. It was like a flag of surrender. Mr. Jackson: “I think I speak for the membership when I say we understand how in times like these feelings run high. We appreciate your patriotism and your spirit of cooperation. Now Mister Tavennner has told us that in executive session you expressed your conviction that the United States of America is under attack and that its enemies are under- mining our institutions and our Constitution.” === Page 40 === 38 PARTISAN REVIEW Another congressman, Mr. Doyle, said, “Would consul read the per- tinent passage from the executive transcript? We are being broadcast by the medium of television. I think all Americans should hear it.” Tavenner had been prepared. His thumb, I saw, was at the proper page. He did not need glasses. “I have it here, Congressman. Mister Jacobi states, ‘I have come to believe the country is being undermined by a small but determined group of fanatics who have no respect for our liberties or our way of life. They have no respect for our laws. They mock our free institutions. They have done great damage and threaten to do more. They are more powerful now than they have ever been before.” Mr. Doyle said, “That’s the part. About being more powerful than ever before. It’s the very point we’ve been trying to establish.” Mr. Jackson: “And did the witness declare that he was willing to give us the names of those he rightly calls fanatics?” “Don’t you think we should change the channel?” I asked in a voice plainly cracking. “Arthur, we won’t know who won. I’ll bet on Wild Red Berry. What about you, Bartie? Want to bet a quarter on Gorgeous George?” But the chauffeur sat unmoving. My brother rocked from foot to foot, a bulge of concentration forming on his brow. Even Mary stood with her fists on her hips, as if to express her indignation. Meanwhile Mr. Tavennner was confirming for the committee that our father had indeed promised to disclose a list of names. It was the turn of Mr. Wood: “Very well, sir. Are you prepared now to give us these people by name?” “I am.” There was, in that paneled room, as in our own stucco den, a perfect silence. Norman, from an inside breast pocket, took out a piece of paper folded in squares. As he spread it open, Stanley, his pale, plump attor- ney, shaded his eyes. “Clyde Doyle,” my father began. Then, a little louder: “Donald Jackson. John S. Wood. Francis E. Walter. Frank Tavennner—" The room was already in an uproar. Mr. Walter, red faced, was smashing the gavel down all over the surface of the desk in front of him. Flashbulbs were going off like lightning. The audience was laughing even more loudly than before. Mr. Wood was on his feet now. “Why, he’s giving the names of this committee!” Norman said, “Oh, I can do better than that. Martin Dies. J. Parnell Thomas. John Rankin. Jack Tenny. Joseph McCarthy. Richard Nixon—" === Page 41 === LESLIE EPSTEIN 39 "He's under oath! Under oath! Cite him for contempt!" Mr. Jackson, in lieu of a gavel, was pounding the desktop with his fists. "Remove the witness." That was Tavennner. "Sergeant at arms! Remove the witness from the room!" Arthur said, "My oh my. Going to be the devil to pay now." "You got no call saying anything about Mr. Norman, the man be so kindly toward us these years." "Those men are big men, that's all I'm saying," "Do you get it, Bartie?" I asked my brother. "Ha ha ha! Do you see how he turned them into fools?" Barton ignored me. He bent to the Zenith and switched back to the live broadcast from the Santa Monica Auditorium. Wild Red Berry was gone. So was Gorgeous George. This was a tag team match. Two men wearing masks were bouncing off the ropes and hurling themselves against two other men wearing capes. They were throwing fists. They were throwing chairs. It was mayhem. It was pandemonium. The referee ran about like a puppy jumping at the humans' knees. The open- mouthed crowd was hooting. Bartie stood up; he turned around. Even in the near-absolute darkness of our little room I could see that his uneven eyes were sparkling with delight. As MARY HAD FEARED, it wasn't easy getting us out of bed the next morning. The telephone, ringing incessantly, woke us, not my old Don- ald Duck clock. There wasn't time for breakfast. Mary packed a bag with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, the crust cut off the way Bar- tie liked them. Arthur had his chauffeur's cap on the dark dome of his head. "I best drive you boys down to school in the Buick." That wouldn't please Bartie, I knew, since he sat in the seat behind the bus driver, Mrs. Rakotomalala, who was from the island of Mada- gascar, and who always kept up a conversation with him, in English and French, which he gave every indication of understanding. "No, no. I want the bus," cried Barton. "I won't ride with old Uncle Ben." We compromised: Arthur pulled the Buick from the garage and drove us through the morning mist to the stop, which was at the corner of Sunset and Capri. The bus was already there, its stop sign extended, the warning lights flashing. We ran to the steps. The Coveney twins stood in the open door. "You aren't getting in," said Pat. His brother, Peter, said, "Un-Americans not allowed." === Page 42 === 40 PARTISAN REVIEW Barton stared up at Mrs. Rakotomalala, but she peered straight ahead, as if mesmerized by the metronomic sweep of the windshield blade. "Keep them out!" shouted someone from the rear. To our amazement the dark-skinned woman pulled on the lever and the door closed in our faces. The school bus pulled away. Arthur remained next to the buttermilk Buick, which was spilling its exhaust over the ground. I got into the back. Barton climbed in next to the chauffeur, where he could pretend to steer and pretend to step on the gas. We started down Sunset but turned surprisingly onto Sepulveda, well before Westwood Boulevard. "Arthur, where are we going?" I asked. "Aren't we going to school?" "No, sir, Mister Richard. Got no time now to take you to the Junior High. Miss Lotte and Mister Norman took the midnight airplane. Got to hurry or we going to miss them." Which explained why he wove through the morning traffic and uncharacteristically sped through the yellow lights. We pulled off at Century Boulevard and after only a few blocks the canvas top of the convertible began to ripple and a huge Constellation passed overhead, its propellers whirring and its flaps fully down. "There they are! It's them!" I watched the landing gear descend. I watched the three rudders fish- tail and sink from view. "Maybe it is, Bartie. Maybe that's the plane. They always fly TWA." "Don't be stupid. Lotte was in the window. She had a hat on. With a feather. Not like the one on TV." All any of us knew for certain was that by the time we'd parked the car and made our way to the gate, Flight 1212, Washington to Los Angeles, had landed. There were, as yet, no passengers in sight. Or, if they'd started down the red carpet, we couldn't see them because of the press of photographers and reporters. There were more of them here than in the hearing room. For a moment I wondered which statesman or movie star they'd come to greet; but at the sight of Hedda Hopper, licking the point of her pencil between her painted lips, I understood they were all here for my father. There were rope lines, just as there were at one of Norman's premieres. At the rear on the opposite side I saw Arthur holding his cap up, the way other people held signs. There was a stir. I ran to the end of the carpet, where the crowd had thinned out. Two men in uniform, with a stewardess between them, were coming down the aisle, pulling their luggage behind in wire carts. Pilots, perhaps. Then the first-class passengers began to come through === Page 43 === LESLE EPSTEIN 41 the gangway and onto the carpet. They were laughing, most of them, as if relieved to be on the ground. Even the solitary travelers seemed to be smiling at some private joke. Stanley came out of the tunnel. His mouth was set and his skin looked green, as if he had been sick on the plane. I always called him Pear Shape, after the Dick Tracy character that I followed in the comics. Betty and Lotte came next, arms linked, just as they had been in the hearing room. The next thing I knew Bartie was running the length of the carpet. “I saw you up in the air!” he shouted. “I saw your hat!" Indeed she wore a light brown hat with a dark brown feather. She knelt, holding her arms out. The light from the flashlamps washed over her like water. Everyone was shouting, wanting to know what she thought of the hearing and whether she had heard that her husband had been suspended by the studio and if the family was going to issue an apology. By way of reply she said, “Do you know my son Barton? He’s the younger one. Just look at these curls! Did you ever see anything like them? And the blue in his beautiful blue eyes! Oh, this is my fine big boy!” She put both arms around him and kissed him on the cheeks and on the forehead. She wasn't done speaking: “And so talented! I used to think he'd be a painter. He did such pretty drawings. But nowadays he goes up to his room and stays there for hours! Do you know what he's doing? Writing! Such wonderful stories. They make me cry. I'll be happy to give the press a statement. Jack Warner may think he has silenced my husband, but the real writer is going to be my son!” The trouble was, no one was listening. That was because Norman had emerged from the gangway. The crowd surged toward him. The stanchions went over, pulling the ropes along with them. Betty gave a shriek. I saw Stanley turn and try to make his way back to his friend. A policeman began to wade through the throng. I followed him until I could break through to where Norman was standing. He crouched upon seeing me and held up his hands. This was a regular greeting; I threw punches and he, once a champion bantamweight at Penn State, expertly blocked every one. The crowd stepped back as I swung away. My fists splatted against his open palms. We both were grinning. “You were amazing!” I told him, puffing already. “You almost fooled me. Except I knew you were no fink. You showed them up. Now the whole country knows.” “You want to fight, eh? Eh?” He seized my fists and, as if perform- ing some new form of jujitsu, bent my punches back toward my face. === Page 44 === 42 PARTISAN REVIEW "I know why you did it," I said, ducking as best I could from the impact of my own blows. "You had to, right, Norman? It's what you always say. Hey! Ouch! Don't!" The harder I struck, the greater the force he directed against my cheek, my chin. I tried to finish what I wanted to say. "You know, about the mirror? About shaving? Ow! That hurt! You always have to look at yourself in the morning." For another half minute he redirected my punches, so that I struck myself hard on my nose and on my eye. Then he dropped his hands and pulled me forward in what I thought was a boxer's clinch, but which I soon realized was an embrace. "Sorry, Rich," he was saying. "Sorry, Richie, sorry, sorry, sorry." I hugged him back. I remembered what he smelled like. I felt the day's growth of his whiskers against my scalp and against my skin. Then the battle was rejoined. But it wasn't I who was striking at Nor- man and it wasn't Norman fighting back. I realized that it was Bartie who had set upon him. He was leaping forward, windmilling his arms. His face was red, both from emotion and from the lipstick kisses with which Lotte had covered him. All during the attack he was screaming like a banshee: "You're a traitor! A Communist! A Benedict Arnold!" II AT THE PARKING GARAGE we said goodbye to Stanley, who was going to drive Betty home in his new Mercury coupe. "Is Norman going to be blacklisted?" I asked him sotte voce, while formally shaking hands. "Not to worry," he answered, though his skin was still ashen. "We're going to sue Jack's ass off." Betty came over, bearing her usual gifts. Mine was a pair of cufflinks, clearly gold. "Don't thank me," she protested. "I am going to make oodles out of your drawings. Don't tell your mother, but I'm planning on opening the show early next year." That's when Arthur came round in the Buick. We locked our suitcases in the trunk; Norman got into the front, and Barton and Lotte and I slid into the rear. "Where's Sampson?" my father asked, as if he had just realized that our little spaniel was not there to greet him. Then the greater realization struck him: "Hey, why are you guys not in Emerson? I hope you're not skipping classes." "Didn't have no time to fetch that dog, Mister Norman. I thought to myself these boys going to find only unhappiness in that school." === Page 45 === LESLIE EPSTEIN 43 "I see," said Lotte. "It's Subpoena Day. Citation Day. A national cel- ebration." "Do you know what Mister Murphy said? He said that I am the fastest boy in P.E. He timed me with a stopwatch." No one responded. Norman looked out his window, squinting against the sun's attempts to make its way through the last of that morn- ing's clouds, and Lotte looked out of hers. There were more reporters in front of our house. Their cars were parked on both sides of San Remo Drive. They besieged us when Arthur rolled down his window to unlatch the gate. There were another twenty or thirty people stretched along the length of the metal fence. They were shouting and waving their homemade signs. "I didn't imagine this in Riviera," Lotte said. "Don't kid yourself," Norman answered. "They never wanted us here in the first place." We drove by the front of the house to the open space between the two wings. Sampson, in greeting, ran in Sambo-like circles around the pecan tree. Mary stood at the back doorway, her hands pressed against her white uniform. We could hear the phone ringing in every part of the house. Then, as if seized by the same breeze that was tossing the bud- ding pecans, the family Jacobi blew off each in his own direction. Lotte said, "I don't care about the weather. Let it rain! Let it shine! I am going for my swim." Off she went to the bedroom to change into her suit. "Take the phone off the hook, please, Arthur," Norman said. "I'm taking a ten minute nap. Don't let me sleep any longer. I've got a moun- tain of scripts." He climbed the stairs to the library, to lie down on the leather couch. Bartie took Sampson through the arch to the yard in back, where they could play catch with figs from the hedge. Mary thought she'd better prepare for lunch; and Arthur took off his cap and his jacket, then rolled up his sleeves and started to polish the silverware with a stained yellow cloth. I snuck out the side gate and crossed Romany Drive to Madeline's house. I hadn't seen her through the window of the bus that morning, which meant that she was probably still in bed with the flu. The Italian maid grudgingly allowed me upstairs. I once heard Norman say she had had to leave Rome because her family was connected to Mussolini. "You should see the grin on Patrizia," I said to Madeline, by way of greeting. She was in bed, with my copy of The Grapes of Wrath propped on her knees. "Our downfall is her triumph. I thought she was going to laugh in my face." "Did you ever hear of knocking? It's the gentlemanly thing to do." === Page 46 === 44 PARTISAN REVIEW I saw that she wasn't reading—or that, while reading, she was also painting her nails. "Who's a gentleman?" I replied. "That's right. You're the bohemian. Exempt from society's rules. Maybe the artiste will do my right hand. I'm no good with my left." I took the little bottle and began to paint the index finger she extended toward me. Her wrist, where I held it, was warm with fever. "I've got news," I told her. "Yes, I read in the paper. What's the matter with you? Why don't you sit down?" I eased myself, a little primly, onto the edge of the mattress. "I don't mean that. I mean I saw Betty this morning. She said we have enough drawings already. She's going to hang them in her gallery. It's going to be a one-man show." Madeline pulled her hand away to clap it against the other. "Oh, that's wonderful! You'll just be starting at Uni. You might be a genius like Picasso." "Yeah, well, Picasso didn't have Betty as his mother's best friend. Everything comes down to luck." "It's a good thing you have enough of the sketches. Daddy, he—well, he doesn't want me to pose anymore. He never liked it. I told him it was only my back, mostly, but that's not what's bothering him. I heard him this morning hollering down at breakfast. 'What a bunch of Commu- nists! I always knew it! A bunch of Commies.' Ha ha ha! It makes you sound like bananas." "It's not true. Even if it was, I'd have no apologies. I know some Communists, ex-Communists actually—at least I think they were. They are idealistic people. They wanted to change the world for the better. Are you reading this book? Or is it a prop?" "Of course I'm reading it. I'm already up to how they are treated when they get to California." "It wasn't just California. It was everywhere. On the East Coast, in Massachusetts, half the workers in the cranberry bogs were children. It was terrible. They were up to their chests in the water." Madeline put both hands—the seven painted nails, the three I hadn't got to—to her face and tee-hee'd like a little girl. "What is so funny? There weren't any child labor laws until the for- ties. Roosevelt tried but the Supreme Court wouldn't let him. Will you stop giggling?" "I'm sorry, Richard-boy. I really am. Bananas and cranberries. I did- n't think we were going to talk about fruit." === Page 47 === LESLIE EPSTEIN 45 “We’re not. We’re talking about children’s lives!” “No need to shout, Richard-boy. I’ll pose for you, no matter what Daddy says, even if you are a Communist.” “I told you, that’s a canard. Lotte and Norman, they didn’t even vote for Henry Wallace. Don’t you remember? How I rang all the doorbells in the last election? Your father, he said he was voting for Dewey. Dewey! That’s practically treason.” “I don’t know why I’m not angry with you when you say something like that. I love my father just like you love yours. He is an outstanding businessman and provides jobs for almost a hundred people, even if he’s not famous for his wit and hasn’t won an Academy Award. I guess if I’m not angry it must mean that a little bit anyhow I also love you.” She took my hand, the one with the little wet wand in it, and drew it toward her mouth. First she blew on her nails, which now were the color of eggplants, and then she kissed each one of my fingers. The voice of the people was speechless; but she said, “How many times do I have to say it, Richard-boy? I love your artist’s hands.” “You’ve got a fever,” I lamely replied. “No, I’m almost better. I could have gone to school today. I’ll go tomorrow. But here’s the thing. What I want to say. Besides your hands, it’s your mouth I love. Not the shape of it even though the shape is very nice. It’s the words that come out of it. All your angry words. About the workers and the Rosenbergs and Senator McCarthy and even the Republican Party. They’re like songs. To me they’re like love songs. Do you know what I mean? You’re the speaker, the orator, and I’m your crowd.” Her breath, as she spoke, washed over my knuckles. That, or her words, made me feel an excitement that I feared was all too visibly sex- ual. I pulled away, twisting in my embarrassment toward the foot of the bed. “Oh,” said Madeline brightly. “You can do my toes, too!” I watched as her foot slid out from beneath the little cotton-tufts that decorated her covers. I had painted it often enough. In fact, I was sure Betty wanted one of those studies to go along with the countless char- coals of Madeline’s buttocks and Madeline’s back. The toes, the arch, the shadows of the hidden bones: none of that had meant any more to me than a peasant’s shoe had meant to Van Gogh. This time, however, I wasn’t painting a portrait of a foot but, with my tiny brush at the end of the tiny wand, the foot itself. “Hold still,” I said, to stop her from playfully wiggling her toes. She did. I leaned forward, pressing hard against the mattress edge; I moved === Page 48 === 46 PARTISAN REVIEW the bristles, full of thick purple liquid, across her nail. It was all I could do not to kiss the white flesh and green veins of her instep. Did she hear me groan? I thought I heard, up at the head of the bed, another light laugh. She twisted to the side, where a pile of 45 RPM records was stacked atop the spindle of her gramophone. She clicked it on. She had all the latest hits. As I stroked and restroked the nails of her toes I heard, first, In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening, and then, Come On-a My House, and then, Your Cheating Heart. From her end at the top of the bed, and from where I knelt at the foot of it, we both started singing, loudly, exaltingly, so that Patrizia could hear-hell, let the whole neighborhood hear-a ballad: "Oh, oh, oh! Kisses Sweeter than Wine!" MARY HAD TAKEN A ROAST BEEF from the stand-alone freezer that morn- ing, and that night we had it, with string beans and potatoes, for din- ner. We ate silently through the salad, though Lotte did her best to brighten the conversation. "I can't tell you boys how good it feels to be home with you eating Mary's cooking and not sleeping in a hotel bed. I certainly prefer my flowers to the Mayflower, ha ha ha! Even though it's dark out I feel comforted by the thought that they are in the garden. First thing tomorrow I am taking my scissors and making a big bouquet. Isn't it strange how though I was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, I do not miss the East Coast in the least? Oh, I do not deny the charms of the boardwalk and the jitneys and saltwater taffy; boys, we had a horse that would jump off a steel tower into a tank of water. I remember my father with his bicycle and his cigar collecting the rents from the Negro people. Oh, and sneaking crab cakes into the house though they were not kosher. What else? My sisters! The three sisters, just like in Chekhov; but before you think I am completely dotty I am coming to my point, which is that when I return to California with its tropical flora and fauna-goodness, cork trees and the quail and the mountain lions, which we used to hear roar: well, to me in the oddest way it's like coming back to my childhood. I can't explain it. It's unnatural. Like the way I much prefer swimming in a pool of chlorine and never once go into the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans." I thought, a little rudely, that there really wasn't much of a mystery. After all, it was only in California that her childhood fantasies, of being rich and a kind of princess, had come true. On cue, Sammy came in with the roast beef and took up his station by Norman's chair. The strands of drool hung from his flews. "Oh, don't!" said Lotte, as Norman threw him a piece of meat. === Page 49 === LESLIE EPSTEIN 47 Then there was nothing but the click of the fork, the click of the knife. After a time Norman said, "Stanley called. He's got tickets for opening day. You guys want to go?" "Is Paul Petit starting?" I asked, referring to the pitcher who had made such a stir as the first of the bonus babies. "I think it'll be Johnny Lindell," Norman replied, "but I haven't seen the papers in a while. What's the outfield like?" "Kelleher's being replaced by Carlos Beiner. Saffel's in center. This guy Ted Beard's in right." "Stevens at first? Sandlock still catching?" "Yes, but-" "Oh, for Heaven's sake!" Lotte exclaimed. "The sky is falling down and we're going to talk about baseball? Baseball!" "What would you prefer to discuss, Lotte? Saltwater taffy?" Barton, with a milk ring around his mouth, said, "Are we going to have to move out of the house when the sky falls? Are Richard and Bar- tie going to be waifs?" "Oh, Bartie," Lotte said. "I could bite my tongue. It's only a figure of speech." "It's because you're Jews. I heard you say so. The sky is going to fall on you because you killed baby Jesus Christ." "Why don't you just shut up, Bartie? You don't know anything about anything." "I do so! You are Jacobies! That's why you are persecuted. The sky is going to fall on you and kill you." "What the hell are you talking about? You crazy idiot-" "Richard! Your language! Shame on you!" "Well, listen to him. He should go to a crazy house or a crazy doc- tor." Norman: "And you should go to your room. Right now. Move!" "What about him? He thinks he's different than us. You're just the same as us, crazy Bartie." "Not! I am not! I am Barton Wilson. Not Jacobi. All the Communists are going to burn in hell." "I can't stand a minute more of this," said Lotte. "I'm going to scream." "Stop it," said Norman, "the two of you." "Make him stop," I cried. "Why won't he stop? Please make him be normal. I am tired of waiting and waiting for him to grow up." "I am normal!" cried Bartie. "I believe in General MacArthur." === Page 50 === 48 PARTISAN REVIEW Then Lotte did scream, loudly. Bartie jumped from his chair and leaped toward Sampson; he covered the dog's ears with his hands. Norman lifted a fist into the air. "Enough!" he shouted. Then he brought it down so hard on the table that, as in a magic trick, every- thing on it jumped half an inch in the air. "Goddamn it! Enough!" LOTTE SPENT THE EVENING playing Schubert sonatas on the baby grand. Exiled to my bedroom, I heard the wrong notes. Later, waking, I heard her voice, then Norman's, arguing, even though they were at the other arm of the house. And this, at all hours: the thud-thud-thud-thump of Barton's head striking either his bedstead or the wall. In the morning we found our suits laid out for us, with white shirts and starched white col- lars. When I went downstairs I saw that Mary was dressed up as well; she had on a matching skirt and blouse, and the lamb's-wool sweater that Norman had given her for Christmas. A row of three suitcases, two small valises and a larger portmanteau, sat near the front door. "What are those for?" I asked the maid. "They aren't Norman's. They aren't Lotte's." "Those are your bags, yours and Mister Barton's. And my clothes and Arthur's clothes are in that big suitcase. We are taking a car trip together all the way to the state of New Mexico; we are going to see those underground Carlsbad Caverns." "What are you talking about? Who said so? Nobody asked us. What if we don't want to go? Don't we have rights?" "None I know to speak of," Mary answered. "Long as you the little people, Miss Lotte, she makes the decisions." "I am going to talk to her. I am going to wake her up. It's ridiculous, this beauty sleep. Where's Bartie? He'll never agree to go." "You look out that front window where Arthur has the car in the drive. That boy has his foot on the gas pedal already." I went into the dining room and pushed the curtains aside. There was the Buick, the top up, the engine off; Barton was in the driver's seat, twisting the steering wheel left and right. Arthur, in a brown suit, came downstairs and carried all three bags to the back of the car. The battle, I saw, had been lost. Nonetheless, I moved to the foyer and shouted up the long curve of the staircase. "You want to get rid of us! You're ashamed of us! Bartie was right! You're going to sell the house when we're gone!" From the sleepers above, no answer. Mary came out with a hamper and her handbag. Docilely, I followed. === Page 51 === LESLIE EPSTEIN 49 “Can’t take that dog,” Arthur said, from where he was rubbing a chamois over the already polished surface of the hood. “Don’t allow no dogs in the motels or in the national monuments.” I saw that Sampson had jumped into the rear and stuck his muzzle through the crack in the window, as if in anticipation of the breezes to come. “I’ll take him back,” I volunteered. Sampson dug in; I had to haul him out by the collar and drag him to the portico and into the house. Arthur turned on the engine before I came out. I closed the front door behind me and started across the bricks. “Richard.” That was Norman’s voice. It came from overhead. I heard my father’s footsteps on the little balcony that jutted out from the room where all of those about to embark on this journey had watched the different sorts of wrestling matches two nights before. I stepped through the colonnade and squinted upward. I saw Norman’s foreshortened head and torso. “You’ll have a hell of a trip,” he told me. “The caverns are a natural wonder. You’ll never see anything like them again.” “Yeah. Okay. But why don’t you take us? Why Arthur and Mary? It’s embarrassing.” “Some other time. There’s a lot to deal with now.” “I guess I understand. You want us out of your hair.” “You’re never in my hair, sweetheart. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you: I’m glad you liked that silly show I put on. I shouldn’t have done it. It’s not fair to you. To any of you. You know the reason: it’s the shaving mirror.” “I’m sorry too. I mean about Bartie. I feel bad. I heard him rocking. I said it out of exasperation.” “It breaks my heart, and it breaks Lotte’s heart, when you talk to him that way. That’s something I have to say to you. But I shouldn’t be up here on a balcony. It’s like I’m talking down to you. You know, like a pun. Rich, I’m proud of Bartie, the same as I am of you. Hell, I showed the pictures of the two of you in my wallet all over Washington. Even to Tavenncr. You don’t measure the love for your children. That would be like choosing between you. Barton is going to be fine. He needs time. Be patient. Please be patient. What I want more than anything is for you to be his friend. He has a pure heart. Remember that. You go on now. And don’t worry. We aren’t selling the house. It’s paid for. You’ll never have to leave San Remo Drive.” === Page 52 === 50 PARTISAN REVIEW He blew a kiss toward where I was standing. He put his hands in the pockets of his bathrobe and stepped back. I saw on his cheeks, at his jaw line, a smudge, like charcoal, of a two-day's beard. III IN THE MORNING TRAFFIC it took us a little over two hours to reach San Bernadino, and about three hours more to arrive in Barstow. Mary had fallen asleep almost at once, her chin, with its rows of frown lines, rest- ing on her breast. Barton and I played our usual game: looking for out- of-state license plates and betting whether the numbers on them added up to odd or even. Georgia was as exotic as we got. Then my brother dozed off as well. What kept me awake were the signs for Route 66 that I saw at the intersections. This was the road the Joads had taken, head- ing westward, in The Grapes of Wrath. You couldn't see any Okies now, though there were plenty of open-backed trucks taking Mexicans up to the farms in the Central Valley. We stopped to have a late lunch in Barstow, and to wait out the worst of that day's heat. Mary, digging into her hamper, refused to get out of the car. Arthur gave me five dollars; while Barton and I ate in the lunch- room, he filled the gas tank and bought a water bag, which hung drip- ping from the front bumper when we came back to the car. There was also a round tube, like an oversized thermos, attached to the passenger- side window. "That machine going to condition the air," Arthur explained, while he scraped away the exoskeletons of the insects that had expired on the windshield. He let Bartie and me fish in a cooler filled with soda pop bottles up to their chins in frigid water. I took a Nehi strawberry and a Nehi orange, and my brother plucked up two Royal Crown Colas. Thus equipped, we set off into the Mohave Desert. Do you know how heat can make the air above a radiator visible? As thick, somehow, as a syrup? That's what the road looked like, straight, black, unending, with little dust devils springing up on either side and- what to call them?-heat devils rising above the macadam. It was like looking through a pane of flawed glass. Between the road's occasional rises and dips a pool of water would shimmer and gleam. "It's just a mirage," I told Bartie, who had long since gone through both bottles of cola. "It's not! Not!" he insisted, licking his parched lips. "Hurry up, Arthur! Go faster! It's an order!" But that pond, and all the others, constantly receded, reforming beyond the next rise, like the waters that tormented Tantalus, Zeus's son. === Page 53 === LESLIE EPSTEIN 51 We pushed on. The Buick's taut dark top concentrated the heat directly over our heads, so that it seemed we were caught between two burning black lids. Real drops of water, no mirage, dripped from the canister and spread across the glass beside me. It occurred to me to imi- tate Sampson—that is, to thrust my head into what I thought would be a reviving spray; but the minute I rolled down the window a hot blast, like a dragon's fiery tongue, forced its way into the automobile and began to lick the last drops of moisture from our bodies. “Why you went and do a fool thing as that?” Mary said. The streaks of perspiration, long dried, left gullies in the dust on her skin. Arthur pulled to the side of the road and got out of the car. He moved to the front and unhooked the wet burlap bag. “Me first! Don't you drink! Uncle Ben isn't allowed!” The servant handed over the sack. Straining with both hands, Barton lifted it and drank, not like a Spaniard with his wineskin, but with his mouth at the valve. “It's cold!” he exclaimed. “It's freezing!” He drank again, longer, the Adam's apple working beneath the flesh of his throat. We watched. My tongue was so thick in my mouth I could barely say, “Hey! Come on! Don't drink it all!” Grinning, he handed the pouch over the back of the seat. I instinc- tively raised it, then stopped. The heat of embarrassment was greater than that in the car. “Here, Mary,” I said. “Ladies go first.” She clutched the bag; she closed her mouth around the nozzle. Streams of water spilled onto her blouse front. The rough canvas pushed her glasses askew on her forehead. At length she lowered the sack. “I appreciate the thoughtfulness,” she said. I drank my fill and handed the bag to Arthur, who was still standing outside the car. He took it and, surprisingly, poured the cool liquid into his palm. Then he drank from that shallow cup, refilled it, and, sipping, drank from it again. Wasn't there a story about this in the Bible? From Exodus? I couldn't remember, exactly. But I thought that the Lord killed the thirsty Israelites who plunged into the water and spared those who drank delicately from the palms of their hands. “You want more, Mister Barton?” My brother, a little pale I thought, shook his head no. Arthur unsmilingly draped the bag over the bumper, so that the wind could cool it by evaporation once again. Then he settled in his seat and restarted the engine. “My turn to drive! You promised! You said in the desert!” Arthur kept his eyes straight ahead, unblinking, as if hypnotized by the repetition of the dashes in the center of the road. === Page 54 === 52 PARTISAN REVIEW Bartie protested. He struck his fist on the leather seat. Then, in frus- tration, he started to cry—at least I thought he was crying. His shoul- ders shook. He covered his mouth with his hands. But when he turned around I saw from the glint in his large eye and in his small one that he was laughing. Finally, he took his hands away and, looking straight at me, mouthed the words, “Nigger lips.” AT AN UNWAVERING FIFTY-SEVEN MILES an hour we made our way to Needles, and, on Front Street, pulled into the Grandeur Cafe. Arthur and Mary came inside; we sat in a booth and ate hot turkey sandwiches for dinner. People did not stare so much as look twice, as if to make sure they had really seen a Negro couple. The sun, when we returned to our car, was low in the sky. We had another hour’s drive ahead of us, across the Colorado and into Arizona, where we had reservations at the Four Cacti Motel. As we approached the town of Kingston, Bartie cried, “I see them! Bartie saw them first!” Then we all did: the great green plants were clustered together like con- gregants, their arms raised to heaven in what might have been a prayer for rain. Arthur and Mary had one room; Bartie and I had twin beds in another. I fell onto the mattress fully clothed. For a moment I watched the thin white curtains, on which the red of the setting sun was soon replaced by the red of a neon sign. I heard the sign’s sizzle. I heard the tick of the Buick as it cooled. Then my eyes, and my ears too it seemed, dropped shut. What time it was when Bartie left his bed and climbed into mine I had no idea. I suppose the middle of the night. But he was there, one arm around me, and his mouth open on the pillow, when Mary knocked on our door with the first light of dawn. We continued east, hour after hour, until the rising sun was no longer shining directly into our eyes. Bartie and I waved at the Indians, who sat under umbrellas and sold blankets and punch cards and jewelry at the side of the road. One time a brave stepped from the door of a wooden tepee and threw a can that bounced once and, spilling out liquid, struck the side of the car. Arthur went on for a mile and then stopped to inspect the fender; there wasn’t a dent. But the poor Buick, with its false, gill- like portholes, looked to me like a fish expiring under the relentless sun. On we went. With the hissing wind, the constant whine of the tires, the ever-mounting heat, it was impossible to remain awake for more than a few minutes at a time. At midmorning, dozing, I felt a slight bump and a swerve. === Page 55 === LESLIE EPSTEIN 53 "What is it, Arthur?" I thought another Indian had struck us with a beer can; on looking back, however, I saw what looked like a piece of rope stretched across the road. "You did it! You killed it! On purpose too!" Tears were streaming down Bartie's face. Arthur kept his eyes on the road. "Ain't nothing to rile yourself with. That's but a common snake." "Snakes have feelings!" Bartie wailed. "But you don't! You don't care! I hate this trip. Turn around. Take me home. It's an order." "You hush up, Mister Barton," said Mary. "You got no reason to be carrying on." "There is a reason! I know about snakes. They are cold-blooded, but Arthur is colder! They play fair. They give a warning. With rattles! He didn't even honk the horn! They shed their skin. It all comes off and they grow a new one. Ha! Ha! Ha! You! Arthur! I bet you wish you could shed yours!" "Shut up, Bartie! I'll tell Norman you said that!" My brother began to rock ominously against the back of his seat. "Take me home! Bartie gave an order! Take me home, slave!" Then he put his thumb in his mouth, which at least stopped the flow of his terrible words. We drove on in silence. After a time Arthur said, "All right, Mister Barton, you put your foot here. You see? On the gas. Not too fast now. That's the ticket." The car slowed as Barton, with a smile I could see from behind his head, moved next to the black man and thrust out his straight stick of a leg. We lurched forward, but soon settled back at the same speed we'd been making before. "You doing real good," said Mary. "It's true. Look, look, look: Bartie's a driver!" "Now you take hold here, slow and easy. No need to tell Mister Nor- man this and no need to tell him anything else." I think both Mary and I gasped; but Barton, twisting gymnastically, reached over with his right hand and seized the wheel. We went on straight as an arrow. All of us, Bartie included, pretended that we did not see the chauffeur's hand clutching the wheel at its nadir. A sound, a bit like a cat's purring, a bit like our engine's hum, came from the throat of my brother. At the sign for Holbrook, Arthur took over and at the town itself we detoured north to the Painted Desert. "Ain't got but ten minutes to see these sights," said the servant, as Bartie and I raced for the visitor center. There was an overlook that === Page 56 === 54 PARTISAN REVIEW afforded a view of how the various minerals had stained the layers of sand. Mary came in to shoo us back to the car, but not before buying each of us a glass box whose contents were arranged in tiers of color. This time Barton climbed into the back. He sat close to Mary, turning the box in his hands, holding it up to the light, and then licking it, as if it were the spumoni we always ordered for dessert at the Swiss Chalet. WE REMAINED ON ROUTE 66 into New Mexico and past Albuquerque; then, in late afternoon, we veered south, more or less along the course of the Pecos River. We had reservations at the Mescalero Motel, only a short drive from the Monument, which we would visit first thing in the morning. It was already dusk by the time we reached Roswell, and pitch-black two hours later, when we pulled into Loving. The Mescalero had one large, red-tiled building and a series of cabins spread in a wide semi-circle. There was a small, lit swimming pool, a little putting green, and a horseshoe pit with iron stakes at either end. Arthur pulled up in front of the office, and we followed him inside. There, a tall, thin man with crutches told us there were no reservations for Jacobi. “Must be a mistake,” said Mary. “Miss Lotte gave me a number.” Arthur put his hand to his cheek. “No, there ain’t no mistake.” “Can’t we rent the rooms?” I asked the crippled man. “Do we have to have a reservation?” “All full up,” the clerk replied. “Full up since the start of the month.” “You’re a liar,” said Barton. “Vacancy.’ That’s what the sign says. I’m a writer. I know every word.” “Looks like I forgot to turn the switch,” said the man, doing so now; the word No flashed on in pink. Arthur led us out the door. We turned back the way we’d come. There were no rooms in Otis and none at any of the motels in the town of Carlsbad. Our luck was no better at the only place in Lakewood, whose proprietor, already in a woolen nightcap, would not open the screen door. Finally, in Artesia, we found a vacancy at the Susanna Motel. It had just a single building, long and low, with the roof sinking like a bro- ken-down horse. There was only one room for the four of us, and it was at the end, closest to the highway. Barton and I claimed the bed—it was as swaybacked as the roof above us—furthest from the window. Arthur brought in the bags and then went back to the car. He wanted to fill it with gas, he said, and buy some sandwiches to make up for our missed dinner. All we wanted was sleep. In the tiny bathroom, in the green-stained wash basin, Mary scrubbed our faces, which she hadn’t done since the === Page 57 === LESLIE EPSTEIN 55 start of grade school; she hovered while we brushed our teeth. When we stepped back to the bedroom, Arthur had not returned. We got into pajamas. We got into bed. Mary turned off the unshaded light. She moved to the far side of her bed and sat, looking out the window. At midnight the floodlight went off outside the building. The headlights from the cars and trucks periodically swept across the black glass of the window, like a lighthouse beam. Mary made obscure gestures in the darkness; she was removing her clothes. She took off her sweater. She unbuttoned her blouse. Her skirt had a zipper. She stood to unzip it. She was wearing a white slip that, like the bones in a Halloween costume or the image in a fluoroscope, seemed to float and flit all on its own. She moved into the bathroom, then returned to her spot before the window. Where is that man? I heard her say under her breath. "Mary, is he lost, do you think?" "My oh my, I thought sure you asleep. No. He's stubborn. He's going to fill that tank or die striving. You go on to sleep, Mister Richard. Tomorrow we're seeing those caves." I didn't sleep, not yet. I watched the ghost of the undergarment pace, sit, pace once again. Then I watched as, like a smoke puff, it began ris- ing higher and even higher. I realized that Mary was taking off the piece of silk. Something clamped my shoulder. Barton's hand. I could tell he'd stopped breathing. The two of us, then, stared at her full breasts, the bulge of her belly, and the overlapping flesh folds at her waist and her thigh. A car came, followed by another. Her spectacles, of gold, shone; so did the cross of Jesus at her neck. Her body was like a black candle whose wax had melted. I held my breath too. I watched as she bent, so that her breasts hung swaying; off went her shoes. Then she reached up and spookily took off the top of her head. Behind me, Bartie gasped. He trembled, making the whole bed shudder. Then, simultaneously, we saw that she had removed what we always thought might be a wig. Her teeth came out next, into a glass of water. Then she wrapped her old plaid nightdress around her body and lay down on top of her bed. The three of us, I think, fell asleep. When I woke I thought it was dawn. But the light that poured through the window came from across the roadway. A number of cars had gathered there, on the shoulder and beyond, and the headlights, crisscrossing, lit up the Susanna's façade. I heard music, or at any rate singing, along with shouts and curses and laughter. I rose to an elbow. Barton was already up, clutching his knees. "Shhh," he hissed, his fin- gers to his lips. "It's a lynch mob. I bet they've got Arthur. They started a fire. They're going to burn us down." === Page 58 === 56 PARTISAN REVIEW I sat bolt upright. My heart beat in my ears and in my throat. There was a fire, a bonfire, across the pavement. I could see silhouettes mov- ing in a jumble before it. There were men in boots and cowboy hats. Some of them had burning pieces of wood in their hands. They waved the flaming torches. I heard, beneath the shouts and the song snatches, a steady moan. I knew it was Mary. She wasn't in her bed; she was sit- ting, dressed and bewigged, in the room's only chair. For a moment I struggled to work out what was real, this scene, this moment, and what the image of the maid, naked, taking her head from her shoul- ders-was the dream. "Where's Arthur?" I asked. "Isn't he back yet?" She didn't answer. She continued to moan. "I told you," said Bartie. "They've got him. They've got that nigger. They're going to string him up!" I rolled off my side of the bed and moved to the window. I pressed, peering, against the glass. I was shocked to see that Barton was right; they did have Arthur. He was standing at the center of a group of men. His coat was off and each time he took a stumbling step it dragged behind him in the dust. The men, all white men, laughed and jeered. Then the old servant staggered; he fell to his knees. There was a whoop, a war whoop, like Indians in the movies. I whirled around. "Mary, get the telephone. Call the police." She did not move from the seat of her chair. I ran to the phone. There was a low dial tone, which, no matter what numbers I dialed, did not alter its drone. Then I ran to the bathroom. The only window was small and high. I didn't think I could get through. Certainly Mary couldn't. But Barton, by standing on the toilet tank, might just be able to wiggle his way out and try to bring help. "Bartie! Hey, Bartie!" He didn't answer. I trotted back to the bedroom. The window was glowing with the reflection of sparks and flame. And not just the win- dow. The door was open and Barton stood in it, the outline of his body lit by the fire. Before I could move he dashed across the sliver of court- yard and onto the lip of the highway. "Let him go!" he shouted. "You bad people! Let him go! He belongs to Bartie!" Then, as if the crazed men had heard him, the mob parted and Arthur lurched onto the black macadam. By one hand he was still dragging his jacket; in the other he waved a flaming stick. In the light of that brand I saw our Buick, parked at the other end of the motel. The chauffeur weaved his way across the roadway, shedding sparks. He stopped in === Page 59 === LESLIE EPSTEIN 57 front of my brother. He grinned, his teeth a flash of white. Then, so that I could hear the sound from where I stood in the door jamb, he hic- c u p e d . A n d i m m e d i a t e l y h i c c u p e d a g a i n . “Come in, Arthur,” said Bartie. The black man dropped the stick and stumbled forward. He braced himself in the frame of the doorway. I could smell his sweat, along with the unmistakable fumes of alcohol. Hiccuping still, he stepped inside and dropped onto the bed. Barton followed, closing the door. The cele- bration continued on the far side of the road. “Look at this fool I went and married,” said Mary. “Went to a party. Got hisself drunk.” IV THE NEXT MORNING WE were among the first in line at the visitor cen- ter. Arthur, chagrined, bought the tickets. I read the brochures while we had to descend in a guano bucket. “Guano, that’s bat doo-doo,” I said. Mary said, “I don’t feature seeing no bats.” We went down to the Big Room and wandered among the illumi- nated formations, the Lion’s Tail, the Sword of Damocles, and the rest. “Looks just like Miss Lotte’s glass chandelier,” Mary said, pointing up at the collection of stalactites that hung, like our dining room fixture, from the roof of the cavern. After a half hour or so we gathered in the Hall of Giants. I began to feel light-headed, perhaps from the strain of staring upward, the blood pooling at the back of my head; perhaps because I could not tell whether the enormous columns were stalactites that had grown down or stalag- mites that had pushed up or a combination of both; or else it was the dinner we’d missed and the breakfast we’d gulped on the run. In any case, the towering pillars seemed to be doing a dance in the light from dozens of flashbulbs, and, at the same time, I thought I heard a voice saying my name: “Jacobi? The Jacobi party, Jacobi?” It was a uniformed ranger. He walked up to Arthur. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to come to the surface.” My first thought was that Negroes were not allowed in the monu- ment. But my brother knew better. He said, “It’s Norman. It’s an emer- gency about Norman. Bartie knows.” The ranger said, “I believe it is an emergency, yes.” When we arrived aboveground Arthur and Mary left us outdoors while they went into the visitor center. I was amazed to see the man from the Muscalero Motel leaning against the cab of a red pick-up. === Page 60 === 58 PARTISAN REVIEW When he saw Barton and me he sagged against the top of his crutches and lifted his hat. Mary was weeping when she came outside. Arthur, when we ran to him, kept his eyes down. "We got's to go home," he said. "You boys please to get to the car." We drove the whole of that day and, though Arthur had not had much sleep, right through the night. The Buick, on the open road, hit seventy- five, then eighty, and stayed there. Mary never removed the handkerchief from her eyes. Neither she nor Arthur would tell us what had happened. We stopped for coffee. We stopped for soup that was too hot to eat. We pulled over so Arthur could take a half-hour's nap. Barton slept most of the time. Once he woke and said, not tearfully, but philosophically, "King George is dead. Norman is dead. All the kings will be dead." WE MADE A DASH THROUGH THE MOHAVE at first light and got to Sun- set by mid-afternoon. Bartie began rocking as we followed the boule- vard's twists and turns. I took his hand as we passed Mandeville Canyon and began the last climb to Riviera. We took the hairpin onto San Remo and drove to the house. There were no reporters, no neigh- bors, at the front of the lawn. We drove past the pillared façade and parked at the circle that surrounded the rustling pecan. Sampson came leaping and barking, as if nothing had happened. The Packard, I noticed, was not in the garage. Lotte was at the back door. She stood on tiptoe. She cried, "Boys! Here I am!" She led the two of us up the staircase, left, and left again to her and Norman's bedroom. She lay down, dressed as she was, on top of the canopied bed. Barton stood by the window. I lay on the carpet, behind the chaise lounge. Lotte began by saying, "Did you get to see the cav- erns? Wasn't it a wonderful trip?" Barton did not reply. I could not think of a word to say. "Well, that was silly. I can't imagine why I said it. Of course it was not a wonderful trip. Now you are going to have to be big boys. All grown up. We are going to have to face this together. Norman went out in the Packard. He was going to Burbank, to clean out his office. Oh, if only Arthur had been here to drive! I can't help blaming myself for that! What happened, boys, Barton, Richard, is that he hit a tree. Perhaps he had a stroke. Or a heart attack. What does that matter? He hit a tree and was terribly hurt and he lingered for a time but at ten o'clock this morning I am so sorry to tell you your father died." Now the tears spilled from me. Hidden by the furniture, I beat my fists on the green carpet. "But he was a good man! He was too good to die!" Barton said, "You are lying! Don't be a liar!" === Page 61 === LESLIE EPSTEIN 59 “But Bartie darling I told you the truth.” “No! You didn’t! Bartie knows! It was suicide! Ha! Ha! Ha! Chop- suicide! Show Bartie! Show Bartie the note!” “Oh, don’t say that! I would tell you! I swear! There is no note. He didn’t say a word. Oh, he said what he always said. Here’s beautiful Lotte. That was our catch-phrase. Isn’t that nice?” My tears dried on the instant. I pushed my head out from behind the divan. I heard myself give a little laugh. “Well,” I said, “now you can marry Pear Shape.” TWO BRAND-NEW SUITS WERE READY for us the next morning, but we never put them on. “I’m not, not, not going to the gravy-yard!” Barton shouted. “And you, Richie?” Lotte asked. “I don’t want to cause you too much pain.” “I’ll stay with Bartie,” I told her. “Well, you can’t be in the house alone. Arthur and Mary will be at the funeral. I’ll see if poor Stanley will volunteer to take you. Oh, dear! He’ll hate to miss it. Everyone in Hollywood will be there. Even Jack.” Madeline came by after breakfast to say how sorry she was. Her father stood behind her in the portico, turning his hat in his hands. Stanley came by not long after that. He drove us to see the scale model of Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis at the L.A. County Museum. The little plane hung above us on wires, its rubber wheels just above our upturned heads. “Is it true? Was he lost in a fog? Lucky Lindy? Did he have to fly upside down?” “That’s the story, Richard. It’s good to remember what one man can do. You don’t give up. You persevere. Then you find your own way.” Did Norman give up? That’s what I wanted to ask him. Are you accusing him of not persevering? But I saw how white his cheeks were, and the lines in them, more like Prune Face than Pear Shape, and I said, “This is great, thanks for taking us,” instead. We ate lunch at the Ontra Cafeteria and then drove down Wilshire to catch the afternoon showing of The Lavender Hill Mob. All around us people were laughing. Barton, as the plan to steal the gold ingots went awry, was squealing with delight. When Alec Guinness began to dash down the thousands of steps on the Eiffel Tower I threw back my head and let out a peal of laughter too. How he clung to that valise! How much he had wanted his golden prize! It was as if it were Norman’s Oscar he had stolen, along with everybody else’s Academy Awards. At the end of the picture, when the actor stood up from the table at which he’d === Page 62 === 60 PARTISAN REVIEW been telling his tale, we were startled to see he was in handcuffs. We gasped as the policemen led him away. "No! No! Run, mister! Mister, you won! Pear Shape! Help him to escape!" We stayed in our seats when the lights came up. Bartie wouldn't stop sobbing. "Will they put him in jail? Poor mister! Why are they so mean to him? It's not fair! Not fair!" "It's just the production code, Bartie." Stanley wiped my brother's tears with his thumbs. "I agree with you. It's stupid. It's not like true life. Movies are never like life. The rule is crime doesn't pay." STANLEY DROVE US ALL THE WAY to Santa Monica Pier and treated us to dinner at Jack's At the Beach. The sun was long down by the time we got home; but there was still a crowd at San Remo Drive. I ran up to my room. Bartie retreated to his. I lay on the bed for a time. Mary came in. She said, "You want to remember something. Miss Lotte, she sure loved Mister Norman. In front of all those peoples she jumped right into the grave." Then she went out, closing the door behind her. But she could not shut out the sounds from the gathering below: the occasional laughter, the murmur of voices, and the tinkle of notes that rose from the baby grand. COMING IN PARTISAN REVIEW: A Memorial Issue for William Phillips with contributions by: Morris Dickstein, Joseph Frank, Helen Frankenthaler, Allen Kurzweil, Walter Laqueur, Doris Lessing, Steven Marcus, Jules Olitski, Cynthia Ozick, Norman Podhoretz, Joanna Rose, John Silber, Roger Straus, Rosanna Warren, and many others. === Page 63 === JIRI WYATT Now That They Are Dead M Y FIRST SUMMER AWAY AT CAMP a fly got lodged inside my ear, raising a furious, hysterical, all-but-unbearable whine. The doctor first poured in tepid water and then, with an eye- brow tweezer, pulled the thing out, sodden, black, and finally silent. I never told my parents of this calamity. They were so reluctant to let me go away that I was first amazed by and then wholly intent on those months of astonishing liberation. I hear them now across the years like that fly, buzzing, buzzing. . . . At the time, I was meek and mild, “a good boy," as the owner of the camp, a little beast of a woman from Jewish Berlin, liked to say in front of whatever audience she happened to have gathered. She was a woman who needed an audience, and, as seems always to be true of such peo- ple, she traveled invariably—even if only across the hall—with an audi- ence in tow. Sometimes that audience was just me, so maybe that was why I found the idea important, the idea that I was a good person doing good. Wher- ever I got the idea, it misled me for a very long time. My mother is arguing with my father. There are three of us, as always, and what did it ever help to know that three's a crowd? In our crowd the odd man out is my father. My father is not very bright. He irritates my mother because she wants to marry the prince. He irritates me because he can't shut my mother up. My mother doesn't need any allies but wants me to herself, I'm her surrogate; she long ago gave up on my father. My father needs allies, but I'm not playing. Why does he let her get away with it? “You expect me to sit in a car for an hour and then just have dinner at Mara's house? She can't even cook. Who else will be there?” “What do you know, an hour! Please—" “You want me to sit in a car for an hour so I can suffer at that woman's house? What, are you that stupid?" I think, "Knock her teeth out! Live! Live! Knock her teeth out!” He says, “Why, what do you know!" === Page 64 === 62 PARTISAN REVIEW He throws his hands up and makes pouting gestures and acts as if his integrity has been besmirched. Of course, she doesn't care. She is a coarse, uncaring woman, made up to be the height of decorum and fashion. I hear them now as I try to sort out where I got this hideous emo- tional tick and who landed me with that embarrassment. Now that they are both dead, what I am is what's left of them, them arguing, whining, farting. You open your eyes in the morning and your father is in the shower farting to wake the neighborhood and you go next and there is his smell and you think “son-of-a-smelly-bitch” only to discover half a century later in your own bathroom, in your own shower, in your own mornings, that very same smell, and it's not him—it's you. That's what you get. You get everything from them you always hated, everything you always tried to get away from, even the smells, even the damn smells. When my mother was dying of bone cancer and I had survived to live more years than Christ, we had to go one day with my father to some clinic where he was having tests. When she was dying he did everything for her, he gave her shots, he tended, he carried and drove. Then one day she is lying in bed and she hears in the bathroom-thud! Thud! It's him, he's fainted. He is lying blue on the cold tiles. She's too weak now to get out of bed. She calls him: “Max!” Thank God it lasts only a few sec- onds; he comes back. When I arrive she says to me, “What will happen to me? If he is not all right, what will happen to me?” For some reason we all go to this clinic. I go along to push her in the wheelchair while he has his tests. She won't stay in the car; we have to go with him to the doctor's office. It's on the third floor. This is one of these new buildings, only doctors, upstairs are the offices and scattered throughout, the x-ray people, the blood people, and so on. We follow him to the third floor, but then he has to go across the hall for test number eight and downstairs for test number one hundred and all of a sudden we've lost him. My mother is in the wheelchair, I'm push- ing, and my father is gone. “Go in,” she says to me, with a desperation I have never seen in her. “Where is he? Where is he? Go in and find him.” The hall is cinder block and institutional lighting. She is a little dis- integrating woman in a wheelchair. I think, I can't leave her alone in this hallway! But I do and go in search of him. When I return to my mother she is whimpering, “What will happen to me? What will happen to me?” === Page 65 === POEMS SOPHIE CABOT BLACK Lost I am still here between the sun That rises and the one that sets. To remain Or go on. Which means to talk, To remember wind, words for what happened, How I could no longer figure you From trees. And a turning of weather so quiet I grew ashamed. I should have stayed with the horse Huddled under ledge, but to go back now Means to come upon myself. Whereas to be lost Is to keep arriving. And so a trail becomes All trails, perhaps a way out. Which is to say I am already Moving toward voices, each bend of the road Made worse by knowing what I tell them Will be different than what I’ve told myself. JOHN BENSKO Bayberry Find them in September, the white dust on them like the finest snow fallen before its time. Find them near the sea, and to water return them. From the boiling pot skim the light green wax. === Page 66 === MILLICENT BELL Eliane She insisted on a picnic in the garden of her family house Beyond the Bois de Vincennes- Circa 1910 with gables and pseudo-Norman lath-and-plaster, A balcony sagging over the door like a rifled purse. The garden was narrow, darkened by the walls of apartment houses. Open doors onto the terraces let out in bursts The music of television sets and tape-players And through the black branches of the old cherry tree under which they sat They could see the shark-tooth gleams of television screens. It should not have been allowed, she said. Once this was the quietest place in the world. But at least we still have the garden. And she began to take their meal out of the sacks and baskets they had carried from the trunk of her car. She threw a cloth on the iron table with its feet sunk in three inches of grass And they helped her to put down three plates and forks and knives And glasses and a bottle of wine, Cold asparagus, and the gigot, salad out of a plastic bowl, A fruit tart. All this would have been fine if it had been somewhere In sunshine, under a country sky. But in early April The shadows from the buildings were cold, a damp wind Lifted the cloth from the edge of the table While they caught up their glasses. The garden smelt of something— Garbage or cats, though neither were visible. === Page 67 === PEG BOYERS On Looking into Stoneware Chambers Squat and stout as a Mayan, vertical, not slant and topped by a small dome: you greet us open-mouthed and tongue-tied. Stone dumb, but clay. Four walls and a roof, a set of windows in the back -and a door- in short, all the spirit needs when the lights go out. Inside your temple womb still smelling of cedar resin and myrrh the soul rises from the mummy shell, plays with faience amulets and alabaster jackals, sips wine from a red limestone cup, perhaps even, in her leisure, contemplates the etymology of hysteria, a word reserved for woman, the wombed one. But she is calm tonight, no time for histrionics now: She reaches for the lyre still in her servant’s hands, accompanies herself in song, makes no demands. Possibly the song’s a prayer, sung out of habit for solace in her lonely tomb, killing time, which in fact passes, until the end of time. === Page 68 === TED GENOWAYS The Slaughterhouse Wall after Jerome Liebling As if that whisper he sometimes thought he heard over the constant howl of slaughter finally tempted him away, his station stands deserted, almost silent, without rattling gates, the volley of shouts, bones cracking under the weight of his maul, but behind where he stood, spatter-shot, caked with blood, is an empty hourglass on the slaughterhouse wall. As a boy, he made angels in the snow when clouds pushed south from St. Paul, swinging his arms to record the arc of his reach; now, even when he is gone, his double, the shadow, has more cattle to knock. His hand, though gone, leaves its blood negative, the palm pressed briefly, against the streaked steel and cinderblock, this once, a moment to catch his breath, a reprieve before he leans out of the camera’s frame and into the world to come. Was this the life of my grandfather, that stranger who gave me his name? If I were ever asked, could I have done the same? JESSICA GOODHEART Adam Eats the Beach Adam wears a beard of drool and sand, and raises his arms to the setting sun. The wind’s fingers take his face in hand. Now his fists are plunging fast toward land; he clutches the gritty floor, and with one hand, evens out his old-man’s beard of sand. === Page 69 === Seagulls huddled nearby disperse and fan out along the coast. They're all to Adam who sways like silk in the wind's hand. He reaches toward a bird until a man and dog pass by. Then gulls are done. Dog is everything, vaster than sky or sand. But night clamps down with its pink band. A woman dusts him off. Her son remakes the beard of drool and sand before she plucks him from the wind's hand. JESSICA GREENBAUM A Day Like This One Says one generation to the next our consideration of darkness habitual by then, and distant like the horizon's black line sprouting yellow rays from the sun's open fist in your drawing. If we could only live among your flowers, their petals cheering like seal flippers their stems free from clustered burrs of memory. Even now the line divides us, for instance, given today's autumn balm I think O just like this very day but calmer, far less probable and so remember how we ate breakfast that morning, washed and dressed, and when we made it home the skyline smoking but the windows open your drawing fluttered from its tack like any turned page and we wondered who drank from that cold cup in the sink === Page 70 === and who wore those limp clothes on the bed, and we stared at the horizon you drew (to offset the day's dizziness) and held you in our breath and wished we could begin again. CAROL ANN DUFFY Wish But what if, in the clammy soil, her limbs grew warmer, shifted, stirred, kicked off the covering of earth, the drowsing corms, the sly worms, what if her arms reached out to grab the stone, the grooves of her dates under her thumb, and pulled her up? I wish. Her bare feet walk along the gravel path between the graves, her shroud like washing blown onto the grass, the petals of her wreath kissed for a bride. Nobody died. Nobody wept. Nobody slept who couldn't be woken by the light. If I can only push open this heavy door she'll be standing there in the sun, dirty, tired, wondering why do I shout, why do I run. White Writing No vows written to wed you, I write them white, my lips on yours, light in the soft hours of our married years. No prayers written to bless you, I write them white, your soul a flame, bright in the window of your maiden name. Editor's Note: Excerpted from Feminine Gospels by Carol Ann Duffy. To be published in April by Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2002 by Carol Ann Duffy. All rights reserved. === Page 71 === No laws written to guard you, I write them white, your hand in mine, palm against palm, lifeline, heartline. No rules written to guide you, I write them white, words on the wind, traced with a stick where we walk on the sand. No news written to tell you, I write it white, foam on a wave, as we lift up our skirts in the sea, wade, see last gold sun behind clouds, inked water in moonlight. No poems written to praise you, I write them white. WILLIAM LOGAN The Vision They didn't know just why they had been chosen- by whom or what would always be unclear. That night, the last remains of hope were frozen into the consolations of their fear. The spirit falters when the vision dies, knowing the shapes in darkness that appall. Around the garden rose the famous cries of crows: awe, awe, awe, awe. Then came the fall. A colder evening, then a bitter dawn. The silence dropping on them like a sheet composed a scene in which the light had drawn a scribbled figure in the empty street. They knew a little of oblivion, the force in things that makes a thing repeat. === Page 72 === GREGORY A. RYAN Danton Keeps His Head Traffic beetles across the Quai Voltaire as an old man's oiled mask is exposed to the cool dusk. A large wing passes over T.V. screens, obscuring the late newscasts so only voices play. The station closes for the night, its last images drift with beached clippings on the Seine. Echoes from protests roll down the street, breaking into needles cellophane, ice, sunbright like a surgeon's teeth, until there is little more than the white noise of an office, a cleaning woman crying, her boy counting breadsticks on a wooden chair. The cigar smoked that evening remains on the gateleg table, the card deck still wet from spilled cognac, the whispers of merchants beneath the street, counting bottles, cork and wax. Then, lock tumblers disengage, a lace veil drops into the alley below, and the ghost of Danton whirrs among the bricks of the Rue des Medicis. STEPHEN SANDY Two for Tu Mu I Old poet, lover of caves, inveterate seeker, or looking into the sun setting === Page 73 === seeing a cracked mirror where your rod crosses the swelling disc, you bring to mind slow Lincoln staring past columns of his fascist-heavy temple, acropolis confining a man; poet or hero, both caught, both alone. We get to visit the basement now; we may think of Coleridge spelunker of mind and giddy pilgrim in Michael's grotto. In the dripping cellar we watch the marble leach in the Lincoln Memorial basement, marshy cellar pools at Potomac water table coaxing ghostly stalactites from stone. II Coleridge in a romantic Malta chasm, looking at thirty women and boys doing of all things-chores!-the washing, beating shirts, and the zoom lens of his oneness-seeking eye tracking the hairy "just like a man" legs of a woman. Amazed as Tu Mu in Chiang-nan, as threatened, man looking with grappled-for courage and some cheer at this lower-class, brooding, common, lower-case spectacle of the beyond; harkering after caves, pilgrim of cave and chasm the notebook man with his pencil; his miniscule sublime. === Page 74 === STEPHEN MILLER Inside Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty If my fellow citizens knew me before I became president, they did so because of these stations. —Václav Havel N JANUARY 1983, I became Special Assistant to the new President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty—James R. Buckley, the former Republican Senator from New York. I worked in RFE/RL's Wash- ington office, but I made frequent trips to Munich, where RFE/RL was headquartered. They were reputed to be stations that, as a Wall Street Journal reporter put it, broadcast "pro-Western messages." But far from being hack radio stations that droned on about the evils of communism, RFE/RL was regarded by many people in Eastern Europe—including Václav Havel, Adam Michnik, and other leading dissidents—as invalu- able, because they were a reliable source of news. RFE/RL had a core of professional English-language journalists who worked out of bureaus in Washington, New York, London, Paris, Brus- sels, Rome, and Munich. Their news copy was dispensed to the differ- ent language services, which were required to use this material in their ten-minute hourly newscasts. The language services—RFE broadcast in six languages, RL in fourteen—also regularly broadcast digests of the editorial and opinion pages of the leading newspapers in Western Europe and the U.S. For the remainder of their programming the ser- vices had a good deal of autonomy; there was no central scripting. "These Munich-based stations," Walter Laqueur says, "provided a free flow of information to the East and contributed more than any other Western source to the emergence of a critical attitude beyond the Iron Curtain and [to] the erosion of Soviet ideology." In the early 1970s, when Senator Fulbright and Senator Church tried to close down the Radios, a number of well-known journalists spoke up for them, including David Halberstam. Testifying before Congress in 1973, Halberstam said that communist authorities "would like to stomp [RFE] out. It is the one thing in their society they can't control in === Page 75 === STEPHEN MILLER 75 any way.... It does heighten the sophistication and the level of knowl- edge of their population." In many respects RFE/RL was a highbrow station-more like National Public Radio than a commercial broadcasting station. It often had roundtable discussions about cultural and political questions, and it frequently held readings of books that were unavailable to listeners- the most notable being Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. Many distinguished writers worked for the Radios or were regular freelancers. Sergei Dovlatov, the Russian novelist, worked for the Russian Service, as did the Yugoslav dissident Mihajlo Mihajlov, who was an ethnic Russian. Several major Russian writers-Andrei Sinyavsky, Vladimir Voinovich, and Vassily Aksyonov-were frequent freelancers. In the Washington office I often ran into two well-known Soviet dissidents: Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Yelena Bonner (the wife of Andrei Sakharov). RFE/RL was a loosely managed conglomerate of language services, and some services were more professional than others. The Polish Ser- vice generally got high marks from outside observers. Contributors to its programming included virtually every major Polish writer, among them Czeslaw Milosz, Jan Kott, and Leszek Kolakowski. When I joined RFE/RL, the Polish Service was headed by Zdzislaw Najder, the author of an outstanding biography of Conrad. Other services also had distin- guished novelists, academics, and journalists on their staff or working as freelancers. The Romanian Service was headed by Vlad Georgescu, a highly regarded historian of Romania. But the Radios also attracted a working-class audience. Describing Poland during the Solidarity strikes in 1980, Timothy Garton Ash says that the "workers and their intellec- tual advisers sit drafting texts, listening to the latest news from Radio Free Europe on a short-wave transistor radio. . . ." RFE/RL also housed a widely admired research institute. It had the largest collection of Soviet samizdat in the world and provided by far the best information on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The insti- tute put out monthly research reports that were considered invaluable by the academics and journalists who subscribed to them, though their main purpose was to provide RFE/RL's broadcasting services with solid information on all aspects of life in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. According to one observer, RFE/RL had "the best research facil- ities in the world for covering the demise of the [Soviet] empire." In 1983 the head of RFE was James Brown, one of the leading schol- ars of Eastern Europe. On his staff were a number of very bright young East European and Soviet analysts who would go on to successful careers in academia or journalism after the institute was eliminated in === Page 76 === 76 PARTISAN REVIEW the mid-1990s. In a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement, two books under review are by former staffers. The institute attracted many distinguished scholars to its conferences. I remember a conference on Russian nationalism attended by Adam Ulam, Peter Reddaway, Robert Conquest, and John Dunlop. Leo Labedz, the tough-minded editor of the journal Survey, was also there, as well as the French scholars Hélène Carrère d'Encausse and Alain Besançon. At another conference Murray Feshbach, the leading Western scholar on the Soviet environment, talked about the dismal state of Soviet health care. In short, RFE/RL was a lively place because RFE/RL staffers were novelists, poets, journalists, academics, and former military officers. Many had life stories that would make a riveting memoir or movie. Of course, all was not sweetness and light in Munich, which brimmed over with backbiting and slander because there were so many factions. There were quarrels between émigrés from different countries, and there were quarrels among émigrés from the same country who had arrived in the West at different times. The older generation generally had never lived under a communist regime, whereas the younger had-and many had been Party members. Some of the nastiness was fomented by spies who hoped to create a scandal so that Congress would close the Radios. I used to have lunch occasionally with a very charming, cultured employee who turned out to be a spy for an East European country. It is hard to overstate the intellectual brio of RFE/RL, which was a great think tank. But I was not at the Radios to learn about Eastern Europe or to enjoy good conversation; I was there to do a job. What does a Special Assistant do? Though I was Special Assistant to Jim Buckley, I owed my job to two other Reagan Administration appointees: Frank Shakespeare and Ben Wattenberg. Shakespeare, who headed the United States Information Agency during President Nixon's first term, had recently been made Chairman of the Board for Interna- tional Broadcasting, which was the federal agency responsible for over- seeing RFE/RL. Ben Wattenberg-author, television journalist, and columnist-was appointed Vice-Chairman. Wattenberg, whom I met when I was an American Enterprise Institute fellow, persuaded Shake- speare to create a job for me because he thought I could help Buckley carry out his policies. It was an odd situation, and my job was a work-in-progress. I reported to Buckley, but Shakespeare was also my boss insofar as he occasionally would ask me to do things for the Board (I also attended Board meetings). Wattenberg was only half a boss, because all he wanted me to do was keep him informed; he would call me to ask what === Page 77 === STEPHEN MILLER 77 I thought of a particular person who worked at the Radios or what I thought about a certain controversy. Occasionally I was not sure what I was supposed to be doing, but I got along with all three men and— more important—I broadly agreed with Shakespeare's program to reform the Radios. (Of course, a cynic could say that I had to agree if I wanted to keep my job.) Did the Radios need to be reformed? Many observers in Munich and elsewhere thought that the Radios were doing a good job. In the 1950s and 1960s the Radios had sometimes been guilty of strident anti- communism and irresponsible broadcasting. RFE's Hungarian Service apparently encouraged Hungarians to rise up in 1956, though what exactly the service did is a matter of some debate. Yet after 1973, when the Radios lost their CIA connection and became publicly funded, they had become respected in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Staffers in Munich worried that the new Reagan Administration team would undermine the reputation for objectivity that the Radios had slowly gained. They feared that Shakespeare would restore the Radios' strident anti-communism of the early years and make them into cheer- leaders for the Reagan Administration. The concern was that if such changes were made, RFE/RL's audience would decline. But some RFE/RL employees welcomed the Reagan team because they thought that Radio officials were too eager to please reformist communist regimes, and as a result rarely gave airtime to outspoken dissidents. When I came on board in January 1983 I knew little about the Radios, but soon realized that some reforms were necessary. To my mind, the problem was not that Radio staffers were soft on commu- nism—an absurd charge since many had suffered under communist regimes, and some had even spent time in prison. Rather, the main prob- lem was that the spectrum of news and opinion was too narrow. The news focused heavily on Western Europe—especially on the doings of left-liberal political parties and Eurocommunism. As Arch Puddington says in Broadcasting Freedom, a study of RFE/RL, “Jim Brown [the Director of RFE] encouraged his broadcasters to feature items about the rift in the global Communist movement caused by the ferment in the Italian and Spanish parties.” The daily “budget”—the package of news stories written by RFE/RL journalists and opinion pieces and general interest stories that were culled from the Western press—contained few articles about social and economic developments in the United States and few columns by conservative and neoconservative writers. Many high-level employees were what I would call “Euro-ists." They thought developments in Western Europe were of far greater interest to === Page 78 === 78 PARTISAN REVIEW their audience than developments in the United States and that change in Eastern Europe would come from above—from communist parties that inched towards reform, like the Communist Party of Hungary under Janos Kadar. "Euro-ist" staffers thought the way to enlighten East European Party officials, who they knew listened to the Radios, would be to tell them about developments in those West European countries that were run by social democratic parties. According to the New York Times, an editor in the Hungarian Service said that "we are not asking the Communists to give up Communism. . . . We would like a beautiful Communism . . . a goulash Communism." This view of how to promote change in the Soviet bloc was the "real- ist" view held by many academics as well as by most people in the State Department. Henry Kissinger, the primary exponent of this position, said in the mid-1970s that the best the U.S. could hope for was "mutual restraint, coexistence, and, ultimately, cooperation" between the two superpowers. Americans must not "mesmerize themselves with simple solutions." To the "realists" the idea of even discussing the question of ridding Eastern Europe of communist regimes was foolish, counterpro- ductive, and possibly dangerous, for the Soviet Union would ruthlessly suppress any political movement that went too fast and too far, as it had done in Prague in 1968. The Reagan Administration attacked this view. "Reagan's victory," Robert Kagan has said, "came at the expense of the realist establishment." I had my doubts about the realist approach. I knew a lot about daily life in Hungary—my wife was from Hungary and often went back to visit her relatives (I had been there twice myself)—and I didn't think "goulash communism" was a good thing or that it was the best the Hungarians could hope for. More important, I thought the realist posi- tion was not realistic, because it was based on the assumption that reformist communist regimes were stable, whereas I thought all com- munist regimes were unstable because they were undemocratic. Finally, I did not think that communist regimes would ever institute serious reforms; the Party would always squelch reforms that threatened its power. Nevertheless, I didn't argue with RFE/RL staffers about the best way to promote change in Eastern Europe. Instead, I said, "Even if the real- ists are right, the views of the Reaganites should be heard on the Radios." I didn't buy the argument that RFE/RL's audience preferred to hear more about political and social developments in, say, Sweden than about those in the United States. I told staffers that listeners should have more information about the U.S. and about the Reagan administration. === Page 79 === STEPHEN MILLER 79 I stressed that in making these recommendations I was not trying to politicize the Radios. I also told Buckley that there should be more news reporters assigned to covering the U.S. He agreed, and soon I was given the title of Director of American Programming. I assembled a staff of four young journalists to write feature stories about life in America, especially about entrepre- neurs, nonprofit organizations, and grassroots political activity. The ven- ture was not successful because many language services did not use the articles. The "Euro-ist" outlook still prevailed in Munich. And since the articles were not hard news, the language services were not required to use them, despite Buckley's recommendation. After a year this venture died a quiet death when three of my four journalists left for other jobs. But the daily budget was revamped and it now included far more news about the U.S. and a much wider spectrum of political opinion. My job, it became clear to me, would never be well-defined, since it depended greatly on the tasks that Buckley—and Shakespeare—would assign me. Sometimes it seemed as if my main job was interviewing job candidates. However, I did not play a major role in the hiring of George Urban, who became director of RFE roughly a year after I arrived. Urban replaced Jim Brown, who quit several months after Buckley became president, citing "political differences with the way the Reagan administration is now directing the radio. . . ." I approved of Brown's departure—not because I disliked him, but because he was an uncon- structed "Euro-ist" who thought that news about Eurocommunists deserved more coverage than news about the U.S. Urban, a Hungarian native who had lived in Britain for many years, seemed to be a good replacement; he was a Reaganite who was knowl- edgeable about Eastern Europe. I admired his extended interviews of distinguished European and American intellectuals, which were broad- cast on the Radios and published in Encounter magazine. Yet Urban turned out to be a poor director because he made enemies unnecessar- ily. In a memoir about RFE/RL, Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of Democracy: My War Within the Cold War, Urban says that he made enemies because of his "reputation for not suffering communists, appeasers, and fools gladly." Arguing that the Radios "stood for a new genre of psychological and political warfare," he saw himself as a gen- eral lecturing to the troops. He ran the morning staff meetings in a high- handed manner, belabored the obvious by lecturing about the evils of communism, and made petty objections to the language of scripts. Any- one who disagreed with him was a fool or an appeaser. Or both. === Page 80 === 80 PARTISAN REVIEW A new director of RL was hired a few months before I joined the Radios: George Bailey. We became friends. Bailey was a great bear of a man who spoke a dozen languages fluently. His career, which he recounts in his exuberant book, The Germans, was fascinating. He was a former college boxer who served as an American liaison officer with the Red Army during World War II and was a translator when the Ger- mans surrendered to the Soviet army in 1945. After the war he worked as a journalist for the Reporter magazine and later for the West German publishing firm of Axel Springer—where he provided financial support for Kontinent, a magazine of Russian literature and thought that was published in English and Russian. Bailey greatly admired Russian culture, and was deeply disturbed by the suffering the Russian people had endured in the twentieth century. Some of his detractors at the Radios said that he was a soft touch when it came to Russians—he would hire any Russian émigré who needed a job, and he wouldn’t fire Russian staffers even if they were drunk all the time. The more serious charge was that Bailey allowed Russian nationalist employees to air anti-Western, antidemocratic, and anti-Semitic pro- grams. The controversy was connected to the controversy in the West about the political views of Solzhenitsyn, whose speeches were often broadcast on the Russian Service. Solzhenitsyn, a Russian nationalist, certainly had strongly attacked the West, but was he also anti-Semitic and antidemocratic? There was no consensus on this question. Bailey denied the charge that he had broadcast anti-Semitic and anti- democratic programs. He also argued that there was a difference between Russian nationalism and Russian ultra-nationalism; the former point of view deserved to be aired on the Radios but not the latter. Two respected journalists, however, said that some programs on the Russian Service were tainted by ultra-nationalism. In response to these allega- tions, as well as to complaints by a number of Jewish staffers who worked for the Russian Service, a congressional committee investigated the Radios in 1984, but found no evidence of anti-Semitic broadcasts. Another investigation by the General Accounting Office came back with the same verdict, though it did call for more controls over broadcast content. But the controversy refused to go away. Representative Lawrence Smith, a Democratic congressman from Florida, charged that RFE/RL broadcast extremist, anti-Semitic, and antidemocratic pro- grams. Most damaging was the report written for Helsinki Watch, a respected organization, by one of RL’s own freelancers, Ludmilla Alex- === Page 81 === STEPHEN MILLER 81 eyeva. She accused the Russian Service of airing programs that were hostile to pluralism and democracy. Soon after this debate erupted, I was asked by Buckley to see what to make of it. I had to become an instant expert on Russian nationalism. I told him that scholars were deeply divided about the nature of Russian nationalism, but the controversial scripts were few in number, and the overwhelming majority of scripts aired by the Russian Service were not tainted with nationalism of any kind. The scripts in question, moreover, were about relatively obscure historical issues that did not lend them- selves to easy clarification. Undoubtedly, the scripts were too strident, tendentious, chauvinistic, and excessively critical of the democratic West. RL's management, I said, should have a better vetting process so that similar unprofessional scripts would not be aired. I also said that the scripts were not anti-Semitic, but some Russian Jews on the RL staff told me I didn't understand code words that Russ- ian-speakers knew referred to Jews. One thing was clear. It was absurd for anyone to suggest that Bailey condoned Russian ultra-nationalism. For one thing, his wife was Jewish. Secondly, he was a great admirer of Andrei Sakharov, whom Russian nationalists often attacked because of Sakharov's "internationalist" views. After Bailey left the Radios he wrote a book about Sakharov, Galileo's Children: Science, Sakharov, and the Power of the State. Bailey may have been a lax administrator, but he was a decent man without any prejudices. At first I found the controversy over Russian nationalism interesting, because it enabled me to learn more about Russian history and culture. But after a year of handling questions from congressional staffers and the press I became irritated by the debate's staying power and by the way it was blown out of proportion. After I was misquoted by a Jewish weekly, I became shy about talking to the press. And though I came to the conclusion that Solzhenitsyn was not anti-Semitic, I still harbored doubts about the RL staffers who had written the offending scripts. I was also less enthusiastic about being part of the Reagan team. Though still a Reaganite in my foreign policy views, I felt that some of the leading team members were hurting the effort to reform the Radios. Urban was too high-handed, and Bailey was too lax. But it was Shake- speare's approach to reform that bothered me the most. A decent and well-meaning man, Shakespeare-how shall I put it? -too gung-ho. Twice, I think, he descended upon Munich and required all staffers to assemble in the cafeteria so that he could lecture them about where the Radios should be going. His speeches made my job more difficult, for he seemed to be saying-though it may not have been his intention- === Page 82 === 82 PARTISAN REVIEW that staffers should broadcast only a positive view of the Reagan Administration. For Buckley I had great respect and affection—he was a thoughtful man who had the rare quality of being a good listener—but I felt that he was caught in a managerial no-man's-land. On one side was the ener- getic Shakespeare, who was deeply involved in the running of RFE/RL; on the other side were the independent-minded Georges—Urban and Bailey—who, it was rumored, went directly to Shakespeare when they had a complaint. I also think Buckley was pained by the many factions he encountered in Munich, and by the controversy over RL's broadcast- ing. I suspect that he was glad to leave RFE/RL in 1986, when he became a federal judge on the Court of Appeals. By the end of 1986, the key members of the original Reagan team had departed. Shakespeare became Ambassador to Portugal, and the two Georges left to write books. The new Board chairman, Steve Forbes, took the same line toward the Radios as Shakespeare, but he was more tactful. To replace Buckley he hired Eugene Pell, a former television cor- respondent for NBC who at the time was the director of the Voice of America. The Radios, it seemed to me, were now in the hands of those leaning toward the realist view. I was now out of the management loop, but I landed another job at the Radios—becoming the head of the Washington office of the Research Institute. For the next seven years I edited a newsletter that was a digest of reports from the institute. I also wrote articles about foreign policy. In 1988 I published a piece in the National Interest that took a skeptical look at the realist U.S. policy of "differentiation" in Eastern Europe, which mainly meant giving Romania Most Favored Nation trade status in order to reward it for being less under Soviet influence than other Eastern bloc countries (one observer spoke of Romania's "semi-indepen- dent foreign policy"). I argued that the policy had not shown any results, for Romania remained a brutally repressive regime that was not nearly as free from Soviet influence as Ceausescu's propaganda maintained. In the article I also criticized the assumption, which was widespread among anti-anti-communists, that Cold Warriors suffered from what Jimmy Carter called "an inordinate fear of communism." If that were the case, then why in the 1950s did the Eisenhower administration reward Tito for breaking with Stalin—giving Yugoslavia aid, trade cred- its, and arms? The Eisenhower administration, I said, decided not to set up a Yugoslav Service at RFE. I also wrote a piece about Soviet health care. One of the standard arguments of anti-anti-communists was that the Soviet Union was a === Page 83 === STEPHEN MILLER 83 repressive state, but that poor people lived better there than in the cap- italist West because health care was free and there was an abundant sup- ply of doctors. Working for the RFE/RL, I knew otherwise, for scholars from RFE/RL's Research Institute would write about many of the fail- ings of Soviet society-its miserable health care system and its terrible neglect of the environment. In 1989 I wrote a piece attacking anti-anti-communists which appeared in Commentary. Certain that the Soviet Union was here to stay, many anti-anti-communist scholars said the Soviet Union's politics could best be understood by appropriating the terms of political scien- tists to describe regimes in the West-e.g., interest-group pluralism-or by using the methodologies of anthropology or sociology. They also argued that those who said that the Soviet Union might collapse were blinded by their Cold War attitudes. I agreed with them that the USSR had changed a great deal from the time of Stalin-that was obvious to all Sovietologists-but I didn't agree that the Soviet Union was a stable country and that communism could be reformed. Yet I believed it would take a long time before communist regimes would collapse. I wrote that "real change in Communist countries is likely to take a long time." I was wrong. On November 9, 1989, three months after my article appeared, the Berlin Wall came down. Most observers were wrong about the fate of communism in Eastern Europe, but the Reaganites were, so to speak, less wrong, for their assessment of life under com- munism was more accurate. They said that Leninist communism could be reformed only on the margins, and they were right. Leninist commu- nism-sometimes called socialism-was an economic disaster. Or, as a Polish worker put it, "Forty years of socialism and there's still no toilet paper!" In my view the Bush Administration's realist approach to the Soviet Union was not very different from the view of anti-anti-communists. Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker, made no secret of their admiration for Gorbachev, and seemed to hope that reform communism would work. Bush, I suspect, would never have spoken of "an evil empire." In fact, in a speech before the Ukrainian parliament-called by its detractors the Chicken Kiev speech-Bush suggested that the empire should be maintained; he told the delegates that the Soviet Union was worth saving and that they should endorse a treaty committing them to the Union. What was the alternative for Ukraine? According to Bush, it was a "suicidal nationalism based on ethnic hatred." But there were differences between the realists and the anti-anti-com- munists. One way to think about the three currents of thought is to === Page 84 === 84 PARTISAN REVIEW imagine a medieval tale in which the Soviet Union is a castle besieged in turn by three different groups: anti-anti-communists, realists, and Rea- ganites. The anti-anti-communists yell, "Come on out. We accept your right to live a different way of life; we are not judgmental, and further- more we realize we bear the greater responsibility for this war." The realists yell, "Come on out. We have some treaties for you to sign that should reduce tensions between us so that we can live together in a peaceful fashion." The Reaganites yell, "Stay there as long as you want. We are going to strengthen our fortifications, and eventually you'll col- lapse because your system doesn't work." What disturbed me most about the realists and the anti-anti-commu- nists was their intellectual complacency—their cavalier way of dismiss- ing the views of dissidents by insinuating that they were not only biased because of their experiences but also a little crazy for sticking their necks out as they did. (This is what a State Department official once suggested to me.) Most of the dissidents I met struck me as sane and modest. And to my mind they had a much better knowledge of life under communist regimes than the realists and anti-anti-communists. The more we learn about the Soviet Union, the more we find out that the concerns of the Reaganites were justifiable. According to the New Yorker, the USSR set up its biological warfare research facilities one year after it signed the treaty banning the development, use, and stock- piling of biological weapons. Looking back on the forty-year debate about American policy toward the Soviet bloc, one can criticize all three groups. Anti-commu- nists like Urban were wrong to lump realists with anti-anti-communists, for the realist position was tenable, whereas the anti-anti-communist position was not. The anti-anti-communists deserve to be criticized the most, for they refused to take seriously the views of the Reaganites— dismissing them as paranoid, deluded, and obsessive. Whatever differ- ences I had with some Reaganites, it was the Reaganites who strongly supported the Radios when many others did not. Most anti-com- munists regarded the Radios as Cold War propaganda—as obstacles to détente and barriers to good relations with the Soviet Union. If the anti- anti-communists had gotten their way in the early 1970s, the Radios would have been shut down. And that would have been a terrible mistake. === Page 85 === EDITH KURZWEIL An Interview with Eda Kriseova Edith Kurzweil: I'm glad to have finally caught up with you. I would like you to tell me what you think has changed since the last time I was here in Prague, about ten years ago. I see many superficial changes in this fantastic city. But I have also been reading about the volatile polit- ical situation. What happened in the most recent election? Eda Kriseova: I'm not a politician, and I'm not all that interested in pol- itics. I can only give you a brief summary of my impressions. I'm a writer, and I'm observing. I'm as engaged as any other normal citizen. Kurzweil: But you were very much engaged when you were in the gov- ernment with Václav Havel. Kriseova: Yes, I was. But I wasn't really in the government; I was in the presidential office, which is different. There is the government, and there is the president. When Havel was elected President, in December 1989, he asked some of his colleagues from the opposition, who, as you know, had been organizing this Velvet Revolution, to work with him and help implement our plans. I couldn't say no. I mean, when a very good friend asks you for help, what can you do? So I became an advi- sor. Then I became Director of the Department of Complaints and Amnesties, which was very difficult work. At that time, the communist institutions were not functioning. There was no legislative impact, because you couldn't use the old laws, and there were not yet new laws. People were waiting for forty or fifty years, because you have to count the war, for some sort of justice. We made some progress, but it was very slow. Kurzweil: So you officially took care of complaints? Kriseova: Well, almost everybody trusted this new president. People ended up asking him to straighten out their personal situations, to change their lives and make up for their misfortunes. === Page 86 === 86 PARTISAN REVIEW Kurzweil: In other words, they were trying to get help for themselves personally, while he was trying to revamp the entire government, the constitution, and the legal system. Kriseova: Yes. The constitution, the legislation, and everything else. But that was the task of parliament. The president is elected by the parlia- ment and is not as powerful as in the United States or France. We don't have a presidential system. Kurzweil: Yes, but was the parliament newly elected, as well? Kriseova: No, it was the old parliament. Some of its members were fired and others were co-opted. So it was a mixture. In June 1990, we had elections; the parliament was changed. Anyway, you know this history. From today's perspective, it was a mistake. The elections should have taken place later on, so that the parliament would have had more time to build a basic and more serious legislative system. The entire process of liberation and privatization should have been guided by a more spe- cific law. But that time is gone. Then, we were full of hope and eupho- ria. We were very idealistic, very romantic. It was one of the best times of my life, because it was so active. Everything seemed possible. Kurzweil: Well, one felt that enthusiasm when one came to visit. Kriseova: It was a wonderful atmosphere, mainly during the first year. In the second year, everything was already more complicated. But in 1992, before the split into Slovakia and the Czech Republic, our presi- dent resigned. Our circle of about ten to fifteen people resigned with him. In 1993 he was elected president of the Czech Republic. After that, he felt that times had changed. He needed an office with bureaucrats, and I use that term in the good sense. We were all creative people and wanted to go back to our professions—architecture, writing, playwrit- ing, screenplay writing. One of us became ambassador to the United States and now is a senator. It seems like a long time ago. When I look back, I am quite disappointed, because our expectations were let down. Kurzweil: To what do you attribute this? Kriseova: First of all, I think I didn't know enough about people. Not only the Czechs, but all of mankind. We made lots of mistakes. On the other hand, being in politics, observing this transformation, is such a === Page 87 === EDA KRISEOVÅ 87 great experience. It was like a stage. Can you imagine how interesting it was for a writer? History always repeats itself in another guise. I regret that one thousand years ago we did not manage to become a part of the Holy Roman Empire. Then, there was a Czech intellectual, St. Vojtech, Adalbert in German, who was recognized by the Pope and the emperor as a bishop. He tried to persuade Czechs who were in power to annex, but they refused to do so and chased him twice from the country. They had slaves and bigamy; they didn’t want legislation that was against all that. And now, we are in a similar situation. The Czechs in power want their mafias and corruption. Not all of them, but many. They want to be hidden, to live in an atmosphere without strict laws, which allows them to continue engaging in their shady businesses. They make more money without the danger of punishment for what they have done. But Havel wants to civilize the Czechs, bring them up as responsible citizens of their community. Kurzweil: According to some people, and I don’t know how much cre- dence to give them, they turned against him because they loved his for- mer wife, Olga, who died, and they don’t like his new wife. Kriseova: Come on, this is stupid. Isn’t it stupid? Kurzweil: Yes. Kriseova: First of all, that is his own private business. Secondly, they loved Olga after her death. They didn’t like her so much while she was alive. This is yet another tradition in this country. People here love spec- tacular funerals, because afterwards that person can cause no more trouble. There have been many important individuals in our history who were independent, and therefore were not accepted by the little bourgeois. And the little bourgeois is happy when he sees the funeral of such an individual, whom he then starts to glorify. Kurzweil: Can you compare it to the Princess Diana syndrome? Kriseova: Something like that, yes. This is one aspect. Another is that Havel is not the sort of person who could live alone. Also, he was seri- ously ill, and by becoming his second wife, Dagmar saved him with her enormous amount of energy. She was fighting very hard for him. Kurzweil: He has cancer, doesn’t he? === Page 88 === 88 PARTISAN REVIEW Kriseova: Yes. At the beginning, she did not know how to be First Lady. Now, she does it perfectly. She is on the boards of many foundations. She is doing wonderful charitable work, but people don't appreciate it. I once told her, “They will appreciate you after you are dead, don't expect anything while you are alive.” Sometimes she is desperate about how critical and unfair the journalists are. Kurzweil: Journalists are unfair all over the world. Kriseova: Havel is badly treated by journalists and the media. Unfortu- nately, journalists don't have the proper education, because they now go to work directly after school in order to earn money. Kurzweil: Well, I don't think that's very different than in the United States. Kriseova: In the United States you have some serious newspapers, which have some interesting columnists. More like in Germany, for instance, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Die Zeit. We don't have that. We have more and more rubbish. Kurzweil: That's part of journalism these days, because the more rub- bish you print, the more readers you get, which means more advertising and more money. Kriseova: It's the tragedy of this world. Mankind is getting more and more stupid. Nobody doubts that. Kurzweil: In Partisan Review we try hard to stay on a higher level. But “little magazines” that don't play down to the lower level of readers cannot get much of a circulation. Kriseova: This is the same thing on another level. Anyway, I think that Havel has made a few serious mistakes, but who would not have done so in this position? Count von Schwarzenberg, who was the chancellor in the Castle in our time, during a discussion with some dignitaries once said: “Imagine you have an aquarium with fish, and you make bouill- abaise out of the aquarium. And now, in our situation, we have to make an aquarium out of the bouillabaisse.” === Page 89 === EDA KRISE0VA 89 Kurzweil: What about intellectual life? You had such a lively one as dis- sidents. Does that still function, or are you more fragmented? Kriseova: We are fragmented. The people who were united under the communists now are independent. But that is normal and doesn't mat- ter. It was not normal to live in ghettos. Kurzweil: You mean intellectual ghettos. Kriseova: Yes. These ghettos were formed in response to outside pres- sure, pressure by the state police. And then, of course, when the coun- try split so completely, we functioned very differently. When you are not under pressure, you are much more independent. But some writers and artists are frustrated, because in the sixties some of them were very suc- cessful. Then, they were banned and were waiting for better times. Now, better times are here, and nobody is interested in their work. When these people were in opposition, they expected much improvement. Instead, our society has turned against the dissidents. Kurzweil: Why? Kriseova: Because people have guilty consciences. That is also a part of the hate for Havel. He is too moral for them. Most of them were and are opportunists. Our society is in a bad moral state. People during the time of "normalization," in the twenty years after the invasion in 1968, lost their dignity, self-respect, honor, and sense for a good reputation. They now conform by telling lies. Some intellectuals and people in power are making up stories about their lives: they pretend to have been dissidents, and even to have signed Charter 77, when they want to sell themselves abroad. They are not even ashamed to tell these stories in the presence of former dissidents. I am not frustrated. I can publish in my own country, in my own language, I can travel, and I have no trouble with the state police. I feel that I am a world citizen. That makes me happy and unhappy at the same time. I am a part of mankind, and I feel responsibility for our world. It seems to me that the world slips up on problems which are no longer solvable, that our reality is more dramatic than any fiction that you might invent. I am scared, and that is why I started to write essays for the first time in my life. When I look around me, it's such a small stage, and small puppets are playing as if they were giants. They are fighting about small amounts of power and money, compared to wealthy and powerful Americans. === Page 90 === 90 PARTISAN REVIEW Kurzweil: But that's nothing new. They fight over travel money in every American university. Kriseova: Here, they become very selfish. Everybody is fighting for him- self. Kurzweil: Again, that happens everywhere. Except it's not necessarily articulated. Kriseova: They have better manners. Here they have scandals and they remain in their jobs. After a big scandal, they don't step aside. I am trying to find out what individuals can do in order to live decently and not be frustrated. I don't really think I am going to explain anything to mankind. I am doing it for myself; this is my problem. Kurzweil: You seem to be quite utopian. Kriseova: Yes, I am. Kurzweil: I think that utopia cannot work, that you're bound to be dis- appointed. But I hope I'm wrong. Yes, you can be successful on a one- on-one basis, but it is very difficult to set up an organization and not have that new organization get corrupted and be run by some individ- ual who is able to shape it, as it were, in his image and for his interests. Kriseova: I am trying to work on such a private program for the good of society, to suggest different activities. Kurzweil: Which society? Kriseova: I am concerned with civic society. I give readings in libraries, without compensation. They don't pay, because they don't have any money. There are always openminded people who are in real trouble. They ask you questions and you are able to encourage them. These activities explore my own program, and make sense for people who are unsure, who need a push. Many young people are asking me questions. Sometimes I feel completely overloaded because I am too social; I am functioning as an unofficial and unpaid director of complaints. === Page 91 === EDA KRISEOVIA 91 Kurzweil: Is there anything else that you think we should know in America that might help to alleviate your frustrations? I don't believe that sending a lot of money is necessarily going to help. Kriseova: No. I think education is most important, especially studying abroad. That is what opens new horizons, as does learning languages. It makes sense to subsidize the foundations active in building this open society. We have to work down to a lower level, because our politicians are corrupt. You can try by reaching people who don't realize that the politicians are lying. For instance, in the village where I am spending my summers, they are totally self-involved; they are envious of each other; and they are bitter and terribly negative, like children. They are think- ing about themselves, but no one thinks of society as a whole. The rich build beautiful houses, buy beautiful cars, but don't think of the roads which go to their houses. That, they feel, should be done by somebody else, even though they don't want to pay village taxes. Kurzweil: This is no different the world over. Kriseova: But it is so sad. Of course we need time. And peace to widen our horizon, not to see Americans as only self-centered. Still, Americans are getting more self-centered because they are afraid of terrorists. Kurzweil: I am not sure. I think they are coming together in some sense. But American society has been fragmented by a multiculturalism cen- tered on ethnic origin, rather than on a global culture that includes all countries, which, I think, is what you're thinking of. Kriseova: Yes. Kurzweil: On the other hand, in defense of America, I must say that it is a country. If you belong to a country such as, for example, the Czech Republic, there has to be something that makes you feel like a Czech. Whereas in America the exaggerated focus on your origins tends to encourage fragmentation. So, from the American point of view, because terrorism hit everybody, it was positive to watch people of all origins help each other. On television, you saw that people of every color and creed walked out of the World Trade Center together, regardless of what they looked like or what positions they held. In other words, we saw === Page 92 === 92 PARTISAN REVIEW human solidarity emerge. To me, this also demonstrated an adherence to democratic values that belies the preoccupation with ethnicity. In the Czech Republic, you seem to have solved that problem to some extent, by separating from Slovakia. Kriseova: I do not think that this separation was good, although it was inevitable. I do not think that Czechs and Slovaks became more self- confident; they both have deep complexes. Thank God the nineteenth- century nationalistic emotions no longer work—as the populist politicians would wish. That has been proven in the last elections. It seems to me that Czechs always functioned better when part of bigger unions, empires, and monarchies than just by themselves. In the small, ethnically pure state, they are becoming small as individuals, provincial. I put much hope in the European Union. I think that if the post- communist states had been admitted to membership a couple of years ago, the present and future Europe would be safer. This “not being good enough,” this waiting and expecting, is humiliating the people, making them more frustrated. Being second-class Europeans, they are scared of the opening world, they do not know the languages, they are less edu- cated. But on the other hand, look at these well-educated first-class Europeans in Austria, Bavaria, Italy etc., who were brought up for fifty- seven years in democratic systems, look at them. Marta Halpert observes it in her “Letter from Europe” in the summer issue of Partisan Review: new tribalism, xenophobia, nationalism. And people seem to be less and less interested in what is happening: they watch simplistic tele- vision, read simplistic newspapers and magazines, get more and more fragmented in their minds. Shouldn’t we all bring intellectual activities to the people of utopia? === Page 93 === CUSHING STROUT "Two Wings of the Same Breathing Creature": Fictionalizing History C ALLIOPE AND CLIO are not identical twins,” Wallace Stegner pointed out, "but they are sisters." For that reason the actual can be transposed into the fictional by a novelist whose imagi- nation has been stimulated by real events and persons, or the fictional can be transposed into the actual by a historical novelist, writing about a particular time and place. "There is a whole middle ground between fiction and history," Stegner argues in his essay "On the Writing of His- tory" (1965); and he has often made it his own territory, whether work- ing as a novelist or a historian. In either role a writer can present material in generalizing, expositional form or in particularizing, dramatic form, often in some combination of both. "There are respectable books all across the spectrum," Stegner observes, "but it is important that they be called what they are, and do not pretend to be what they are not." His account in The Preacher and the Slave of the life and death of the IWW martyr Joe Hill, for example, was based on as much research as he would have done had he intended to write a biography. Nevertheless, he took pains in a foreword "to label it an act of the imagination," which is what he wanted it to be so that he could "invent characters, scenes, motiva- tions, dialogue," taking a "novel's liberties." An influential French theorist of literature, Gerard Genette, in Fiction & Diction (1993) acknowledges that most of the theoretical work on narratives, including his own, has been on fictional rather than factual narratives. Trying to avoid this omission, he asserts that factual narra- tives are characterized by having "the obligation to report only what one knows but at the same time everything that one knows, to provide all the relevant information-and to state how one has come by that knowledge." By the end of his difficult and abstract chapter, however, he comes to attenuate his distinction by conceding that in practice "there is no such thing as pure fiction and no such thing as history so rigorous that it abjures any 'emptotting' and any use of novelistic tech- niques." If narrative forms "readily cross the borderline between fiction and nonfiction, it is no less urgent, rather it is all the more urgent, for === Page 94 === 94 PARTISAN REVIEW narratology to follow their example.” Catching up, in effect, with a position that Stegner had articulated several decades earlier, Genette fails to consider, however, the case of historical fiction (whether as novel, play, or poem), which has always had to cross this borderline and to use both fictional and historical techniques. John Updike confessed that in thinking about doing historical fiction about an actual person, James Buchanan, his “imagination was frozen by the theoretical discoverability of everything. An actual man, Buchanan, had done this and this, exactly so, once, and no other way. There was no air.” Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1962) dealt with the problem of respecting the singularity of historical persons and events by having the novelist focus instead on the general milieu, make protagonists fictional, view actual historical persons through the eyes of other people, and avoid dealing with well-known episodes in the careers of historical figures. Cynthia Ozick has sharply formulated the issue in Quarrel & Quandry (2000). As a novelist, she would like to believe that “imagi- nation owes nothing to what we call reality; it owes nothing to history.” By definition “a work of fiction cannot betray history.” Yet the point of her title is that “there are certain difficulties.” Notable among them is her objection that in the popular Broadway version of Anne Frank’s story, “history was transcended, enobled, rarefied,” leaving out or dilut- ing not only its grimness but also her “consciousness of Jewish fate and faith.” She also objects to William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and Bern- hard Schlink’s The Reader because their protagonists (a Polish Catholic and an illiterate Gestapo agent, respectively) deflect from the historical fact that Jews were the specific target of Hitler’s genocidal racism; and middle-class and educated Germans were complicit with the atrocious crimes committed in his name. Typicaility is not the obligation of a nov- el, as she says, yet in these two cases it is the historical importance of the Holocaust that makes the books targets of her criticism. That is the quandry. Her way out of it is to conclude that history has its rightful claims on a novel when the fiction is “directed consciously toward history.” She suspects both authors of attempting to deflect their readers away from the more typical Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Yet she acknowledges that both authors recognize the atypicality of their protagonists. Why should- n’t that entitle them to more artistic freedom than she is willing to give them? Anyway, the question of the intentions of both authors is a histor- ical one, requiring more evidence and argument than she presents. But her crucial point is that poetic license is not always immune to criticism. A === Page 95 === CUSHING STROUT 95 reading of historical fiction is not a matter of wholesale response any more than a reading of a historian's work need be. An excellent current example of the use-not the abuse-of poetic license is Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring (2000). She invents a maid to the painter Johannes Vermeer in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. We see everything from her point of view, a Protestant young woman who, out of economic necessity, becomes a maid to a higher-class Catholic family. She has an artistic eye, as the painter real- izes, so she finally enjoys the high privilege of sitting for the portrait that has become known as "Girl with a Pearl Earring." Most women in Ver- meer's paintings are engaged in domestic actions and are seen in relation to the interiors of the rooms they inhabit. Two figures have only a black background, and one of these is dramatically distinguished by looking over her shoulder at the viewer, her lips parted expectantly, as if she is responding to a voice and is about to speak. It fits the novel's depiction of a sexual undercurrent sometimes running between the artist and his model, though it never results in action that would violate the social barriers between them. The point of the novel is not to answer the question, "Who sat for this intriguing portrait?" Perhaps no one ever did. We shall never know. The success of the novel is that its story about the genesis of the paint- ing fits the social context of the Dutch Republic and the style of Ver- meer's artistry, by making something eloquent, restrained, and moving about ordinary domestic life. The novel does not aim to fill in a gap in the historical record. It enhances our response to Vermeer's portrait. In the 1930s John Dos Passos invented a complex border-crossing technique in his trilogy, USA, that covered several decades, involved fic- tional stories, an authorial stream-of-consciousness ("Camera Eye"), newspaper headlines, and biographical sketches of famous persons with whom the fictional stories are emotionally resonant. Some of the biogra- phies (Thorstein Veblen, Sacco and Vanzetti, Frank Lloyd Wright) are icons whom Dos Passos celebrates. Historical persons, however, are not intermingled with fictional ones, for Dos Passos had the traditional sense that the line between the fictional and the historical, though it could be crossed, should not be eradicated or entirely confused. In 1941, at a time of international crisis, he turned to writing history himself. It was the sort of Whig history that searches for a useful past to provide a "a sense of continuity with generations gone before" by finding "what kind of firm ground other men, belonging to generations before us, have found to stand on." He used his novelist's sense for narrative and the humanly significant detail; but he was writing a kind of history in The Ground === Page 96 === 96 PARTISAN REVIEW We Stand On that was consistent with his literary talents by being pri- marily a series of biographical sketches of several influential American figures, most of whom lived in the eighteenth century. Since Dos Passos's time, the border crossings have become more fre- quent and more complex. Max Byrd's historical novel, Grant (2000), is in many ways a descendant of Dos Passos's trilogy in attempting to por- tray the Gilded Age on a canvas much broader than its title suggests. Byrd creates a fictional memoir based on an actual one written by a Chicago reporter, newspaper accounts of Grant, and extracts from his notes and letters. Byrd's novel, however, follows Lukács's principle in that Grant is mainly seen from the point of view of the surrounding characters. The historical characters are all connected to Grant in impor- tant ways: Sylvanus Cadwallader, a reporter who wrote Three Years with Grant; Henry Adams, who investigated the scandals in the Grant administrations and satirized him in Democracy; Senator James Donald Cameron, who managed Grant's unsuccessful third-term campaign; and Mark Twain, who irreverently joked about him in a speech at a Union veterans banquet, idolized him, and published Grant's memoirs. Grant goes beyond Dos Passos's technique, however, by seamlessly mingling fictional persons and real persons and events. His crossing of the literary with the historical can be multilayered. Byrd prints a news- paper review, supposedly written by the fictional Nicholas Trist, of Adams's actual novel Democracy. Later on, Byrd presents, as an extract from Trist's notebook, a passage directly quoting word for word a page of Adams's novel Esther, which he wrote under a pseudonym. Grant was called "the American Sphinx" and has seemed to be a mystery to his biographers, even to himself. Brooks D. Simpson has recently declared that "there are no single threads that hold everything together." He finds Grant to be an enigma: "How to explain both the depths of defeat and the heights of triumph?" He thus makes a good subject for a novelistic treatment in which he can be seen obliquely and through many different lenses. Byrd's interpretation of Grant's extraordinary hold over the emotions of Americans after the war is expressed by Cadwallader: Grant's gener- ous terms at Appomattox were "the first great step toward national rec- onciliation and forgiveness." As his friend and heir, Grant was "the country's last true connection to the martyred Abraham Lincoln." "The two of them had walked side by side down the smoking streets of Rich- mond in 1865, the tall and the short of it, as Lincoln had joked." Byrd also recognizes that Grant and Twain have an affinity as self-invented men who have risen from obscurity to eminence, and that as writers, === Page 97 === CUSHING STROUT 97 they have (as Trist puts it) "cleared the arabesques out of American prose." Interviewing Grant in his last days, Trist concludes that in writ- ing his memoirs Grant was exhibiting "the old qualities of his general- ship, which had seemed to vanish during the dark days of his presidency-utter clarity, complete mastery of detail, singleness of pur- pose, a will that could apparently defy the fierce rebellion even of his own body." Byrd appropriately concludes the section on Grant's death with the dying Grant's poetic insight into himself, written in a letter to his doctor: "The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pro- noun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three." The novelist Diane Johnson, in reviewing Gore Vidal's The Golden Age, recognizes that "the historical novel has a sort of implied contract with truth," but she goes on to claim that "on faith, we must decide whether it is all made up or true." For all his mingling of fact with fic- tion, Byrd's sense of his contract with the reader includes explaining how much he has fictionalized fact. In a note at the end of it he explains that the wounded journalist Nicholas Trist is an invented character, though his romance with Elizabeth Cameron is "loosely based on her real-life affair with the poet Joseph Trumbull Stickney." Historical char- acters, however, "do and say here pretty much what they actually did and said. . . . Whenever possible I have taken dialogue verbatim from letters, books, diaries, etc." Byrd admits that his version of Clover Adams's dismayed discovery that her husband wrote Esther is "speculative, but not inconsistent with the facts," because there is "no evidence whatsoever" that she "knew all along about the authorship," as most scholars assume. In Byrd's novel she comes upon her husband's letters, which lead her to see Esther as referring obliquely to their marriage-such as when a character says that "being half-married must be the worst torture." Byrd appropriately has Trist, a wounded veteran in the disastrous battle of Cold Harbor, find a bond with the witty, artistic, childless Clover, who has a morbid preoccupation with death and a fear of insanity as a family curse. Trist comes to the conclusion that Esther is an "angry, frustrated book" that obliquely "sought to cause pain" to Clover Adams and was "as terrible and deadly to her in the end as cyanide." Trist's harsh judgment is con- sistent with his persistent dislike of Adams as a disdainful patrician, and Byrd could cite Gore Vidal's view that the historical novelist is justified in using fictional characters to speculate about the motives of historical persons, though it is "dangerous territory for historians." But no biog- rapher of Adams would support Trist's interpretation. === Page 98 === 98 PARTISAN REVIEW To see just how controversial Byrd's treatment is one can compare it to, at the other end of the spectrum, Edward Chalfant's biography of Adams, Better in Darkness (1994). He asserts that reading the novel in the light of Clover's suicide is "egregiously mistaken, as well as lugubri- ous." He sees it as a book written by "a happily married person for another happily married person." In Chalfant's view, after reading George Eliot's Middlemarch and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Adams and Clover were "in a position to imagine his writing a novel truly Clover's" that would show an American woman rejecting a self- centered clergyman because of her agnostic lack of Christian belief. Chalfant insists, moreover, that though it was "written with her knowl- edge" and "was designed to express her thoughts and feelings" as an agnostic, the novel's heroine must be seen as "exclusively and only" the fictional Esther, not the actual Clover. This claim is excessive, but it is at least true that whatever the private subtext of the novel may have been, its public text was a novel of ideas in which the characters (loosely linked to actual persons whom Adams knew) are engaged in discussions about science, religion, and art. Neither Byrd nor Chalfant, however, make anything out of that. In 1911 Adams told Clover's niece that he was the author of Esther, and Chalfant cites her plausible belief that she didn't see how Adams could have written it without his wife knowing about it. She had, after all, participated in the secret of his authorship of Democracy. Chalfant has no evidence, however, for his dogmatic claim that Adams and Clover conceived the novel together, nor can he so clearly separate the heroine from Clover. Esther's devotion to her father and her depression after his death can be paired with Clover's attachment to her own father, whose death precipitated her clinically severe depression. (Perhaps a genetic trait was involved, for her sister, shortly afterwards, also com- mitted suicide.) Trist's subtext for Esther is supported in Grant when Elizabeth Cameron points out to him that Clover and her father are inseparable: "It's a wonder Henry isn't jealous." Rather than being jeal- ous, however, he may have been perceptive enough to foresee in his novel the psychological danger of her dependence on her father. Adams's friend Clarence King told him that Esther should have jumped into Niagara when she visited the Falls, given the conflict between her love for the minister and her refusal to pretend to a faith she did not have. King reported that Adams said, "Certainly she would but I could not suggest it." Chalfant, as if he were telepathic, interprets this reply as a "half assent" that conceals an actual "disagreement in fact." Nor does he cite Adams's own statement, made a year after === Page 99 === CUSHING STROUT 99 Clover's death, that the novel was "written in one's heart's blood." It is not surprising that Adams too would look back on his novel, as critics have done, with grim hindsight. The novel's Catherine Brooke is as beautiful as Elizabeth Cameron, Esther is as plain and troubled as Clover Adams, and Adams did later develop a platonic love affair with Mrs. Cameron. Trist's reading of Esther as maliciously directed at Clover is consistent with his affection for her and his hostility to her husband; nevertheless, it is a melodra- matic stretch of poetic license on Byrd's part. Have I put myself in a quandry by giving Byrd so much freedom already that I am no longer in a position to criticize his treatment of Adams? Is it arbitrary to draw the line at this point? It is not as irrelevant as it may seem that Trist makes a mistake by assuming that the characters in Democracy congregated to visit Monti- cello, when actually they did so in order to visit Mount Vernon. There is nothing to indicate that Byrd knows Trist is wrong. For Adams the response of his characters to Mount Vernon was a measure of their worth. He would not consider it a trivial mistake, because he was a tenacious critic of Jefferson and an ardent admirer of George Washing- ton, a "pole star" who, Adams remarked in his autobiography, "alone remained steady, in the mind of Henry Adams, to the end." Trist's view of Adams as a prejudiced disdainful patrician blots out the patriot, reformer, and great historian. Byrd has conceded that his exercise of poetic license is "speculative," and he is right that there is no evidence to settle the question decisively of when Clover knew about Adams's authorship of Esther. Trist's lurid version of Adams's maliciousness, however, is hard to reconcile with the abundant evidence for Henry and Clover's mutual love. An afterword from Byrd about Trist's prejudice, or a way of dramatizing his unrelia- bility on Esther, would make the story more subtle and complex. Uncertainty has become a modern theme, especially in postmodern literary theory in which "undecidability" has become something of a critical refrain. In some influential extreme versions there is a dogmatic skepticism about the ability of either fiction or history to get into refer- ential relationship to anything outside our own imagination. Michael Frayn's play, Copenhagen (1998), might seem to fall into this category. It uses the indeterminacy principle in quantum mechanics as a metaphor to explore the historical and moral uncertainties about Werner Heisen- berg, its discoverer, who was head of the German nuclear program dur- ing World War II. Yet Frayn is historically very well informed about his subject, discusses the issues in a lengthy postscript, and even comes to === Page 100 === 100 PARTISAN REVIEW some firm conclusions about them. He denies that he is imposing ambi- guity, for “where there's ambiguity in the play about what happened, it's because there is in the recollections of the participants." In an interview Stegner once defended his extensive use of the letters of an actual Eastern woman (Mary Hallock Foote) who had gone West with her husband as the basis for making a novel about such a transition (Angle of Repose, 1971). But he also has cautioned that "if you are writ- ing about what might be called public events, historical events that are almost everybody's property—conspiracy of Pontiac, Montcalm and Wolfe—then I think you had better be very, very careful about changing anything or inserting anything which is too personal or speculative." Frayn faced this difficulty at once, because all three of his characters in the play are historical persons, two of them well-known internation- ally as great physicists. In his postscript Frayn acknowledges that "where a work of fiction features historical characters and historical events, it's reasonable to want to know how much of it is fiction and how much of it is history." While he has invented the speeches of his characters, he has done so according to the Thucydidean principle of following "in so far as possible the original protagonists' train of thought." Like Stegner, Frayn believes that the historian and the fic- tional storyteller occupy some common ground because "the great chal- lenge" facing both of them is "to get into people's heads, to stand where they stood and see the world as they saw it, to make some informed esti- mate of their motives and intentions." Frayn asserts, however, that recordable history cannot reach motives and intentions, so "the only way into the protagonists' heads is through the imagination." This distinction is meant to justify his departures from the historical record, but it ignores the fact that historians often do deal with motives and intentions: Did Lincoln intend to have the South fire upon Fort Sumter when he reinforced it? Did Franklin Roosevelt plot to bring America into the war by provoking the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor? In both cases historians have used evidence and reason- ing to deal with such controversies, distinguishing, for example, between an agent's willingness to risk an enemy's military response, while hoping and expecting to avoid it, and an agent's intention to bring about that result. Frayn himself discusses and assesses the historical evi- dence about Heisenberg's motives and purposes just as historians have had to do. Questions have arisen because of the claim made by some German scientists after the war that they had deliberately slowed work on the atomic bomb because of their fear of what Hitler might do with it. The === Page 101 === CUSHING STROUT 101 argument had the advantage of making them look better than the Allied scientists, who not only had produced the bomb but had dropped it on two Japanese cities, killing thousands of civilians. Frayn's play is in no way an apology for the German scientists, but it does provide an oppor- tunity for an audience to hear Heisenberg's version of what he was try- ing to do when he headed the German nuclear program and in particular what his purpose might have been in his wartime visit to Copenhagen, where he talked with Niels Bohr, his former teacher, sci- entific collaborator, and friend. "Why did he come to Copenhagen?" is the question, asked by Mar- grethe Bohr, that opens the play. As it unfolds, the play enables the audi- ence to think about Heisenberg's visit not only through his explanations but also through the critical responses of Bohr and his wife, who were strong opponents of fascism. It is a fascinating mystery to unravel. Frayn audaciously obtains imaginative freedom for exploring it by having the principals discuss the problem posthumously in the hope of arguing "until they achieved a little more understanding of what was going on, just as they had so many times when they were alive with the intractable difficulties presented by the internal workings of the atom." The time frame shifts back and forth to recollections of earlier meetings in 1924 and a later one in 1947. At times the characters replay a past moment in their history as if it were happening again. Conventional realism is fur- ther rejected by having Heisenberg and Margrethe speak thoughts that are heard by the audience rather than by the other characters. The play requires the audience to understand something about quan- tum mechanics and the historical situation of the time, while it also dra- matizes the emotional currents that animate the characters, who are on opposite sides in the war at a time when the Germans have already occupied Denmark. Moreover, Bohr had lost his eldest son in a drown- ing accident when they were sailing together, and his pupil Heisenberg is in part a surrogate; while the German feels especially drawn to Bohr as a father-figure with the memory of their collaboration in creating the new physics. Heisenberg is also under the strain of working for a brutal regime for which he has no ideological sympathy, while still having strong patriotic feelings about his country. (These feelings kept him from accepting handsome offers of professorships in America.) In the play, looking back on the meeting of 1941, Heisenberg says that what brought him to Copenhagen was knowing that "if we could build a reactor we could build a bomb." Therefore he asks Bohr if physicists have the right to work on the military application of atomic energy. Heisenberg remembers Bohr "muttering something about every- === Page 102 === 102 PARTISAN REVIEW one in wartime being obliged to do his best for his own country.” Yet governments would have to come to the scientists to find out if there was any hope of producing the weapons in time for them to be used in the war. “We are the ones who will have to advise them to go ahead or not,” Heisenberg says. Both men believed it would be extremely difficult practically to pro- duce a bomb, therefore it would have been possible for both of them to tell their governments “the simple discouraging truth.” Nine months later, Heisenberg asked for so little money from Albert Speer to keep the reactor program going that the Nazi high command did not take the project seriously. Heisenberg claims that his strategy worked: “And that is the end of the German atomic bomb.” It is not, however, the end of questions about the visit in 1941. Heisenberg’s reactor had almost reached a critical mass, and if he had more time and more uranium, he tells Bohr proudly in the play, “it would have been German physics that achieved the world’s first self- sustaining chain reaction.” (Bohr points out, however, that it would have killed Heisenberg’s team because the device had no control rods.) His boast fits Margrethe’s charge that he came to Copenhagen because he wanted to show that he was important enough to have been given the chance “to save the honor of German science.” If he didn’t tell Speer that the reactor could produce plutonium (and therefore a bomb), it was, she says, because he was afraid of what might happen to him if the Nazis committed huge resources to a project that he could not bring to fruition. Moreover, she has an even simpler explanation for his not building a bomb: “You didn’t understand the physics.” Bohr realizes in the play that Heisenberg had spent the war believing that it would take a ton or more of plutonium to create a critical mass, when actually it would take only kilograms, as the Allied project proved. He had not done the essential calculation that would have kept him from his error, and it bolstered his belief that the bomb could not be made in time to be used in the war. Bohr speculates that if he had asked him if he had made the calculation, instead of angrily ending their talk, Heisenberg might have seen that he needed to make it and then “suddenly a very different and very terrible new world begins to take shape.” Instead, Bohr reflects ruefully, he went on to Los Alamos “to play my small but helpful part in the deaths of a hundred thousand peo- ple.” Perhaps, Heisenberg suggests in the play’s last lines, the present world was “preserved, just possibly, by that one short moment in Copenhagen. By some event that will never quite be located or defined.” === Page 103 === CUSHING STROUT 103 We have come full circle with the play's analogy between uncertainty in physics and uncertainty in history. The play's speculation is more appropriate to a historical drama than it is to a history, because we know so little about it. There are no docu- ments, only conflicting and incomplete recollections. It is possible, how- ever, as Heisenberg's scrupulously judicious biographer, David C. Cassidy, has suggested, that Heisenberg was in 1941 trying to avert an Allied crash program for a bomb that might be used on his country by telling Bohr that the Germans were "a long way from constructing an explosive." That hypothesis would fit the point of a drawing that Heisenberg gave to Bohr in their 1941 meeting, who passed it on to the Los Alamos scientists when he joined their project. They judged it to be the sketch of a reactor, not a design for a bomb. The drawing cannot now be found. Neither the biographer nor the play mentions it, but Frayn discusses it in his postscript, wondering why Heisenberg didn't refer to it in order to bolster his interpretation of what he was trying to tell Bohr. Heisenberg had not convinced Bohr of his sincerity, as Richard Rhodes points out in his authoritative history, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), "nor in any way begun a dialogue to avert possi- ble catastrophe." Instead, he had only "managed potentially to alarm Germany's most powerful enemy further with news of progress in approaching the chain reaction. That news must necessarily accelerate Allied efforts to build a bomb." Not surprisingly, J. Robert Oppen- heimer concluded that Heisenberg wanted "to see if Bohr knew any- thing that they did not; I believe it was a standoff." As soon as Heisenberg heard of the Allied success in making the bomb, he said to his scientific colleagues, in a discussion which was secretly taped by their captors at Farm Hall in England, "At the bottom of my heart I was really glad that it was an engine [a reactor] and not a bomb." Yet a reactor using natural uranium can produce plutonium, and it can be extracted by chemical means and used as an explosive. The German scientists knew of this method and in 1942 Heisenberg told the Nazi leaders about it, though he cautioned against expecting quick results and emphasized the technical difficulties that remained to be solved. Heisenberg also had another reason for visiting Copenhagen, as Frayn's play suggests. He participated in a lecture series sponsored by the German cultural propaganda institute. It would help to prove his reliability to Gestapo officials, who had long been suspicious of him; it would therefore give him more freedom to develop atomic physics in === Page 104 === 104 PARTISAN REVIEW Germany, for he had often tried, as he put it, “to make warfare serve physics by demonstrating how physics could serve warfare.” Margrethe’s charge in the play that Heisenberg didn’t “understand the physics” is supported by Jeremy Bernstein’s thorough analysis in his edition of the Farm Hall documents, Hitler’s Uranium Club (1996). Frayn in his play’s postscript comes to the same “inescapable” conclu- sion that is “beyond a reasonable doubt”: Heisenberg did not do the necessary and correct calculation of what would be needed for a critical mass. He therefore thought that the technical problems of making the bomb would be much too difficult to solve during the war. “The effects of real enthusiasm and real determination are incalculable,” Frayn points out, but they are “sometimes decisive.” Ironically, the Allied pro- ject had these qualities in large part because of a reasonable fear that German scientists might make the bomb, which Hitler would then surely use with devastating effect. Plays seldom create a stir among scientists, but Copenhagen has done that. As a result the Bohr family decided to release, much earlier than had been planned, eleven documents on Bohr’s drafts of letters to Heisenberg, which he never sent, about their controversial meeting in Copenhagen. Bohr was responding sixteen years later to Heisenberg’s account of it as reported in Robert Jungk’s Brighter than a Thousand Suns (1957). A letter to Heisenberg on the issue was found in Bohr’s personal copy of the book. He maintained that Heisenberg had given him the impression, though he spoke in “vague terms,” that “Germany was participating vigorously in a race to be the first with atomic weapons” and “I did not sense even the slightest hint that you and your friends were making efforts in another direction.” Bohr claimed to have remembered “every word” of their conversa- tion, though in another draft he acknowledged more credibly “how dif- ficult it is to form an accurate impression of events in which many have taken part.” Heisenberg is surely believable when he wrote that their attempt in 1947 to reconstruct what had been said in 1941: “we noticed that both our memories had become blurred.” Bohr’s drafts of his let- ters of 1957 cannot and have not settled the issue. Distinguished scien- tists still take contrasting views of the episode. Some think he was possibly trying to get Bohr “to be a messenger of conscience, and wanted Bohr to persuade the Allied scientists also to refrain from work- ing on a bomb,” as Hans A. Bethe, a Cornell University physicist and Nobel Prize winner, has put it. This view is also endorsed by Klaus Gottstein of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, who worked under Heisenberg when he was director from 1950-1971. Cas- === Page 105 === CUSHING STROUT 105 sidy, the biographer of Heisenberg, thinks he wanted Bohr to use his influence to prevent the Allies from building a bomb that could be used against Germany. Other scientists think Heisenberg was doing a little espionage, just trying to find out what Bohr knew. From this point of view, as Bernstein has argued, “Heisenberg may not be the ‘complex fig- ure of the play,’” but a person who is easier to understand. I would argue on the contrary that Frayn’s complex view is all the more pertinent, given the mysteries that still surround the meeting. Why did Bohr never send his letter? Why did he wait until 1957 to explain what he thought Heisenberg had said? Why did Heisenberg give Bohr a rough sketch of the German reactor, which Bohr drew from memory for the Los Alamos scientists? Was it a message that Germany was a long way from making a bomb? Unlike the silence of the dog that helpfully did not bark in the night, the silence of both Bohr and Heisenberg about this sketch leaves their meeting fraught with ambiguity. It is this histor- ical uncertainty that justifies Frayn’s exploration of the possibilities with their psychological and moral implications. Our sense of being at terri- ble risk in a nuclear world and our concern about the way dedication to technological prowess can blunt our moral sensitivities have given Copenhagen attentive and enthusiastic audiences for its dramatizing of a historical moment of what might seem at first to be only an obscure and transitory meeting between arcane scientists. As fictionalizers of history, Tracy Chevalier, Max Byrd, and Michael Frayn have in their own ways exercised with artistic effect a good deal of poetic license, but they also have the merit of not treating that license as a blank check. A reviewer of a current historical novel in the New York Times complains about its author’s long afterword, telling us which characters are imaginary and which real. “We read fiction with our disbelief suspended,” the reviewer insists, “and most of us like to leave it that way.” The historical imagination, however, is not some- thing the literary imagination can ignore in fictionalizing history, because modern minds care about both. Only the best practitioners know how to solve the difficult problem of reconciling and integrating them. It is their artistic practice, rather than any critical generalizations, that in the end can bring to life the point of Benedetto Croce’s elegant aphorism: “Poetry and history are, then, the two wings of the same breathing creature, the two linked moments of the knowing mind.” === Page 106 === ALBERT KEITH WHITAKER Teaching Lincoln "NOW HE BELONGS TO THE AGES," whispered Edward Stanton at the moment of Abraham Lincoln's death. No doubt, in his grief, Stanton had reached for a consoling thought: in imita- tion of his immortal soul, this man's spirit would live on and influence the American people-maybe even the human race-for ages to come. But history is no docile student, and Lincoln's memory has possessed and become possessed by the generations since 1865 with a remarkable diver- sity of results. Indeed, even while he lived and breathed, no single Lincoln stood before his countrymen. During the campaign of 1860, Lincoln appealed to Republicans and wavering Democrats in part as a simple man with a moderate view on the slavery question. During the Civil War, he became, in the eyes of many Northerners, not to mention Southern whites, a tyrant, "King Abraham I," who trampled upon laws for the sake of blacks. A more recent age worshiped Lincoln as a progressive defender of middle-class men and morals against the greed and corruption of the rich; while in our own times, at least until quite recently, academic critics have charged Lincoln with incompetence, racism, and even insanity. The events of September 11 have muted some of these criticisms, it seems, and have certainly elevated Lincoln upon the stage of public opin- ion. The annual ABC News "greatest presidents" poll, taken in early Feb- ruary, announced that Lincoln had reclaimed the spot of number one president, with a commanding six-point lead over his nearest competitors (JFK and George W.), and, just as strikingly, a six-point rise from his third-place spot only a year before. It makes sense, of course, for Ameri- cans to think of Lincoln when faced with the first attack on the U.S. main- land since the Civil War, an attack which has also reignited old questions about the president's constitutional powers. But, I believe, even before September 11 many Americans were quite ready to renew their embrace of Lincoln-this is, at least, one of the many inferences I drew from the thought-provoking experience of teaching "Lincoln's Life and Writings" to a group of college freshmen last year. I suspect that many people, at least outside of academia, would agree with my students, who at their entrance to the course described Lincoln as a "great man," or, as one of === Page 107 === ALBERT KEITH WHITAKER 107 them put it, "the man." To be sure, they had only vague ideas about or interest in Lincoln's role in the Civil War. For them, as for most people, Lincoln was above all the man who freed the slaves, a simple view that nicely contrasts with that of some of Lincoln's scholarly supporters, who praise him for his deliberative powers or prudence. But both of these impressions, "The Great Emancipator" and "The Great Statesman," cap- ture only fragments of Lincoln the man; they are the mythical results of history's action upon a complicated life. One needs to return through the ages, through history, to the man's words and deeds, to better understand who Lincoln was and was not, where he succeeded-in reshaping Amer- ican political thought and writing-and where he failed-in attempting to unite respect for the country's Constitution with respect for its abstract founding principles. Such was my experience in teaching Lincoln. A careful and sympathetic return to Lincoln's words first discloses that the man reshaped the American public tongue. He used rhetorical figures at once to simplify and to complicate, to sometimes clarify and at other times obscure American political prose. While his Secretary of State, Charles Sumner, for example, would dazzle crowds of educated elites, in his most important addresses, as Carl Sandburg aptly noted, Lincoln spoke with the seeming simplicity and clarity with which a farmer, leaning on a split-rail fence, might use when chewing the fat with his neighbor. But Lincoln's simplicity and clarity, unlike the farmer's, owed a great deal to conscious art. A striking example of this combination of simplicity and artfulness appears in the second para- graph of Lincoln's famous "Second Inaugural," the speech which he himself considered his best. Most readers of this speech leap immedi- ately to the two long periods, with their Biblical diction and powerful attempt at theodicy, that compose the third paragraph. They thus pass by the carefully arranged indefinite pronouns, the balanced clauses, and the impersonal, stunning ending of the second paragraph: On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it- all sought to avert it. . . . Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came. In class, while discussing that third sentence-its clauses balanced within a syllable of each other-one student remarked that it seemed as though Lincoln meant that no one side was the cause of the war. The war, an all-too-human action, seems to lack human agents. Others then === Page 108 === 108 PARTISAN REVIEW mentioned the American bombers that were pulverizing Afghanistan at that very moment, and wondered aloud how Lincoln could imply such a thing: how could war—in which human beings have at all times been willing to risk their lives for their countries—be an effect without a cause? Finally, one member of the class noticed the difference, rather than the likeness, between these balanced clauses: one side would “make” war, the other would “accept” war. Balance does not simply equal equivalence, though Lincoln’s choice of rhetoric here fits exactly with his reluctance to point any fingers. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lincoln did not use rhetorical fig- ures as flourishes, to show off, but he did use these devices with precision and skill when they advanced his thought. Perhaps the humblest figure of speech is asyndeton (the omission of conjunctions), but Lincoln uses it with great effect at the end of the “Gettysburg Address.” There he mem- orably asks his listeners to “highly resolve . . . that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Helpfully borrowing preacher Theodore Parker’s definition of democ- racy, Lincoln lends a hand to all future teachers of history or rhetoric. For by doing nothing more than observing the omission of the “and” in this sentence, one can come to understand Lincoln’s central political principle, a principle bitterly disputed by some of his most capable contemporaries and anathema to many of the nation’s founders—the principle that the United States is a union, grounded not in many States but in one People, a democratic rather than a federal union—far better and more concretely than if told so by a dozen historians. Indeed, by saying less, Lincoln simultaneously increased the clarity and power of his statement, while slipping it all the more slyly into his audience’s—and our—memory. Of course, in addition to understanding Lincoln better, if we study the rhetoric of Lincoln and his contemporaries, if we learn such names as asyndeton, balance, and others—names that have gotten short shrift in most contemporary English classes—we thereby gain a living connection to the tradition of artful writing and enlarge our own literary arsenal. To learn these strange words gives us (as they gave Lincoln) some power over things—and in this case, a most important thing, our own language. As a practical matter, any reader wishing to make this sort of return to Lincoln’s words should observe that it requires, if it is to be successful, a willingness to practice the art of reading, an art which Lincoln himself mastered. My students found encouragement in learning that Lincoln taught himself the rules of English usage at the ripe old age of twenty-two, studying Kirkham’s Grammar while lying on the countertop (and getting paid for it) at Denton Offutt’s country store. But, in addition to knowl- === Page 109 === ALBERT KEITH WHITAKER 109 edge of how to read, my class and I discovered that writing can bring to life an author such as Lincoln. Even the humble process of copying—a process that, again, Lincoln applied to his own favorite authors—can lead the reader to discover a dozen nooks and crannies in any given paragraph that the eye skipped blindly past. Also, for most of our forefathers, care- ful reading meant speaking the words aloud. (Lincoln used to drive his law partner crazy with his own vocal reading.) Such an approach makes all the more sense when trying to understand an orator. For example, at one point during the semester my students transcribed, memorized, and then publicly declaimed the following passage, from Lincoln’s speech in Edwardsville, Illinois, during the senatorial campaign of 1858: When . . . you have succeeded in dehumanizing the Negro; when you have put him down and made it impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul in this world and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out as in the darkness of the damned, are you quite sure that the demon you have roused will not turn and rend you? What constitutes the bul- wark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea-coasts, our army and our navy. These are not our reliance against tyranny. All of those may be turned against us without making us weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has placed in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you. Besides impressing passages upon one’s mind through memorization, and besides allowing one to hear these beautiful words as they were meant to be heard—aloud—the act of giving utterance to a man’s words gives the student of history and literature a chance to store up some of an author’s passion and character in his own soul. With such methods, one can find one’s own introduction to Lincoln the man, to how his heart beat, and to how his mind worked. As I quickly learned in class, if most people today know little about the Civil War, they know even less about the people who fought with or against Lincoln in that war or in the larger struggle over slavery. This neglect owes something to Lincoln’s own uniqueness; he charms, in part, === Page 110 === 110 PARTISAN REVIEW because his personality encompassed that of so many others: they were lines, he a cube. But it also blinds later generations to the complexity of Lincoln's character and deeds by foreclosing the possibility of making the most apt comparisons. By making such comparisons in class, we found that what Lincoln gains in breadth and complexity he also loses, at times, in sharpness and force. Lincoln hated slavery, but not with the kind of pas- sion and heat that could explode in the dazzling fulminations of a Douglass or Sumner. He loved poetry, and dabbled in it, but his speeches rise only at moments (wonderful moments!) to the poetic beauty that Longfellow or Whitman possessed in superabundance. He excelled at telling stories, but could he rival the sentiment or expression of Harriet Beecher Stowe? His powers of analysis, deductive reasoning, and logical exposition rightly won him fame, but many competent observers would say that his own consti- tutional arguments—his highest legal training, after all, consisted of read- ing parts of Blackstone, an author that Thomas Jefferson detested—could not stand up to the barrage of such antagonists as Davis or Stephens, even as his battalions crushed theirs on the battlefield. Of course, this is not to say that Lincoln was a worse man than any of these others. But if one truly wishes to study the humanities, one should not squint, looking only for "greatness"; one should eagerly examine the many different forms of human goodness—and badness. For example, in my syllabus, I took it as a sufficient reason for assigning Lord Charnwood's biography of Lincoln to make sure my students saw the following masterful snapshot of pusilla- nimity (Charnwood refers here to Jefferson Davis's memoirs, which in part describe Davis's flight at the end of the war): Amongst other things he tells how when they heard the news of Lincoln's murder some troops cheered, but he was truly sorry for the reason that Andrew Johnson was more hostile to the cause than Lincoln. It is disappointing to think, of one who played a memo- rable part in history with much determination, that in this reminis- cence he sized his stature as a man fairly accurately. Lincoln's life and writings were richer, perhaps, than those of any contemporary American; but to do justice to Lincoln one should not assume he possessed all the virtues in their extremes. As mentioned, much scholarly attention today focuses on Lincoln's political deliberations, especially his thoughts on the Constitution, searching for his prudence or lack of prudence. In contrast, most people outside academia remember Lincoln quite simply as a lover of his fellow man and a defender of equality, as the Great Emancipator. To grasp Lin- === Page 111 === ALBERT KEITH WHITAKER 111 coln's own view of the Constitution and Emancipation, any present-day admirer of Lincoln has to traverse difficult ground. Most people have forgotten or never knew that for most of his political career-on con- stitutional and prudential grounds-Lincoln opposed anything but slow, compensated emancipation. It confuses them to learn that he came to fame calling not for the end of slavery but for its restriction from ter- ritorial lands. His whole attempt to denounce slavery in the territories while yet preserving it where it already existed proved, for my students at least, hard to swallow. The modern mind gets clumsy when distin- guishing prudence from hypocrisy. In the end, perhaps the most difficult nut to crack involves the contrast between Lincoln's life-long solicitude for the Constitution and his conscious decision to overstep his presi- dential powers in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. For here one must judge not only the goodness of Emancipation itself, but its intellectual foundations and its political consequences. The difficulty that this line of thought poses for the contemporary friend of Lincoln shone forth for me in one of the many conversations that occurred outside of my class. I walked out one day with one of my best stu- dents, who obviously looked puzzled. When asked what he was thinking, he replied, "I'm not sure. I thought Lincoln did everything right in the Civil War. But now you seem to be saying that he did in fact do something very wrong." We got outside. It was November but unseasonably warm, so we walked over to the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and chatted. "Do you think Lincoln meant it when he said that the president had no lawful authority to free even one slave?" I asked. When he agreed, I followed up with another question: "And do you think he was satisfied with the justi- fication by military necessity?" "But the country-the Constitution-was going to be ripped apart," he replied. "He had to do something." "That's absolutely right. But 'had to' or not, his actions had consequences. How can he fight for the Constitution with unconstitutional means? It's just like Christ said-as Lincoln well knew-one cannot cast out devils by the devil. 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' What is this Constitution you've saved if you 'save' it only by transcending it?" At this point some- thing happened that every teacher hopes for-whether as the conscious result of his teaching or simply as a happy accident: this student's true sen- timents broke out into what had up until then been merely an argument, and they found fuel in the thought of another, in this case, in the thought of Lincoln: "But he had to emancipate the slaves, Constitution or not. Slav- ery was an evil, a sickness in our country. It had to be removed. Lincoln always thought that and he was biding his time. What better opportunity could there be than a Civil War? He needed to weaken the South. But even === Page 112 === 112 PARTISAN REVIEW more than that: how could Lincoln end the war without freeing the slaves? It would be terrible.” I knew what he meant. It is simply wrong, that prin- ciple of “You work—I’ll eat.” Still, slavery is not the only wrong, nor is equality the only thing that’s right. There is Law, and Lincoln broke it. My students began the course with a naïve admiration of Lincoln, an admiration shared, it seems, by more of their countrymen every day; but this admiration coexisted with ignorance of most of Lincoln’s political views and choices. One might expect that, on discovering Lincoln broke the law, contemporary Lincoln fans would respond with world-weary sighs: “Ah! What president doesn’t break the law?” After all, democ- racy’s memory for political details runs very short, and for the last ten years all of us have been told by the political cognoscenti that breaking the law is no big deal, that “everybody does it,” especially presidents. Indeed, one might even expect that, compared to Clinton’s, Lincoln’s infractions would strike most people, including college freshmen, as minor. How can hesitant abrogation of the Constitution in order to save the Union measure up to wholesale indifference to law—and even to the meaning of “is”—in pursuit of petty, private vices? Yet the young men and women who composed my class did not sigh or sniff at Lincoln’s actions. They could not. They—like many of their fellow Americans—had already put their trust in Lincoln as a man who, as they saw it, had died to make men free. They, unlike most of their countrymen, had also come to admire Lincoln’s deep love for the Constitution and the laws, and his earnest, life-long effort to preserve them. And they had grown to relish his ability to embody noble thoughts in noble words, words that moved their own souls, too. When they saw that Lincoln’s love of freedom and equality, the principles of the American regime, conflicted with his love of the laws of that regime—when they saw him with heavy heart and much misgiving sacrifice the latter for the former—they did not fall into cynicism or indifference. Rather, they learned from Lincoln a lesson appropriate to our current crisis and those to come: that there is much that is very good in America, and much good that America has to offer to “all men, in all lands everywhere”—but that even when a man seeks to do as much good and as little harm as possible, he may still do much harm nonetheless. Cer- tainly I could not have taught them this on my own. While I am pretty good with grammar and rhetoric, I could never rival Lincoln on tragedy and nobility. Lincoln is one of the indispensable teachers for our time; he reminds us what we are fighting for and the worthiness—and difficulty— of such a fight. And so, as was only fitting and proper, even in my rather pedantic course, teaching Lincoln somehow became Lincoln teaching. === Page 113 === KAREN WILKIN At the Galleries Y EARS AGO, WHEN I FIRST BEGAN WRITING for Partisan Review, William Phillips’s only directive was “Write about a lot of shows.” I thought this was simply a bid for variety, but I soon realized that there was more to it. Writing “about a lot of shows” within the confines of an article of fixed length meant that each exhibition had to be discussed economically and tellingly. William was imposing a salu- tary discipline on a newly recruited writer used to more extended formats and I have been grateful to him ever since. But if I now propose to “write about a lot of shows,” it is not only to honor William’s memory, but also out of necessity. There were a lot of exhibitions worth writing about last season and, what is more notable at a time when painting is frequently declared to be exhausted, a lot of them were of painting. Notable, too, at a time when unformed, unripened talent (however promising) is stan- dard fare in many galleries, they were by seasoned adults. Jules Olitski celebrated his eightieth birthday at Ameringer Yohe with a recent series, With Love and Disregard, that took his preoccupations of the past few years to new heights. If you hadn’t noticed the “JO 80” sign, you could have been forgiven for attributing these no-holds-barred pic- tures to a talented, fearless newcomer. At once extravagant and moody, lyrical and brutal, they collapsed the distance between the outrageous and the sublime. Olitski has reinvented Romanticism in terms of colli- sions of saturated pigment, pools of abrasive color, and an indescribable range of surface marks and inflections. Loaded, turbulent discs of pig- ment burst towards you, like bubbles in lava, or frayed off, like sunspots. Space seemed mutable; scale shifted. Color was intense and saturated, with abrupt contrasts of bright and dark, a little raw and, despite the lack of conventional tonal or chromatic harmony, frankly gorgeous. Olitski’s swirled, puddled paint expanses were notably physical, yet strangely abstract. Paint seemed to have its own life. The only overt evi- dence of the artist’s hand was to be found in the relatively restrained, centralized smaller works, where drawn lines, reminiscent of the defin- ing edge-drawing of Olitski’s early spray paintings, kept wandering plan- ets and shooting asteroids in check. In the larger works, floods of paint === Page 114 === 114 PARTISAN REVIEW swooped and clashed, while the "planets" and "asteroids" rode on the crests of waves; occasionally, at the edge, a broad stroke (or more usu- ally, an uninflected spill of color) called attention to artifice by diagram- ming the difference between what was the picture and what wasn't. There were echoes of the slightly over-the-top landscapes Olitski has made in pastel over the past few years and echoes, too, of his full- blooded drawings from the model; his recent abstract paintings, like his recent figurative works, evoke elemental forces of nature: weather, light, seasons, sex. Being confronted by these lusty canvases, with their crash- ing tonal oppositions and their near-vulgar palette was like watching the birth of the cosmos—or the birth of painting. Calling Olitski one of the best young painters around honors the electric charge of his recent work, but for all the apparently ageless, even youthful energy that animated these pictures, it was clear that only a lifetime's making and thinking about paintings could generate work at once so obviously indifferent to ordinary notions of beauty (or that much-maligned idea, taste) and so assured. Olitski appears utterly willful, concerned only with learning what might happen if—as he did in one painting-he forced an expause of reddish black to share space with a sea of superheated yellow and sep- arated them with a shaggy orange and gold disc. That the experiment produced an expressive image obviously pleased him, but you suspected that if he had ended up with the worst painting ever painted, that would have been all right, too. Olitski seems willing to risk disaster on the off- chance that the result might be one of the best paintings ever painted. With Love and Disregard was what "late style" is supposed to be: dar- ing, deeply informed by experience, intolerant of the expected or the familiar. Opulent and fierce, Olitski's recent works seemed to drag the High Baroque, kicking and screaming, into the twenty-first century and into abstraction. Or, to change metaphors (and centuries), they were what Delacroix might have painted if he had been transported into our era from nineteenth-century Paris and embraced abstract color painting without compromising any of his hard-won academic skills. Experience, passion, and youthful freshness were also hallmarks of Pat Passlof's recent works at Elizabeth Harris. About five years younger than Olitski, Passlof similarly seems to have achieved with maturity a marvelous combination of mastery and willingness to be surprised by what she does. Each of the brushy, urgent paintings at Harris was a dis- covery of uncharted possibilities; each seemed newly improvised even when it obviously was part of a related group. Passlof is ready to try anything. She flirts with candy pinks and playful spots, deploys === Page 115 === KAREN WILKIN 115 unmoored triangles and bone shapes, builds up furry, layered surfaces, drags speedy lines across them or ploughs them into shimmering bands, (rightly) trusting the personality and virtuosity of her touch to animate and unify the result. A deceptively simple near-monochrome canvas with biomorphic, vaguely triangular shapes dominated the show by its sheer size, but many smaller works more than held their own, especially a densely stroked "weaving" of luminous ochre-rose, and a golden expanse punctuated with red dots and lines. Passlof's best paintings are both self-sufficient and powerfully expressive. They make you think about the irrationality of the act of painting—that intensely serious, but playful process of transferring sensuous stuff to a surface—and, at the same time, they compel you to consider the accumulated thinking, liv- ing, and feeling that magically charges every stroke. A similar passion for the painterliness of painting was evident in the work of two younger German-born artists, Markus Lüpertz and David Stern. Semiramis, Lüpertz's gathering of recent paintings and works on paper at Knoedler and Company, could be read as an inquiry into whether it is possible for a hip, ironic European to make lyrical, nature- inspired images in 2002. Lüpertz's nominal point of departure appeared to be the exotic, verdant visual and literary associations conjured up by the name Semiramis—as in Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Such prece- dents as Emil Nolde's flower paintings were invoked by the "close up" scale and nervously worked areas of saturated, exaggerated landscape tones: greens, sky blues, and floral hues ranging from crayon-bright pri- maries to murk. These associations were reinforced by the plant-name titles of individual pieces, but Lüpertz's most florid (and floral) chro- matic extravaganzas were disciplined by calligraphic, stabbed zones of non-color, imprisoned by crisp-edged, agitated borders, and/or punctu- ated by mechanical-seeming gray arcs. All of this wrenched you away from an illusory natural world to the fact of paint on canvas and the grittiness of urban life—Monet's idyllic vision of Giverny transformed by the machine and twenty-first-century cynicism. Incipient sentiment, perhaps even conviction about the specific subject matter, were sub- sumed by the reality of mark-making and the metaphorical drama of uneasily related color patches that, paradoxically, seemed to unravel as you watched. Yet it was clear that Lüpertz's purpose was more complex than simply evoking nature through formal means or commenting on the conflict between nature and modernity. He simultaneously sustained and called into question an entire tradition of landscape painting with these tough, uningratiating, and absorbing pictures. === Page 116 === 116 PARTISAN REVIEW Downtown, at Rosenberg and Kaufman, the expatriate Stern, a New Yorker for more than a decade, turned his attention to more local con- cerns in The Gatherings, a series undertaken to exorcise his feelings about September 11. Not that there was anything literal or illustrative about his disquieting, thickly troweled compositions in which groups of figures—mourners? watchers? witnesses?—clustered together against a cold blue New York sky. Stern’s images were evocative but elusive; paint seemed to have only momentarily assumed the ability to conjure up a crouching woman or a leaning man before turning back into an active but undifferentiated expanse. The Gatherings were unnerving, intensely material images that seemed elegiac in tone without being maudlin or embarrassingly specific. Equally ambiguous was a wall of self-portrait drawings. Stern is adept and inventive in dealing with both face and figure, but in these drawings, which he makes almost daily, likeness (and sometimes even allusion to the human head itself) seemed less important than the range of lines, washes, strokes, and gestures called into the service of the pro- ject. Working on paper allows Stern to make use of a fuller vocabulary of marks than working on canvas does, partly because of the intimate scale of his drawings and partly because ink and wash are more fluid and responsive than paint, which for him is always a medium notable for its density and resistance. It will be interesting to see if his two prac- tices overlap at some point. Stern’s formation and artistic inheritance, as a Northern European born in the late cold war years—among other attributes—is evident in his expressionist approach to paint-handling and subject matter. But American light seems to have invaded his pictures in recent years and I’m curious about how else his move to the U.S. will affect him. In his recent show, a new direction was suggested by a number of small paint- ings of a clenched, crouched, otherwise indeterminate figure; the com- pacted form seemed generated as much by the combined pressure of surrounding swipes of pigment and the edges of the canvas as by any desire to be faithful to perception. (Think expressionist versions of Velázquez’s dwarves.) I’m eager to see where this promising new series takes him. Kikuo Saito’s sensuous recent pictures, at Stephen Haller’s new Chelsea space, managed to fuse the calligraphic and the painterly, the elegant and the messy, the abstract and the specific. Each canvas was a fairly uninflected field of luminous, light color—radiant blue, off-green, milky cream—on which Saito scrawled reckless private “messages,” === Page 117 === The Gatherings: Engine 5, Ladder 24 (2002) by David Stern. Oil on Canvas. 80 by 73 inches. Courtesy of Rosenberg and Kaufman Fine Art. === Page 118 === 118 PARTISAN REVIEW sometimes employing an overloaded, oozing brush, sometimes tracing delicate "written" lines. In one of the show's largest (and most com- pelling) pictures, these drawn and painted "glyphs" appeared to have drifted to one side, only to escape and float towards the opposite cor- ner of the canvas. In other paintings, they were disposed with differing degrees of regularity, like the visible equivalents of musical composi- tions with varying rhythms and chromatic signatures. At first, Saito's elegant, slapdash gestures and his subtly disposed color harmonies demanded your primary attention, but with time, the nature of the glyphs themselves became increasingly absorbing. You began to recog- nize repeated configurations and relationships of configurations from picture to picture, so that they gradually became like a cast of comme- dia dell'arte characters, half seen, half remembered, enacting impene- trable dramas. As has been true in Saito's work for some years, these deceptively spare images became more and more complex and reward- ing with longer scrutiny. Nothing was ever quite what it seemed to be and nothing was arbitrary. This insistent sense that each scratched and scrubbed "glyph" on Saito's canvas had an independent reality, that it referred to something (albeit something unnameable) outside of the borders of the canvas, is what separates him from the painter with whom he is often compared, Cy Twombly. Saito's motivation seems quite different from Twombly's. That Saito is, on some level, tapping into the calligraphic tradition of his native Japan is obvious; what is also evident, although more subtly, is that he is also drawing upon the rich heritage of Japanese performance. (He is greatly admired by practitioners and cognoscenti of vanguard theater as a creator of poetic, ambiguous performance-dance works.) Rather than manipulating paint for aesthetic effect, Saito always appears to be representing, admittedly very freely, otherworldly crea- tures and personages who are, you suspect, quite real to him as per- formers in personal dramas. It's rather like the way a child makes images of a private world-assuming that the child is immensely sophis- ticated and possessed of an astonishing ability to draw and paint at the same time, with eloquent gestures. On stage, Saito's private world is a pristine plane haunted by equivocal presences who compel your atten- tion and stir your emotions, without ever fully explaining themselves. On canvas, these oblique dramas are presented in terms of rich, seduc- tive, painterly touches that fully engage you as painting at the same time that they tease your powers of association. That Andrew Forge's miraculous abstractions depend on a similar, hard to reconcile but undeniable coexistence of the ephemeral and the === Page 119 === KAREN WILKIN 119 material, the intellectual and the intuitive, was made plain by a memo- rial exhibition of his last works at Robert Miller. It was also plain that the acclaimed critic, teacher, and artist was painting at the height of his powers when he died suddenly this fall. Since the 1960s, his abstract "dot" pictures have tested the limits of both abstractness and percep- tion. (It should probably be pointed out here that the dots notwith- standing, Forge's pictures have almost nothing to do with pointillism or depiction through optical mixing.) His accretions of slow, deliberate marks in unstable, "off" colors seemed to elude being seen, at the same time that they powerfully suggested real experience. From a close view- point, his gatherings of dots and bars appeared to be autonomous, their disjunctive paths and interlaces the result of nothing but Forge's having given free rein to his intuition. The frayed edges of his dotted "fields" reinforced that sense of spontaneous mark-making. Yet from other van- tage points, the powerful sense of order underlying the seemingly ran- dom shoals and eddies of paint became apparent; hints of geometric structures, perhaps man-made, perhaps fragments of the natural world, began to assert themselves and then subsided once again. In some of Forge's last paintings, these latent images were more evi- dent than usual, without being more recognizable or specific. In these, the layered zones of dotted color contrasted dramatically in terms of tone and hue, so that the loosely defined borders where dots intersected simply refused to settle down, without, however, disrupting the sonorous unity of the whole. I kept thinking of Mallarmé's injunction: "To paint not the thing but the effect it produces." Other pictures were miracles of tenuous oneness. In a staggeringly beautiful all-over blizzard of off-whites and grays, the whole expanse pulsed and vibrated, threat- ening to disappear if you looked away. It was as though Forge, at the end of his life, had begun to make paintings about the experience of see- ing itself, at the same time that he remained wholly engrossed by the act of painting. His shifting fields may suggest specific times of day or sea- son or weather or place, but they are also about particular amounts of paint placed on a surface of a particular dimension by a particular indi- vidual. Each thoughtfully deposited dot remains distinct, but the accu- mulated fabric of strokes plays with your senses and sensory memories and then returns you, once again, to the fact of a repetitive, dispas- sionate, but personal touch-vivid testimony to why Forge recalled thinking that his first "dot" painting was "the realest thing I had ever done." The opposite end of the emotional and pictorial spectrum was to be found uptown, at Tibor de Nagy, in Shirley Jaffe's crisp, exuberant recent work. Now nearing eighty, Jaffe has lived in France for the past === Page 120 === Bruit d'été (2002) by Shirley Jaffe. Oil on Canvas. 87 by 67 1/2 inches. Courtesy of Tibor de Nagy. === Page 121 === KAREN WILKIN 121 half century, yet she remains the most American of painters-brash, jazzy, a little loud, irrepressibly cheerful, and wonderful. It's clear that she admires Fernand Léger, Stuart Davis, and Henri Matisse, especially when he was making papiers coupés, and that she has learned a good deal from them about the expressive possibilities of clean-cut planes, untethered lines, and quirky shapes set at telling intervals. But Jaffe's palette of half-tones and nuanced brights is wholly her own, as is (for the most part) her vocabulary of snappy shapes. Her recent works demonstrated her ability to choreograph complex ensemble numbers of wildly differing shapes and colors, here set against clarifying expanses of white, without resorting to repetitions or conventional methods of achieving balance or harmony. Exceptionally, but to good effect, Jaffe also modulated the density of her normally uninflected surfaces, which let additional air into her spirited compositions. The result was a group of uninhibited, sweetly dissonant images that seemed to assert the plea- sure of being alive and the continued fertility of the modernist legacy, with equal conviction. Painting may have dominated the past season, but that didn't mean that noteworthy sculpture shows were absent. At David McKee, William Tucker showed overscaled, rough-textured works that demon- strated his continuing fascination with the apparently fluid boundaries between allusion, image-making, and pure three-dimensional mass. For some years, Tucker has been more or less single-handedly carrying on and expanding Rodin's legacy in wholly contemporary terms and, as in the past, his profound understanding of Rodin's achievement colored his recent sculptures. Two immense heads and a huge foot, apparently captured in mid-step, were like giant improvisations on the celebrated body fragments-the detached hands and arms, for example-of Rodin's studio practice. From some vantage points, mass seemed Tucker's principal concern, but abstract physicality yielded to a sketchy figuration as you moved around the pieces, sometimes with more happy results than others. Scale is crucial to the success of these ambitious, deeply felt works-not mere size, but scale as embodied by the size of surface inflections in relation to the whole; larger marks seem more inevitable, less imposed. Crucial, too, is the relation of incipient (or explicit) illusionism to the purely "sculptural" reading of the mass; too literal an image can compromise sculptural presence. That the mammoth heads, poised horizontally like sleepers, were more convincing than the foot was probably due to their ambiguity-although a life-sized foot criticized its larger counterpart, === Page 122 === 122 PARTISAN REVIEW probably because of its greater coherence as a volume. But these are quibbles. As always, Tucker's thought-provoking, tough-minded objects made you reexamine your preconceptions about what sculpture can be at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Further reexamination was provoked by Anthony Caro's The Bar- barians at Mitchell-Innes and Nash, a brilliant ensemble of six near- life-sized horsemen and a smaller-than-life ox-drawn cart, forced into being out of stoneware, wood, steel, and derelict vaulting horses. While at first acquaintance the group seemed dramatically unlike the abstract constructed sculpture in steel that established-and maintained-Caro's reputation since 1960, The Barbarians proves more seamlessly related to the British master's continuing concerns than was initially apparent. As a young sculptor, Caro first attracted notice with heavy-set, expres- sionistically modeled figures, a direction that he abandoned when he began to work in steel. The Barbarians and the multivalent narrative groupings that preceded them, The Trojan War, 1993-94, and The Last Judgment, 1997, (which share the same elusive approach to narrative and the same rich, disparate material palette) suggest that at seventy- eight he is rethinking first impulses, returning to unfinished business. Unlike his early figures, however, Caro's recent allusive works depend not on urgent modeling, but on the additive language and expressive syntax of how things touch that he devised in his abstract steel works. It's as though this endlessly inventive artist had decided to reconceive the "new tradition" of constructed sculpture that he inherited from Picasso and González, via David Smith-at least for some of his current works. In The Barbarians, Caro forces the language of additive con- struction to accommodate his lifetime's accumulated fascination with ancient and modern tribal and archaic sculpture from both East and West, with workaday objects, votive offerings, and more. More impor- tant, he transforms these complex, fleeting references into unexpected, new objects that embody deep feeling. The Barbarians seems to sum up the history of constructed sculpture. Caro's implacable riders appear wholly modern, but they also seem pri- mal, as though they revealed the origins of image-making: one thing added to another thing and another thing, to make something that stares back as a confrontational, nonliteral figure. At first, it's hard to get past Caro's potent imagery, but time makes it subside. The way ele- ments are stacked and butted, the sculptures' frontality, symmetry, tex- tural variations, and subtle spatial articulation become paramount. Then those fierce riders declare themselves again. I kept thinking about === Page 123 === Untitled (2002) by Karlis Rekèvecs, Plaster and Wood. Courtesy of P.S.1. === Page 124 === 124 PARTISAN REVIEW that eerie army of life-sized ceramic Chinese tomb figures. The Barbar- ians are strange, unforgettable, and disturbing. Old pros may have claimed pride of place in the fall season, but young hopefuls were showcased in Building Structures at P.S. 1, a selec- tion of work by fifteen young sculptors from New York and abroad who, according to the curators, “re-stage the context and principles of architectural techniques.” Some employed what must be called building languages. Some used materials associated with ordinary things and constructions. Some invoked place. All seemed to take as their point of departure, more or less explicitly, the phenomena and objects of our sur- roundings. Many works, alas, were overly literal or just plain trivial. Simply displacing domestic cabinetry, however beautifully made, or a shop awning, however schematized, does not automatically make it compelling as sculpture, nor does gathering the detritus of packaging or what have you into haphazard arrangements. A few works, however, were notable both for their conviction and invention. The Dutch sculptor Lara Schnitger's playful, precarious skeletal forms, wrapped with boldly patterned fabric, evoked the figure more than the built environment, but they had presence and charm. Ross Knight's wonky aluminum and vinyl structure, like a three-dimen- sional drawing, was one of the few works in the show to make use of symmetry without appearing simply to have settled for the condition. A second, smaller piece, was more “artful” and less surprising. Knight's larger sculpture, at once wagon-like, ceremonial, and inexplicable, was one of the strongest in the show. Another standout, the most inventive and most fully sculptural work in Building Structures, both formally and in terms of making the physical character of materials expressive, was newcomer Karlis Rekevics's installation in plaster and wood. A casual-seeming stack of plaster slabs, some unexpectedly swollen and notched vertical walls, and a couple of strategically placed light bulbs became a metaphorical distillation of the least romantic aspects of urban place, transformed by a simultaneously sensuous, rough material palette. Rekevics is someone to watch with attention. === Page 125 === BOOKS Versions of an Unmastered Past THE FRAGILITY OF GOODNESS: WHY BULGARIA'S JEWS SURVIVED THE HOLOCAUST. By Tzvetan Todorov. Translated by Arthur Denner. Prince- ton University Press. $26.95. THE ALGERIA HOTEL: FRANCE, MEMORY, AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR. By Adam Nossiter. Houghton Mifflin. $26.00. THE HOUSE OF RETURNED ECHOES. By Arnošt Lustig. Translated by Josef Lustig. Northwestern University Press. $17.95. THE BITTER SMELL OF ALMONDS: SELECTED FICTION. By Arnošt Lustig. Translated by Vera Bokovec, Josef Lustig, Jeanne Nemcová, Iris Urwin- Levit, and Paul Wilson. Northwestern University Press. $25.95. THE HOUSE OF FICTION, Henry James wrote in the preface to Portrait of a Lady, has "not one window, but a million," and sometimes it seems as if the same might be said for the house of Holocaust Studies. James, of course, was interested in the "fictive picture," while Holocaust com- mentary betrays a much wider and more varied concern. For James, the interpretation of observed reality depended on the consciousness of the artist. The authors of the books under review include not only a Czech novelist, who would qualify for James's pantheon, but also an American journalist and a French intellectual renowned for his works on literary theory. Depending on the sill where he is perched, each offers a differ- ent perspective on the diverse and complex human and historical land- scape known as Holocaust Studies. Tzvetan Todorov, who began his search for virtue among victims of German atrocity in Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1996), continues his quest for pulsations of ethical strength within the black horror of mass murder in The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria's Jews Survived the Holocaust. The story of the saving of native Bulgarian Jewry has already been told, and Todorov makes no claims for the originality of his narrative. Indeed, following an intro- ductory commentary, the bulk of his text comprises documents that cast light on the fate of Bulgaria's Jewish population during the years that saw the ranks of European Jewry expunged by the Nazi "final solution." === Page 126 === 126 PARTISAN REVIEW Todorov's contribution is nonetheless valuable because his selections illustrate what might be achieved when individuals from the political and religious community raise their voices in behalf of simple human decency, recognizing that the repute of their nation after the war would be measured in part by its stance on the destiny of its Jewish citizens. At the outbreak of World War II the Jewish population of Bulgaria numbered approximately 48,000, more than half living in the capital city of Sofia. Only a small percentage was employed in the professions. Nevertheless the Law for the Protection of the Nation, similar in many respects to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws in Germany, passed the legisla- ture in January 1941, a few months before Bulgaria became a member of the Axis Powers. Jews (as well as their homes and businesses) had to display the Star of David. Jewish men between twenty and forty were sent to camps where they worked on roads and bridges for much of the year under slave labor conditions. Thus the Jews were officially marked as a scorned minority undeserving of civil rights or legal protection. The substructure for their subsequent ghettoization and deportation was clearly in place; yet when the critical moment arrived, after some initial wavering, King Boris III blocked the process, saving the lives of Bul- garia's Jews by informing the Germans that he needed them for essen- tial toil at home. Todorov traces the steps leading to this "humane" decision, and assesses the private and political strategies that made it possible. Implicit in Todorov's analysis and the documents he presents is the inescapable question of why the fortune of Bulgarian Jewry was so different from (with the exception of Denmark). Or put more precisely: did other soci- eties do enough to try to save their fellow Jews from deportation and death? Todorov has no illusions about a national surge of heroism or philo-Semitism in Bulgaria. But when the position of the Jews became precarious, enough voices were raised in protest to convince the King that it was in his own and his nation's self-interest to shield them. The government's motives were mixed, but when so many lives were at stake, one may be inclined to find the reason for rescue less important than the fact of the happy outcome. Admittedly, although some German troops and SS officials were in Bulgaria throughout the period, they did not control the daily life of the people or administrative decisions at a higher level. Those who spoke out against the threat to the Jews or came to their defense did not fear imminent arrest, followed by Gestapo torture and possible execution. Still, there were many reasons why discretion might have overruled con- === Page 127 === BOOKS 127 science, not the least of which was the risk of displeasing the nation's German allies. As official mistreatment of Bulgarian Jewry grew, how- ever, supportive letters and speeches came from the lawyers' union, the writers' union, the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church, and from indi- vidual members of parliament, whose majority would have endorsed deportation until King Boris made the practical (rather than righteous) decision to postpone the action. As the German military situation dete- riorated, he found no cause to reverse his position. Not to be forgotten in this narrative of advocacy for the intended vic- tims is the counter-narrative of loss, which includes the expulsion in 1939 of 4,000 Jews who were foreign nationals and the later deporta- tion of more than 11,000 Jews from the former provinces of Thrace and Macedonia, which were restored to Bulgarian control by Nazi Germany as recompense for cooperation in the Yugoslavian and Greek cam- paigns. Few of them returned. There were protests in their behalf too, but the King and his cabinet remained firm, dooming those Jews who were not Bulgarian citizens. This example of collaboration leaves behind a governmental image of besmirched virtue, one that Todorov acknowledges without reflecting in any detail on how it might taint the compensating "goodness" of saving native Jewry. Left unresolved is the question of why the Germans didn't simply send in troops to overthrow King Boris and install a more compliant regime, as they did in Hungary in the spring of 1944. Because Bulgaria was not a terror state, the defenders of legal, religious, and human values found forums for their ideas, leaving a legacy of honor after the war, however qualified, that few of their fellow nations could share. And, after all, is this as remarkable as Todorov insists? When decent people behave decently, do they do anything more than we expect them to, or than they expect of themselves? Why are accounts of such behav- ior during the Holocaust celebrated with passionate enthusiasm, as if virtue were such a rare and fugitive trait during periods of extreme hard- ship that its mere appearance deserved special recognition? A far more disturbing issue is the moral failure during the Holocaust that led large numbers of individuals in both public and private life to behave so inde- cently. The heritage of dishonor that followed is a major focus of Adam Nossiter's Algeria Hotel: France, Memory, and the Second World War, which, unlike Todorov's study, reconstructs in some of its chapters the sources of a nation's shame, a passive collaboration with the enemy that, according to the author, remains widely unacknowledged to this day. Nossiter is less concerned with the history of the Vichy regime than with contemporary memories of that time. The subjects he interviews === Page 128 === 128 PARTISAN REVIEW formally or with whom he carries on casual conversations adopt pos- tures ranging from limited remembering through misremembering to a transparently self-ordained amnesia. Although he has done extensive documentary research, Nossiter’s principal interest is the individual response in France to its own unmastered past. He measures personal memories of events against archival or newspaper accounts of the same episodes, and reveals with understated irony how often remembering “had turned out to be a matter of choice.” He calls this the “will to efface,” a kind of mental virus that infects its host and gradually blunts the penchant for honest confrontation. Nossiter divides his volume into three sections, each testing the power of recollection. The sections are identified with particular locales in France: Bordeaux, where the trial of accused collaborator Maurice Papon had been dragging on for months; Vichy, whose residents insist on separating the Petain government from the pleasant summer resort that mirrored the “true” source of the town’s reputation; and the village of Tulle, where in June 1944 the Germans hanged ninety-nine male res- idents and deported more than a hundred others (scarcely a dozen sur- vived the war) as reprisal for a Resistance attack on a military barracks in the area, during which forty German soldiers were killed. Better known—though Nossiter does not discuss this in detail—is the next day’s atrocity at nearby Oradour-sur-Glâne, where the Germans razed the village and burned alive in a local church all the citizens they could get their hands on, mostly women, children, and elderly men. In the case of German crimes in Tulle, the virus of forgetfulness suddenly disap- pears; details of that day remain etched in the consciousness of numer- ous current inhabitants, including those not born at the time and those too young to have witnessed the crime—though most are reluctant to speak of it today. In Bordeaux and Vichy, Nossiter finds considerable memory distor- tion. He can excavate only a miniscule number of community voices that spoke up at the time in behalf of free- dom, democracy, and the sanctity of all human life in France, including foreigners and Jews. But among the aged former bureaucrats or their younger family members he does not find one able to approach the sim- ple eloquence of the surviving French Jew who testified at the Papon trial: “It’s a wound that doesn’t heal, that can’t heal. There is something irreparable, something that doesn’t move. It’s the inhuman conditions that were the fact of the Shoah.” Nossiter unearths little evidence that the populace in Bordeaux and Vichy share this sentiment, or even pay conscious homage to the “inhuman conditions” the witness described. === Page 129 === BOOKS 129 Nossiter does uncover enough expression of a lingering if subdued anti-Semitism in Bordeaux and Vichy to help explain why there was no public outcry against the roundup and deportation of the Jews. Both Bul- garia and France, to their discredit, agreed to turn over to the Germans foreign Jews living in unoccupied areas of their country. But only France, with little official protest, surrendered native Jews too, using their own police force to organize and execute the task. Yet virtually none of the older residents of Vichy whom Nossiter interviewed could recall that the former Hotel Algeria once housed the Bureau of Jewish Affairs, or that such an agency had even existed in the town. Although regional archives give the details of the arrest and removal of Vichy Jews, from the peo- ple’s accounts one would have thought that it took place beneath a cloak of invisibility. Nossiter controls his indignation at this scandal of forget- fulness almost to the point of virtual neutrality, but the strategy acts as a revelation to the engaged reader. For those familiar with Todorov’s vol- ume, a staggering question echoes from the pages of Nossiter’s text: if a confederate country like Bulgaria could denounce Nazi policy toward the Jews from so many pockets of society, why could not equivalent traces be found in a center of European culture like France? The question becomes all the more perplexing, and its possible answers more unsettling, when we examine the response of the citizens of Tulle to the atrocity committed against their non-Jewish neighbors by the Germans in June of 1944. The viciousness of the SS action in this rural community left the villagers with a permanently scarred memory that resembles the lasting wound described by many survivors of the Holocaust, though neither Nossiter nor the residents he interviews ever hint at this connection. They speak of a “lack” (those who were mur- dered or deported to their death) that is not an “emptiness” but a painful “fullness,” much as those Jews who outlived the camps describe the absence of family members as a relentlessly afflicting presence. “As I’ve grown older, over the years, I don’t think a year passes when I am not more appalled . . . by the horror,” says one woman of Tulle who was two years old at the time of the hangings. Does her sentiment differ from the words of the Jewish survivor at the Papon trial who said, “It’s a wound that doesn’t heal, that can’t heal”? Or does anguish have a self- ish core that finds difficulty acknowledging the universal wound Ger- man barbarism inflicted on its victims? The visible misery of the townspeople of Tulle following the slaughter of their sons, husbands, and fathers deserves nothing but our sympathy. Yet in the context of Nossiter’s overall narrative, which includes his preceding accounts of the indifference in Bordeaux and Vichy toward the fate of the Jews, the === Page 130 === 130 PARTISAN REVIEW reader is left by this unhappy legacy with much to reflect about on a subject we might call the egotism of grief. The abundant fiction of Czech novelist Arnošt Lustig grants us insight into the impact of Nazi Germany on the lives of individual Jews that the intellectual and the journalist, by the very nature of their disci- plines, could not offer. Lustig is an expert at patiently reconstructing the details of what James called the “fictive picture,” so that the doom threatening the Jews of Prague eases into the story amidst a plethora of mundane concerns. The literary imagination need not record the flood that overwhelmed European Jewry as a sudden catastrophe. It has the leisure to portray the gradual and unsystematic erosion of individual mental peace, followed by ever more severe instances of physical dis- tress. In The House of Returned Echoes Lustig unfolds the family plea- sures and economic pursuits of his protagonists before and after the incursion of Nazi Germany into Czechoslovakia, enabling us to trace the paralysis of the individual will as it slowly grasps how few and futile are the gestures of protest or avenues of rescue still available to it. Throughout he manages to maintain sympathy with his victimized char- acters, whose diminishing space to maneuver is shaped not by loss of initiative but by the ruthless intentions of their Nazi masters. Only the world of fiction could provide such a richly textured account of how hope, delusion, skepticism, and inertia combined in the Jewish commu- nity to mask the dangers that mounted their relentless incremental threats despite the bland reassurances of the enemy. Lustig rephrases the recurrent question in Holocaust discourse about how the Jews “allowed” their ruin to engulf them so easily. One possi- ble response he explores is that they were undone by their own decency. Encountering for the first time a mindset driven by a culture of exter- mination, Lustig’s characters fail to identify its inner evil because they continue to measure the foe by the familiar values that invigorate their own lives. Temporarily discarding his Jewish star, Lustig’s main protag- onist takes a train journey to the country, simply indifferent to the risk. “The trip itself is like a promise,” he thinks, “and if you have chosen the destination yourself, rarely can anything go wrong. Who would choose to take a trip into danger? He liked to travel by train. . . . It reminded himself of something. It brought out memories.” The ironic gulf between his innocent reflections and our post-Holocaust knowl- edge exposes the vulnerability of an imagination inspired by the unfet- tered certainty of choice. When Emil Ludwig and his wife and children take their last train trip, from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, the husband has long since relin- === Page 131 === BOOKS 131 quished that sense of certainty. The Ludwigs are housed in the so-called “family camp” in Birkenau, whose inmates maintain a semblance of normalcy until the Germans are ready to send them almost en masse to the gas chambers. In the long closing section of the novel Lustig sets the scene in the vestibule of death itself as the doomed Jews slowly make their way under the stern prompting of SS men and camp Kapos toward the profane sanctuary of mass murder. It is a bold imaginative stroke that is virtually unique in the annals of Holocaust literature-André Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just is another rare example. Few authors or readers are willing to venture into this alien terrain, consid- ering it too ghastly or too sacred to despoil with a conjectural eye or pen. Only luck saved Lustig from this awful fate, which engulfed his parents and other family members. In a combination of personal shriv- ing and artistic penance, he grants us a glimpse into the ultimate moment of atrocity, giving us empathic access to the realm of the never- to-be known. To be sure, by deflating the drama of extinction and creating contra- puntal fragments from the musings of victim and murderer, Lustig offers us only one likely version of this horrific event as it was experienced by those present. And he does it with humility and a clear sense of the sus- picion with which his foray into the unspeakable may be received. The text announces its own misgivings: “Everything is maybe. Maybe Emil Ludwig knew that everyone would die alone. Perhaps it is up to those who put words on paper about him to breathe souls into them, as though that were possible and preferable.” The narrative raises but can- not resolve the question of whether its trespass among the columns of the doomed represents sacrilege or vision. But if the most extreme chal- lenge of Holocaust literature is to help us to imagine the unimaginable, Lustig has met that summons with disciplined courage and admirable restraint. What other form of discourse can match that particular achievement? The “returned echoes” of this novel’s title reverberate through much of Lustig’s fiction, reminders that time does not always dissipate the memories of a murdered past. Over the years Northwestern University Press has been reissuing many of Lustig’s titles. The most recent, The Bitter Smell of Almonds: Selected Fictions, contains the short story col- lection Street of Lost Brothers, the novel Dita Saxova, and Indecent Dreams: Novellas. Like returning echoes, bitter almonds assail a sense with hints of violent death, since the odor is associated with prussic acid, the principal ingredient of the Zyklon B used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Lustig must have enjoyed the ironic proximity === Page 132 === 132 PARTISAN REVIEW of “bitter almonds” with the subtitle’s “selected fictions,” since his real interest is the “selected truths” that this aura of death has bequeathed to his artistic endeavors. Space does not allow detailed responses to this recent sampling of Lustig's works, originally published between 1962 and 1990. Through- out his career he has wrestled with the problem of rescuing from the void of oblivion the obscure anguish of tormented hearts that continue to beat on the margin between survival and loss. Like one of his charac- ters, he confronts the paradox that "those who were together remained alone." He invites us into a world where, as the still-young Dita Saxova cannot forget, something inside you remains crippled even as you enjoy the relief of having escaped the inferno of mass murder. His characters carry within them a profoundly troubling insight, not designed to reunite them easily with the life of the spirit: “It had been blind fate, an accident, very rarely any personal quality or service that preserved them from catastrophe.” If the legacy of the Holocaust is nothing more than that life is only a matter of sheer luck, and death too, then what moral foundation does one use in order to rebuild a secure future? Lustig's principal contribution to the literature of the Holocaust is a willingness to enter the minds of those engulfed by the disaster and to animate their interior mental landscapes. Confusion, uncertainty, and dread have forced us to linger on the borders of this terrain, wary of intruding on a realm for whose existential codes we lack an experiential basis. In Lustig's fictional world these codes burst through those bor- ders, disrupting the settled premises of our comfortable lives. In his artistic universe the memory of mass murder and the celebration of love are not polar opposites but participants in each other's reality. It can be no accident that suicide forms the climax of many of Lustig's tales, a logical if grim tacit gesture of respect to the illegitimate death that con- sumed millions of his fellow Jews. Fortunately, the “fictive picture” gives us imaginative access to this haunted world without making such stringent demands on our physical selves, adding a mournful human dimension to the historical narrative of Holocaust atrocity that is an indispensable part of the story. Lawrence L. Langer === Page 133 === BOOKS 133 The Case of Victor Serge VICTOR SERGE: THE COURSE IS SET ON HOPE. By Susan Weissman. Verso. $35.00. VICTOR SERGE, MÉMOIRES D'UN RÉVOLUTIONNAIRE ET AUTRES ÉCRITS POLITIQUES. Edited by Robert Laffont. Bouquins. 30.30€ VICTOR SERGE, WHO DIED IN MEXICO CITY IN 1947, had been forgotten for a while; the Village Voice published an article in the 1980s entitled "Who is Victor Serge?" But in recent years there has been a Serge revival in France and, to a certain extent, in the English-speaking world. There have been biographical studies, dissertations, as well as articles about him; there is now a Victor Serge Foundation and a Victor Serge library offering revolutionary literature in Moscow, and his books have been republished in several countries. A leading French publisher recently put out a massive volume of Serge's nonfiction. This revival has been largely the work of a small number of devoted admirers, one of which is Ms. Weissman, the author of the most recent Serge biography. Serge (whose real name was Kibalchich) was born in Brussels in 1890 to a family of poor Russian political refugees. His uncle had been a key figure (and the main bomb expert) of the Russian terrorists of 1879 vin- tage (the Narodnaya Volya). He grew up mainly in Belgium and never had a systematic education but was taught science by his father and lit- erature by his mother, and he read an enormous lot. His parents sepa- rated and from the age of fifteen Serge lived alone, first in Belgium, later in France. He worked as a photographer's apprentice and from a very young age was active in anarchist circles. Even in his teens he lectured and contributed to anarchist periodicals. In 1912 he was arrested in Paris as the alleged brains of the "bande Bonnot." This was a strange, semicriminal group of militants specializing in bank robberies. They killed a number of people in the process, and some of the proceeds went to their cause, some to their own pockets. Serge was considered the inspiration of the gang and given a five-year sentence. That he had been involved with the group is beyond doubt, but the extent of his activity is unclear. Had he truly been the brains of the gang, the sentence would have been much more severe. Serge's biog- raphers have not tried very hard to go into this more deeply because they were apparently not very interested in the libertarian period of his life. This is regrettable, because Serge was an ardent revolutionary but === Page 134 === 134 PARTISAN REVIEW never really a faithful party man. All his life he remained an anarchist at heart, which is borne out both in his novels and in his political behav- ior. Party discipline did not come to him naturally—he was a born rebel. Serge was released from prison in early 1917 and deported from France. He spent some time in Spain and then found his way to revolu- tionary Russia; in later years he wrote a fascinating account of Year One of the Russian revolution. Serge's attitude towards Bolshevism was crit- ical almost from the beginning—or, to be precise, from Kronstadt (1921), the uprising of the sailors against the Soviet government which was suppressed by Trotsky. Serge joined the Russian left-wing opposi- tion early on but for a number of years was sent to missions on behalf of the Communist International in Berlin and Vienna, where he made the acquaintance of most leading Communist intellectuals and political leaders of the day. He returned to Moscow in 1926 and witnessed the growth of Stalinism and the destruction of the various oppositions. He was excluded from the party, put under surveillance, and eventually arrested. Most of his friends and relations disappeared in the 1930s. His fate would not have been different but for the fact that his friends in France launched a massive campaign demanding his liberation. This campaign lasted for years, and the Serge case became a major embar- rassment for the Communists and for Soviet policy in Western Europe. Serge's friends enlisted André Gide and even Romain Rolland, who intervened with Stalin on his behalf. Thus, alone among all the opposi- tionists, he was released from prison just before the great purges. The fact that he was originally of foreign nationality might have helped the Soviet authorities to let him leave the country (minus his manuscripts) while saving face. In Moscow Serge was considered not so much a polit- ical figure but a littérateur, and this could also have been of importance in Stalin's unprecedented magnanimity. The next few years Serge spent in France; Weissman's biography con- tains many interesting details about his meetings with defectors from the Soviet Union such as Ignaz Reiss and Walter Krivitsky as well as Trot- sky's assistants, who included Mark Zborowski, the leading Soviet spy in these circles. Serge was also in touch with many independent figures of the far left, and his portraits of the left-wing opposition in Russia, of Soviet writers of the twenties (many of whom he knew intimately), and of his revolutionary friends in Western Europe are of considerable his- torical importance. Serge admired Trotsky and joined the Trotskyists in France for a lit- tle while. Whereas Trotsky wanted to create a Fourth International at the time, Serge thought the timing altogether bad, since the Left in === Page 135 === BOOKS 135 Europe was in full retreat. Trotsky turned his full invective against this "coquettish moralist," even though Serge had been close to him and had translated six of his books into French. Serge (Trotsky wrote) was a poet, that is to say not a person to be taken seriously, a “bridge from revolution to reaction." Serge did not reply. The whole affair turned into an ad hominem attack and Weissman notes that when Serge pub- lished in Partisan Review an article called “Marxism in Our Time,” Trotsky wrote about it “without any evidence of having read it.” Serge faced social and political ostracism during the Paris years; most pub- lishers did not want his books. When he wanted to find work as a proofreader the Communist unions tried to declare a strike. On the day the Germans entered Paris, Serge left for the south of France with his son Vlady; like so many others he was helped by Varian Fry in Marseilles. Another lifeline, according to the biographers, was the Partisan Review fund for European writers and artists, established mainly by Nancy and Dwight Macdonald. It was Serge's fourth exile and seventh flight in twenty years. The stay in Marseilles lasted far longer than antic- ipated. It proved to be impossible to get even a U.S. transit visa for him because of his anarchist past; having been a member of the CPSU, an executive member of the Communist International, and even one of the Red Army General staff (during the civil war in Russia) may have been less a hindrance after the Soviet Union became an ally. Serge left Mar- seilles in 1941 and, after some further adventures lasting several months, reached Mexico by way of Martinique and the Dominican Republic. The fall of France is described in one of his novels (The Long Dusk), written in Marseilles while waiting for his visa; it was the only one of his novels published in English in his lifetime. A very young Irving Howe reviewed it in Partisan Review, saying that Serge was one of the still- responsive survivors of a destroyed generation who had retained his socialist convictions tempered by a warming humanism. Howe did not think very highly of the literary value of the book ("neither his political work nor his novels are as significant as the man himself"), but he con- cluded, "Others will write better novels on these themes but to few will we respond so warmly." Serge's life in Mexico was anything but trouble- free. All his life he lived in dire poverty. Small fees from articles pub- lished in the U.S. (in Politics, Partisan Review, New Leader, and Mod- ern Review) were almost his only income; he felt very lonely; and the Stalinists, as before, were out to get him. He spent a considerable amount of time defending himself against various Stalinist calumnies. Serge continued to write fiction as well as nonfiction (mainly on the Soviet Union and its future), but he had no certainty that what he wrote === Page 136 === 136 PARTISAN REVIEW would have any impact, indeed, would be read outside a small circle of friends. He died of a heart attack in Mexico City in November 1947; his family believed that he might have been poisoned or murdered in some other way. The present Serge revival is deserved in every way; he was a very brave and honest man at a time when so many intellectuals in Europe compromised and collaborated. He belongs to a very small group of survivors, the revolutionaries of World War I vintage. He was an eye- witness of events of world historical importance, of great hope and even greater tragedy. His political recollections are very important, because they reflect so well the mood of this lost generation. His novels will find readers now because they help grant an understanding of the aftermath of the Russian revolution and its impact on militants and intellectuals, a world of yesterday almost as distant from subsequent generations as the Napoleonic wars. The revival of interest in Victor Serge has to do in large part with the desire of present-day Trotskyist sympathizers to find a cultural icon; throughout its long history Trotskyism attracted a great many intellec- tuals but could not keep them for any length of time. While Trotsky lived, his personality served as a rallying point. True, his later theoreti- cal and political writings, the obsessive endeavor to give a Marxist explanation for developments in the Soviet Union and the world at large, were neither particularly innovative nor persuasive. But his strong personality, his tragic fate in exile, and eventually his assassination attracted many intellectuals. Trotskyism after Trotsky is a different story, in the age of Pablo and Posadas, of Tony Cliff and Ernest Mandel, there was room in the move- ment for enthusiasts and true believers but not for those with more than a superficial knowledge of history, politics, economics, or sociology, let alone for critical spirits. The Trotskyists in France, and to a lesser degree in Britain, would attract generations of students, but these would invari- ably drop out within a short time. Trotskyists had a golden opportunity to make headway following the decline of the appeal of Soviet Commu- nism and its demise. But their sectarian quarrels and splits, their growing detachment from the real world, and their egregious political misjudg- ments (including the “critical support” for Ayatollah Khomeini and even the Taliban) antagonized all but the hardiest and most obtuse spirits. In this situation Victor Serge must have seemed exceedingly attractive in the search for figures giving the movement historical and moral legit- imacy, but there were certain difficulties to overcome. To begin with, Serge in his divergences with Trotsky (who treated him almost with con- === Page 137 === tary) was more often right than the "old man." This fact is acknowl- edged by Ms. Weissman, and it provoked the ire of some of the more orthodox Trotskyist reviewers of her book. More important yet, it has to be proved that with all his harsh criti- cism of the Soviet Union, he would, had he lived, never have become a cold warrior and renegade. Thus the Trotskyists (as does Ms. Weiss- man) compare Koestler's Darkness at Noon unfavorably with Serge's "Case of Comrade Tulayev" and "Midnight in the Century." In fact, both Koestler and Serge were wrong with their explanations of Stalin- ism and the purges. Koestler argued that the "enemies of the people" confessed because Stalin appealed to party discipline, whereas for Serge the case of Tulayev was more or less an accident. As Serge saw it, Stalin was a tool of the bureaucracy, which, as we now know, was very far from historical truth. Koestler is rejected by the Trotskyists not so much because of what he wrote at the time but because (to quote Ms. Weiss- man) he became one of the god-that-failed anti-communists. She also calls his book "a pure statement of Stalinist thinking." In contrast, Serge, we are told, kept his hope despite all that had happened and all that he had witnessed. I have a strong suspicion that with all this, Koestler would have been acceptable to the Trotskyists had he died, like Serge, in 1947. Ms. Weissman and others have been struggling valiantly to make Serge posthumously one of them, a revolutionary who never wavered, perhaps not a faithful member of the movement but an outstanding fel- low traveler. It is a struggle against overwhelming odds. After his escape from France he contributed almost exclusively to social democratic journals and some which were not socialist at all. This is not just because others would not publish him; his views had changed as the result of his experiences. The socialism he envisaged during the last fif- teen years of his life had little to do with traditional Marxism, let alone Marxism-Leninism, but was based on radical rethinking and revalua- tion. It included an emphasis on freedom and humanism, and in some ways it was a return to the libertarian socialism of his youth. He praised the Mensheviks and strongly recommended their writings, for their understanding of the Soviet danger was far more astute than that of his old political friends of the far left. All this appears not just in his articles published in the United States but most strikingly in his let- ters in 1945-1946 to his old friend Emanuel Mounier, a left-wing Catholic leader and founder of the influential French monthly Esprit. Early on Serge called the Soviet Union and the various Communist parties "totalitarian," a term considered today cold--warrish and unfor- === Page 138 === 138 PARTISAN REVIEW givable in some circles, and considerable energy is invested by Serge's present-day promoters to show that "totalitarian" meant something dif- ferent then. But there is no escape from the fact that Serge was an ardent cold warrior even before the cold war had really come under way. Seen in retrospect it could not have been different. He had lived more than fifteen years in the Soviet Union; he had witnessed Communist ide- ology and Communist reality from a close angle. In contrast to some of his comrades in the West he could not possibly consider Stalinism a mere aberration. For him the Soviet Union and Communism was the most important issue in world politics and, after the destruction of fas- cism, also the greatest threat. The debates about whether the Soviet regime was bureaucratic collectivist or state monopoly capitalist or other such hair splitting must have appeared to him either ridiculous or incomprehensible. And yet, with all this, one owes a debt of gratitude to those who, for whatever motives, are resurrecting the work of Victor Serge. His articles and books speak for themselves, and we would be poorer without them. Walter Laqueur Intimacies and Mysteries confessions of a secular jew: A MEMOIR. By Eugene Goodheart. Overlook Press. $27.95. HOW DOES ONE RECOUNT A LIFE that is not heroic enough to have put the author on a postage stamp or atop an equestrian statue? How can a memoirist do justice to a life that is drenched in reading, writing, teach- ing, and talking? The answer is: by bringing the pressure of thoughtful- ness to bear upon the people and incidents that have marked one's life. What gives it even a rough approximation of meaning is the self- consciousness that can be invested in the recollection of the past, and what gives that life any claim of interest to readers is the distinctive voice-the immediacy of personality-that can be cultivated in giving shape to autobiography. The name Eugene Goodheart appears on no pieces of legislation, nor has he discovered any subatomic particles. A scholar of modern litera- ture (primarily British), a commentator on contemporary culture (espe- cially academic), and a frequent contributor to Partisan Review, === Page 139 === BOOKS 139 Goodheart has learned enough from the fiction he has spent a lifetime explicating to make the characterizations in this memoir vivid. He has also reflected deeply enough upon the sadness and instability of human relationships to gain some solace from the struggle to retrieve the traces of friends and relatives from oblivion. Caught between natality and fatality, Goodheart doesn’t differ from the rest of us. But out of the episodes and encounters that might otherwise be random or inconse- quential have come meditations that achieve a lapidary acuity. Confes- sions of a Secular Jew is therefore something of a triumph in the richness of its psychological texture. The title is a bit misleading, however. Jewish origins, Jewish attach- ments and allegiances, Jewish fate—these are hardly synonymous with the memories that the author summons, nor with the persona that this book projects. For example, he broods on the laser-intensity of the sta- tus of an only child, on the vulnerability of the graduate student (which he felt at the University of Virginia and then at Columbia), on the pun- gent yet fleeting intimacies of friendship and the mysteries of familial bonds. He indulges in comparative analysis of academic life, having taught at institutions as varied as the University of Chicago, Mount Holyoke, and MIT. Part of Goodheart’s saga is political—a record of emancipation from the Stalinoid coils of his boyhood. He became a cen- trist or a moderate who disdained the rancid self-righteousness of the New Left, yet he is still unable to forget the hunger for social justice that marked his own coming-of-age. A certain loyalty to the modest circum- stances of his Brooklyn origins has kept the author vaguely on the left and has blocked the path to neoconservatism. But because Goodheart is a Diaspora Jew, the academic star cannot distance himself entirely from the shlemiel; and success co-habits with self-deprecation. Thus the humiliations are inscribed as well: from a boyhood spent on the borough’s playing fields, where maladroitness cannot be covered up with ambiguity; to France, where he lands on a Fulbright, strides for the first time into a cafe, and orders a cheese sand- wich—but it comes out as “dommage,” to the universal ridicule of the local patrons. Giving the first in a series of prestigious Christian Gauss lectures at Princeton, Goodheart flirts with disaster; his typescript has been mistakenly placed in a friend’s briefcase during the earlier dinner. The most commonplace theme of embarrassed recollections is sexual initiation. Recounting such experiences is a temptation to which he does not yield; also discreetly soft-pedaled is a failed first marriage. Not that the claims of the body can finally be ignored—but in its suf- fering and its senescence. The most harrowing chapter in Confessions of === Page 140 === 140 PARTISAN REVIEW a Secular Jew is not about marginality or alienation but about asthma. "Heavy Breathing" is Goodheart's own contribution to the literature of the experience of pain—a promise that life does not fail to keep. The poet Emma Lazarus had depicted the immigrants of a century or so ago as "yearning to breathe free"; and a son of those immigrants makes ter- rifying what it is like to endure the agonizing intimations of near-death, the anxieties and panic-fear and sleeplessness, the desperate and urgent need for relief as a substitute for a cure that remains elusive. Nor does Goodheart spare the reader observations on the subject of old age—its loneliness akin to desolation, as faith and hope vanish, to be succeeded by a kind of suspended void. For the memory of the past has so often dimmed or disappeared as well. But resilience and gallantry can sometimes be detected as well. A tenacious élan vital can even erupt to jump-start life itself and arrest its inevitable decline. That is what happened to Goodheart's mother, who became a widow in 1981 and lived independently in her own apartment for fifteen more years, before moving into a nursing home near her son and daughter-in-law in 1997. Had he himself not encountered so many striking figures who are at least briefly portrayed in this memoir (from novelists as different as Richard Wright and Saul Bellow to philosophers as different as John Silber and Robert Nozick), Goodheart's mother would win the Reader's Digest contest for "the most unforgettable char- acter I've met." Hers is the only portrait that gets a full chapter in Con- fessions of a Secular Jew. And speaking of philosophers, Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein is what deepens the serious reading of Good- heart's 88-year-old mother, who did not graduate from high school. The syllabus has continued—burnished with Cather and Wharton. Nor does Goodheart's mother permit his friends to patronize her, however fes- tooned they are with academic pedigrees; she is not to be trifled with. In the twilight of her own life, she grasps in Wittgenstein the plenitude and distinction of which some are capable; and she fathoms how the philosopher's "genius was connected with his suffering." What neither of Goodheart's atheist parents had perpetuated in the 1930s and 1940s was the marrow of Jewish culture. The religion once at its center was so extinguished that his father's funeral was an awk- ward moment. "At the grave site, the rabbi guided me through the kad- dish, the Jewish prayer for the dead," which left the mourning son feeling "deprived of the tradition that my family had rejected." Bereft of the thick immediacy of a continuous and complex culture, Goodheart represents a type familiar to modern Jewish historians. The youthful leftism that he recalls assigned the working class as the agent of histor- === Page 141 === BOOKS 141 ical transformation and elevated the Soviet Union to the vanguard of the world's peoples struggling for justice. Zionism was therefore as fully repudiated as the Jewish religion; both were atavistic violations of uni- versalist ideals. Exalting the detachment of the free-floating intellectual, Goodheart grew up suspicious of the clamminess of organizations and institutions; affiliation with a synagogue would have seemed unnatural. Yet this memoir is permeated by a Jewish consciousness. Proud of the hold that a fluent Yiddish continues to exert upon his sensibility, com- fortable with his associations and friendships with what can hardly be termed "co-religionists," mystified by the precariousness of ethnic iden- tity, Goodheart knows that the choice of a vocation like literary studies wasn't utterly capricious, given the extreme bookishness of the Jewish people. (Even the gangster Meyer Lansky had belonged to the Book-of- the-Month Club.) Goodheart claims that other Jews recognize him by his physiognomy. He is also aware that such marks of identity fall far short of membership in a living community. He is also conscious of what a peculiar yet representative figure he is. After all, categories like "secular Christian" or "secular Buddhist" make little sense. But a secular Jew is not exactly a novelty item. Its exemplars have included Goodheart's own mentor at Columbia (and this memoir gives perhaps the best compressed account of the sensitivity and ele- gance of Lionel Trilling's prowess as a teacher), plus well over a million of the 5.7 million Americans who identify themselves to pollsters as Jews. A viable secular Jewishness is in doubt, however. Freud ques- tioned the future of an illusion. Yet Goodheart has no illusion about the future of a secular Jewish identity: there will be none. The Brooklyn of his youth cannot be duplicated. What Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter once praised as "ethnic purity" has thinned out, and the ways by which Jewishness can be expressed have now narrowed. The Yiddishists and the Hebraicists are now mostly statistics in the actuarial tables; so are the varieties of radical cosmopolitanism. Eventually only the obser- vant will be left standing. Because secularists have so little to affirm, they have little to transmit to their children. To be sure a "confession" can also be something to profess. But Goodheart himself offers no con- fessio fidei in this book. On the contrary, his skepticism, his resistance to general expressions of organized life, his cultivation of intellectual independence all hint at the radical discontinuity to which this subtle memoir-this examined life-so poignantly testifies. Stephen Whitfield === Page 142 === 142 PARTISAN REVIEW Special Wretchedness LIFE AT THE BOTTOM: THE WORLDVIEW THAT MAKES THE UNDERCLASS. By Theodore Dalrymple. Ivan R. Dee. $27.50. THE AUTHOR OF THIS REMARKABLE VOLUME is an M.D. (psychiatrist) at a prison and hospital in the slums of Birmingham, as well as a world traveler and prolific writer. He practiced medicine in Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific and published at least ten books and countless articles both in his native country and in the United States. He displays a sense of humor even when addressing grim subjects, which he often does. And he manages to combine strong moral convictions, a sensible, rational view of the world, and a lucid and engaging style of writing. Life at the Bottom deals with crime, drug addiction, single parent- hood, unemployment, homelessness, welfare dependency, and other social ills. Policymakers, social workers, and mental health profession- als, as well as students in the social sciences, would benefit from read- ing it. This is not a volume of airy theorizing but the distillation of personal experience, prolonged reflection, and curiosity, which leads the author beyond the prison and hospital to bingo halls, pubs, and night clubs to observe their patrons and converse with them. Little is known in this country about the social pathologies of Britain. Americans seem to be under the impression that it remains a civil, law- abiding, and peaceful society, largely unaffected by the kinds of social problems all-too-familiar in this country. Dalrymple, however, finds that “Britain is the most culturally degraded country in Europe” and chronicles with determination “the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, [and] the sheer ignorance of how to live.” He sees around him “lives dominated . . . by violence, crime and degradation.” It is, of course, not poverty as such that is responsible for this “special wretchedness.” Rather, “it is a way of life . . . , [of] conduct unrestrained either by law or convention . . . , when people satisfy every appetite with the same minimal effort and commitment . . . , trap[ping] themselves in squalor.” No traditional values or obligations govern or guide the lives and relationships of these people: “The only cement for personal rela- tionships is the need and desire of the moment, and nothing is stronger but more fickle than need and desire unshackled by obligation.” Information from outside this volume confirms its findings: most cat- egories of crime in Britain now exceed those in the United States, although murder rates remain substantially lower. === Page 143 === BOOKS 143 The most unexpected revelation about the British underclass is its close resemblance to its counterpart in the United States. This is all the more surprising, since in the U.S. the underclass is largely composed of ethnic minorities, mostly black and Hispanic, whereas in Britain it is mostly white with a growing colored representation. No historic expe- rience of slavery and racial discrimination can account for the burgeon- ing social pathologies of this white underclass in England. Why is a stable and democratic society that has had a generous wel- fare state for a long time beset by these pathologies? Why so much recreational violence, brutality toward women, and a wide range of casual antisocial behavior? Dalrymple does not shy from answers. There is, to begin with, human nature not spontaneously given to benevolent social impulses. Unlike most American commentators on such matters, he does not believe that most people have enormous unrealized poten- tials of kindness and creativity. People need to learn as children how to act decently and take responsibility for their actions. When neither par- ents nor schools nor any other social agency are able to willing to per- form these tasks, there will be a multitude of aggressive, amoral, and predatory adults, especially among young males. Britain also suffers from high rates of illegitimacy, soaring to a national average of 40 per- cent and higher as one descends on the social-class scale. Mass culture is also to blame for the conditions that inculcate worth- less aspirations and encourage an irresponsible sense of entitlement to pleasure and self-indulgence, especially among the uneducated. These indictments dovetail with the prescient message of Richard Hoggart, who warned almost half a century ago (in his Uses of Literacy) about the destruction of British working-class culture and values by the insid- ious impact of mass culture, well before television became omnipresent (Dalrymple reports that "the average English adult now watches twenty-seven hours of it per week"). Finally there is the British welfare state and what the author calls "the bureaucracy of compassion," which institutionalized a determinis- tic view of human behavior relieving people of responsibility for their behavior on either social, psychological, or biological grounds. It appears that every tenet of political correctness and the associated supportive beliefs found in the United States not only flourish but appear to be more vigorous and uncontested in Britain: Mere semi-literacy and ignorance doesn't necessarily disqualify young people from passing public examinations. . . . Since failure is now regarded as fatally damaging to self-esteem, anyone who === Page 144 === 144 PARTISAN REVIEW actually presents himself at an examination is likely to emerge with a certificate. I recently encountered a boy aged 16 in my clinic who wrote Dear Sir as dee sur and I am as ime... who passed a public examination in English. The British middle class has bought the multiculturalist cant, that, where culture is concerned, there is only difference, not better or worse. . . . The belief in the equality of cultures... a long established peda- gogic orthodoxy has now seeped into the population at large. Today's slum dwellers are aggressively convinced of the sufficiency of their knowledge... and of their cultural life... whatever it might consist. In the schools that the children of the underclass attend (as in com- parable American schools) those who express a desire to learn "suffer mockery, excommunication, and in some instances outright violence from their peers." Public housing where the underclass is sheltered is just as deplorable as it is in this country: "What do the tenants think of their apartment blocks? They vote with their urine. The public spaces and elevators of all public housing blocks I know are so deeply impregnated with urine that the odor is ineradicable. And anything smashable has been smashed." There is also garbage everywhere that cannot be blamed on poor architecture. Most surprising is that in Britain, too, the attitude Shelby Steele des- ignated (with reference to American blacks) "the victim focused identity" has become widespread among groups whose historical experiences have been very different from those of their American counterparts: The sour satisfaction of being dependent on social security [i.e. welfare] resides in its automatic conferral of the status of the Vic- tim, which in itself explains one's failure and absolves one of the obligation to make something of oneself... because of the unjust nature of society which made one a victim in the first place. The victimized sense of identity, amoral refusal to take responsibility for one's life and behavior, and belief in social determinism are, of course, intertwined. Dalrymple had met... suspected killers in prison... to whom killing was no more problematical, morally, than making a telephone call: men, === Page 145 === BOOKS 145 who...were so convinced of the gross injustice of the world that they were convinced also that nothing they did themselves could add significantly to its sum. Much of this could be ascribed to modernity which, as has often been noted, undermines the sense of community and purpose while raising expectations about the fulfillment of various material as well as emo- tional needs. The result has been a serious erosion of both formal and informal controls over behavior. Freedom without responsibility, free-floating aggression, and a moral vacuum are the key characteristics of this underclass, whose difficulties are mostly self-inflicted, the author argues. He also comes to the con- clusion that "the mental, cultural, emotional and spiritual impoverish- ment of the Western underclass is the greatest of any group of people I have encountered anywhere." The fundamental source of all the pathologies and miseries Dalrym- ple vividly details are to be found in the ideas of intellectuals, and in the elites and policymakers influenced by them. He reserves his most with- ering criticism for left-liberal intellectuals whose ideas not only helped to shape the welfare state but filtered down to those inclined to irre- sponsible, antisocial attitudes and provided excuses for such behavior. For example "the extension of the term 'addiction' ... cover[s] any undesirable but nonetheless gratifying behavior." Likewise "criminals call for therapy for all anti-social behavior-curiously enough only after it has led to imprisonment, not before." He holds responsible the pre- vailing non-judgmentalism, "the climate of moral, cultural and intellec- tual relativism . . . [that] has been successfully communicated to those least able to resist its devastating practical effects." Life at the Bottom is a powerful reaction against, and corrective to, the prevailing conventional wisdom about human nature, social prob- lems, education, sexual morality, personal responsibility, and the part the government can or should play in creating conditions for personal fulfillment and social harmony. This helps us understand why the author occasionally overstates his case. There are circumstances that substantially diminish personal control and choice and significantly contribute to antisocial behavior. If this volume places little emphasis on them it is because the opposite, deterministic point of view has prevailed for so long. Most importantly, Dalrymple is right to reemphasize that "human behavior cannot be explained without reference to the meaning and intentions people give to their acts and omissions." === Page 146 === 146 PARTISAN REVIEW Locating the confluence of the personal and the social is extremely difficult. But Dalrymple has gone a long way to clarify these complex connections and restore the balance between the influence beliefs and individual choices exert on the way we act and the external circum- stances which also shape the highly unattractive and destructive forms of behavior dealt with in this book. Paul Hollander Whose Rock? THE ROCK: A TALE OF SEVENTH-CENTURY JERUSALEM. By Kanan Makiya. Pantheon. $26.00. KANAN MAKIYA, AN IRAQI EXILE living in America, came pseudony- mously to the notice of the American reading public with a powerful indictment of Saddam Hussein's regime in Republic of Fear. He is also the author of the award-winning Cruelty and Silence. In The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem, he has turned his attention to the time when the prophet Mohammed appeared and Islam conquered Christian-held Jerusalem. Makiya has not turned antiquarian. Though not exactly allegorical in its intentions, The Rock invites reflection on the circumstances of religious conflict in our own time. In the seventh century religious identities were relatively fluid. Since Mohammed was a prophet in the tradition of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, a Jew could follow Mohammed without abandoning his Jewish identity. The main character in Makiya's narrative, Ka'b, a historical personage, was one such follower. The narrator Ishaq (his son) becomes in the course of the tale the architect of the Dome of the Rock. Perhaps the most controversial rock in human history, it is the putative place where Adam landed in his fall from Paradise, where Abraham intended to sacrifice Isaac, where Jesus preached, and where Mohammed was supposed to have ascended to heaven. Small wonder then that the great religions have contended for the possession of it. The Rock is not easily classified. It does not present itself as a novel, though the blurb speaks of it as "a narrative of novelistic depth." In a historical note at the end of the narrative, Makiya says that he has "not allowed [himself] the liberty of changing the original sources from Editor's Note: This review is a version of a presentation at Brandeis University. === Page 147 === BOOKS 147 which the pieces were taken" except for "changes in language, continu- ity and the modification of detail." He has remained faithful to his sources, which are meticulously provided for every chapter at the end of the book-too faithful, I would say, for it to be called a historical novel, in which the novelist usually makes liberties not allowed the historian. The reader may wonder (as I did for a while) why Makiya didn't sim- ply present his narrative as history. Well, he tells us, no amount of schol- arship will be able to do justice to the fraught history of the emergence of Islam, its conquest of Christian Jerusalem, and the complex relations among Judaism, Islam, and Christianity in the seventh century. He is faithful to his sources, but "the outcome is unmistakably fiction, mim- icking the assembly of a building to a new plan, using the detritus of greatly esteemed predecessors as its raw material-predecessors that were designed to celebrate the much revered site." The metaphor of the building is what one might expect from Makiya, a trained architect, who has an architectonic sense of the composition of the book. It also reminds us of the splendid passages which describe the architecture of Jerusalem and in particular the Dome of the Rock. But I don't see how assembling a building to a new plan distinguishes the making of fiction from the making of history. Historians also assemble their sources to plans that differ from the plans of other historians. What makes the difference is Makiya's choice of a character to nar- rate the story. Unlike the historian, who aims for an objective narration of events (whether he can achieve it is another matter), Makiya entrusts his story to a participant in the events who, by virtue of his participa- tion, cannot claim objectivity. In the historical note at the end of the narrative, Makiya focuses on Ka'b, a convert to Islam and the source of the stories his son recounts. What Makiya has to say about Ka'b is very much in the spirit of fiction. Ka'b does not have a reputation as a reli- able truth-teller. Makiya is attracted to his modus operandi, his imagi- native relationship to the truth. Makiya writes: "I think of the historical Ka'b as an entertaining rogue, a man with an agenda but also who liked playing to the gallery." He adds: "The most delightful thing about Ka'b from my point of view is that in telling stories about the summit of Mount Moriah he did not favor one source or religious tradition over another. Like Ka'b, I ardently hope my readers have a difficult time dis- cerning whether a given tale in this book . . . is Jewish, Muslim, or Christian in origin." No character, Christian, Jew, or Muslim, not even the narrator, the son of a Jewish convert to Islam, can be said to possess the Truth. The quarrels that arise between Christian and Muslim, Mus- lim and Jew, Christian and Jew are never resolved as they would be by === Page 148 === 148 PARTISAN REVIEW the particular interpretation that the historian provides. Fiction is the medium that allows for a multiplicity of perspectives, a contestation of views, a freedom for characters to speak their minds and act out their convictions without the intrusion of an objective narrator who pre- sumes to tell us where the truth lies. Fiction is antithetical to dogma. This opposition plays itself out indi- rectly in one of the major themes of the book: naming. Early in The Rock, Ishaq and his father engage in a dialogue about the relationship between a name and the thing it names. Ka'b insists that the name is the thing it names, its very essence. So he refuses to call the Rock by any- thing other than its oldest name, the Rock of Foundation. Ishaq, still a child and a student, notes that the Rock has been given other names: Precious Stone, Rock of Atonement, Adam's Sepulchre, Navel of the Universe, Stone of Stumbling, Rock of Fear and Trembling, and so on. When Ka'b asks his son to say whether he believes that the Rock is one thing or many things at once, Ishaq says he is uncertain. He may be uncertain because he is too young to know or perhaps too wise to be dogmatic in his answer. Ka'b dogmatically conflates name and thing. Elsewhere, however, Ka'b takes the opposite line when he resists the idea that God can be reduced to his aspects and attributes; he cannot be reduced to his ninety-nine names. The view that all names are provi- sional or partial (reflecting perhaps aspects of things and not their total- ity) is the anti-dogmatic view. And the difference between the views is momentous. It can become the difference between tyranny and freedom, war and peace. In naming a thing (a rock, building, or piece of land), the Jew, Christian, or Muslim takes possession of it. If he believes that the name that he gives the land is final and irrevocable, it remains for- ever his. No change or accommodation or compromise is possible. On the other hand, if names are provisional so is possession. In the Middle Ages the doctrine that the name was the essence of a thing was called realism (a doctrine quite difference from modern realism), which in the religious sphere promotes dogmatism and in the political imperialism. There is a connection between naming and another theme in the book, idolatry. Idolatry has always been anathema to the monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Ka'b cautions his son against, excef- sive enthusiasm for the Temple. "Idolatry run amok," he calls it, though Ishaq remarks to the reader (not to him) that his father forgets his own idolatrous passion for the Rock. What is idolatry? The dictionary defines it as the worship of idols or images, the immoderate attachment to or veneration for any person or thing. An insufficient definition, for it doesn't say what makes for immoderation. Idolatry, from the point of === Page 149 === BOOKS 149 view of the great religions, diverts us from the true object of veneration, the invisible transcendent Deity. If we admire the lines of the Temple or the strength or power of the Rock or the beauty of the desert, our admi- ration must not be an end in itself; we must be led through the material object and beyond to a contemplation of the divine. To be arrested by the material is paganism. Idolatry may be self-worship when its object is what the idolater has created, for instance, a temple. Idolatry persists as a temptation because the human mind finds it difficult to attach itself to the transcendent and invisible. The objects and images of the natural and man-made world nourish our minds and spirits. What then is the connection between idolatry and naming? The real- ist who declares that the name is the essence of a thing is in a sense an idolater, for he has conferred upon a material object (a rock or a tem- ple, for example) an excessive significance of his own making. He has transformed a thing into a sign and reified it. Even the landscape is not allowed to have a life of its own-that is, independent of the human possession of it. Consider, for instance, this description of the desert in The Rock: Those who know what a great seducer the desert is understand how the faith of its sons gets tested daily simply by their being con- demned to live in it. Amid sands and dunes that shift and undulate like loose women, rocks stand out, omnipotent and steadfast, com- manders of presence, demarcators of boundaries, bearers of wit- ness-visible presences in place of invisible ones, the known in place of the unknown and the unknowable. And when such signs of God's work cannot be found because the terrain is too flat, too muddy, too monotonous and unrestant, they have to be made up. A building then takes the place of a mountain. The nominalist makes no such presumption. Unlike the realist, he allows the object to have an unmastered life of its own. There is a moment in the book when Sophronious, a Christian; Umar, a Muslim; and Ka'b, a Jew, albeit a convert to Islam, enter the ruins of the Old Temple, David's sanctuary. Makiya writes through his narrator: "[Ka'b] removed his sandals, a custom of both the followers of Mohammed and Moses, signifying that they make no claim to the hallowed ground upon which they were about to walk." This occurs at a moment when "by dint of sheer necessity . . . a bond was achieved between [sic] the three men inside the tunnel that held the forces of competition, prejudice, and hatred in abeyance for a while." === Page 150 === 150 PARTISAN REVIEW The Rock treats a period of intense religious conflict-in particular between an emergent Islam and a beleaguered Christianity. In reading a book about the seventh century that is at once history and fiction, the reader inevitably speculates about its contemporary relevance. It seems to me that the narrative tries to find within the turmoil of religious and national conflict moments when "the forces of competition, prejudice and hatred are in abeyance," when, that is, the sacred is conceived as a presence beyond the exclusive possession of any community or commu- nion. The competition of religions is all about rival claims to hallowed ground-the very act of naming and of signifying implies mastery and possession. Or the competition may be in rival claims about what con- stitutes hallowed ground. Ka'b's rock has to contend with the increasing passion of others for a different rock. (As it turns out, there is more than one rock, the one in Jerusalem and the other in Mecca. Where should the worshiper face? Can the rocks be reconciled?) Religion is at its best in its respect for the unknown, its resistance to the naming and the possession of it. Do I need to say more about The Rock's contemporary relevance to our time? And I have in mind not only events in the Middle East. Fiction has the virtue of not presuming to be the exclusive truth about the reality it depicts. It is a medium that allows various stories to be told about the same events, and as I have already remarked it encour- ages a diversity of points of view. It resists the temptation of idolatry. Writers of fiction in their use of symbolism and metaphor are nominal- ists, searchers after truth, yet provisional in their truth claims. The Rock nevertheless shares something of the idolater's passion for the Rock and the Temple. Without that passion fiction would be deprived of its beauty and conviction. Eugene Goodheart Pooh-Poohing the Postmodernists POSTMODERN POOH. By Frederick Crews. North Point Press. $22.00. IN WHAT WAS SURELY A HAPPY COINCIDENCE, Frederick Crews's delicious parody of freshman casebooks, The Pooh Perplex (1963), arrived during the same year I began my graduate studies in English at the University of Washington. I also served as a teaching assistant, which meant being entrusted with several sections of freshman composition. Casebooks-on === Page 151 === BOOKS 151 The Scarlet Letter or King Lear, Heart of Darkness or The Turn of the Screw-came with the territory, as did the dreary papers that brisk intro- ductions to “approaches” (Freudian symbol-hunting, myth criticism, source studies) tended to generate. The freshmen under our care soon learned that the most ingenious literary criticism could “take on” virtu- ally anything, including A. A. Milne’s bear of “Very Little Brain.” Crews collected the best and brightest critics of those halcyon days, gave them appropriately fictitious names, and sat back as they set about exposing Pooh’s hidden meanings. Given Crews’s sharp wit, it is hardly surprising that The Pooh Perplex became a bestseller, livening up the discussions wherever graduate students, and their professors, congregated. For better or worse, my undergraduate experience with literature was limited to close readings of the “canon,” although I cannot recall any of my professors using that word. I soon figured out that one of them was a die-hard Freudian, while another set his cap on Jungian archetypes, but most simply focused on the novels, stories, poems, and plays at hand without bothering to tell us that they were, in truth, latter-day New Critics. In such matters I was, thank goodness, an innocent-that is, until I enrolled in a graduate course in contemporary criticism and was exposed to the likes of William Empson, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, Northrop Frye, and a handful of others. As the late Irving Howe liked to point out, in those days there may have been a certain amount of mutual suspicion between the New York intellectuals and the Southern agrarians, but at least they conducted their quarrels in plain English. That is only one of the differences between the literary criticism Crews parodies in The Pooh Perplex and the theory-heavy jargon he scours in Postmodern Pooh. Another is the way that our contemporary fascination with “teaching the conflicts” has steadily replaced the teaching of individual works. As Crews points out, tongue firmly in his cheek, A Teaching-the-conflicts department says in effect to expectant nineteen-year-olds . . . : “Here is Husserlian phenomenology, here are the Jungian archetypes, here a Jakobsonian structuralist, here a Zurkian Lacanian-ism, here a counterhegemonic Post-Gramscian Marxism, and here is the Deleuzoguattarian Anti-Oedipus, now you decide which hermeneutic should prevail.” Thus a newly minted B.A. can step confidently into the greater world, not knowing Mil- ton and Gray, perhaps, but knowing exactly how he would want to account for the magic of their art, should the occasion ever arise. === Page 152 === 152 PARTISAN REVIEW Reading Crews's bitter but all-too-accurate words, one is reminded of the Israeli army recruit who was asked if he could swim. "No, sir," he replied, "but I know the theory of it." In much the same way, far too many undergraduates know the "theory" (or theories) of literature without the bother of reading primary works. Interestingly enough, the sad turn of events Crews clearly deplores was foreshadowed in The Pooh Perplex. There, each casebook essay was dutifully followed by outrageously inappropriate "Questions and Study Projects." The one following Benjamin Thumb's hyper-scholarly "The Style of Pooh: Sources, Analogues, and Influences" is an arrow pointing toward the heart of our current problems: 1. Professor Thumb makes allusion to the general critical agree- ment now happily prevailing on the subject of King Lear, a play by Shakespeare. Get your teacher to recommend two or three articles on Lear from one of the many Shakespeare casebooks; read the articles, and make a report to your class on the agreed-upon mean- ing of the play. If you find that you have some extra time, you might read King Lear itself. Talk about "disconnect"! What The Pooh Perplex makes clear is not only how absurd literary critics look when they try to pluck the heart out of Pooh's mystery but also how irrelevant these exercises in ingenu- ity are to undergraduate education. Still, the casebooks that were Crews's original models had the singular virtue of exposing students to the full, often annotated texts of serious literary work, and this is surely better than the current crop of composition anthologies devoted to mul- ticulturalism and identity politics. In Crews's sequel, the setting is a panel put together for an annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA), an event that has provided pundits with enough ammunition to write endless op-ed columns about the sorry state of literary study. Undergraduate students are no longer the focus; rather, the interest is squarely on careerism and who can grab the hottest new theoretical wire. Each of the panelists who holds forth about Pooh asks, in effect, the following question: "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, /Who's the most radical theorist of us all?" And, not surprisingly, each insists that it is moi. As Carla Gulag (nice name, that!) insists in a paper that begins with an in-your-face "Power to the people!" the only question about "conflict" that need be settled is who are the pretenders and who the Real Goods. This, to her mind, is a no-brainer: "while every school of criticism these days is concerned === Page 153 === BOOKS 153 to show how it stands to the left of all the others, we Marxists have the advantage of actually being, not just posing as, authentic radicals." But tell that to Das Nuffa Dat (another deliciously crafted name) who insists that Milne's colonial unconscious is racist to its teeth. Citing Edward Said, former president of the MLA, as an authority beyond challenge ("every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was . . . a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric"), Dat goes on to show how the accusations fit Milne to a "tea"-yet another word pre- sumably dripping with cultural imperialism, whether it appears in a novel by Jane Austen or in House at Pooh Corner. For critics who pride themselves above all else on the independence of their minds, the bows to theory mavens are everywhere to be seen, even if they are, in truth, so jargon-riddled as to be unintelligible. Here, for example, is a snippet from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak that, as Dat puts it, explains "what we're all here for": The rememoration of the "present" as space is the possibility of the utopian imperative of no-(particular) place, the metropolitan pro- ject that can supplement the post-colonial attempt at the impossi- ble cathexis of place-bound history as the lost time of the spectator. The result makes for mind-numbing language and lots of contentious- ness (post-structuralists beat up on structuralists, deconstructionists square off against radical feminists, Marxists, and post-colonialists- while a cyberpunk cultural studies person pooh-poohs on all of them), but none of the verbal fireworks tell us a whit about A. A. Milne, his age, or his work. Indeed, as the pun in Crews's title suggests, what we have here is so much "pooh," which is to say, so much shit. Crews had his work cut out for him when he set about writing paro- dies of cutting edge theory because it is difficult, if not downright impossible, to exaggerate what is already an exaggeration. That's why I found myself equally divided between laughter and tears as each mock- MLA paper droned on to its dreary, absolutely predictable conclusion. In my better moods, I try to convince myself that Postmodern Pooh marks the end of the arrant foolishness that has turned literary studies into a laughingstock; in my darker moments, however, I fear that there are other, even more outrageous would-be celebrities hoping to cash in on whatever post-postmodernism turns out to be. Sanford Pinsker === Page 154 === 154 PARTISAN REVIEW Corpse in the Kitchen, Poem in the Hole ESSAYS OF FOUR DECADES. By Allen Tate. Introduction by Louise Cowan. Intercollegiate Studies Institute Books. $29.95. THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER: ESSAYS ON THE POETRY OF ELEANOR ROSS TAY- LOR. Edited by Jean Valentine. Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press. $15.00. IT'S EASY TO SEE WHY NO ONE READS Allen Tate anymore. New Criti- cism is now supremely old hat, and his was the Jim Beam of new crit- ics. At every facet his outlook fails us: he is Classical-Christian (Virgilian-Dantescan), humanist, formalist, poet-critic of the center- back when we believed in such thing as a center. I think of the stone in Yeats's "Easter 1916" while reading him, set there to "trouble the liv- ing stream"; a more apt figure would be Old Rocky Face from the late poem "The Gyres": The gyres! the gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth; Things thought too long can be no longer thought, For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth, And ancient lineaments are blotted out. Irrational streams of blood are staining earth; Empedocles has thrown all things about; Hector is dead and there's a light in Troy; We that look on but laugh in tragic joy. "Things thought too long can be no longer thought. . ." Tate and his clan held intellectual sway for forty years, at least in the land of letters; these reprinted essays span those decades. In his company are such lumi- naries as John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and Randall Jarrell. Beginning with the journal The Fugitive and the manifesto-anthology I'll Take My Stand in 1930, these southern Fugi- tive-Agrarians, writes Louise Cowan in her insightful introduction, "went on individually to produce an impressive number of volumes in both poetry and criticism, dominated the literary journals and the most important English departments in the nation, generated hundreds of dis- ciples, taught thousands of students how to read poetry." They stressed the poem itself, not as a product of its time or culture. Theirs were the quaint notions that literature had value, was capable of being judged, that each good poem was (in Brooks's famous figure) a well wrought === Page 155 === BOOKS 155 urn, a specimen of fulfilled intent that could tell you all you wanted to know about it—or at least all ye need to know. Then came—what?— Woodstock? Derrida? The gyres! the gyres! May we alter Yeats and say that this is also true, “Things taught too long may be no longer taught”? My generation was brought up in Tate’s wake (Essays of Four Decades was first published the year that I was born; Tate died in 1979). Which means that, for me, Tate has been conspicuous largely as an absence, the corpse in the kitchen while postmodernity has wheeled away with champagne and cigars in the family room. It’s been quite a party. Empedocles and all. We’ve very nearly burned down the house. But did anybody notice, through it all, how strained, how superficial it has felt? Although the old family portraits had their faces turned to the walls—those grim-visaged countenances of yore—and could no longer spook us, still one couldn’t get over the sense that the parents were just around the corner in the car. That the soirée was on borrowed time. That, like it not, there was a corpse in the kitchen. Ding-dong. Tending- time has come. “We lack a tradition of criticism,” Tate writes in 1928, at the age of twenty-nine. “There were no points of critical reference passed on to us from a proceeding generation.” How many grad students in how many English departments could say the like today? Looking back, one finds a gap of thirty years, a lacuna the dimensions of the book I am review- ing. Tate was about establishing such a tradition, a coherent, indige- nous, critical continuum in which he and we could locate ourselves—not a “method,” not “theory,” but something living, inte- grated, coming out of life itself: I am not upholding here the so-called dead hand of tradition, but rather a rational insight into the meaning of the present in terms of some imaginable past implicit in our own lives: we need a body of ideas that can bear upon the course of the spirit and yet remain coherent as a rational instrument. We ignore the present, which is momently translated into the past, and derive our standards from imaginative constructions of the future. The hard contingency of fact invariably breaks these standards down, leaving us the intel- lectual chaos which is the sore distress of American criticism. Marxian criticism has become the latest disguise of this heresy. Marxian criticism or, what he calls elsewhere, “the effluvia of France.” Both herald “the dark ages of our present enlightenment,” a symptom, for Tate, of his central theme, what he labels in his preface to Reason in Madness (1941) “the deep illness of the modern mind.” This mind he === Page 156 === 156 PARTISAN REVIEW identifies as “the dark center from which one may see coming the dark- ness gathering outside us,” a darkness resulting from the West’s retreat from its fundamental principles. Nor need those principles be merely religious, though for Tate they include religion—a society which has once been religious cannot, without risk of spiritual death, preceded by the usual agonies, secularize itself.” The supreme loss has been the breakdown and abandonment of cultural analogies, “the analogies in which man conceives his nature” and which matter far more than, say, political rhetoric or theoretical “discourse.” Away from intellectual abstraction, from a technocracy of infinitely generated means without ends, away from the modern malady which Tate calls “the angelic imag- ination” and which finds its exemplar in “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe”—away from these Tate points back to a mode of imagining which found its fruition in Dante and the medieval world of correspondences, pitting against Poe’s “nothingness” the “symbolic imagination,” a centripetal instance of unity on a variety of planes: To bring together various meanings at a single moment of action is to exercise what I shall speak of here as the symbolic imagination. ... The symbolic imagination conducts an action through anal- ogy, of the human to the divine, of the natural to the supernatural, of the low to the high, of time to eternity. ... Shall we call this the Poetic Way? It is at any rate the way of the poet, who has got to do his work with the body of this world, whatever that body may look like to him, in his time and place—the whirling atoms, the body of a beautiful woman, or a deformed body, or the body of Christ, or even the body of this death. If the poet is able to put into this mov- ing body, or to find in it, a coherent chain of analogies, he will inform an intuitive act with symbolism; his will be in one degree or another the symbolic imagination. In his apprehension of cultural loss, no less than in his application of a Dantescan paradigm, Tate resembles other poet-critics of the twentieth century such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Rangier than Eliot, better grounded than Pound, Tate nonetheless shares with them a deep nostal- gia and a corresponding grit, Odysseus adrift upon Yeats’s “filthy mod- ern tide.” Indeed, one senses in his essay on Yeats, the attitude and voice—the desideratum—of Tate himself: “He only wanted what all men want, a world larger than himself to live in; for the modern world as he saw it was, in human terms, too small for the human spirit.” It is obvious from the above that for Tate “literary criticism” involves the whole person, a whole culture, and not only that, whole worlds; he === Page 157 === BOOKS 157 is unabashedly metaphysical (another reason, one supposes, for his pre- sent neglect). Though he dismisses the possibility of unity in a collection of this sort ("I am on record as a casual essayist of whom little consis- tency can be expected"), the work does have a remarkable coherence and thrust. It embodies what for him, looking back, was "the gradual discovery of potentialities of the mind that must always have been there." Discoveries accumulate in time to make the man, to make the mind—its implicit "imaginable past"—explicit. These are essays in the root sense: endeavors, attempts, efforts at defining and maintaining a critical point of view on subjects as disparate as Dickinson and Poe (not wholly disparate, it turns out). Here are the classics, "Tension in Poetry," "The Point of Dying: Donne's 'Virtuous Men," "The Present Function of Criticism," "The Man of Letters in the Modern World"— all critical touchstones of the century—along with prefaces from each of his separate collections. "The perpetual task of criticism, every genera- tion or two," he writes, "is to understand again the poetry of the past." These essays are prospective in their retrospection; in their search for "the meaning of the present in terms of some imaginable past implicit in our own lives," they point towards a future where meaningful dis- course may yet be possible, discourse that is part of a continuum, imply- ing past and present (he would probably have said "communion"). No corpse, this collection presents us rather with a corpus, a life's work, like Yeats's, "hammered into unity." In more than this reprint, Allen Tate is our contemporary. In our present darkness, he is with us, Dante-Pilgrim; he is also the Virgilian guide, instructor. Old Rocky Face, look forth. We ignore him, even as some of us may read him, to our peril. In The Lighthouse Keeper, Jean Valentine has assembled an impres- sive array of writings in homage to North Carolinian poet Eleanor Ross Taylor; as in the above, here we have essays stretching back four decades. Born in 1920, Taylor was married to Peter Taylor, one of the South's most respected writers of fiction; both were members of Tate's loose circle of Fugitives. Randall Jarrell was probably responsible for getting Eleanor's first book published in 1960. That year he praised her poetry in a foreword to the work, included here, and went on to praise it after he'd been given the National Book Award, saying that he wished she'd won the prize, to gain a greater audience. If his estimation of her work is right—that she is "with Dickinson, Moore, and Bishop in our western sky"—it's high time she enjoyed a wider readership. This col- lection aims to make her better known. Taylor's poetry draws grand claims from its admirers, and that list is a distinguished one indeed: along with Jarrell's foreword to A Wilder- === Page 158 === 158 PARTISAN REVIEW ness of Ladies, we have Richard Howard's to her second book of poems, Welcome, Eumenides (1972), in which he pronounces Taylor the "reconciliation" in American poetry between Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Adrienne Rich's 1972 review of that volume (later col- lected in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence) is included here; she, too, com- pares Taylor to Dickinson, calling her first book "underground," "fierce," "difficult," and saying she carried two of its poems with her for a decade, "as a kind of secret knowledge and reinforcement." (Inci- dentally, it is Rich's phrase that gives this collection its title-that, poet- ically speaking, with feminist implications, Taylor is "one of the 'lighthouse keepers' of the century.") And the list goes on, many essays freshly penned, mostly by contemporary American poets: Betty Adcock, Fred Chappell, Lorrie Goldensohn, Eric Gudas, James Harms, Heather Ross Miller (the poet's niece), Gregory Orr, Deborah Tall, Henry Tay- lor, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Rosanna Warren, and Alan Williamson. The pieces are uneven in merit and scope; one expects this perhaps in any festschrift, but particularly in one made up primarily of poets opining on poetry. They range from impressionistic folderol, to autobiographical testaments of influence, to mature and just appraisals of Taylor's work. There are patchwork effusions of desultory brilliance (Jarrell's foreword) and compelling close readings of individual poems. Rosanna Warren and Fred Chappell take this reviewer's prize for their penetrating essays on the distinguishing features of Taylor's verse. Warren is vivid, full of the verve she notes in Taylor's poems-their "characteristic zing and archness" ("For all their shapeliness, Taylor's poems twist the language hard, until it lets loose the yelp of the true"). Chappell is sober, probing. Is it coinci- dence that both writers draw metaphors from electricity in describing Taylor's work? The poems for Warren "hum, sizzle, jolt, slide"; for Chap- pell (who titles his essay "The 'Voltaged' Language of Eleanor Ross Tay- lor") particular phrases "are rather like transducers that convert one sort of energy to another"; "the "electrothought"-inchoate, unspoken-is converted into language "somewhat in the way that a microphone con- verts sound into electrical impulse." Gregory Orr offers a prose poem, "Reading the Poetry of Eleanor Ross Taylor," in which the reader/ walker-through-woods comes on a frozen pond, sees "Not far from the shore, an irregular shape made where someone or something fell through." Taylor's poetry, in the landscape of analogy, is in that zigzaggaged trace surrounding "some significant truth" that slipped through the sur- face and "moved on after a shattering experience." === Page 159 === BOOKS 159 When these writers want to describe Taylor's work, they fall back upon such images. Not only is it the hole in ice through which a body has fallen; it is the body of water itself. Writes Richard Howard: In Castalia, not far from where I was raised in northeast Ohio, there is a place called The Blue Hole, which I used to be taken to see as a child: it is a small pond, apparently without source or out- let, blue indeed and said to be bottomless—there is the inevitable story of the team of horses accidentally driven into it one winter night a century ago and never found, though grappled for at unimaginable depths. [Had its surface also frozen? Howard does- n't say.] The Blue Hole is a mysterious site, nor can its mystery be vulgarized, even in northeast Ohio. . . for there is a silence about this body of water . . . an unexpected presence from below that keeps the gum-wrappers from polluting such fountains with which poetry has always been associated. "Of course," Howard reasons, "The Blue Hole is not really bottomless, merely the sudden surfacing, among trivial meditations, of an under- ground river which then vanishes once more." But bottomless or not, "[t]he natural miracle is before us—it has occurred in the work of Eleanor Ross Taylor." (Taylor's work is here variously compared to an anomalous, rundown piano in the kitchen, a vase of captured light, and an electromagnetic field.) "The ladder of analogy," Tate writes in his essay on Dante, determines "the reach of our imaginative enlargement." One hopes that for Taylor, through the analogies these contributors have provided (among other means), she will gain the enlarged readership she deserves. One hopes the same for Tate. I can't help applying Richard Howard's phrase, "the sud- den surfacing, among trivial meditations," to the "resurfacing" of his essays after all these years. In the words of Pound's elegy for Eliot, but in the context of American letters, "His was the true Dantescan voice. . . I can only repeat, but with the urgency of 50 years ago: READ HIM." Todd Hearon === Page 160 === Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation 1. Publication Title: Parti- san Review. 2. Date of filing: October 2, 2002. 3. Frequency of issue: Quarterly. 4. Location of known offices of publication: 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215, and One Lincoln Plaza, New York, NY 10023. 5. 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Total Percent paid and/or requested circulation 7,500 2,000 3,240 480 5,720 420 120 540 6,260 1,240 0 7,500 91% 7,500 2,000 3,264 496 5,760 452 125 577 6,337 1,163 0 7,500 91% I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete. Edith Kurzweil, Editor === Page 161 === A Special Offer from Partisan Review Subscribe to three years of Partisan Review and get Sixty Years of Great Fiction FREE! An anthology of fiction from past issues of Partisan Review. Includes works by: James Baldwin Samuel Beckett Saul Bellow Albert Camus Franz Kafka Doris Lessing Gertrude Stein and many others. 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"Excellent....No one understands the history of evangelicalism better than D. G. Hart."-LEO P. RIbirthO. ROGER KIMBALL Lives of the Mind The use and abuse of intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse-what happens when intellect trumps common sense. "His intellectual rigor is refreshing."-New York Times Book Review. ADAM KIRSCH The Thousand Wells Winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize, here is a remarkable debut by the young poet-critic whom James Wood calls "the most exciting, the most serious, and the most courageous in America." "Mr. Kirsch has already written poems that will endure." -DANIEL MARK EPSTEIN. ALDOUS HUXLEY Complete Essays Volume 6, 1956-1963 The sixth and concluding volume in a "remarkable publishing event...beautifully produced and authoritatively edited."-JEFFREY HART. Edited with commentary by Robert S. Baker and James Sexton. PENELOPE HUGHES-HALLETT The Immortal Dinner A fascinating recounting of the famous evening of genius and laughter in literary London, 1817, when Keats, Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb dined together and indulged in displays of brilliance and wit. "Fascinating...terrifically rich." -New York Times Book Review. Ivan R. Dee, Publisher www.ivanrdee.com Chicago A Member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group At your bookseller, or order toll-free 1-800-462-6420 with a major credit card. Partisan Review Published at Boston University Printed in the U.S.A.