To the Reader: The New York Review of Books presents reviews of some of the more interesting and important books published this winter. It does not, however, seek merely to fill the gap created by the printers’ strike in New York City but to take the opportunity which the strike has presented to publish the sort of literary journal which the editors and contributors feel is needed in America. This issue of The New York Review does not pretend to cover all the books of the season or even all the important ones. Neither time nor space, however, have been spent on books which are trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation or to call attention to a fraud. The contributors have supplied their reviews to this issue on short notice and without the expectation of payment: the editors have volunteered their time and, since the project was undertaken entirely without capital, the publishers, through the purchase of advertising, have made it possible to pay the printer. The hope of the editors is to suggest, however imperfectly, some of the qualities which a responsible literary journal should have and to discover whether there is, in America, not only the need for such a review but the demand for one. Readers are invited to submit their comments to The New York Review of Books, 33 West 67th Street, New York City.

—The Editors

15 West 67th Street
New York, NY
January 23, [1963]

Dearest Elizabeth:

We’ve been in a great flurry lately. Lizzie [his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick] is on the board of a new book review about to be set floating during the lull of the newspaper strike here that has temporarily put the New York Times book section out of existence. Meetings, arguments, telephone calls, and now at the end of two weeks, a fairly dazzling first number has been promised and will come out in the middle of February. One of my side-line duties was to phone Randall [Jarrell], who said he promised himself never again to write anything he could use in a book of essays. There was nothing he wanted to review. Then he paused and said there was one book, yours. He has been following all your new poems in the New Yorker, and is choosing a good many for a new anthology.

I pass this on to cheer you and perhaps prod you. The wolf with its head on its paws lies looking at the desolate yellow wastes of our present civilization, ready when your book comes to howl its welcome. This makes a difference. I remember my second book seemed lost in the dust of carping and the mildest praise, when Randall wrote a long piece violently liking and disliking. In a preface to Emily Dickinson, John Brinnin asks if she isn’t the greatest woman poet, brushes away the past, and then says only Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop (of the English poets of this century) reach her level.

I don’t suppose you need praise, but I find there are sinking times when everything I do looks about like what dozens of others are doing, or worse. It’s pleasant to have an art that can never make money or much sensation; then in dry times it hardly seems to exist. You have more to offer, I think, than anyone writing poetry in English. On, Dear, with those painful, very large unfinished poems!

I am at the end of something. Up till now I’ve felt I was all blue spots and blotches inside, more than I could bear really, if I looked at myself, and of course I wanted to do nothing else. So day after day, I wrote, sometimes too absorbed to even stop for lunch and often sitting with my family in a stupor, mulling over a phrase or a set of lines for almost hours, hypnotized, under a spell, often a bad spell. Now out of this, I have seven poems and seven translations, just about a book when added to what I had before. Now I say to myself, “Out of jail!” I look back on the last months with disgust and gratitude[.] Disgust because they seem so monstrous, gratitude, because I have lived through the unintelligible, have written against collapse and come out more or less healed. Oh dear, have you ever felt like a man in an unreal book?

I begin my Harvard teaching next week, and have been boning up on the standard old Americans, Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant etc. They are much farther away than they were when I was in school and college. Then they were almost something one shouldn’t read much of lest they led astray. Now the times have brought them back maybe,—hardly imitated still, they are like our own kind of revolt and competence. The beats have blown away, the professionals have returned. Sometimes they flash—Emerson is a funny case of the poet who was all flash in theory and desire and even gifts, and somehow his equipment and instincts wouldn’t let him. Then a lovely moment would come.[…]

Love,
Cal

15 West 67th Street
New York, NY
March 10, 1963

Dearest Elizabeth:

I think of you daily and feel anxious lest we lose our old backward and forward flow that always seems to open me up and bring color and peace.

Things are gayer now, but we indeed live in the current. Each Monday I fly to Boston, each Wednesday or Thursday morning I fly back. This gives me two short weeks, each with its own air and pace, instead of my old all of one cloth New York weeks. The teaching is enjoyable, not too much work really, unlocking in a mild way, except that of course one sees too many people and talks too much about poetry to too many embryonic poets. Here we are in the hectic whirl of putting out the new book review. I’m very much a bystander and admirer. But Lizzie is furiously engaged and in a way making inspired use of her abilities—for God knows we need a review that at least believes in standards and can intuit excellence. The bad side is a rush around us of the excoriated and excoriating—nerves and people. We live in the fire and burnt-outness of some political or religious movement.

I want to send you a few books or two at least. Hannah [Arendt]’s book on revolutions is somewhat diffuse and theoretical but is full of things that give me pause and I think we would both feel. She approves of the American Revolution but finds it somehow somewhat abstract and inspired no serious thought after Jefferson and the founders. The French Revolution however which she thinks doomed to violence and tyranny began with pity for the miserable, set up standards of violence and unlimited desire and has inspired generations of thinkers. She is wonderful on how sentiments of compassion get changed into blood power-lust and dictatorship. This is a very garbled way of expressing her dense thought, but she brings home to me frighteningly how certain redcapped liberal feelings can go with a sinister acceptance of the terrible.

The other book is quite different, a magical little essay on Herbert by Eliot.[…]

We are terribly interested in having you write a Brazilian letter for the Book Review—in your wonderful letter style and about anything that you want.

Love to you and Lota,
Cal

The post Founding the New York Review: Two Letters from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

“Dear Mary, with her usual motherly
solicitude for the lost overdog….”
You’ve always wished to stand by a white horse,
a Jeanne d’Arc by Albrecht Dürer, armed and lettered
in the tougher university of the world….
Since your travels, the horse is firmly there;
you stare off airily into the mundane gossip,
our still more mundane ethics, listen puzzled,
take note; once or twice, blurt your ice-clear sentence—
one hand, for solace, braided in the horse’s mane….
The immortals are all about us and below us;
for us immortal means another book;
there are too many…with us, the music stops;
the first violin stops to wipe the sweat from his bow.

From Notebook, 1967–1968 by Robert Lowell

The post Mary Mc Carthy (1912–1989) appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The hospital was a blending of the latest and laciest Gothic-and-skyscraper styles of the Twenties and Thirties—arch, groin, coign, and stainless steel. I thought for a moment of that island in the Seine, a little Manhattan with river water on both sides, the island of King Louis’s SainteChapelle, all heraldry and color and all innocent, built to house a thorn! Under its veneer of fragile white bricks, how merely geometrical this New York hospital was, how securely skeletonized with indestructible steel, how purely and puritanically confined to its office of cures. Counting the tiers of metal-framed windows, I myself was as if building this hospital like a child, brick by brick or block by block.

The mornings were long because, after breakfast and bed-making and informal lounging and television-news period, we were all expected to walk for some forty minutes in the courtyard. It was a formal, flowerless place covered with bright gray octagonal paving stones, like some unaccountably secluded and clean French place. Two by two, we walked round and round, and without any props or screens or diverting games, we tried to make conversation. It was thought uncooperative and morbid if we walked with another man. The women were terrible to me. Some were concave and depressed, some worried endlessly about their doctors’ feelings and remarks, some flattered, some flirted, some made fierce well-expressed sarcastic thrusts—they all talked. Distant, thorny, horny, absentminded, ineptly polite, vacantly rude, I walked with the ladies. They were hurt, and I was hurt. The men were almost as bad. I had my cronies, but I had soon exhausted their novelty, which mattered little to me. What hurt me was that in a matter of minutes I used up any strength I had to be new or fresh or even there.

Then there were the student nurses, crisp-fronted, pageboy bobbed, pale-blue-denim bloused, reading new Herald Tribunes and eyeing watchfully the strategic angles of the courtyard. They were ready to engage me gently and bring me back, if ever I dawdled into single file or sat down by myself on a bench. The unflowering shrubbery was healthily a full green, the leaves were all there, and in spite of the dusty dreariness of midsummer New York all about us, it all seemed cool, spontaneous, and adequate. That’s how all the other patients seemed. And a great iron gate, some twenty feet high, protected us from the city and living. The gate was just a little bit prettier and more ornate than use demanded. It was really locked, and a patient would have had to be an athlete or a thief to scale it. Beyond it we could see the blinding blue sparkle of the East River. Often, an orange tugboat was moored a few feet away from us. It had a swollen fleece-and-rawhide buffer on its prow. As if begging admission to our asylum, the boat kept moving with chafing sounds toward the concrete embankment.

My mind moved through the pictures of conscience and remained in its recollections, weightless, floating. On a sallow sheet of onionskin paper, whose semitransparency half revealed and half concealed the pink pads of my fingers, I tried to write some lines of verse:

In Boston the Hancock Life Insurance Building’s beacon flared
Foul weather, Father, as far as the Charlestown Naval Yard.
And almost warmed…

On the nights when Mother was dying all alone at that little private hospital in Rapallo, the needle of the Hancock Life Insurance Building was flashing storm warnings. As I took the taxi to the Boston airport, I watched the angry discouraging red lights go on and off. Far to my left, men were working with blow-torches on the blistered gray of old battleships scrapped at the Charlestown Naval Yard, Father’s old hunting ground. This was the last place he had found employment worthy of his optimistic esprit de corps and his solid grounding in higher mathematics. In New Hampshire, the White Mountains would have been freezing. And at our family cemetery in Dunbarton the black brook, the pruned fir trunks, the iron spear fence, and the memorial slates would have been turning blacker. The motto on Father’s family crest would still say Occasionem Cognosce, as he lay buried under his ostentatiously recent unacclimatized tombstone, the single Lowell among some twenty-five Starks and Winslows. And as the moonlight and the burning cold illuminated the carved names of Father’s in-laws, one might have thought they were protesting Father’s right to hold a single precious inch of the over-crowded soil, unless he produced a dead wife, a Winslow.

I arrived at Rapallo half an hour after Mother’s death.[^*] On the next morning, the hospital where she died was a firm and tropical scene from Cézanne: sunlight rustled through the watery plucked pines, and streaked the verticals of a Riviera villa above the Mare Ligure. Mother lay looking through the blacks and greens and tans and flashings from her window. Her face was too formed and fresh to seem asleep. There was a bruise the size of an earlobe over her right eye. The nurse who had tended Mother during her ten days’ dying stood at the bed’s head. She was a great gray woman and wore glasses whose diaphanous blue frames were held together by a hairpin. With a flourish, she had just pulled aside the sheet that covered Mother’s face, and now she looked daggers at the body as if death were some sulky animal or child who only needed to be frightened. We stood with tears running down our faces, and the nurse talked to me for an hour and a half in a patois that even Italians would have had difficulty in understanding. She was telling me everything she could remember about Mother.

For ten minutes she might just as well have been imitating water breaking on the beach, but Mother was alive in the Italian words. I heard how Mother thought she was still at her hotel and wanted to go walking, and said she was only suffering from a little indigestion, and wanted to open both French windows and thoroughly air her bedroom each morning while the bed was still unmade, and how she kept trying to heal the hemorrhage in her brain by calling for her twenty little jars and bottles with their pink plastic covers, and kept dabbing her temples with creams and washes, and felt guilty because she wasn’t allowed to take her quick cold bath in the morning and her hot aromatic bath before dinner. She kept asking about Bob and Bobby. “I have never been sick in my life. Nulla malettia mai! Nulla malettia mai!” And the nurse went out. “Qua insieme per sempre.” She closed the door, and left me in the room.

That afternoon I sat drinking a Cinzano with Mother’s doctor. He showed me a copy of Ezra Pound’s Jefferson and/or Mussolini, which the author had personally signed with an ideogram and the quotation “Non…como bruti.”

At the Italian funeral, I did everything that Father could have desired. I met the Rapallo English colony, Mother’s brief acquaintances. I made arrangements at the simple red-brick English chapel, and engaged a sober Church of England clergyman. Then I went to Genoa and bought Mother a black-and-gold baroque casket that would have been suitable for burying her hero Napoleon at Les Invalides. It wasn’t disrespect or even impatience that allowed me to permit the undertakers to take advantage of my faulty knowledge of Italian and Italian values and to overcharge me and to make an ugly and tasteless error. They misspelled Mother’s name on her coffin as Lovel. While alive, Mother had made a point of spelling out her name letter by letter for identification. I could almost hear her voice correcting the workmen: “I am Mrs. Robert Lowell of One Seventy Marlborough Street, Boston, L, O, W, E, double L.”

On the Sunday morning when we sailed, the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova was breaking into fiery flower. A crazy Piedmontese raced about us in a particolored sea sled, whose outboard motor was of course unmuffled. Our little liner was already doing twenty knots an hour, but the sea sled cut figure-eights across our bow. Mother, permanently sealed in her coffin, lay in the hold. She was solitary, just as formerly when she took her long walks by the Atlantic at Mattapoisett in September, “the best season of the year,” after the summer people had gone. She shone in her bridal tinfoil and hurried homeward with open arms to her husband lying under the White Mountains.

When Mother died, I began to feel tireless, madly sanguine, menaced, and menacing. I entered the Payne-Whitney Clinic for “all those afflicted in mind.” One night I sat in the mixed lounge, and enjoyed the new calm which I had been acquiring with much cunning during the few days since my entrance. I remember coining and pondering for several minutes such phrases as “the Art of Detachment,” “Off-handed Involvement,” and “Urbanity: Key to the Tactics of Self-Control.” But the old menacing hilarity was growing in me. I saw Anna and her nurse walk into our lounge. Anna, a patient from a floor for more extreme cases, was visiting our floor for the evening. I knew that the evening would soon be over, that the visitor would probably not return to us, and that I had but a short time to make my impression on her.

Anna towered over the piano, and pounded snatches of Mozart sonatas which she half remembered and murdered. Her figure, a Russian ballerina’s or Anna Karenina’s, was emphasized and illuminated, as it were, by an embroidered Middle European blouse that fitted her with the creaseless, burnished, curved tightness of a medieval breastplate. I throbbed to the music and the musician. I began to talk aimlessly and loudly to the room at large. I discussed the solution to a problem that had been bothering me about the unmanly smallness of the suits of armor that I had seen “tilting” at the Metropolitan Museum. “Don’t you see?” I said, and pointed to Anna. “The armor was made for Amazons!” But no one took up my lead. I began to extol my tone deafness; it was, I insisted, a providential flaw, an auditory fish weir that screened out irrelevant sonority. I made defiant adulatory remarks on Anna’s touch. Nobody paid any attention to me.

Roger, an Oberlin undergraduate and fellow patient, sat beside Anna on the piano bench. He was small. His dark hair matched his black-flannel Brooks Brothers suit; his blue-black eyes matched his blue-black necktie. He wore a light cashmere sweater that had been knitted for him by his mother, and his yellow woolen socks had been imported from the Shetlands. Roger talked to Anna with a persuasive shyness. Occasionally, he would stand up and play little beginner’s pieces for her. He explained that these pieces were taken from an exercise book composed by Béla Bartók in protest against the usual, unintelligibly tasteless examples used by teachers. Anna giggled with incredulous admiration as Roger insisted that the clinic’s music instructor could easily teach her to read more skillfully. Suddenly I felt compelled to make a derisive joke, and I announced cryptically and untruly that Rubinstein had declared the eye was the source of all evil for a virtuoso. “If the eye offends thee, pluck it out.”

No one understood my humor. I grew red and confused. The air in the room began to tighten around me. I felt as if I were squatting on the bottom of a huge laboratory bottle and trying to push out the black rubber stopper before I stifled. Roger sat like a rubber stopper in his black suit. Suddenly I felt I could clear the air by taking hold of Roger’s ankles and pulling him off his chair. By some crisscross of logic, I reasoned that my cruel boorishness would be an act of selfsacrifice. I would be bowing out of the picture, and throwing Roger into the arms of Anna. Without warning, but without lowering my eyes from Anna’s splendid breastplate blouse, I seized Roger’s yellow ankles and pulled. Roger sat on the floor with tears in his eyes. A sigh of surprised revulsion went round the room. I assumed a hurt, fatherly expression, but all at once I felt eased and sympathetic with everyone.

When the head nurse came gliding into the lounge, I pretended that I was a white-gloved policeman who was directing traffic. I held up my open hands and said, “No roughage, Madam; just innocent merriment!” Roger was getting to his feet; I made a stop signal in his direction. In a purring, pompous James Michael Curley voice, I said, “Later, he will thank me.” The head nurse, looking bored and tolerant, led me away to watch the Liberace program in the men’s television parlor. I was left unpunished. But next morning, while I was weighing in and “purifying” myself in the cold shower, I sang

Rex Tremendae majestatis
qui salvandos salvas gratis

at the top of my lungs and to a melody of my own devising. Like the catbird, who will sometimes “interrupt its sweetest song by a perfect imitation of some harsh cry such as that of the great crested flycatcher, the squawk of a hen, the cry of a lost chicken, or the spitting of a cat,” I blended the lonely tenor of some fourteenth-century Flemish monk to bars of “Yankee Doodle,” and the mmmmmm of the padlocked Papageno. I was then transferred to a new floor, where the patients were deprived of their belts, pajama cords, and shoestrings. We were not allowed to carry matches, and had to request the attendants to light our cigarettes. For holding up my trousers, I invented an inefficient, stringless method which I considered picturesque and called Malayan. Each morning before breakfast, I lay naked to the waist in my knotted Malayan pajamas and received the first of my round-the-clock injections of chloropromazene: left shoulder, right shoulder, right buttock, left buttock. My blood became like melted lead. I could hardly swallow my breakfast, because I so dreaded the weighted bending down that would be necessary for making my bed. And the rational exigencies of bedmaking were more upsetting than the physical. I wallowed through badminton doubles, as though I were a diver in the full billowings of his equipment on the bottom of the sea. I sat gaping through Scrabble games, unable to form the simplest word; I had to be prompted by a nurse, and even then couldn’t make any sense of the words the nurse had formed for me. I watched the Giants play the Brooklyn Dodgers on television.

Prince Scharnhorst, the only other patient watching the game, was a pundit and could have written an article for the encyclopedia on each batter’s technique and the type of pitching that had some chance of outwitting him. The Prince understood catcher Roy Campanella’s signals to the Dodger pitchers, and criticized Campanella’s strategy sympathetically but with the authority of an equal. My head ached and I couldn’t keep count of the balls and strikes for longer than a single flash on the screen. I went back to my bedroom and wound the window open to its maximum six inches. Below me, patients circled in twos over the paving stones of the courtyard. I let my glasses drop. How freely they glittered through the air for almost a minute! They shattered on the stones. Then everyone in the courtyard came crowding and thrusting their heads forward over my glasses, as though I had been scattering corn for pigeons. I felt my languor lift and then descend again.

I already seemed to weigh a thousand pounds because of my drug, and now I blundered about, nearly blind from myopia. But my nervous system vibrated joyfully when I felt the cool air brushing directly on my eyeballs. And I was reborn each time I saw my blurred, now unspectacled, now unprofessorial face in the mirror. Yet all this time I would catch myself asking whining questions. “Why don’t I die, die?” I quizzed my face of suicide in the mirror; but the body’s warm, unawed breath befogged the face with a dilatory inertia. I said, “My dreams at night are so intoxicating to me that I am willing to put on the nothingness of sleep. My dreams in the morning are so intoxicating to me that I am willing to go on living.” Even now I can sometimes hear those two sentences repeating themselves over and over and over. I say them with a chant-like yawn, and feel vague, shining, girlish, like Perdita, or one of the many willowy allegoric voices in Blake’s Prophetic Books.

“For my dreams, I will endure the day; I will suffer the refreshment of sleep.” In one’s teens these words, perhaps, would have sealed a Faustian compact. Waking, I suspected that my whole soul and its thousands of spiritual fibers, immaterial ganglia, apprehensive antennae, psychicradar, and so on, had been bruised by a rubber hose. In the presence of persons, I was ajar. But in my dreams I was like one of Michelangelo’s burly ideal statues that can be rolled downhill without injury.

Three days after Father’s death, the Beverly Farms house almost gave the impression of having once been lived in. Its rooms, open, eviscerated, empty, and intimate, were rooms restored to “period.” Perhaps this vacancy, this on-tiptoe air, came from my knowing that everything about me had waited three days for Father’s return to us from the undertaker. But it was obvious that my parents had lived at Beverly Farms less than eighteen months. Mother had bought the Beverly Farms house as a compensation for Father, whose ten years’ dream of moving from Boston to Puget Sound had been destroyed by a second heart attack. Fearfully, she had looked out of her windows at Beverly Farms, as though she were looking from the windows of a train that was drawing into one station beyond her destination. From the beginning, she had lived with an eye cocked toward Boston. She wanted to be in Boston, and dreaded Boston’s mockery of this new house, which was so transparently a sheepish toy house for Father.

The third day after Father’s death was an overcast day. His little ship’s-cabinsized bedroom, the blue bedroom, lay overlooking the sloping garden, the huge, smooth boulder, the gunmetal railroad tracks showing through scarlet sumac. Whitecaps on a patch of black Atlantic appeared through the lopped tops of garden trees, chalk writing on a blackboard. The blueness of the bedroom had been achieved by Mother through an accumulation of inconspicuous touches: blue lines on the top of the bedspread, blue fringe on the curtains, blue velvet straps on the Chinese sandals, a blue kimono. Blue symbolized baths twice a day, a platonic virility, the sea—Thalassa! But the bedroom was ninetynine one-hundredths white of course. Elbow grease, an explosive simplicity—the floor’s old broad softwood boards seemed sandblasted into cleanliness. On a white enamel bedside table, and beside a glass lamp with a lace lampshade, lay Volume I of Lafcadio Hearn’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. The cover, olive green ornamented with silver bamboo stalks in leaf, was as wrinkled and punished and discolored as an old schoolbook. On the flyleaf my Grandmother Lowell had written: “Rob, from Mother. September 1908.” The book had originally been given her by someone named Alice on January 23, 1908. This, too, was noted down. On another page, she had written: “This book had hard usage on the Yangtse River, China, when R.T.S.L. was on the gunboat Villalobos. It was left under an open porthole in a storm.” This inscription was unlike the ones written by Mother’s family the Winslows: it was correctly spelled, and made no attempt to amuse or improve.

Mother’s bedroom was a better place. It was four times as large as Father’s. Sensibly, world-acceptingly, it overlooked a driveway and faced away from the ocean. Here were objects which proclaimed admirable pleasures: an adjacent, pavilion-like bathroom, a window seat, a boudoir table, lending-library whodunits with plastic covers, an electric blanket; and, perhaps crowning all in its idyllic symbolism, a hot-water bottle, silver, engraved like an old-fashioned hip flask with a family crest and covered by a loosely woven pink woolen slip which Mother had knitted herself. Mother’s double bed, her tall bureau, her short bureau, her boudoir table bench, her telephone stand and stool, her rocker, her hearth broom, and her breakfast tray with folding legs all matched, were painted a mustard yellow ornamented with wheels and ripplings of green and gold. Alas, her innocent breakfasts in bed—ubi sunt!

On the third day, one room, as though it were a person, seemed to experience Father’s absence. This was the “den.” All its soft, easeful, chilly leather surfaces glistened and mourned: the brown oakand-iron escritoire brought back from Palermo by Grandfather Winslow; the brown rug, lampshades, and curtains; the brown wood of paper knife, chairs, and ship’s-clock base; the helmsman’s-wheel frame of the ship’s clock, a hollow brass rod that was a combination poker and bellows. His ivory slide rule protruded from a pigeonhole of the desk, where it rested in its leather case, as handy as some more warlike householder’s holstered revolver.

Also on the desk was a red-and-gold portfolio which held pitilessly complete and clear records of Father’s interests since 1945. Here was the twenty-page booklet of scaled diagrams executed in inks of five colors, a page to each room at Beverly Farms. The position and measurements of each sofa, bed, table, chair, etc., were given. Father had spent a cheerful month devising and correcting this booklet; it had proved a godsend to the movers. Here was a similar booklet filled with hypothetical alternative plans for a rearrangement of the Salem Museum’s display cases. These furniture-position booklets were derivative art; Father had learned how to make them from his cousin A. Lawrence Lowell. When Lawrence Lowell was elected president of Harvard in 1908, he packed up the furniture in his Marlborough Street house and moved to the Yard. He was a man who always landed on his feet, and who looked with modest foresight into the sands of time, and before moving he had accordingly drawn up a furniture-position plan of his old house. In 1936 he had returned to Marlborough Street—an ex-president, a widower, an octogenarian, and an automobilist who had just been deprived of his license for reckless driving. But not a piece of the old furniture had been lost; the position plans were consulted and each piece unalterably reoccupied its old position. Here finally were Father’s estimates and drawings for the installation of the new Sears, Roebuck furnace, which by its low fuel consumption was to pay for itself in ten years. Missing only were the innumerable graphs on which Father had plotted out catastrophic systems for his private investments in those years before the war when he had been an investment counsel and his own chief customer.

I was the only person Mother permitted to lift the lid of the casket. Father was there. He wore his best sport coat—pink, at ease, obedient! Not a twist or a grimace recalled those unprecedented last words spoken to Mother as he died: “I feel awful.” And it was right that he should have the slight overruddiness so characteristic of his last summer. He looked entirely alive, or as he used to say, W & H: Well and Happy. Impossible to believe that if I had pressed a hand to his brow to see if it were hectic, I would have touched the cold thing! There were flowers; not too many. To one side of the casket, someone had accidentally left Admiral K—’s framed photograph. In the Navy, officers are listed according to rank and age; Father and K—had once been the only officers in their class who were not outranked by younger men. And now in the photograph Admiral K—, who had risen from glory to glory, stood on his Mediterranean flagship holding his binoculars half-raised to his eyes, and seemed to squint through the sun’s dazzling, difficult glare into what were either folds of an awning or thirty uniforms on hangers. The picture was inscribed: “To my old friend, classmate + a shipmate ‘Bob’ Lowell.”

Occupational Therapy, or O.T., was held in a suite of rooms on the top floor. It was a sunny, improving world; and here, unable to “think” with my hands, I spent a daily hour of embarrassed anguish. Here for weeks I saw my abandoned pine-cone basket lying on the pile for waste materials. And as it sank under sawdust and shavings, it seemed to protest the pains Mr. Kemper, our instructor, had once taken to warp, to soak, to reweave, to rescue it. And there in an old cigar box I saw my materially expensive, massively hideous silver ring, which Mr. Kemper had mostly forged and then capped off with an intaglio of an Iroquois corn shock ripening under the arrowy rays of a crescent moon. And as I stood there, obsequious, scornful, fearful, and fierce, Mr. Kemper would come to me in his mild, beach-colored smock. He was a shy, precise man who, blushing as if at his own presumption, would tell gentle, instructive anecdotes so as to avoid crude, outright answers to my haphazard questions on techniques. He was used to the impatience of patients; but he seemed stunned when he discovered that my polite, hesitant, often erratically detailed questions seldom implied even an appearance of attending to his answers. I would interrupt in midsentence with new questions, or drive deafly, blindly, marringly into my work.

At Occupational Therapy there was the room of the loom and the room of the potter’s wheels. I spent several mornings in each, inquiring. But when the loom or the wheel was put in my hands, I excused myself by explaining Charles Collingwood’s theory that art could never be merely craft, “despite all the attacks made on inspiration by our friends the antiromantic critics.” I pretended that my doctor had given me permission to read Kim.

But in the end, of course, I gravitated to young Ms. Rodgers’s painting class, which was held in a long light room whose windows surveyed the East River and its shipping. For a few mornings, I asked questions about method, drew cones, and tried to memorize the complementary colors; then, wearying, I began to shout against representation, the laws of perspective, and the Hollywoodization of America. I declaimed paragraphs from a brochure of Cézanne written by Meyer Schapiro. I praised that “plodding dispositional ferocity” which had ruined Cézanne’s White Monk but later made possible the serene and triumphant Madame Cézanne Tête Bassé. Prince Scharnhorst was finishing a delicate and architecturally correct nocturne of the UN building. I enraged him by calling his picture an “impromptu Whistler,” and sneered pityingly at his “deployment of mass.” I began my lifesize copy of Madame Cézanne dans la Serre; obscenely tried to add the nude male bodies of Les Baigneurs as background, and then, prompted by Ms. Rodgers, consented to content myself with Les Grandes Baigneuses. Ms. Rodgers mixed my paints, measured my proportions, steered my brush.

Halfway through, I began to experiment with late Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock palate-knife techniques. My picture was finally almost a likeness, almost attractive, but in a moment of vandalistic Freiheit, I plastered a Dali mustache on Madame Cézanne and made my picture hideous. Then I discovered Paul Klee. Prince Scharnhorst had meanwhile abandoned painting in disgust, and now sat putting the finishing touches on an exact replica of a new Swedish plywood sloop. I showed him a Klee reproduction, Die Hoehe—a girl with triangle body and pumpkin head on a tightrope over a pink and purplish glare. The Prince said this was work that would disgrace a child or a criminal psychopath, so I began a Klee. I used a formula that my Grandmother Winslow, Gaga, had taught me as a child. By making O’s of different sizes and adding rectangles and a few dots, I could draw a picture which began as a farmhouse, a yard, a path, and a pond; and then presto! a man’s face.

After six or seven weeks at the Payne-Whitney Clinic, my bluster and manic antics died away. Images of my spoiled childhood echoed inside me. I would lean with my chin in my hand, and count the rustling poplars, so many leagues below me, which lined the hospital driveway and led out to the avenues of Manhattan, to life. “Rock” was my name for Grandfather Winslow’s country place at Rock, Massachusetts. An avenue of poplars led from the stable to the pine grove. The leaves on these trees were always crisp, brilliant, dusty, athirst. “But I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to go to Rock!” That’s how I would stop conversation when my father and mother talked about trips to Paris, Puget ‘Sound, Mattapoisett, anywhere. The letter paper at Rock bore the name “Chardesa,” taken from the names of my grandfather’s three children—Charlotte, Devereux, and Sarah.

On an August afternoon in 1922, I sat squatting on the screened porch. The porch was ranch-style. Like everything Grandfather built, it was a well of comfort. Comfortable, yes; but stern, disproportioned, overbearing. The maids, Sadie and Nellie, came in bearing frosted pitchers of iced tea, made with lemons, oranges, mint. Or it was a pitcher of shandygaff, which Grandfather made by blending yeasty, wheezing, exploding homemade beer with homemade rootbeer. Chardesa had been our family property and hobby for fifteen years. No one, except a silly gun-shy setter, had ever died there. I sat on the tiles, all of three and a half. My new formal gray shorts had been worn for all of three minutes. Obsequious little drops of water pin-pricked my face reflected in the basin. I felt like a stuffed toucan with a bibulous, multicolored beak. Up in the air, on the glass porch, my Great-aunt Sarah played the overture to The Flying Dutchman. She thundered on the keyboard of her dummy piano, a little soundless box bought to spare the nerves of her sister-in-law, my Grandmother Winslow, who despaired of all music except the pastoral symphony from Handel’s Messiah. But once in a vexed mood, my grandmother had said, “I don’t see why Sally must thump all day on that thing she can’t hear.” Great-aunt Sarah lifted a hand dramatically to the mute keys of the dummy piano. “Barbarism lies behind me,” she declaimed grandly. “Mannerism is ahead.” It was teatime in New England.

I scratched destructively at the blue anchors on my sailor blouse, which was like a balloon jib. What in the world could I be in want of? Nothing, except perhaps a wishes-are-white-horses horse; or a fluff of west wind to ruffle the waters, to stretch my canvas sail, to carry me kiting over the seven chimneys of Chardesa, the white farmhouse, and on over the bunched steel-blue barrels of the shotguns fortifying my Uncle Devereux’s duck blind, and on over the three ample, unislanded miles of Assawamsett, the great lake. I was going far, farther than was useful.

I had always loved my Uncle Devereux’s hunting cabin at Chardesa on the island between the lakes Pochsha and Assawamsett. And now I entered. Uncle Devereux had already shut up shop for the winter almost. He was heaving a huge Stillson wrench to fasten down the bars on the last window blind. I cowered in a corner behind a pyramid of Friends Baked Beans cans. Sunlight from the open doorway struck the loud period posters nailed everywhere on the cabin’s raw, splintery wood. On the boards I saw Mr. Punch, watermelon-bellied in crimson Harvard hockey tights, tippling a bottle of Mr. Pimm’s stirrup cup; the remnants of a British battalion formed in hollow square on the terrible veldt, and dying to a man before the enfilading fire of the cowardly, nigger-hating unseen Boer; flocks of prewar opera stars with their goose necks, their beauty spots, their hair like rooster tails, and their glorious signatures; and finally, the patron of all good girls, Entente Cordiale himself, the porcine, proper, majestic Edward VII, who raised a model of a city, gai Paree above Big Ben. “What an eye for the girls,” someone had scribbled tentatively in pencil.

I wasn’t a child at all. Unseen and all-seeing, I was Agrippina at the palace of Nero. I would beg my Uncle Devereux to read me more stories about that Emperor, who built a death barge for his mother, one that collapsed like a bombarded duck blind! And now I sat in my sailor blouse, as clean as Bayard, our carriage horse. And Uncle Devereux stood behind me. His face was putty. His blue coat and white-flannel trousers grew straighter and straighter, as though he were in a clothes press. His trousers were like solid cream from the top of the bottle. His coat was like a blue jay’s tail feather. His face was animated, hieratic. His glasses were like Harold Lloyd’s glasses. He was dying of the incurable Hodgkin’s disease.

One morning toward the end of my stay at the hospital, I told my psychiatrist about an experience I had during the war, when I was serving a five months’ sentence in jail as a conscientious objector. I belonged to a gang that walked outside the prison gates each morning and worked on building a barn. The work was mild: the workers were slow and absentminded. There were long pauses, and we would sit around barrels filled with burning coke and roast wheat seeds. All the prisoners were sentenced for a cause, all liked nothing better than talking the world to rights.

Among the many eccentrics, one group took the prize. They were Negroes who called themselves Israelites. Their ritual compelled them to shave their heads let their beards grow. But the prison regulations forced them to shave their beards. So, with unnaturally smooth and shining faces and naked heads wrapped in Turkish towels, they shivered around the coke barrels, and talked wisdom and non-sense. Their non-sense was that they were the chosen people. They had found a text in the Bible which said, “But I am black though my brother is white.” This convinced them that the people of the Old Testament were Negroes. The Israelites believed that modern Jews were impostors. Their wisdom was a deep ancestral knowledge of herbs and nature. They were always curing themselves with queer herbal remedies that they gathered from the fields.

Once, as we sat by the coke, the most venerable and mild of the Israelites stretched out his hand. Below him lay the town of Danbury, which consisted of what might be called filling-station architecture; the country was the fine, small rolling land of Connecticut. One expected to see the flash of a deer’s white scut as it jumped a boulder wall by a patch of melted snow. My friend stretched out his arm, and said, “Only man is miserable.” I told my doctor that this summed up my morals and my aesthetics.

I am writing my autobiography literally to “pass the time.” I almost doubt if the time would pass at all otherwise. However, I also hope the result will supply me with swaddling clothes, with a sort of immense bandage of grace and ambergris for my hurt nerves. Therefore, this book will stop with the summer of 1934. A few months after the end of this book, I found myself.

As I try to write my own autobiography, other autobiographies naturally come to mind. The last autobiography I looked into was a movie about a bullterrier from Brooklyn. The dog’s name was, I think, House on Fire. The district he came from was so tough that smoking had to be permitted in the last three pews at High Mass. House on Fire’s mother had been deserted by his father. House knows that his father is a great dog in the great world, either as a champion fighter or as a champion in exhibitions. House on Fire keeps saying with his Brooklyn accent, “I want to be a champ so that I can kill my father.” In the end, there is peace.

My own father was a gentle, faithful, and dim man. I don’t know why I was agin him. I hope there will be peace.

(1957)

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BELLOSQUARDO

Oh how faint the twilight hubbub rising from
that stretch of landscape arching towards the hills—
the even trees along its sandbanks glow
for a moment, and talk together tritely;
how clearly this life finds a channel there
in a fine front of columns flanked by willows,
the wolf’s great leaps through the gardens past the fountains
spouting so high the basins spill—this life
for everyone no longer possessed with our breath—
and how the sapphire last light is born again
for men who live down here; it is too sad
such peace can only enlighten us by glints,
as everything falls back with a rare flash
on steaming sidestreets, crossed by chimneys, shouts
from terraced gardens, shakings of the heart,
the long, high laughter of people on the roofs,
too sharply traced against the skyline, caught
between the wings and tail, massed branchings, cloud-
ends, passing, luminous, into the sky
before desire can stumble on the words.

FLUX

The children with their little bows
terrify the wrens into holes.
Sloth grazes the lazy, thin blue
sky-painted trickle of the stream—
rest from the stars for the barely
living walkers on the white roads.
Tall steeples of poplars tremble
and overtop the hardened hill
surveyed by a statue, Summer—
stonings have made her negro-nosed,
and on her there grows a redness
of creeper, a humming of drones.
The wounded goddess does not look,
and everything is bending to
follow the fleet of paper boats
descending slowly down the trough.
An arrow glistens in the air,
fixes in a stake, and quivers.
Life’s this squandering of banal
occurrence; vain, rather than cruel.
They come back, if a season’s gone,
a minute, these tribes of children
with bow or sling, and find the dead
features unaltered, even if
the fruit they grasped no longer hangs
dead on the young bough. The children
come back again…like this. One day,
the circle that controls our life
will return with the past for us,
distant, fragmented and vivid,
thrown up on an unmoving screen
by an unrevealed projector.
And still the hazy, pale blue vault
vacantly bridges the teeming
watercourse. Only the statue
knows what plunging, lost, entangled
things die in the burning ivy.
All is arched for the great descent:
the channel surges on wildly,
its mirrors crinkle; small schooners
are speeded, caught and wrecked in the
eddies of soap-foamed waste. Goodbye—
stones whistle through the thinning branch,
and gasping luck makes off again,
an hour slips, its faces dissolve…
life is cruel, rather than vain.

BOATS ON THE MARNE

Joy of the bobber heading for the drift
drawn by the small, white arch-stones of the bridge,
the full moon drained of color by the sun—
the boats are nimble on the Marne, retarded
by autumn and the city’s sluggish drone;
and if you touch the meadows with your oar,
the butterfly catcher will reach you with his net;
each ivied swelling and espaliered wall,
a wash of red, retells the dragon’s blood.

It’s easy to hear their voices on the river,
bursts from the banks, the twilight of canoes
and couples gliding under breezy manes
of chestnut trees, but who can hear the filing-in
of seasons, each measured out its brandy for
the vast, untrampled dawn? Where’s the great wait?
How measure their invading emptiness?

This is the dream: a huge and endless day
returns to pour its glare, almost unmoving,
below the bridges, then, at every turn,
man and his good works struggle to the surface,
and float, and vague tomorrow veils its horror…
But the dream was more than this, and its reflection,
still fleeing on the water, swims below
some swinging nest, unreachable, pure air
and silence; and high above the gathered cry
of noonday hangs another morning, morning
over evening and evening over morning—
and the great turmoil is a great rest.
Here then?
Here the enduring color is a mouse
dancing among the rushes, or the starling,
a dash of poisonous metal, sinking in
the smoke-mist of the bank.
“Another day,”
we’ll say. Or what will you say? Ask this day
where it will carry us, this mouth, this river,
writhing into a single gush?
It’s night:
we can go lower, explore the depths, and rest,
until the rising constellations burn.

The post Three Poems by Eugenio Montale appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

—Frank Bidart

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” Auden said; but the great epics, like our own classics, must mean something, not by didactic pedagogy, propaganda, or edification—but by their action, a murky metaphysical historic significance, a sober intuition into the character of a nation—profundities imagined, as if in a dream, by authors who knew what they had written. Even to the Philistine podestà, Dante was the soul of Italy.

Homer—hexameters must have slid from his tongue, as easily and artfully as Shakespeare’s last blank verse. He had no necessity or license to vary meter, and has less anxiety than even Walt Whitman for the triumphs of overcurious craft. This and narrative genius were his simplicities to celebrate the cycle of Greek radiance, barbarism, and doom with the terrible clairvoyance of a prophet.

The Iliad is the epic of Greece, written when Greece was still half-Asiatic, and tossing in the womb of her brilliance. Here, already foreshadowed, are deviously debating fractious Greek leaders, kings of petty city states; the bisexual warrior, heroic comradeship, the lonely man of Excellence, unreliable, indispensable, ostracized at the height of his fortune—here too the theme of Greek pathos, the young men carved on the stele for Marathon, the victory’s gloria mundi killed in full flower.

The Iliad, unlike other world-epics, is dialectical: thesis, antithesis—the synthesis is wearisome to work and transitory…fury then contrition—insensate rage of Achilles forced to relinquish his concubine, Briseis, to Agamemnon, then his recoiling on himself after the death of Patroclus to rejoin the Greek fighting—then his rabid butchery of the Trojans, then gently relenting to return Hector’s body to Priam, the helpless father…what no other Greek would dare to do. Achilles is the most mercurial and psychic mind in epic narrative—if mind may be defined as wavering, irresistible force, a great scythe of hubris, lethal to itself, enemies and the slaves—animator of the actual.

Alexander carried the Iliad with other Greek classics on his own Asian invasion, and mysteriously relived with greater intelligence, though a Macedonian alcoholic, the impulsive brutality and forgiveness of Achilles. General Fuller writes, “He was both mystical and practical…. It was in his outlook upon women—in nearly all ages considered the legitimate spoil of the soldier—that Alexander stood in a totally different moral world compared with the one inhabited by his contemporaries…. Yet, in spite of this extraordinary respect for womanhood, his highest moral virtue is to be discovered in one of the final remarks Arrian makes in The Anabasis[:] ‘But I do know that to Alexander alone of the kings of old did repentance for his faults come by reason of his noble nature.’ ” It’s the same Achilles, imitated by a long line of Plutarchan Greeks, from Themistocles and Socrates of Athens down to Philopemon of Megalopolis. What can Homer teach…the generosity in cruelty?

Milton’s run-on blank verse is very baroque, but strangely unlike other ornate verse, it is hard and idiomatic. I believe him when he boasts that with time, his numbers became easy and unpremeditated, an inspired, various instrument whenever his plot condescended to him.

“Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell.” Thus Blake, of course, in the most famous comment on Paradise Lost. Blake based a whole heretical theology on it, many revolutionary Songs of Experience…and much distrait sprawling. Blake was right. One can prove this by running through Paradise Lost, and marking the good lines or groups of lines. The only celestial angels are fallen.

I do not understand Milton’s intention. Who or what is Satan? He is not ultimate evil, though in Milton’s myth the origin of human ill. He lacks many of the common vices of tragedy: disloyalty to friends, cowardice, and stupidity. By title, the Father of Lies, he is not provably a liar. What he says to the rebel angels, Eve, and even Christ might well seem true to the sage and unorthodox Milton. He is no devil, but a cosmic rebellious Earl of Northumberland, Harry Hotspur, with an intelligence and iron restraint. He is almost early American, the cruel, unconquerable spirit of freedom.

He has great moments—rousing his followers prostrate in the infernal bog, his great oratory to them, the Cromwellian drill and parade of his defeated armies. One feels Milton knew more of military tactics than Shakespeare, whose battles are charade. This can’t be simply the limitations of Elizabethan stage. Yet Shakespeare understood most realistically the evil and pestilence of civil war. In Book Two’s great parliamentary speeches, the devils organize their words like old parliamentarians, less dishonest, and more concise. Satan defying the sun at the beginning of Book Four might be Milton addressing his blindness, his head only ringing now with ideal upheaval. Satan even animates Eve, though Adam has never been able to, nor she him. He brings out all the good in her, then her ruin. We can’t deprive Satan of his power to destroy—“…yet all his good proved ill in me…evil be thou my good.” In Paradise Regained, a diminished Satan, maybe himself in disguise, makes all the brilliant speeches. Christ is only a rocky, immobile Puritan break-water—the voice of denial? Which voice rings true? Are both schizoid anti-selves of one person?

Paradise Lost is alone among epics in being without human beings, except perhaps Eve and Adam. Satan is the engineer of ruin.

His troubled thoughts…stir
The Hell within him, for within him Hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step no more than from himself can fly.

After twenty centuries of Christianity, we see our ruin is irreparable. Satan cannot be discovered by faith or science. Could he have been plausible to Milton in the 1660s? Paradise Lost is of the world’s great poems; I do not see the author’s intention. Is Satan the hermetic God…Christus Liberator?

Dante was virtually a Ghibelline, a fanatical one. His Commedia is a Ghibelline epic. The Ghibellines looked for a German Emperor, their shadowy hope, who would unify, but not annex, Italy. They loathed popes as principals of disharmony and internecine murder. They had leanings toward heresy. They led lives, as did the Pope’s adherents, the Guelphs, that sinned in a hundred common ways: adultery, sodomy, murder, treason, intrigue. In the Commedia, they are tortured for these misdeeds—but who is ever hurt in a poem? Almost all Dante’s poetically inspired or humanly attractive characters are Ghibelline—if they are not, like Francesca and Ulysses, they seem the Ghibelline underground. There’s one arguable exception, Beatrice, but I will come to her in time. The great sinners are imagined with such sympathy that Erich Auerbach believed that they almost crack Dante’s theological system.

With saints, Dante is apathetic. They are written with a dry pen, and parsimonious vision. St. Francis, St. Dominic, St. Bonaventure, Cato, etc. seem almost like primitive lives of the saints read in the silence of a Trappist dinner. They are nature morte, and hardly nature, though girded in cunning coils of scholastic philosophy.

Dante’s unique genius as a writer of epic—I even include Melville’s prose—is that his chief characters are not heroically enlarged, but life-size. Masaccio, alone among the old Italian painters, had this wish for human proportion, lost by the grandeur and embellishment of his greater successors. It’s in Farinata’s “But who are your ancestors?” Or, holding himself upright in his fiery tomb “as if he held the Inferno in disdain.” Ugolino’s eating his own starving children, who willingly sacrifice themselves to save their father from starvation. Or Manfredi in the Purgatorio, a type of the liberator German Emperor and solider than Othello, “Biondo era e bello” etc., down to his burial, a lume spento, without the rites of the Church. He is the bastard son of Federico Secondo, the stupor mundi, and the greatest Ghibelline, who, though only listed in the Inferno among those damned for heresy, somehow overshadows the whole Commedia with a revered spirit; just as Pope Boniface VIII is its devil, though paradoxically consigned to Purgatory, not Hell. I am suggesting that the Commedia, like Paradise Lost, is in part hermetic, and means at times the opposite of what it asserts.

I find it hard to consider Dante as entirely orthodox. Much in his political preference and poetic training, in the dolce stil nuovo derived from the Provençals, points toward heresy. But Christian Faith is alive in him, not cold as in Milton. The Church gave his writing a dialectical confusion and intensity. Two forces, not one. His dogs of the Church, Hell’s torturers, are real dogs. The Commedia is not just a political epic, but also, perhaps with less ebullience, a religious epic. Pilgrim’s Progress. In Canto 100 of the Paradiso, by far Dante’s greatest purely sacred poem, dogma changes miraculously to mystical contemplation, the most magnificent in Christian literature.

Beatrice? Saving Grace? She was born in Provence, in the heretical Toulouse of the troubadours—the lady, not one’s wife, but the one the troubadour truly loves—chastely by necessity with Dante, but not always in the tradition. Where, where, in the whole Commedia, are Mrs. Dante and the Dante children? Dante’s meeting with Beatrice in the Purgatorio burns with a fiercer love than Francesca’s for Paolo. Without Beatrice, Dante’s Comedy wouldn’t exist, but as Pound said would be “a ladder leading to a balloon.”

Homer is blinding Greek sunlight; Vergil is dark, narrow, morbid, mysterious, and artistic. He fades in translation, unlike Homer who barely survives. By combining the plots of the Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil has seemed a plagiarist, attempting an epic as a task for rhetoric. He is as original as Milton. Dryden and the Restoration critics were wrong in thinking the Aeneid something like their regilding of Jacobean tragedy…giving alloy and polish to old gold.

One cannot doubt that Vergil sincerely and deeply admired the Emperor Augustus, not only for personal patronage, but for the peace he brought Italy after her ulcerous, unceasing civil wars, from Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, Marcus Antonius and Brutus, to Marcus Antonius and Octavian…to Augustus. Aeneas is a peace-bringer, a bringer of peace through carnage. I feel Vergil, like a more ambivalent and furtive Milton, was also on the devil’s side.

The Aeneid is the song of Rome’s annals in prophecy and hindsight. Aeneas, unlike Achilles and Odysseus, is darkened by destiny—his actions do not emanate in the present, or from impulsive passions. He exemplifies the grit, torture, and sacrifice that made Rome’s unification of the Mediterranean possible. One’s heart goes to the defeated. How could Vergil, an outlander, sympathize with Rome’s bloody, centralizing conquest of Italy? Why does he make us weep for the deaths of Camilla, Mezentius, and Turnus, outlanders like himself? It’s interesting how instinctively and without justifying himself, Vergil chose archaic heroes of his country from both Trojan and Italian.

Mezentius:

“nunc vivo neque adhuc homines lucemque relinquo.
sed linquam.”

Camilla:

“hactenus, Acca soror, potui; nunc volnus acerbum
conficit et tenebris nigrescunt omnia circum…”
vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras[^*]

Aeneas puzzles, a force more than a person—nothing here of Achilles’ dialectic, or the crafty, resourceful companionship of Odysseus. He lumbers through his irresistible march in the last books, less a living man than a Patroclus, hit on the head and stunned by Apollo—or Sintram, paranoid, brave, riding half-paralyzed by his costly armor through the bedeviled wood of Dürer. He thinks little, thinks up little, though subject to heartfelt depression. Whatever his author was, he is not an anima naturaliter Christiana.

Aeneas has a moment or two of imagination and clairvoyance—his hallucinated and almost surrealist narrative of the fall of Troy in Book Two—dust, smoke, butchery, deceit, terror, the annihilation of his home and city. Some authentic murmur in Aeneas’s voice makes us unwilling to believe this book was ghost-written by Vergil. With Dido too, he is alive. Dido is hell, Phèdre, Madame Bovary, talkative, repetitive—her few words symbolize thousands. Yet our love goes with her, her beauty, her bravery, her misfortune; and Aeneas, her deserter, seems no man. After her suicide, Aeneas must descend to the underworld, a Roman cemetery with shades like statues: the Illustrious, his dead comrades and unborn descendants. Dido alone is alive, when she turns her back and says nothing to Aeneas’s false, forced appeals.

Aeneas is sometimes swollen and Rubensesque, as if painted for the peaceful triumphs of Marie de’ Medici—I wish he were greater and had more charm. Yet Vergil, like Frankenstein, put a heart and mind, his own, into his Colossus, the triumphant Roman general, the soul of his great epic, if not of Rome. He bears all, he suffers all, a man of sorrows, if human…. He mislays his wife, while himself escaping the ruin of Troy. He ungrapples mighty Dido, though almost as unfitted for this struggle as Prufrock. Don’t doubt him; his soldiers move forward undeflected. They do not fight helter-skelter like Greeks, but rather as legionnaires drilled by Marius or Caesar to slaughter the barbarian. All Italy is turned on its head by Aeneas for him to marry Lavinia—she must have loved his victim, Turnus, whose plea for life is refused by Aeneas with stoical severity. Turnus’s last action is the final line of the Aeneid:

vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras.

Forever, indignation—too many beautiful things were crushed by the conquest. Too much attrition for the slavery to be immortal for the Romans hard as nails. Vergil may have understood his epic, its prophecy that the Empire of the Divine Augustus was inevitably eroding.

Unlike other epics, Moby-Dick, though an allegory, is also an exact whaling voyage. It is not hermetic; things are what they are, and do not opaquely suggest the opposite. The plot is as uncomplicated and straight as its harpoons. Ahab, of course, is other things than a veteran Nantucket whaling captain. In “the Guinea-coast slavery of his solitary command,” he suggests Melville’s copy-clerk, Bartleby, and Pierre crazed on his withdrawal to write…three cut off from society by the wreck of seclusion. Ahab’s perverted religious hunt to kill the White Whale is monomaniacal. He is apocalyptic, with a rage that drowns ship, shipmates, and himself. His destiny is analogous to heroes in Norse Saga, Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, and in real life, Adolf Hitler. “The first thing that but offers to jump from this boat, I stand in, that thing I harpoon.’ …all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to…how they still strove through the infinite blueness to seek the thing that might destroy them.” There’s no doubt of Ahab’s courage and ability—in action he is more subtly alert and correct than his subordinates.

Moby Dick, the Whale, is more ambiguous. Contradictory scholars label and symbolize him as both evil and its opposite, Nature. Let him be nature, a Leviathan with the dolphin’s uncanny psychic brain—superior, his enthusiasts would claim, to man whom he never fought, except to save his life. His evil is strength to kill the killer whalemen. Indestructible by Ahab, he is not immortal, and is often permanently wounded.

Moby-Dick, like most of our nineteenth-century masterpieces, was published still-born, and sold so little, it soon snuffed out Melville’s popular reputation. It’s our epic, a New England epic; unless we feel the enchanted discontinuity of Pound’s Cantos qualifies. Moby-Dick is also our one epic in prose. Are there epics in prose? I know one, Carlyle’s French Revolution, also stylized as poetic extravagance. The modern British historian, Taylor, wrote, “…more than five hundred errors, some of them by no means minor. But what does it matter? When you read Carlyle’s Revolution, you are there.” Epics as verifiable history have too many pitfalls, too many to tempt a rival.

Moby-Dick is fiction, not history—beside James or Dickens, how thin and few its characters, how heroic and barbarous its adventure. As a librettist once said to me, “Not the faintest whisper of a female voice.” Often magnificent rhythms and a larger vocabulary make it equal to the great metrical poems. Parts, of course, are not even prose, but collages of encyclopedic clippings on cetology. It is our best book. It tells us not to break our necks on a brick wall. Yet what sticks in mind is the Homeric prowess of the extinct whaleman, gone before his prey.

Melville had much experience, if sailing on whalers brings more than working like Hawthorne in a Customs House…as Melville himself did for the remainder of his life…twenty unfathomable years of marriage, parenthood, customs, whatever—then thinking of the oceans, and possibly allegorizing himself a little, Melville wrote his final and imperfect masterpiece, Billy Budd, the blond, innocent young seaman, hanged from the yardarm by naval law.

The post Epics appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

My executions begin at 10 P.M.
and end with dawn.

I sit under the royal oak
raising most, condemning few
with an inaudible whisper to my guard—
these six years, these sixteen years…
it doesn’t matter, the count was lost.

Besides the necessity to keep awake,
what is life without the relief of love?
Love to the mind is wind to the sea—
a saintly, two-tongued wife….
I too have loved—an incumbent husband
all wives can imagine dead.

These days when I give judgment,
I look spruce and unchanging,
I wear a fine suit of gold—
two slaves to fan me
and carry me in a huge armchair
shaking in their hands,
as I count the steps downward
from my throne: 25, 24, 23.

I escape…everything,
intermittently. I forget
my intolerable, metallic heat,
my distrusted gaiety the day
I decided to decline…and live.
I can point out myself, the culprit,
with my palsied, pedagogic scepter.

Night executions spare me
the agony of early rising.

The post Executions appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

“Hence, as Robert Lowell has asserted, Yeats couldn’t see anything” (NYR, May 26).

Why should one blind man say this about another? I suppose such a patronizing phrase might slip from one’s tongue in conversation or in an interview. However Denis Donoghue has a gift for isolating, slanting, and distorting when he paraphrases—often to make an unfair point, strangled in a web of qualification. In a short poem of mine called “Truth,” I have a half fictitious British poet, hostile to Yeats, say, “He had bad eyes, saw nothing.” Dare I say in this place that Yeats saw beyond the reviewer?

Robert Lowell

New York City

Denis Donoghue replies:

Mr. Lowell is intemperate. His courtesy, like his tongue, has slipped. The theme was not, of course, Yeats’s eyesight but his mind-sight; not a question of 20/20 eyesight, the nature of his retina, or the trouble he gave his oculist. I was talking about a certain tradition in Yeatsian criticism which ascribes to Yeats the habit of imagination which sees each object “only for the sake of what it answers to in him, not for what it is in itself.” I quote from Donald Davie’s Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor, the most explicit version of that tradition, lest it be thought that I am isolating, slanting, and distorting. As for Mr. Lowell’s part in this tradition, it would be tedious and exorbitant to track down the source of my evidence, whether it is in a poem, an essay, or one of those conversations or interviews in which Mr. Lowell’s tongue slipped. The question can be cleared up at once: if Mr. Lowell wished to dissociate himself from the notion of Yeats as an excessively symbolizing poet—and this is the gist of the tradition from Pound to Davie—I am surprised that he has not taken the present opportunity to do so.

The post Yeats’s Vision appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The last years we only met
when you were on the road,
and lit up for reading
your battering Dream—
audible, deaf…
in another world then as now.
I used to want to live
to avoid your elegy.
Yet really we had the same life,
the generic one
our generation offered
(Les Maudits—the compliment
each American generation
pays itself in passing);
first students, then with our own,
our galaxy of grands maîtres,
our Fifties’ fellowships
to Paris, Rome and Florence,
veterans of the Cold War not the War—
all the best of life…
then daydreaming to drink at six,
waiting for the iced fire,
even the feel of the frosted glass,
like waiting for a girl…
if you had waited.
We asked to be obsessed with writing,
and we were.
Do you wake dazed like me,
and find your lost glasses in a shoe?

Something so heavy lies on my heart—
there, still here, the good days
when we sat by a cold lake in Maine,
talking about the Winter’s Tale,
Leontes’ jealousy
in Shakespeare’s broken syntax.
You got there first.
Just the other day,
I discovered how we differ—humor…
even in this last Dream Song,
to mock your catlike flight
from home and classes—
to leap from the bridge.

Girls will not frighten the frost from the grave.

To my surprise, John,
I pray to not for you,
think of you not myself,
smile and fall asleep.

The post For John Berryman appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

I was overawed. Years earlier Randall Jarrell had written me in Holland that if I wanted to discover something big and new, I would read Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. Randall seldom praised in vain, but my Dutch intellectual friends, as usual embarrassingly more into whatever was being written in America, were ahead of me, and were discussing Origins with minds sharpened by the Dutch Resistance, a hatred of Germany, and a fluency with German philosophers. I felt landless and alone, and read Hannah as though I were going home, or reading Moby Dick, perhaps for the second time, no longer seeking adventure, but the voyage of wisdom, the tragedy of America.

Writing when Stalin was still enthroned and the shade of Hitler still unburied, Hannah believed with somber shrewdness, like Edmund Burke, that totalitarian power totally corrupts. Compared with Melville, however, she might seem an optimist about America. Origins, like many of her books, is apparently a defense of America, one that overstates and troubles us by assuming that we must be what we declared ourselves to be in our Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary beginnings. Her dream, it is both German and Jewish, now perhaps seems sadly beyond our chances and intentions. Yet the idea is still true, still taunting us to act. What is memorable, and almost uniquely rare and courageous in a thinker, is that Hannah’s theory is always applied to action, and often to immediate principles of state. Her imperatives for political freedom still enchant and reproach us, though America has obviously, in black moments one thinks almost totally, slipped from those jaunty years of Harry Truman and the old crusade for international democracy. We couldn’t know how fragile we were, or how much totalitarianism could ameliorate, bend, adulterate itself, and succeed.

Hannah’s high apartment house high on the lower Hudson always gave me a feeling of apprehension, the thrill, hesitation, and helplessness of entering a foreign country, a north German harbor, the tenements of Kafka. Its drabness and respectability that hid her true character also emphasized her unfashionable independence. On my first visit, I blundered about a vacant greenish immensity unable to find the name of any owner. Then I ran through the small print cards, uniform as names in a telephone book, that filled a green brass plaque camouflaged to lose itself in the dark green hall. No Arendt; then I found what I was seeking: Blucher 12a. It was inevitable for Hannah to use her husband’s name for domestic identification. The elevator was brusque and unhurried; through my ineptitude, it made false premature stops. A vehemently not-Hannah German woman appeared and gave me advice that sent me to the top of the building. Did another lady dart out shouting wrong directions? So it seemed, but memories magnify. Later when my arrivals were errorless though gradual, it seemed an undeserved rescue to find Hannah in her doorway and ready to kiss me.

Once inside, the raw Hudson, too big for New York, was chillingly present, but only in a window at an angle and raised several feet above the floor. We almost had to stand to see it, and it was soon lost in the urgency of conversation. I sometimes had an architectural temptation to cut away the unalterable window.

How many fine views have given me comfort by their nearness, yet were only taken in by chance over a typescript or the head of a friend. How unconsciously Hannah held the straying mind. Though a philosopher in every heartbeat of her nervous system, she belonged, like all true thinkers, to culture and literature. Coming to America in early middle age, she had the pluck not only to learn English but to write it with a power of phrase and syntax that often made her a master, the strongest theoretical writer of her age. Phrasing, syntax, and vehemence—her finest sentences are a wrenching then a marriage of English and German, of English instantness and German philosophical discipline. She translated many of her books into German, but I imagine if she had written in German and let someone else translate her into English her freshness, nerve, and actuality would have suffered a glaze, a stealing of her life.

Because I once failed to speak out, yet was stirred almost to hysteria by the smearing reception of Hannah’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem, I want to take it up now, yet evade what is beyond my non-Jewish limitation. I read her book innocently in The New Yorker before the anger of faction could accumulate and burst. I was astonished to discover a new kind of biography, a blueprint of a man flayed down to his abstract moral performance, no color, no anecdote, nothing kept that would support a drawing or even a snapshot—yet a living kicking anatomy, Eichmann’s X-ray in motion. It was a terrifying expressionist invention applied with a force no imitator could rival, and to a subject too sordid for reappraisal. The book’s lesson seemed to be that given the right bad circumstances, Eichmann is still in the world. I have never understood why Hannah’s phrase the banality of evil excited such universal polemic. She wasn’t writing of Attila or Caesar, but Eichmann. The Eichmann who managed the railroading of thousands, perhaps millions, to their death camps was an apallingly uninteresting man both in his criminal efficiency and in his irrelevant pedantry and evasions while on trial for his life. Since Hannah has written, who has dreamed of painting Eichmann as colorful? Hannah’s rage against Eichmann’s mediocrity was itself enraging.

It was far more so when she turned with the same heat against the rhetoric and windowdressing of the Eichmann trial in Israel; and far more still when she said that certain Jews, themselves martyrs, cooperated in the destruction of other Jews. Who can expound the sober facts? Must not justice allow that Hannah Arendt, where she was wrong, wrote with the honest foolhardiness of a prophet? Perhaps her warnings to us to resist future liquidation are too heroic to live with, for nearly all of us are cowards if sufficiently squeezed by the hand of the powerful.

No society is more acute and over-acute at self-criticism than that of the New York Jews. No society I have known is higher in intelligence, wit, inexhaustible willingness to reason, bicker, tolerate, and differ. When Hannah’s Eichmann was published, a meeting was summoned by Irving Howe and Lionel Abel, normally urbane and liberal minds. The meeting was like a trial, the stoning of an outcast member of the family. Any sneering overemphasis on Hannah, who had been invited but was away teaching in Chicago, was greeted with derisive clapping or savage sighs of amazement. Her appointed defenders drifted off into unintelligibly ingenious theses and avoided her name. When her tolerance was eloquently and unfavorably compared with Trotsky’s, Alfred Kazin walked self-consciously to the stage and stammered, “After all Hannah didn’t kill any Jews.” He walked off the stage laughed at as irrelevant and absurd. His was the one voice for the defense. I admire his bravery, and wish I had dared speak. Half my New York literary and magazine acquaintance was sitting near, yet their intensity was terrifying, as if they were about to pick up chairs.

Hannah did other portraits, genial, penetrating, good-humored ones, and had an unlikely genius for the form, as if the universal could win in a contest for hunting down particulars. How Disraeli and Clemenceau shine in her Origins of Totalitarianism. A subtle, relentless search for truth animates her essays on Rosa Luxemburg, Brecht, and Auden.

My meetings with Hannah were most often alone and at four in the afternoon. They had the concentrated intimacy of a tutorial. Large nuts were spread out on the table, the ashtrays filled, the conversation rambled through history, politics, and philosophy, but soon refreshed itself on gossip, mostly about people one liked, the dead and still living. Hannah made crushingly laconic sentences, but narrow slander, even of one’s enemies, bored her. She thought and breathed within boundaries, ones held with such firm belief that she could function safely with almost torrential carelessness. She used to talk with merry ease, revising my definitions and her own, as if haphazard words could be as accurately attuned as writing. Yet all was warm, casual, and throwaway. It seems immoral to remember her epigrams I used to repeat, her acuteness and good temper seemed to inspire me to make sense beyond my custom.

I felt so much at home, I used to bring her poems. Rhythms with meaning would delight her, but she was quick to find obscurities and uncouth, pretentious generalizations. Mostly the poems were a device to diversify our talk about history, politics, and persons. I tried not to overstay, but sometimes I left in the dark and was late for supper—so cooling and kind was her affection, a parenthesis in the unjust blur of ordinary life.

The post On Hannah Arendt appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

—The Editors

Sheldon S. Wolin

“The lessons of the past in Vietnam,” the President said recently, “have already been learned—learned by Presidents, learned by Congress, learned by the American people—and we should have our focus on the future….” The past, he declared, should be left to the historians. For then, presumably, after events have lost their preternatural shape and passions have cooled, when no one cares any longer, perspective is possible once more. Not long ago, Watergate evoked the same advice, even the same words. Then, too, we were advised to “put the past behind us,” to cease our recriminations, and to concentrate on the urgent matters of the day. Then as now, when the nation has been transfixed by events of extraordinary peril and significance, our leaders have all but told us that, as a people, we lack the maturity to reflect upon the meaning of great events. They have invited us, instead, to emulate the landlord who walks away from his profitless investment, leaving only the memorial of a tax write-off. Then as now, we have had urged upon us a politics of oblivion, a mass drinking ritual by which we drown memory in the sweet waters of Lethe and find in forgetfulness the healing balm for “our” wounds.

In one respect the President is right. Political common sense tells us what Freud confirms, that it is unhealthy to pick endlessly at bygone failures and to indulge an “abnormal attachment to the past.” Practical statesmen have to deal with the world as it is and as it is becoming, not as it was. But if the politics of oblivion is necessary for the politician, is it the right course for the citizen?

Among our crimes oblivion has been set;

But ’tis our king’s perfection to forget.

The question which Dryden’s couplet suggests is: does the rationale still hold for allowing kings their perfection so that they may “get on” with the nation’s problems? Until recently the rationale for not burdening politicians with the past has been a faith in their power and ability to master events, to deal creatively (“new” deals) with problems, and to set new directions (“new” frontiers) for society. Now Vietnam and the current depression have combined with recent experience of Watergate, ecological warnings, the chaos of welfare programs, the bankruptcy of cities, racial violence, and persistent unemployment to signify a new and awesome fact of our national existence that the politics of oblivion seeks to hide from us. The fact is that the options of the politician have been drastically narrowed and there is little of significance that he can “get on” with. Wherever he looks, at home or abroad, his choices are few and they consist mainly of struggling to hold things together and of riding out the times. Wherever he turns, he is hemmed in: by previous commitments, programs hardened into structures, once hopeful directions which now serve only as demanding grooves down which the present must run.

As a practical people, proud of its adaptability and experimentation, we have long been practicing our own politics of oblivion by which immigrants effaced their origins, workers surrendered their skills and bodies to the tempo of machines, and localities traded history for the benefits of centralized control. All the fruits of progress, increase, and expansion have been purchased by the dependence of each of us on structures—governmental, economic, and educational—whose steady expansion has increased that dependence to the point where, as a society, we are literally enslaved, that is, our daily existence requires the expansion, let alone the perpetuation, of governmental bureaucracies, huge corporations, and international networks in which government and business are intricately interwoven.

What all of this means, Vietnam included, is a dramatic and qualitative break in American history. We have moved from a society of free choice and opportunity to a society shaped by necessity. Instead of being the showcase refutation of Marxian determinism, we have become an instance of it. Watching the Vietnamese claw their way into our planes; listening to Nixon’s last tapes—we have learned that the nation does have a fate, that concentrations of power in the name of welfare are easily transmuted into the power to suppress liberty and promote empire.

Vietnam and the other experiences of recent years signify not only a different future but a different past. December bombings, search-and-destroy missions, free-fire zones are an indelible part of our history, as are Watergate, the misuse of our natural resources, and the shocking realization that we have a long record of past wrongs against blacks, Indians, and Mexican-Americans. A history has begun to take shape in which we can scarcely recognize ourselves—“Among our crimes oblivion has been set” and we all must long for that king’s perfection. Instead, by some terrible irony, we have been forced to enter history a second time, in this our bicentennial year. The first time we entered proclaiming our independence and liberty, the second time frantically trying to conceal our dependence and servitude.

There are, nonetheless, choices available. We can obey necessity and follow the grooves of the past, trying to deal with problems as they arise, making some gains, dealing with discontents by making the discontented more dependent on the system, and waiting apprehensively for “the return of the repressed.” Or we can embark on a riskier and more demanding politics which rejects the notion that growth, satisfaction, and skill can only be realized through expansion. It would be a politics of smaller scales, of more intensive care, of common concerns that are immediate to our daily lives. During the past decade we have witnessed many examples: in the struggles of neighborhoods to survive; of local school boards to control their affairs; of professionals turning to community services; of people trying to form new communities or to revitalize older ones.

We remain a people of great energy, inventiveness, and moral concern, but our lives and our politics have always had the potentiality of a politics of oblivion, of obliterating memories, things, and peoples. We first entered history under the sign of Eros, seeking a “more perfect union”; but we sought also what Hobbes called “felicity,” “a continual progress of the desire from one object to another; the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter.” Then we entered history again, this time under the sign of Thanatos, fulfilling the Hobbesian prophecy that those who seek felicity through “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power” will find that it “ceaseth only in death.”

Thanatos or death is that which cannot be undone or overcome, least of all by seeking refuge in anonymous structures of abstract power where cruelties are no less cruel for being remote. The true choice is the harder, more challenging one of a politics of reversal which does not mean going back to a pastoral society but of undoing our own necessities and seeking the intensive fulfillments that can only be found in smaller scales where we cannot evade the consequences of our own actions.

Garry Wills

“It may take twenty-five or thirty years before one can make a real judgment where the course of wisdom lay, either in getting in or getting out.”

—Dean Rusk

Analyzing the Vietnam war may become as long and futile a process as waging it. Most of the debate will involve problems of self-perception. The war was, among other things, a social thermometer for this country. Its opening years reflected our confidence, our reliance on technology, our belief in “surgical” tamperings with anything and everything beneath (or on) the moon. Its middle time showed a dying of confidence, disguised by a tendency to soothe ourselves with lies: the official rejection of the Kerner Report on American racism was a domestic Tonkin Gulf affair. Nixon inherited a legacy of mendacity, one he had great talents for but did not initiate. Our confidence, once it crumbled into lying, led to fear—an anticipation of violence by pre-empting violence: Kent State was a domestic My Lai. And as we were stunned into impotence—ready to settle at last, and to call anything we settled for “peace with honor”—we clung to the despicable and claimed it was our preference: Nixon was the domestic Thieu.

The war was invisible at the outset, from mere ignorance; we kept it invisible by an ever-more-difficult willed ignorance. We waged it absent-heartedly, without songs or slogans, movies or morale—to the end, few Americans could point the damn place out on any map or globe. There were 50,000 Gold Star Mothers; but no one wanted to see the stars hung in their windows. It became, instead, a civil war—hawk against dove, bombing Hanoi to impress the Woodstock Nation, a kind of bloodless infanticide (with Asians to do the dying for us).

But to pursue this line of thought is to keep dealing with a series of American peripheries, without ever reaching a Vietnamese center. It concentrates on ourselves—and self-absorption was our problem from the outset. America has never been “isolationist.” It has been solipsistic. The world only mattered as a projection of ourselves, our novus ordo seclorum. Vietnam should have been, but wasn’t, a reality breaking in. It became our own surreality breaking out. Our success or failure; idealism or greed, philanthropy or cruelty; our spiritual health or sickness. How the rest of the world must tire of America’s rapt self-accusations and exonerations.

We shall not understand Vietnam till we stop seeing it as anything particularly American. It was one rather small (but unnaturally inflated) episode in a large historical process. We splashed our way into the quickening ebb of the long colonial tide. France lost Indochina as it lost Algeria, or as England lost India—and France knew Indochina better than we did, had settled it longer, and fought for it more skillfully. Even now we talk of how things went wrong, how we did things wrong at this or that stage. None of that matters. The only wrong thing was being there.

The great rebuke to our self-absorption is the fact that Graham Greene wrote all about our engagement, in The Quiet American, ten years before it became full-scale. He predicted that we would think we were a Third Force—fresh; outside of history. We would pay no attention to the “old colonialists,” whose sins could not infect us. We would be the Good Guys, and everyone would know it—except the Bad Guys, who must be communists. We would shout at the anticolonial wave, “Stop!” And the wave would not listen. It is all there, in 1955, the napalm, the My Lais, the body counts, even the dominoes:

Pyle: If Indochina goes—“

Fowler: “I know that record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does ‘go’ mean?”

It will take some people twenty-five or thirty years to discover what was always wrong about our presence there. It would probably take Mr. Rusk even longer. It should have taken about twenty-five minutes.

Because we concentrate on ourselves, the result of Vietnam will probably be that of the Bay of Pigs—a search for some new place to prove our toughness. How obscenely our Congress welcomed the chance to bomb a small Cambodian island, to demonstrate America’s spiritual-military health. It is too much to hope we can break out of our solipsism. But it is the only thing worth hoping for.

Gore Vidal

Ten years ago I thought of the Vietnam caper as our empire’s Syracusan adventure, an analogy which now seems melodramatic, for during all this time there has not been a Sparta (pace Kissinger—Schlesinger—Fordinger) capable of bringing us down. Only we could have done that; and we came close. Fortunately, the very thoroughness of our defeat ought to put an end forever to our loony military pretensions. Americans have always been lousy soldiers. In the face of the enemy, Kilroy throws away his gun and splits; should an officer object, Kilroy frags him. To me our enduring cowardice is a sign of good judgment. We win the occasional war and deter would-be Spartas through our superior production of lethal toys. This true state of affairs makes all the more meaningless the rhetoric of those who have no actual connection with American life, like the current administration which has now taken to warning us that the last virginal orifice of the all-American, all-macho imperium is in serious danger of penetration by nuclear-tipped cylindrical hardware unless we cease our pitiful, helpless “isolationism.”

But even the ventriloquists who speak through the dummy in the Oval office know that we are none of us isolationist, nor can we ever be, thanks to the interdependency of the world’s economies. “Isolationist” is simply this year’s code word for those who oppose the use of military force against other nations, for those who refuse to bear any burden, make any sacrifice, etc. After 1976, I predict (being an optimist) that the word will have gone forth to friend and foe alike that the era of American bullshit is finished and that we will now try to create that society the world has been waiting two hundred years to see: an American civilization.

Susan Sontag

One can only be glad about the victory of the DRV and the PRG, but there seems little taste for rejoicing. It would have been disheartening beyond imagination if America had its way with Indochina, and yet nobody I know has managed to feel festive. Celebrations of the war’s end, like the one in Central Park a few Sundays ago, had the wanness of a class reunion, its participants moist-eyed and nostalgic for the Sixties’ gallant hopes, communal ardors, and risks antic and real.

For while “they” won, “we” did not. The “we” who wanted “us” to lose had long since been disbanded. The domestic convulsion set off by the Vietnam War had subsided long before the peoples of Indochina were liberated from the American murder machine. Those of us who raged against this unjust war and its unbearable accretion of atrocities reached the limit of our influence when the Sullen Majority turned against the war for quite other reasons—because it was interminable, or wasteful, or bungled. When the warriors in Washington switched to fighting by proxy, Nixon won in 1972 by a huge majority. “We” in the “Movement” affected public opinion, but weren’t able to affect the use of power or damage the spectacular electoral consensus for continuing a surrogate war without American deaths.

The American-financed and supplied slaughter of Asians by Asians might have gone on indefinitely. Only the distractions of Watergate prevented Nixon from resuming the bombing of North Vietnam in 1973. Vietnam could have been our Spain (for the generations born after 1930) right through to the usual denouement of such a great political Passion play. And living with their victory (however devoutly that was to be wished) will not be as edifying or as simple morally as protesting their martyrdom—a matter which is already clear as they busy themselves installing a social order in which few of us who supported the DRV and the PRG would care to live, and under which none of us, as “us,” would survive.

The Vietnamese won politically; the antiwar movement lost. Although the Mad Bomber in chief has been pensioned off, most of the warriors, unrepentant, are still in office. The Nobel Peace Prize winner remains secretary of state; the architect of the CIA’s Phoenix Program (20,000 South Vietnamese civilians fingered and assassinated) now heads the CIA. The US is still “in” Southeast Asia. Two weeks after the fall of Saigon, Kissinger is headlined as “now pushing hard-line foreign policy” (what was it before?). The avowedly theatrical and didactic use of firepower in the Mayagüez rescue has become Ford’s first popular act.

The reasons why “we” lost are complicated. While for some Americans the Vietnam war was an extraordinary, decade-long political education in the nature of imperialism, state power, etc., for many more it was an éducation sentimentale which quite underestimated the nature and extent of state power. The Movement was never sufficiently political; its understanding was primarily moral; and it took considerable moral vanity to expect that one could defeat the considerations of Realpolitik mainly by appealing to considerations of “right” and “justice.” (See Thucydides, Book V, the Melian Dialogue.)

The Movement was in fact an ad hoc and leaderless coalition, most of whose constituents (what was dubbed the “counterculture”) were always antipolitical. Movement politics had a great deal of innocence (both inadvertent and willed) about them, guaranteeing both their integrity and their powerlessness. And in the Movement (and in the agitation of the Seventies that inherited its rhetoric) were other impulses reflecting the death wish that infects our culture itself: along with a properly aggrieved relation to power, a nihilistic impatience with all structures and institutions. “Right” and “left” labels seemed more and more unworkable, with some New Left rhetoric echoing the rhetoric of the European fascist movements of the Twenties and early Thirties—much as Wallace’s right-wing rabble-rousing can sound like left-wing populism. Kids played at being urban guerrillas and settled for being punks. Intellectuals played at being egalitarians and zealots, only to discover that they were still elitists and liberals. And liberals can only have an ambivalent attitude toward revolutions.

The Sixties made political life interesting again, restored its urgency. But awakening to the recklessness, cynicism, and ingenuity of power would mean understanding, finally, how long and difficult a task it is to effect real political change. The Seventies could be a more serious time of political education, with a growing and history-minded distrust of all slogans of historical optimism, a respect for the implacableness of cultural diversity, a lessening of affection for our own innocence, an awareness of the perils of self-righteousness—“liberal” virtues, all, but no less necessary if the anger that still burns in America is to have political meaning.

Mary McCarthy

The only beneficiaries I can see of the event of April 30 are the Vietnamese. As the end approached, it was hoped, by many Americans and their sympathizers abroad, that some domestic benefit would be noticed. A weight, it was argued, ought to be lifted, of taxation, guilt, and shame, and new priorities could be set for the republic. With Vietnam out of the way, liberty and equality, a package, would no longer have to be viewed as articles for export and promotional salesmanship. The “lesson of Vietnam” would have been learned, both by our leaders and by the citizenry, which had been viewing the instructive spectacle on television.

It is too soon, of course, to be sure that nothing of the kind is happening. Perhaps a subliminal effect has been registered. Yet since so few “lessons” are ever learned in private life, one wonders why the process should be expected to take place in public life, so much less subject to the control of individual conscience and so poorly endowed, comparatively, with the means of reform. In any case, as it seems to me, the time had long passed when an opportunity for “correction of errors” was present and visible to everyone. That time was 1968, when the light had been seen, as Johnson’s “abdication” in the spring had made clear. The war ought to have been terminated then with North Vietnamese cooperation in an American exit. Between April 1968, when the Paris peace talks were agreed upon in principle (though not, in practice, until the fall), and April 1975, when the last American was withdrawn, nothing basically changed except the color of the corpses.

Had the US gone home then seriously, for good, the result would have been the same as what we are seeing now, with the single difference that third-force elements in the South might have been in a stronger position. At home, the time seemed right for reform or renovation; it looked as if a new leaf might really be turned. The Bobby Kennedy candidacy, the Gene McCarthy “children’s crusade,” the youth rebellion on the campuses, all touched off by revulsion from the war in Vietnam, were signs of a change of heart. The first and last signs. The nomination of Humphrey by the Democratic convention that summer demonstrated that inertia had resumed control of US political behavior. The reaction to Vietnam lost its impact, frittered away in fringe manifestations, such as the various mobilization marches—fun and games dampened by tear gas. Despite all the bloody and sensational events in between—Martin Luther King’s murder, Bobby Kennedy’s murder, Kent State, the attempt on Wallace, Watergate, Nixon’s fall—you could almost say that time had stood still during those seven years.

Nothing is worse for a private person than to have seen in a moment of clarity the error of his ways and then failed to alter them; the last state of the man is worse than the first. That is where our country is now, and to blame our leaders, with their professional deformations, for not rising to the occasion offered them by the war’s end, in other words for not being different from what they evidently are, is a stupid exercise, itself the product of fatigue. That Ford and Kissinger, anxious about US “credibility” abroad, inflated the Mayagüez incident in their own minds and action as though it were a missiles confrontation, that Defense Secretary Schlesinger “warns” the North Koreans that the US has “learned the lesson of Vietnam” (does he mean that the next time we will use nukes?) only shows that the bruised leopard cannot change its spots. The acclaim of Congress for the Mayagüez performance is nothing new either—the Tonkin Gulf reflex all over again. And when we now hear that our air force tear-gassed and nearly killed the crew it was bent on retrieving, we remember Têt and the officer explaining, “We had to destroy the city in order to save it.”

If anything has been added it is the smell of vengefulness associated with the Mayagüez episode, typical, I fear, of the current mood of this moody nation. It is not proceeding just from the White House and Capitol Hill.

We read that the American people want to forget about Vietnam; they are sick of it. That, obviously, is the opposite of learning a lesson, where a fact or an experience is imprinted on the memory, with cautionary results. I admit that I myself hoped last summer during the House Judiciary Committee hearings that Vietnam and Watergate, between them, would have caused us, at least, to do some self-questioning. The first awful intimation that this was not so came with the orphan airlift. The competition for Vietnamese babies made clear that Americans were still intent on mass demonstration of their essential goodness—a fatal motive in the Vietnamese enterprise, as hospitals, dispensaries, GI-built schools, improved seed strains, toothbrushes, surplus canned goods were strewn over the bombed, defoliated country, proving good intentions. If this sincere delusion had not been persisted in, the war could not have continued. With the orphans, the national heart again began to swell with the familiar philanthropic sentiments; nobody thought to ask what right we had to appropriate these babies, who in fact were part of the Vietnamese patrimony. Again, we were “saving” them, from disease and malnutrition; at the same time, they were little trophies, keepsakes—war loot salvaged from the wreck of the US involvement, so costly to the taxpayer.

The American amour-propre was seriously damaged in Vietnam, and the orphans in the end were insufficient restitution, especially since everybody could not have one. In any case, our generous image, not wholly inexact (Americans are kindly and helpful), is a dangerous reflection of our sense of national superiority, of our having more things to give away, like the ballpoints Nixon used to distribute on the streets of West European capitals, imagining that there was still a hunger for them. The idea that some nations would not want our things or our “know-how”—which made them—is inconceivable to most Americans.

The immense natural wealth of the American continent, ready for exploitation, and the wide internal distribution of that know-how have been a baneful gift. It is not only that the indigenous profit system must keep seeking fresh fields for investment as well as new consumers, but that the feeling of being an enormous creative matrix implies notions of leadership in every sphere of activity: literature and the arts, science, space, communications; democracy is regarded as an American manufacture along with Diners Club cards, happenings, rock music, and what were once called groovy life styles. No American is immune to the conviction of having something to offer the world by virtue of this native plenitude, and rejection (as happened in Vietnam) appears so incomprehensible that quite a few of the GIs who turned against the war turned also and simultaneously against the Vietnamese. Few Americans really drop out; instead they transfer their managerial and entrepreneurial skills, and the burgeoning pride that goes with them, to marginal activities such as the health food network or LSD manufacture, in which again they are “ahead” of other countries.

One of America’s problems is an inability to see itself. Hence the concern even among intellectuals with how the US looks after the defeat and how the defeat has affected our “position” in the rest of the world, as though what has happened were as much a social snub or slap in the face as a true loss. And the concurrent hope that the loss can somehow be turned into a gain, something positive, which would be true if whole peoples were able to revise their unthinking estimate of themselves, that is, break with all their habits.

There is no doubt that Germany was profoundly changed and sobered by the Nazi defeat, but it would take an atomic catastrophe, I often think, for the US to recover from the American way of life—the production-consumption cycle that has become an almost biological fact, resting as it does on rapid obsolescence and replacement. Intermittent elections add to the helpless feeling of stasis and eternal recurrence. You watch the same old candidates—Reagan, Jackson, Kennedy, Humphrey, Wallace—on your new color TV set. Anybody in his right mind would rather have it the other way around: fresh voices and faces on a quavery senior citizen TV screen. But for some un-Marxist reason, the constant restyling of the objects among which we live has no effect on the political superstructure, politicians being sent to the junk heap of history at a much slower rate than cars and ice-dispensers.

I can think of no way in which US political life can now be revitalized. The wistful idea (in which I have fitfully shared) of a “use” to which the Vietnam experience could be put shows that our faith remains a naïve, mechanical utilitarianism, which has no room in it for death in private life or tragedy in politics.

Norman Mailer

The responsibility for the war is entirely ours. The US was immersed in a geopolitics that looked on countries as aggregates. Whoever had the most aggregates won the Christianity versus Communism game. The domino theory was a corollary of this kind of thought, and the domino theory has proved “operative,” but in the worst way. Agrarian communist cadres, their intelligence tempered by war, will take over from urban Indochinese populations which now have small desire to resist. America’s military forged those communist cadres. My point is that the domino theory was always operative; the communists would have absorbed Southeast Asia whenever America was no longer there.

If it had happened earlier without our presence, those communists would however have been less ready, less skilled, less wise, and more prone to be at odds with one another. Ten years ago, there would have been intense local resistance to the communists, who would have suffered ideological schism in the yaws of trying to control countries they were not ready to govern. What was utterly lacking in American geopolitics was a rudimentary idea of real self-interest. Was there even a clue to the concept that it is often to corporate America’s advantage for countries to turn communist? The argument rests on Russia and China. Who would argue the USSR is better off because of Communist China?

The effect of the war on American life and on the US position in the world has obviously been next to wholly negative. With one remarkable exception. The resistance of the left in America broke the will of the establishment to wage a serious war. One by one, influential members of the military-industrial complex and the higher enclaves of finance came to decide that the war would wreck America morally, economically, and finally technologically. They did not decide this because secretly they admired the militancy or ideology or principles of the left. They detested all that. But about the time students began to destroy valuable equipment and burn university buildings—even a minority of students in a minority of universities—the perspective was clear. Those students were America’s future technological experts. (I obviously include the soft technologies of communications, sociology, et al., which center around social planning.) So members of the establishment came to recognize each by himself—will a novelist ever capture their long dark night?—that America could never run its industrial and media complex if even a fraction of its brightest people were determined at sabotage. And it seemed likely that sabotage would increase in at least direct relation to an increase in the war effort.

Who can now measure the subterranean effect of the March on the Pentagon upon the Washington establishment? Lyndon Johnson must have been first to see the significance of fifty thousand middle-class souls spending their own money to come to Washington in the full possibility that any one of them could meet physical violence on their person, that well-protected middle-class person! Johnson must have known some part of the game had to be up because he could have counted in the low hundreds those of his own Americans who would pay money and travel in order to be beaten up as an expression of faith in him and his war. Johnson, consciously or unconsciously, could read the meaning of that.

Now the next question becomes real to us: do we recover from Vietnam? The answer is most certainly yes. We will recover. We will doubtless come out of the depression for a time and come to some terms with inflation. But we will never be the same. We will be considerably better or worse. Perhaps the establishment has gained one vast intellectual clarity. It can hardly continue to operate on the old paranoid J. Edgar vision, which saw communist operators as more attuned to a psychic network than American patriots. The establishment may even see the likelihood that communism can prove as full of contradiction, internecine war, and internal crisis as Christianity in the Reformation.

The critical question for America is then not our-role-in-the-world but the nature of the democracy we can or cannot create here. Even if three-quarters of the world turns communist, our interest, even our most conservative interest, will not be endangered. That communist world will never be able to function as a single force. It takes little imagination to recognize that some communist countries in the future will prove relatively superb and others will prove God-awful.

Our real question is not geopolitical at all. It is whether America can improve, whether we can come to grips with industrial pollution, and the psychic pollution of high-rise and suburban real-estate overdevelopment, with automobiles and freeways, with the voids of synthetics, with the buildings of the last twenty years which have to be the worst architecture in the history of the world, with the packaging of food—it may yet prove the most unhealthy food in the history of the world—with the shriek-zones of electronics and media glut, and all of our lack of participatory democracy, yes, all of our political impotence, and the next question is whether we find answers to the assassinations, and solutions to CIA operations in symbiosis with the Mafia (read CIA cum FBI cum DIA cum good old Treasury narcotics in symbiosis with the Mafia) plus the labor unions in symbiosis with the Mafia, plus the entertainment industry. We have not even spoken of the lack of solution to civil rights, sexual rights, and the fast disappearing sense in every American of a neighborhood or any other root. We’re bombed on future shock.

Improve America? Good luck, sisters and brothers. Our odds are not going to look like even. Yet the future is hardly predictable. In all the technological horror of the social machine and TV’s cancer gulch there has to be—it might as well serve as our political faith—there has to be the notion that all this enormous and stupefying overdevelopment of our years is somehow wrong, gluttonous, and deadening even to the most mindless of Americas. We may as well suppose that the desire to look for a better way to live is not dead in this country and we will find solutions that yet surprise us. There may be demonstrations of imagination in the manipulated we could never expect. The odds are against us, but then ten years ago who ever thought we would play a serious role in bringing to an end the fecal strategies of our developing nightmare in Vietnam?

Robert Lowell

I am glad the war is finished, despite the poison it leaves behind: it leaves more than we can face, the catastrophic moral and military disaster, 55,000 dead, a half million unpardonably unpardoned deserters, half Vietnam killed, robbed, and scrapped with our complaisance—the Waterloo of anti-Stalinism. How can we get out of the indignities of the display window? The black prophet is now drowned by his truth. In our defeat communism is inevitable and cleansing, though tyrannical forever.

Christopher Lasch

Any lingering illusions that this was to be the American century have been shattered by the collapse of anticommunism in Southeast Asia.

After World War II the United States emerged, temporarily, as the strongest power in the world, and its leaders entertained visions of vast and continuing influence. But American ascendancy, even while it lasted, was based on highly unusual circumstances—the economic exhaustion of Europe, the disintegration of Japanese influence in the Far East, the collapse of older colonial systems in general, and the polarization of the world into rival blocs led by the two great nuclear powers, the United States and the USSR.

As these conditions passed, cold-war alliances crumbled and both Soviet and American influence declined. In both cases, but especially in the American case, misguided policies hastened even if they did not cause this decline. As early as the mid-Fifties, détente and “disengagement” would have provided a better basis for American foreign policy—as critics within the establishment, like George F. Kennan, understood—than containment, especially in the bloated and militarized version the US adopted. The containment policy committed the United States to resist the expansion of communism even into regions where the United States had no real diplomatic, economic, or political influence—like Southeast Asia. On the one hand American policy makers exaggerated their own capacity to control events by means of their overwhelming military supremacy, while on the other hand they worried excessively about the American “image” abroad, as if they themselves were not quite sure they were as tough and big as they pretended to be.

Given at the outset of the postwar period the advantage of unprecedented economic and military power, those bigtime bunglers—Truman, Acheson, Dulles, Kennedy, Johnson, McNamara, Kissinger, and the rest—dissipated that advantage in a series of actions chosen without regard to strategic considerations but purely with an eye to American “prestige”; the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, Cambodia. The latest escapade in the Gulf of Siam, though far more puny and contemptible, bears all the earmarks of earlier American interventions—panicky and premature resort to force out of all proportion to the actual stakes involved, undue attention to such considerations as “credibility” and saving face, refusal to seek congressional advice, utter disregard for the electorate’s will or capacity to sustain long-term military commitments. The Mayagüez incident is the Cuban missile crisis writ small, history repeating itself as farce.

The American intervention in Indochina was a grotesque mistake from the start. Any reasonably intelligent student of politics would have foreseen (and did foresee) the futility of backing dictators with no popular following and no other means of support than American arms. Even the CIA warned repeatedly that military measures would not work unless accompanied by social reforms instituted by Saigon. Many other officials reluctantly came to the same conclusion in the course of time: yet the war went on because no President wanted to be the first to lose a major war (including Nixon who might still be bombing today if he had not carelessly allowed himself to be driven from office). What made it a major war in the first place if not American intervention, which furnished the arms that allowed both sides to escalate a little war into a big one?

Both sides have been corrupted by the American “presence.” No doubt this is the story of Western colonialism in general, but at least France left Indochina something besides missiles, venereal disease, and a taste for PX high living. The rot that finally undermined the anticommunist regime was in part the direct result of prolonged American intervention. As for the other side, it would be naïve to think that they have not been corrupted in their own way by the bitterness generated by a very long war, by the experience of having been bombed nearly back to the Stone Age, by deprivations, the desire for revenge, and thirty years of military discipline. What may have begun as a heroic struggle for liberty is likely to end in a wholesale political regression, thanks in part to the intensification of violence that American intervention made possible. Only sentimentalists would argue that the long war for independence has laid the foundations of democratic socialism, popular rule, and civil liberties.

As for those other sentimentalists, the totalitarian liberals—who will predictably remind us that omelets can’t be made without breaking eggs—the so-called peasant revolution in Cambodia ought to give them pause. That “revolution” already suggests that it is no socialist omelet that is in the making but the familiar scrambled eggs that pass for political progress in our century—a socialism of barbed wire, the forced march, the forced confession, the concentration camp, and “self-criticism.”

George Kennan

The lessons of Vietnam are few and plain: not to be hypnotized by the word “communism” and not to mess into other people’s civil wars where there is no substantial American strategic interest at stake.

Beyond that, the end of the involvement in Indochina changes nothing in the pattern of needs and challenges with which our world environment confronts us. Learning to view Russia and China as national rather than communist great powers, we must treat them accordingly, with a view primarily to avoiding serious destabilization of the international power balance, further proliferation of nuclear weaponry, and the catastrophe of nuclear war. This requires continued support of NATO and the continued recognition of our stake in the security of Japan. In the Middle East we should be concerned to establish for the first time a power of independent decision—vis-à-vis both parties; for without that we can play no useful and constructive role at all.

Elsewhere, there can indeed be an extensive curtailment of American involvement. We need have little fear of the establishment of pseudocommunist regimes in Third World countries. They may be unfortunate for the inhabitants; they need not be for us. They have the advantage that their anti-Americanism is declared, not concealed; and they offer less provocation to our inane impulse to involve ourselves everywhere, to dispense arms and largesse, and try to be loved.

Besides the strategic problems, our main international tasks lie in the environmental field: the curtailment of the inexcusable misuse of the oceans, the bringing of ourselves and others to desist from the mad production of atomic wastes for which we have no safe means of disposal, the frank confrontation, generally, with the abuse modern industrialization and urbanization are inflicting on the usefulness of the earth as a seat of human living. It is here that there lie our greatest possibilities for leadership and for usefulness to ourselves and others in the aftermath of Vietnam.

Elizabeth Hardwick

I feel some hesitation about a final statement. One’s adjectival vehemence has been used up. Novelty is beyond me and the horrific repetitions fall from the air without instruction. The intervention, undertaken for the most glassy motive, prestige, was destructive with a mad excess that finally became an unfathomable national caprice. Now, at the end, we are prepared to grant that Indochina was always far, far away. Yet neither distance nor defeat quite separates us as we had imagined: they, there in the Mekong Basin, in the damp heat, with the memory of forests of hard woods and care-worn rubber trees; and we, back home from a foreign adventure, sore and bored, and not altogether pleased with our too many friends who have made the journey back with us.

Are we separated, divorced from the past so swiftly? Hardly; not yet. It appears that Saigon and Phnom Penh are cut deeply into the rock of our imagination; they are not at all like Seoul. The war transformed the will and the possibilities of Cambodia, the curtain has not yet gone up on the stage of the future, but our attention is fixed by the chaos and the mysteriously drastic decisions of the beginning. Saigon, Da Nang, and Hue in a trembling, vigilant truce, await the historical process, whatever it may be. There is nothing more interesting to us than these destinations right now. They move past us, not as strangers, but as movements we are bound to by, at the least, the most active fascination. And we are bound to events by buried wishes that lie far from indifference. A wish perhaps for disaster and the wish of others for radical prosperities.

There is no visible remorse about Vietnam on the part of our leaders. They speak of the “tragedy” of losing; they give the appearance of having in the end lost by way of a perplexing and questionable degree of leniency. But they are far from seeing virtue in the limitations of force brought about by processes, political and American. Those limitations alarm and so the leaders are quick to assert that we will stand by our commitments, as if it were the constancy that mattered rather than the justice, the wisdom of the commitment itself.

The incongruities of the Nixon years with the furry, velvety ceremonial visits to Russia and China and the coarse, passionate vindictiveness toward the presumptions of North Vietnam. He (Nixon) will be “remembered for his foreign policy.” Everyone reminds us of that peculiarity—his children, his fallen comrades, the newspapers. And now President Ford, eager for the historic, enters the mist-heavy gloam of “foreign policy.” He seems to expect to find there a clear day, a sort of sunlight of distance, to have a taste of the foreign pleasures of his predecessor. The President and his vexed secretary of state issue on the far shores the multifarious commands and orders of the mythical America for whose rights and character they like to stand. The last arena for the exhibition of powers. Back home, for the two protagonists, the weary processes of government: carping at dawn, suspicion at midnight, and a long daytime of obstruction and ingratitude. They have learned a lesson, yes. But which one?

Stuart Hampshire

As an Englishman who lived in America from 1963 to 1970 I recall that there was always well-informed opposition within the US to the war, from 1965 onward. Why then were the opponents of the war able to see the realities of the situation while the men in the Washington war-rooms, particularly Johnson’s advisers, utterly misjudged events?

One reason is not often enough mentioned, I think. Neither American presidents nor the American people have learned by long experience, as European governments and people gradually have, that they must distrust chiefs of staff and military leaders and advisers as being liable always to be wrong about foreign policy. De Gaulle, Eisenhower, and Churchill, the first two because they were generals themselves, and Churchill because of World War I, knew that the plans and forecasts of their generals were apt to be wrong and biased in favor of more bombing, more fighting.

A check is needed within the government, always there alongside the military. The US must have a real foreign service and a real diplomatic service. A Kitchen Cabinet, together with predominantly amateur, untrained ambassadors, is a recipe for blundering and inconsistency and is a danger to the world. A State Department that offers a career and the opportunity of a decisive influence on policy is necessary so that young men of ability can be recruited from the universities. The State Department has become a shadow. A real State Department, properly manned, would be in a position to counterbalance the military effectively and would make it possible to reduce the CIA to a reasonable size.

There are obviously more fundamental needs, though an Englishman is not well qualified to speak about them. The American involvement in the war in Indochina was prolonged after 1968 principally for electoral reasons: it seemed politically disastrous to withdraw. Democracy, pressed so far, can destroy the human race for the sake of someone not losing an election. Respect for human rights and for liberal values ought always to prevail over the claims of democracy; at the very least, the international decencies need professional guardians, however recruited.

I have of course been assuming that there will be no change in the social composition of the ruling groups in the US. Within this framework, I think the strengthening of the State Department is the best that can be done immediately: the universities should be called in to help. I know that Americans distrust elites in political matters and that I am being undemocratic. But the Pentagon Papers showed a frightening illiteracy, and both the lives of Cambodian villagers and Angkor Wat were put at risk, or worse, partly because of this illiteracy: one cause of the unnecessary war, among others.

John K. Fairbank

Many “lessons” are being drawn from Vietnam, most of them profoundly culture-bound. Ignorant of Buddhism, rice culture, peasant life, and Vietnamese history and values generally, we sent our men and machines to Saigon. Now we are out, and still ignorant, even of the depth of our ignorance.

Ignorance of local languages, traditions, loyalties, and reactions leaves the cultural stranger prey to his own preconceptions, hopes, and fears, ready to be cozened by the local English-speakers and manipulated for their private ends. It puts him out of touch with reality. “The enemy is hurting,” it used to be said in Washington, “and so he will negotiate.” But Hanoi never seemed to get the message. Lesson one: do not intervene when culture-blind.

Our successful interventions have been within our own Atlantic culture area—notably World War I and World War II in Europe, “just” wars to defend “democracy” and “freedom.” Our interventions in China against Japan, later in Korea, and finally in Vietnam took us into strange territory, the age-old Chinese culture area of East Asia. Lacking common roots, we imposed on East Asian situations the stereotypes we brought from home, supporting “Free China” against Japan’s invasion and subsequently looking for “democratic” leaders in our sense of elected representatives of the people. But Chiang Kai-shek, Syngman Rhee, Ngo Dinh Diem invariably disappointed us by proving less Jeffersonian than out-of-date Confucian and, even less forgivably, losing power.

After a century of contact with Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese we had many common bonds from trade, missionary work, medicine, education, student exchanges, diplomacy, and tourism back and forth between our countries. But with Vietnam no such background had accumulated. It was for us part of France, not open to American contact or enterprise. Until 1945 even the people there were known to us not as Vietnamese but as Annamites, from the old Chinese name, Annam, “the pacified south.” The root cause of our Vietnam failure was thus the profound American cultural ignorance of Vietnamese history, values, problems, and motives when we originally went to the aid of the French in Vietnam after World War II. The worst evil of such ignorance was that it left Vietnam faceless and speechless, an almost meaningless object to be manipulated by us for our power-politics purposes.

Thus cultural ignorance leads on to imperialistic exploitation, not for gain but for seemingly worthy aims of international security. This amounts to disregarding the interests of the local people as they see them in their cultural terms and imposing upon their situation our view of the world as seen in our cultural terms. To call this arrogant is of course an understatement. Arrogant or not, it is a recipe for disaster. Lesson two: Our values are not those of everyone. In a multi-cultural world we must pursue more vigorously the understanding of other cultures. We may even get a cultural perspective on ourselves.

Another lesson of Vietnam is to revise the history of the “loss of China,” which was in fact not a loss but a lucky escape. When General Marshall returned from his unsuccessful mediation of 1946 and became secretary of state in 1947, he was able to forestall our intervening in the Chinese civil war in what might have become a super-Vietnam, in spades, doubled and vulnerable. Granted that we “lost” China in our national sentiments where “China” had been peculiarly enshrined, the main fact after 1949 was that we had escaped from fighting the Chinese communist-led revolution, that amalgam of nationalistic sentiment and communist doctrine that has since remade China. The lesson of our “loss” of China was simple: do not intervene against patriotic revolutions, no matter what they call themselves.

The lesson derived by the American political leadership came from closer to home—namely, that a “loss” of a foreign country could be disastrous for the party in power. This dubious proposition, which overlooked most of the facts in the situation, was accepted as a lesson of history and served as a motivation for our Vietnam intervention. Seldom has history been worse understood. Even after the Chinese fought us to a standstill in Korea despite their inferior firepower, we persisted in regarding our exit from China as having been a loss rather than a boon.

From this record one obvious conclusion is that we should try to avoid engraving a “lesson of Vietnam” on our minds, since the last time around is seldom similar to the next crisis. It is one thing to avoid intervening in civil war in the vast areas of the agrarian-bureaucratic societies of mainland East Asia. It may be quite another thing to maintain security arrangements among the islands and peninsulas of the trading world in the western Pacific. Power politics will not go away. The lessons of history are never simple. Whoever thinks he sees one should probably keep on with his reading.

Noam Chomsky

The US government was defeated in Indochina, but only bruised at home. No outside power will compel us to face the record honestly or to offer reparations. On the contrary, efforts will be devoted to obscuring the history of the war and the domestic resistance to it. There are some simple facts that we should try to save as the custodians of history set to work.

In its essence, the Indochina war was a war waged by the US and such local forces as it could organize against the rural population of South Vietnam. Regarding the Geneva Accords of 1954 as a “disaster,” Washington at once undertook a program of subversion throughout the region to undermine the political arrangements. A murderous repression in South Vietnam led to the renewal of resistance. Kennedy involved US forces in counterinsurgency, bombing, and “population control.” By 1964 it was obvious that there was no political base for US intervention. In January 1965, General Khanh was moving toward an alliance with anti-American Buddhists and had entered into negotiations with the NLF. He was removed as the systematic bombardment of South Vietnam began, at triple the level of the more publicized bombing of the North. The full-scale US invasion followed, with consequences that are well known. The civilian societies of Laos and then Cambodia were savagely attacked in a war that was at first “secret” thanks to the self-censorship of the press.

In January 1973 Nixon and Kissinger were compelled to accept the peace proposals they had sought to modify after the November 1972 elections. As in 1954, the acceptance was purely formal. The Paris Agreements recognized two equivalent parties in South Vietnam, the PRG and the GVN, and established a basis for political reconciliation. The US was enjoined not to impose any political tendency or personality on South Vietnam. But Nixon and Kissinger announced at once that in defiance of the scrap of paper signed in Paris, they would recognize the GVN as the sole legitimate government, its constitutional structure—which outlawed the other party—intact and unchanged.

In violation of the agreements, Thieu intensified political repression and launched a series of military actions. By mid-1974, US officials were optimistically reporting the success achieved by the Thieu regime, with its vast advantage in firepower, in conquering PRG territory where, they alleged, a North Vietnamese buildup was underway. As before, the whole rotten structure collapsed from within as soon as the “enemy” was so ungracious as to respond, and this time Washington itself had collapsed to the point where it could no longer send in bombers.

The American war was criminal in two major respects. Like the Dominican intervention and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, it was a case of aggression, conscious and premeditated. In 1954, the National Security Council stated that the US reserved the right to use force “to defeat local Communist subversion or rebellion not constituting armed attack,” i.e., in violation of “the supreme law of the land.” The US acted on this doctrine. Furthermore, the conduct of the war was an indescribable atrocity. The US goal was to eradicate the revolutionary nationalist forces which, US officials estimated, enjoyed the support of half the population. The method, inevitably, was to destroy the rural society. While the war of annihilation partially succeeded in this aim, the US was never able to create a workable system out of the wreckage.

Opposition to the war at home made full-scale mobilization impossible and placed some constraints on the brutality of the war planners. By 1971, two-thirds of the US population opposed the war as immoral and called for the withdrawal of American troops. But the articulate intelligentsia generally opposed the war, if at all, on “pragmatic”—i.e., entirely unprincipled—grounds. Some objected to its horror; more objected to the failure of American arms and the incredible cost. Few were willing to question the fundamental principle that the US has the right to resort to force to manage international affairs. Throughout this period, there was a negative correlation between educational level and opposition to the war, specifically, principled opposition. (The correlation was obscured by the fact that the more articulate and visible elements in the peace movement were drawn disproportionately from privileged social groups.)

The gulf that opened between much of the population and the nation’s ideologists must be closed if US might is to be readily available for global management. Therefore, a propaganda battle is already being waged to ensure that all questions of principle are excluded from debate (“avoid recriminations”). Furthermore, the historical record must be revised, and it will be necessary to pretend that “responsible” political groups acting “within the system” sought to end the war, but were blocked in their efforts by the peace movement. People cannot be permitted to remember that the effective direct action of spontaneous movements—both in the United States and among the conscripted army in the field—that were out of the control of their “natural leaders” in fact played the primary role in constraining the war makers.

The US government was unable to subdue the forces of revolutionary nationalism in Indochina, but the American people are a less resilient enemy. If the apologists for state violence succeed in reversing their ideological defeats of the past years, the stage will be set for a renewal of armed intervention in the case of “local subversion or rebellion” that threatens to extricate some region from the US-dominated global system. A prestigious study group twenty years ago identified the primary threat of “communism” as the economic transformation of the communist powers “in ways which reduce their willingness and ability to complement the industrial economies of the West.” The American effort to contain this threat in Indochina was blunted, but the struggle will doubtless continue elsewhere. Its issue will be affected, if not determined, by the outcome of the ideological conflict over “the lessons of Vietnam.”

J. M. Cameron

Outside the United States there is some gloomy joy over the way in which the Vietnam war ended. David’s slaying of Goliath is always a good story and a heart-warming spectacle. Those of us who know and like the United States and its people are sad and anxious.

My mind goes back over the whole period, from the decision, under Eisenhower, to take no notice of the Geneva agreements, through the earliest military intervention under JFK, through the terrible Johnson years, and then the long and bloody, and futile, effort of the Nixon regime to get the soldiers out of Vietnam without loss of face. Only for a brief moment, during the candidacy of Eugene McCarthy, did it seem likely that, outside the antiwar circles, people in general might come to believe that the question was one of morality and not of military and political calculation.

My memories are a confusion, though some things stick out. There are the words of Cardinal Spellman on Christmas Eve 1966 in Vietnam: “Anything less than victory is inconceivable.” These words were spoken in a sermon at Mass, for Catholics the great sign of God’s love for the entire human family. When Spellman got to Manila on December 28, he was asked if his remark had been intended to deny the possibility of a negotiated peace (something Vatican diplomacy was then trying to bring about). His reply was memorable: “Total victory means peace.”

Well, many days and many lives, many maimings and many betrayals later, a kind of peace has come. The B-52s from Thailand will fly no longer and Thailand will soon rid itself of their obscene presence. The Claymore mine—a flying bolt from this could kill a man more than a hundred yards from the explosion—invented by the Americans and copied by the Viet Cong, will explode no more. The poisoned fields and woods will begin to regenerate themselves year by year. All this will happen under the hard rule of the communists and the NLF. The bitterness secreted in the years of war with the French and the Americans and their Vietnamese allies will continue to prompt acts of terror and counterterror.

I remember the time when, to innocents such as myself, it looked just possible that Eugene McCarthy would be the Democrats’ antiwar candidate. Instead we had the intervention of Bobby Kennedy, seeking to reap where McCarthy had plowed and sown, then his assassination; and then Humphrey’s steering his way between the Scylla of Yes and the Charybdis of No.

To my mind the lesson of the war is not that it turned out to be a mistake, an error, the mistake and the error being shown by the failure of American arms. It was a vicious and immoral war in which the means employed bore no proportion to the (variously and often incoherently stated) objectives of the war. It is often said by the apologists of the Pentagon that the war was fought with restraint. Of course, it was. North Vietnam wasn’t bombed back into the Stone Age in Curtis Le May fashion. But the reasoning behind the talk of restraint is curious. If a superpower does not use nuclear bombs or if it doesn’t use conventional weapons to bring about the total destruction of civilian lives and property it is said to be exercising restraint. The corruption of the mind and heart represented by such an argument is the worst consequence of the war for the United States. The McCarthy candidacy, the burning of draft cards, all the campaigns of the peace movement, the Calley trial, these and many other happenings will have been fruitful if the shocking nature of this argument is perceived. (Compare: we only abort, sterilize, and so on in the cases of one out of every four teen-age mothers on welfare. What restraint!)

War is a moral question and the lesson of history is that governments can’t be trusted to think of it in such terms. Stephen Decatur’s often misquoted maxim is interesting. “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.” If this is turned into the doctrine that loyalty to the duly constituted government of one’s country is the supreme moral imperative, the consequences are—as we have seen—very evil. “Putting Vietnam behind us” is not a wise prescription so long as there are influential men who continue to congratulate themselves on their high-minded “restraint” in the period of maximum American intervention in Indochina.

Geoffrey Barraclough

The decision to liquidate the entanglement in Vietnam may have marked, in President Ford’s words, the end of one chapter. It also marked the beginning of another. What matters now is not the antecedents but the sequel. As a historian, Kissinger is well aware of the old adage: reculer pour mieux sauter, and there is a good deal of evidence that what we are witnessing is not a revulsion against imperialism but a reappraisal of America’s imperial mission in terms better suited to the present constellation of world forces.

Nearly thirty years ago, enunciating the misguided policies which led with ironic logic to the sorry outcome in Vietnam, George Kennan spoke of “the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” Can it be that all that has happened is that the geographical and political focus, which appeared in 1954 to have shifted to Southeast Asia, has shifted away again? If one main reason, back in 1969, for the initial decision to run down American commitments in Vietnam was the realization that the United States was overextended, and that the entanglement in Southeast Asia was impairing its ability to defend its interests elsewhere, can it be that what we are witnessing now is a redeployment of forces enabling the United States to intervene more effectively in areas—say the Middle East—where it has more vital interests to defend?

I raise these questions not to answer them, but because of the danger of mistaking a change of direction for a fundamental break with the past. A corporation with an unprofitable subsidiary may wind it up and put it in liquidation, but it does not go out of business; it concentrates on its profitable operations. All we know at present is that, as late as April 12, when he was well aware of the imminent outcome of the fighting for Saigon, Kissinger spoke of his determination “to conduct a strong foreign policy” and “re-establish American leadership.” This does not sound like the leopard changing its spots.

In terms of power politics (which are the only politics Kissinger understands) the decision to get out of Vietnam was a wise one—provided always it does not mean getting in somewhere else. That is to say, there was never a serious American interest involved, and it is likely, now that the whole entanglement is over, that Indochina, far from entering an anti-American communist camp, will land safely in a neutralist stance, which may not do the United States any good (once again, in terms of crude power politics) but certainly will do it no harm.

The trouble is that imperialism is a many-headed monster, and if one head is chopped off, as Thieu’s has been, another is apt to sprout. If the Vietnam commitment has been wound up, it is not because the nature of imperialism has changed, but because the world we live in is different from the world of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Power may be transient, but its nature remains the same though, like the chameleon, it may change its color. That is why, though withdrawal from Vietnam may end one imperialist chapter, it may just as easily mark the beginning of another.

Many years ago Dean Acheson got himself into bad odor when he said that “Britain has lost an empire, but not yet found a role.” At the risk of incurring similar bad odor, I would say that Acheson’s dictum applies no less forcefully to the United States today. The liquidation of the Vietnam adventure provides an opportunity for reappraisal of the United States’ role in the world; but there is little evidence, so far, that the opportunity has been taken, and a lot of evidence that it is being botched. If the object is still, in Kissinger’s words, “to re-establish American leadership” in the world, the lesson of Vietnam has not been learned; for the one thing that is certain is that the world repudiates American leadership—or that of any other country, including Soviet Russia.

No one threatens a United States which looks after its own concerns; but a United States which throws its weight around and tries to make the world an “American world” is in for trouble, as Vietnam should have shown. Happily, if Ford and Kissinger do not realize this, the American people—far more concerned with the depression and unemployment, which were the price of Vietnam, than with the display of American power—seem to do so; and that at least provides a hope for the future.

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