The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities Early Winter 2001-2002 |
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RALPH: The Review of Arts, Literature,
Philosophy, and the Humanities
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Gerard J. De Groot
(Palgrave)
5,000 Years
Photographs by David Finn
(Harry N. Abrams)
Amos Oz
Translated by
Nicholas de Lange
(Harcourt)
A True Story of
The American Dream
Mawi Asgedon
(Megadee)
Of Abbie Hoffman
(Four Walls/Eight Windows)
Richard Timothy Conroy
(St. Martins)
The Archaeology
Of Garbage
William Rathje,
Cullen Murphy
(Arizona)
Famous Men
James Agee
Photographs by Walker Evans
(Houghton Mifflin/Mariner)
Tivadar Soros
(Arcade Publishing)
Michael Faber
(Harcourt)
Pre-Raphaelites
Elizabeth Prettejohn
(Princeton)
And Black
Gordon MacCreagh
(Chicago)
Beauty and Violence in
The Desert Southwest
Ellen Meloy
(Arizona)
End of the World
The Apprenticeship of a
Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
Mary Rose O'Reilley
(Milkweed)
I Miss It So
Anthony Loyd
(Penguin)
Adventures in Wartime Russia
Aleksander Topolski
(Steerforth)
the Dead
Norman Mailer
(Picador USA)
Elsa Morante
William Weaver,
Translator
(Steerforth Italia)
The Twinkie Murders
Paul Krassner
(Loompanics)
Other Means
A Journalist's Memoir
Shelby Scates
(University of Washington)
The Pleasure and Tribulations
Of Moving from a Big City to
An Old Country Farmhouse
Michael Korda
(Harper Collins)
Apartments of old stone list, iron balconies, awnings, His lip perspires, his eyes intent. The man has a book under his arm. The pages are gilt-edged, the title The road turns. A black sedan rounds the corner The man is not cold without clothes. He sees whole worlds Now when he stops and considers the spokes, the bicycle tires, He does not believe in this. He believes in something else.
Out of a total of 2,400,000 soldiers mustered up on both sides, mortality figures reached over 600,000. The death rate in battle was moderate --- it was the subsequent devastation of disease and doctors ignorant of sanitation that killed the larger number of soldiers. As a book, Gangrene and Glory is a mess. The book design is like something they'd hand out to you in Nathan Hale High for your 10th grade English composition workbook. In addition, it is quite scattered. It goes into great detail about the lives and education of various doctors, lists American Medical Schools in 1860 (there were slightly more than four score), and contains a number of rather peculiar tables: "Union Doctors Released at the Winchester Accord," "Support Hospitals for the Army of Tennessee," and "Workers at Chimsborazo Hospital, January 1863" [166 Hospital Stewards, 58 cooks, 123 Laundry Workers]. It is, thus, not even a little bit like reading Ward, Churchill or Macauley. But some of the quotes from those who lived through it are genuine show-stoppers. This from a doctor William Morton, receiving the wounded at Fredericksburg: It is the most sickening sight of the war, this tide of wounded flowing back. One has a shattered arm, and the sling in which he carries it is the same bloody rag the surgeon gave him the day of battle; another has his head seamed and bandaged so you can scarcely see it, and he weaves like a drunken man as he drags along through the hot sun; another has his shoe cut off, and a great roll of rags around his foot, and he leans heavily on a rough cane broken from a pine tree; another breathes painfully and holds his hand to his side, where you see a ragged rent in his blouse; another sits by a puddle, dipping water on a wounded leg, which , for want of dressing since the battle, had become inflamed; another lies on a plot of grass by the roadside, with his browned face turned full to the sun, and he sleeps. The photographs, etchings, and drawings, as badly reproduced as they are, almost make up for the lack of structure. The portraits of the surgeons general look like they just got out of prison (or out of bed). The textbook drawings of procedures for amputation are alarming enough so that if you lived in Newport News, New Haven, Boston or Charleston in 1863, and if you were of draft age --- you would have been best off taking the next steamer to Canada. The reference books the doctors used were quite direct. Those soldiers who claimed to be sick were cowards: In cases of doubt, it is always safest to assume the disease as feigned, rather than real. Many commentators have pointed out that the American Civil War, like the Spanish American War and WWI, came about more through happenstance, bad timing, and an innocent and naive populace, rather than through political necessity. Now as then, a bit of jingoism serves to enhance the image of those in power, gives a shot to the nation's finances, and offers economic juice to those who have --- as opposed to those who have nothing. Wars scarcely benefit the populace at large; are, indeed, somewhat detrimental to the well-being of young men who are young enough to be of service to their country. Edmund Wilson's justly famous Introduction to Patriotic Gore should convince anyone who has romantic ideas about war in general and the Civil War in particular that there was a special bloodiness on the battlefields that was unheard of in previous wars. It was thus a strong foreshadowing of what was to come in the trenches of Ypres.
It's ostensibly the tale of a Maryland country lawyer, involved in country law: wills, divorces, personal injury, torts. But being Barth, it's more --- much more. For one thing, it has to be one of the best writings extant on the silliness of the practice of law in American. It is, too, one of the first novels --- outside of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Anderson --- to demonstrate what some might think of as U. S. Existentialism. Most fetchingly, there are the tricks the author uses to suck us in: tricks right out of Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne. "I don't know anything about this novel-writing business," the hero seems to say, "But I'll try, and let's see what comes out of it." And so he leads us a merry chase, at times chastising himself for getting off the track; at times chastising us for what we might be thinking. For instance, if the main character's name is Todd, does that have anything to do with the German word for "death?" Absolutely not, says Barth: perish the thought. And the very fact of his bringing it up makes it stick in our minds: maybe The Floating Opera is all about death. Every reader will have his favorite passages. For me, it's the description of the central legal hinge of the novel, the Harrison Mack Senior Will case: Now of the several characteristics of Harrison père, three were important to the case: he was in the habit of using his wealth as a club to keep his kin in line; he was, apparently, addicted to the drawing up of wills; and, especially in his last years, he was obsessively jealous of the products of his mind and body, and permitted none to be destroyed. As the narrator tells us, this gives Todd and his legal counterpart on the other side a chance to have a field-day with legal technicalities. It is in the description of these that makes the book such a pleasure. There is, above all, the simple fact that Barth is a fine writer. Listen to this description of the possibility that because of a peculiar heart condition, that Todd, relatively young, might well pop off at any moment: Eleven times the muscle of my heart contracted while I was writing the four words of the preceding sentence. Perhaps six hundred times since I began to write this little chapter. Seven hundred thirty-two million, one hundred thirty-six thousand, three hundred twenty times, since I moved into the hotel. And no less than one billion, sixty-seven million, six hundred thirty-six thousand, one hundred sixty times has my heart beat since a day in 1919, at Fort George G. Meade, when an army doctor, Captain John Frisbee, informed me, during the course of my predischarge physical examination, that each soft beat my sick heart beat might be my sick heart's last... [Note the luscious use of "soft;" the heart-beat like repetition of "sick heart"] ...Having poured my drink, I may not live to taste it, or that it may pass a live man's tongue to burn a dead man's belly; that having slumbered, I may never wake, or having waked, may never living sleep...Having heard tick, will I hear tock? Having served, will I volley? Having sugared will I cream? Having eithered, will I or? Itching, will I scratch? Hemming, will I haw?... Sigh. This is prose-poetry of the highest order --- and it is part of a dandy novel, one that won't leave you alone until you come, very regretfully, to the end.
I have been reading RALPH since its inception. Or should I say, "Since the literary D&C that some people would call a birth." Wouldn't it be worthwhile for you and your writers to do something constructive now and again besides beat on America, Americans, and American publishing? My definition of your magazine is "peculiar." Or would you prefer "puerile?" I hope you are smart enough to figure out what it means. It rhymes with "phew." Meanwhile think about getting a life. Or, even better, a job.
He was a dynamite speaker, especially when there was a brouhaha amongst his fellow rabble-rousers, as there usually was. He could round up the troops, get anything he wanted passed when he was running, say, the International Working Men's Association.
And he was wonderful at insults. Arnold Ruge, he said, stands in the German revolution like the notices seen at the corner of certain streets: "It is permitted to pass water here." Rudolf Schramm: A rowdy, loudmouthed and extremely confused little mannequin whose life-motto came from Rameau's Nephew --- "I would rather be an impudent windbag than nothing at all." After he started Das Kapital, he was forever and a day promising to deliver the manuscript to the publishers, forever and a day putting it off. He had a bad liver, pains here and there, and boils so terrible that he often couldn't sit to work. These carbuncles gave a colorful edge to his work. When he delivered Das Kapital to his German publishing house, the manuscript had blood all over it. Engels had to lacerate one of his more pernicious boils, sited on his...well, don't ask; I won't tell.
He and Frederick Engels were a pair. They used to go pub-hopping along Tottenham Court Road. There were eighteen pubs, and they vowed to visit each and every one. By the time they got to the last, they were drunk enough that they began to throw cobblestones at streetlights --- until the police came running. To avoid being caught, they ducked down alleys and jumped over fences like a couple of rowdy schoolboys. O these kids!
Marx was gloriously stupid with money. One of his followers --- a certain "Lupus" Wolff --- left him 800 pounds, a considerable sum for the time. Within months, Marx had spent it all on a fancy apartment, dresses for his daughters, tobacco, paper, hock. He was, they say, a loving father, buying books galore for his three daughters, telling them funny stories late into the night.
"Marx had a most endearing passion for sobriquets and pseudonyms," Wheen says. He himself was known as "Moor" --- after Othello --- because of his dark skin and hair, "coming out of every pore." His alias when he was hiding out from the police in Paris was "Monsieur Ramboz," after the movie character Rambo. I just made that up. Engels was called "The General" because he was such an armchair soldier. His housekeeper (by whom, they say, Marx sired a son) was "Lenchen." His wife Jennychen became "Qui Qui, the Emperor of China." Daughter Laura was "Kakadou" and "The Hottentot." His children were encouraged to call him "Nick" or "Charley." Hi. Who are you? "Just call me Charley Marx."
Never a day went by that Marx and Jenny weren't being harassed by tradesmen to whom they owed money. Sometimes when they demanded entrance, Marx would have to hide behind the ratty old couch in the upstairs office. The office itself was a scandal. Pipes, tobacco, bottles, manuscripts, books, letters, and newspapers were scattered all over the place, but in exactly the right place so he would know where to find whatever he needed. No one was allowed to touch the desk or his room. When money ran out, as it always did, he would hock the furniture, then the girls' shoes and clothes, so that they were often ashamed to go to school because they were in such rags.
He fought with all the political types who came into his orbit, either in person, by mail, or in pamphlet: Michael Bakunin, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Ernest Jones, Karl Heinzen, Gottfried Kinkel, Joseph Wedemeyer, Wilhelm Liebnecht --- even the deceased Hegel. Engels --- who stuck with him through thick and thin, and was a master of forgiveness --- would even, at times, lose all patience. When one of his mistresses died, he received a long letter from Marx complaining about his own problems and lack of finances. Usually, when things got bad, Engels would ship off a case of sherry, which he claimed was a fine medicine for the carbuncles and fevers.
Marx authored almost 500 articles for Richard Henry Dana, editor of the New York Daily Tribune. Or rather, he was assigned to write articles for them. Being a notorious procrastinator, he would hand them over to Engels, who did the actual writing.
Wheen has done a fine job of making Marx human. Better, he translates the key Marx documents for those of us who are unwilling to suffer through them ourselves. His take on the various works is original and daring. He says the Communist Manifesto, rather than being the radical document that everyone assumes, "celebrates the bourgeoisie." "The bourgeoisie," wrote Marx, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations, into civilization. "He also," says the author, "understood that the pace of technological change would become ever more frantic, creating a sort of permanent revolution where any computer software bought more than a couple of years ago is all but obsolete."
Wheen is at his most captivating in explaining Das Kapital: "More use-value and indeed profit can thus be derived from Kapital if it is read as a work of the imagination," he says. A Victorian melodrama, or a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the monster they created ("Capital which comes into the world soiled with mire from top to toe and oozing blood from every pore"); or perhaps a satirical utopia like Swift's land of the Houyhnhnms, where every prospect pleases and only man is vile. In Marx's vision of capitalistic society, as in Swift's equine pseudo-paradise, the false Eden is created by reducing ordinary humans to the status of impotent, exiled Yahoos. He then compares it to the Manifesto: All that is solid melts into air, he wrote in the Communist Manifesto; now, in Kapital, all this is truly human, becomes congealed or crystallized into an impersonal material force, while dead objects acquire menacing life and vigor. Money, once no more than an expression of value --- a kind of lingua franca in which commodity could speak unto commodity --- becomes value itself.
Wheen makes much of the language that Marx uses: "appears," "phantom-like," "Unsubstantial ghost," "pure illusion," "false semblance." He compares it to high comedy (Marx was a great fan of Tristram Shandy:) To expose the difference between heroic appearance and inglorious reality --- stripping off the gallant knight's disguise to reveal a tubby little man in his underpants --- is, of course, one of the classic methods of comedy.
Here, Wheen might be writing about the very writing of this book. The words "Karl Marx," still, for most of us, have such power. The author has chosen, as we would expect, to reveal the man warts and all, with all his silly tiffs over forgotten competitors, his funny nicknames, his chaotic way with personal finances, his endless procrastination. He could have made Marx an object of high ridicule, could have made him "a tubby little man in his underpants."
But he has chosen to do something far more dramatic. He gives us the man Marx, carbuncles and all, and we end up with no little respect for him, his struggles, his works. The life he had in England was a mess; how he was able to write at all --- much less, write one of the key economic treatises (or, if you will, Gothic novels) of the 19th century --- could be classified as miraculous. After reading Wheen, we are left with not only respect for the man --- as cantankerous and off-putting as he was --- but respect for one who sincerely wanted better for the world: better for the workers, better for the poor, better for those who, at the time, were at the very bottom of the financial and social totem pole.
We bonded easily --- not my sisters and me, but me and the ducks. They would follow me around the yard: me, then Pete, then Repeat, in single file. When we tired of playing foot-soldier, we would head down to Fishweir creek where we would wade under the loblolly pines, with moss hanging off the trees, in the cool shade (this was Florida, 1943). They followed me upstream, doing duck things in the water like nibbling at the weeds and eating the sand-flies and making muttering noises of contentment.
Their quacks should have given them away. Female ducks quack, noisily; male ducks just make a hoarse, whispery "wack" sound. By late summer, Pete and Repeat started leaving eggs here and there in their pen. They were, indeed, Kate and Duplicate, but you don't go around changing ducks' names in midstream. Unlike other pets, I ate all their babies, scrambled in butter, for breakfast: and I didn't feel like a cannibal.
One day when I was off playing softball with my friends the family Chesapeake Bay retriever suddenly remembered his calling. By the time I got home, Pete was a goner and Repeat was barely hanging on. We took him to the local vet, but in those days they had little in the way of duck-resuscitation equipment. That evening I buried the two of them down at the creekside and wet their gravestones with many a tear.
After all these years, you'd think I'd get over it, right? Not so. Recently, I was fiddling around looking up chickens in hyperspace and ended up at the FeatherSite, eyeing Silver Grey Dorkings and Silkies and Orpingtons and at one point I stumbled across Indian Runner Ducks and there went my heart. These guys look just like Pete and her sister but they stood up tall, like they were trying to be penguins. I mean, imagine a duck standing straight, not hung close to the ground like all their other duck brothers and sisters.
I fiddled around in the bowels of the Global Village for awhile and found that Metzer Farms in Gonzales, California sends out ducklets the day they are hatched, to be delivered by the P.O. They don't up and die on you because ducks (and chickens) can live without food or water for three days postpartum. It's a clever device thought up by their Darwinian ancestors to make it possible to survive in the wild, and hatcheries like Metzer make full use of it.
Nine of the Runners made it to my doorstep and I set them up in the bathroom on a card table with water and food and a 40-watt light-bulb to keep them warm which was a mistake because they kept me up all night drinking and laughing and telling each other noisy motherduck stories. They also made a disgusting mess in the wooden box that I had so lovingly created for them.
I started showing them to some of my friends, and some of my friends' kids. Then, when their parents were in the other room, I would ask the youngsters if they'd like to have one or two as a gift. By this subterfuge I managed to get rid of seven ducks in one week, and --- in the process --- managed to alienate several close friends who had to put up with a new and very raucous pooper- The kids and I were very subtle about it. I coached them in their lines, lines like, "If you don't let me have these ducks right now I'm gonna hate you forever."
I kept two ducklets for old time's sakes, and they've grown like weeds and have taken over my back yard. They're less like ducks, however, and more like old ladies in a retirement home: they hate strangers --- even me --- and they bitch endlessly if they don't get fed exactly at six in the morning and six in the evening. In spite of this, they have the appetite of polled Herefords. I'm thinking that by mistake they've sent me genetically engineered ducks. At six weeks, these guys stand almost twenty inches tall and I figure by Guy Fawkes' Day they'll be as tall as I am.
I've named them you-know-what in honor of my buddies from sixty years ago. However, and alas, there is no near-by creek to take them to and if there were I probably wouldn't do it anyway because I don't much fancy heading down the street with a couple of six-foot-tall Indian Runners in hot pursuit.
Furthermore, it's different now. As a kid I didn't notice things like flies and poop and the down-home astonishing stupidity of these ninnies. They're not like a Siamese that'll put the attic rats to death or a hound that you can train to roll over and play dead.
There is one compensation, though. As soon as they start delivering, I am going to be eating their progeny. Scrambled; in butter; with a bit of chives; served on toast.
It's a story of many battles: getting out of the town of Adi Wahla, walking for days to the Sudan, living in a refugee camp, finding a sponsor to bring them to the United States, and then, once here --- making it through school and into college with no assets at all outside of brains and gumption. Asgecom manages to convey in less than 150 pages a story of horror, mayhem, and joy. One of his first memories is of a refugee woman fleeing with them from Ethiopia, "limping, wanting to stop, but knowing that if she did, she wouldn't move again." She pressed on and on, and soon her limp became a crawl. And then I saw a sight that I would never forget --- the soles of her naked feet melting away, and then disappearing into the desert, leaving only her bloody, red flesh, mixed with brownish sand and dirt. Any writer can come up with horror tales --- and the refugees of Ethiopia can come up with some of the most squalid and disheartening. But there must be hope (for the writer, for the reader) and, at times, humor. For instance, in his case, there are always the puzzles of America. Like his fellow Ethiopian, Fisoom, who mistook the refrigerator for a clothes dresser. He organized his trousers and shirts on the shelves, even placing his underwear and socks in the pull-out drawers on the bottom. Or watching television after arriving in Chicago, having just left one of the bitterest civil wars on the planet. Asgedom's father cries out, God show mercy on us! Did you hear that? The boyfriend killed his girlfriend and her parents, too. He stabbed them more than fifty times. What kind of country have we come to? Not the least of their problems is Asgedom and his brother trying to survive in the American schoolyard: "African Boodie Scratcher! Scratch that Boodie!" "Black Donkey! You're so ugly!" "Why don't you go back to Africa where you came from?" He and his brother are fighters. They had to be: We were just two, and they were often many. But they had grown up in a wealthy American suburb, and we had grown up in a Sudanese refugee camp. We were accustomed to fighting almost daily, using sticks, stones, wood chips, and whatever else we could get our hands on. One of the tests of a worthy writer is how he or she handles unbearable tragedy. Sentiment and pulling out all the stops is easy (we see such in the newspapers every day). Using restraint --- no matter how deep the grief --- can move travail into art. In the midst of surviving and beginning to prosper in America, Asgedom's older brother Tewolde is killed by a drunken driver. Not long after his death, I went to his room and looked through some of his papers. A single picture stopped me. It showed a dark-haired South American boy, about five years old.... I flipped the card over and read it: "Here is your child. Thank you for sponsoring him...." I wondered how my brother had donated $240 a year to Compassion International, when he had so little money to spare. The joy of his own success is pitted against the death of his brother and the decline of his father --- spiritually, emotionally, physically. Asgedom compares his father to Gregor, in Kafka's Metamorphosis. Soon after arriving in America, blindness made it impossible for him to work, and he turned into a querulous old man, with little to do, making the children clean and re-clean the house, the driveway, the basement. But just before his death, at a gathering of Ethiopians, he offered them a memory of what they had left behind: He had a rare talent for rhyming in geetme, our culture's spoken-word freestyle rap. He would go on for half an hour without pause, "ISIKOOM DHO KITBAHALOO AKAHL GODOLO, AYNISIKUM INDEEKUM BEHAGOD NETEE MULUO KEYHEE BAHREE TIZELILWO." (OH, YOU, WHO ARE CALLED HANDICAPPED. AREN'T YOU THE VERY ONES WHO WITH BOUNDLESS JOY LEAP OVER THE EXPANSIVE RED SEA?) "In my younger days, my embarrassment created a smokescreen that blocked me from hearing my father's rhymes," the author says. Later, "maturity opened my ears and my heart....I remember one time when his poetry rivaled Homer, Virgil, and Shakespeare. I waited until we got home and then asked him to repeat the lines." I have since forgotten those lines, but I can never forget the quiet, almost embarrassed shock that flooded his eyes when I asked him to repeat them. It was the shock of a man who had slowly been convinced by those around him that he had little to offer; a man whose new country had labeled him insignificant; a man whose opinion rarely mattered as it once had. We reviewers prize our toughness when reading books that may try to push us into sentiment. With this one, however, I surrendered. Asgedom finds himself accepted to five colleges. Then, later, I got home and found two envelopes waiting for me, one from Harvard and the other from Yale. I opened them and read their contents. Then I walked over to the living room to tell my parents. Their dream had come true. Their boy had earned admission to the best universities in the country. And Harvard --- the best-known one in the land --- had offered him a full-tuition scholarship. His parents wept. He wept. And, dear reader, alas --- so did this reviewer.
Hoffman figures it was his getting into Brandeis. The teachers that ended up there! In the mid-1950s, you could find Herbert Marcuse, Frank Manual, Irving Howe, Max Lerner, Abraham Maslow, Philip Rahv, and "a crafty old codger named James Klee who slipped off each summer to score mushrooms in Mexico." After graduating, Hoffman found Berkeley and "strange rumblings" in the United States: sit-ins in Greensboro, "angry poems" in San Francisco, vigils for Caryl Chessman, and the House Un-American Committee hearings in San Francisco. He was on his way. We go along willingly. For Abbie writes winningly, scintillatingly. His tale of those years is the tale of so many of us being bored silly during the Eisenhower years, all the while knowing that our country was sponsoring secret revolutions abroad, murdering dissent within its own borders. Our sense of justice was piqued, especially when we found out that our own elected officials "overthrew the elected governments of Guatemala and Iran. They are trying every day to kill Castro." There was organizing, there were marches, there was love in the streets, and psychedelics: ALife magazine cover story was touting LSD as the new wonder drug that would end aggression. I've always maintained that Henry Luce did much more to popularize acid than Tim Leary. Years later I met Clare Boothe Luce at the Republican convention in Miami. She did not disagree with this opinion. America's version of the Dragon Lady caressed my arm, fluttered her eyes and cooed, "We wouldn't want everyone doing too too much of a good thing." The CIA was funding LSD experiments at the Langley Porter Clinic. Hoffman and his friends stole a batch, and after trying it out, he reports: "Say what you want about the CIA, but they sure had damn good acid." Time danced in space. I talked continuously. When the others didn't want to hear, I picked up the phone and called God --- collect. We had a nice chat. The Virgin Mary swept down from a cloud in the ceiling and I think we...I'm not sure, but we petted a little... I took buddy Ira's pen and wrote, "I was burned on the silver rim of space." It took on meanings beyond meanings. Later, Hoffman goes alone out to get food for everyone. The guy "with the funny white hat" repeats back his order, "That'll be four tunafish, two ham and egg, five BLTs, four hamburgers, three malteds and a Coke." "That's right," I agreed. "Do you have any mushroom clouds?" "No, we ain't got mushroom but I can whip up a cheese omelette..." "Right." I said. Twenty-six lives later he appeared out of the back room with three huge brown bags stuffed with food. I paid the bill and somehow managed to steer everything back to the loft. "Let's see now, who ordered the pickle- Later, Hoffman is to give a speech at a "movement disco at a church." Father Gonyer eyed me strangely. "Your speech was getting pretty flowery there. What's all that jazz about 'trailways of life' and 'byways of bliss?' You trying to be Allen Ginsburg or somebody, hunh? hunh? hunh?" he jabbed. Hoffman is comic, but he's no fool. He studies television intensively to figure out how to use it to change the world. His philosophy is pure pragmatism: I practice nonviolence as a tactic, but was far from a follower of Gandhi. Confrontation always demanded surprise and uncertainty. By saying, "If you punch me in the face, I'll turn the other cheek," you could often get hurt more than if you kept a threat of returning the blows. While Gandhi was fasting in jail, guerrillas blew up trains throughout India. When Martin Luther King, Jr., prayed, blacks rioted and armed groups formed in the ghettos. Despite this rhetoric, much of Hoffman's power comes from his willingness to be silly. The trial of the Chicago Seven --- and the description of it here --- is so rich because he's talking high theatre, carefully orchestrated by him and most but not all of his fellows (Tom Hayden, he convinces us, was an arrogant twit, "absolutely without humor.") The defendants had something different to offer the world --- their "willingness to go outside the accepted form of courtroom behavior:" Once it was demonstrated that we neither feared the court's power nor were impressed with the pomp and circumstance of tradition, all hell broke loose. The Chicago Conspiracy Trial became, among other things, the greatest comedy of manners ever to occur in a courtroom. As Hoffman (Abbie, not Julius) said later, "When decorum becomes repression, the only dignity free men have is to speak out." And as Hoffman, (Julius, not Abbie) said during the trial, "The jury will disregard the kiss blown by defendant Hoffman." It's useless for me or anyone else to try to "review" Abbie Hoffman's Autobiography. He is an eloquent writer, and what he has to tell us is pure Abbie. He was a merry idealist who was appalled at a governmental system that was (and, apparently, still is) willing to validate cruelty, war, and injustice as patriotism. For his funny, righteous caring about his country, he was spied on, cornered, beaten, jailed (three times in one day was his record) and finally set up with a drug charge which, had he not fled, may have consigned him to jail for the rest of his days. Even in hiding, he could not stop working for Right and Good. He reappeared (new face) as Barry Freed and embarked on Save the River! to stop the Army Corps of Engineers from destroying the St. Lawrence. But running away turned out to be ruinous. For one who was so purely Abbie, changing his name and his face, hiding, always on the move, always terrified of being discovered, pretending to be who he wasn't --- all these murdered the true, comic part of him. Even after he emerged from underground, he was given to grievous depressions. Finally, several years ago, using Phenobarbital and alcohol, he did himself in. I have lived outside of the United States for many years. I do it mostly because of health and dotage but, too, I return less than I should because, when I am here, I cannot stop despairing for my country. Abbie was of our generation and our mind-set. The barriers that me and my friends stormed, marching, protesting --- and, yes, getting naked --- were a small scale tribute to Abbie's works on such a grand scale. It seems harder now. To demonstrate at a convention, Democratic or Republican, they move you as far from the action as possible, into an isolated open-air prison called "The Protest Area." To march for any cause, one has to have a license, and often the police --- in their Darth Vader outfits --- outnumber the protesters. Free speech has come to mean low insults on radio or television. Our legislators seem as much bought, paid for and delivered as those from the desolate times after the Civil War. The country seems stuck on an escalator that continuously moves down. Bulging prisons, ruinous, meaningless drug laws, a slow and careful dismantling of the Bill of Rights coupled with the victories of position, money and power that come from stepping on the still-warm corpses of the poor and the dispossessed. The media that Abbie so loved for its ability to change people now seems primarily used to show the needy what they need in order to get ahead (advertisements), coupled with the repeated message (programs ) that to achieve these goals one must have guns, cruelty, greed, cynicism and a terrible desolation of spirit. The message has gone far beyond the medium. Because I am away from America many months of the year, I often miss national events of importance. The whole Gulf War took place outside my consciousness, as did the Clinton Weenie Scandals. (Unfortunately I was here when they destroyed the WTC). I somehow missed news of Hoffman's self-inflicted death in April of 1989, so as I read through his Autobiography, I found myself looking forward to the last chapters where, in his merry way, he would offer some ideas of how we might get out of this new jungle of American frenzy and hate --- one that seems so much more vicious than the one that we lived through in the 60s. Then I learn, on the very last page, in a brief encomium by Howard Zinn, that Abbie is no longer with us; and I find myself feeling abandoned, grieving that our society should so casually chew up and spit out such a patriot; drive him into exile, forcing on him a death of spirit from which there could be no escape.
In 1999 he was diagnosed with a degenerative disease of the eyes known as AMD --- age-related macular degeneration. He begins his story with the first symptoms: the feeling that there was never enough light to read by; then, one day, "a smudge of ash, as from a distant fire, falling on the page of my book." It was not ash that was falling; it was his vision that was failing.
Within weeks, Champlin was forced to give up driving, his daily luncheons with friends and --- except, at great strain, using peripheral vision --- going to art shows and watching television and movies. Hardest of them all, for one who had been writing for over sixty years, he lost the ability to read.
There were, of course, compensations. There were books on tape, and the many recordings offered by the Library of Congress. But he complains that it never will be the same; he often finds himself drifting off to sleep after a couple of chapters of, say, The Brothers Karamazov.
Champlin can still compose letters and articles on his computer, but he faces the problem that many of us touch-typists have: when his fingers drift to one side or the other, and "smf jr gomfd jo,dr;g etoyomh ;olr yjos" [he finds himself writing like this].
It is hard not to be touched by this most ironical of destinies for one whose life was reading and writing. And, because he is such a good reporter, in the course of My Friend one learns a great deal about AMD. But simple fact-telling can be frustrating for the reader, and possibly for the writer.
As a reporter, Champlin was trained in post-WWII America journalism, where one must keep emotions under control, to let the facts speak for themselves. He is obviously a person who has been programmed to be uncomfortable with feelings.
This becomes apparent in his telling of his meetings at the Center for the Partially Sighted in Los Angeles, where he had an interview with a young social worker: She asked me many questions about depression. Was I depressed? Did I have to fight depression? She asked the same basic questions in different guises, almost as if they were trick questions and this was one of those devious police interrogations.
He tells us that he shrugged these off "with a show of resistance to the questions as being irrelevant." He then goes on to tell us, "I think I have coped with my new handicap fairly well."
However, those of us who have been in the handicap business all these many years know that coping doesn't always mean stiff-
"I dream as if I were still fully sighted....Perhaps because of my dreams, I awake each morning imagining for one brief, very brief, moment that my full sight has returned."
Champlin offers the possibility that his dreams might be "a psychological truth that is probably worth studying."
Well, yes and no. Denial, as he is rapidly learning, can be a life-saver. But it can also be punishing. Dreams have a truth of their own that has little to do with journalism, and less with logic --- at least the logic of the daytime world. I have been in a wheelchair or on crutches or on a gurney for almost fifty years now, but I still dream of walking --- although, wonderfully true to form (for me, for the dreams), it's often as if I am trying to walk through molasses.
The very persistence of these dreams may be telling me that my walking or running (or even wading) is not the key to survival. More crucial is what we do with what the gods have dealt out to us.
We can rage at those around us, be angry at the world, sulk. Or, we can pretend that it never happened. We can also keep on keeping on, and maybe learn a few tricks in the process. In his fine autobiography, John Hockenberry wrote that being quadriplegic gave him a chance to teach himself about a whole new world: of wheelchairs, of getting from here to there without falling, and --- if you will believe it --- of learning to give live network feeds to NPR at a time when there were no pay phones built to handle wheelchairs.
Champlin doesn't spend much time on his grief or anger. I suspect his journalistic self thinks it unseemly to do so. But there are clues of something going on... far beyond what he believes he is telling us about himself.
He admits to being moved when his brother Joe, a Catholic priest from Syracuse, had the whole family do a laying-on of hands, "touching my head and saying a silent or barely audible prayer." He tells us that it was a "deeply moving experience," reports that the moment of togetherness with his family "reaffirms me when the going gets rough."
It probably goes deeper than "reaffirmation," and the truth of this shows in his choice of words. In two pages, speaking about his new dependence, his lost independence, and related spiritual matters, he wobbles between three different personas --- "I", "you," and "one." (Good psychotherapists invariably examine case --- the use of the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person in patient's speech --- to reveal how far we are distancing ourselves from our agony.)
On page 38 of we have "Generally speaking, my faulty vision is not a danger to me." [Italics added.] On page 39, it's "You are dependent --- most particularly on your wife, who has suddenly added the duties of full-time chauffeur, stenographer, reader, guide to all the functions you had before." And towards the bottom of the page, the final mix: "Wherever one stands theologically, I commend to you the warmth and support of family and friends."
Champlin tells us that his friends are fond of his sense of humor. There's the quote from George Burns:
He used to say, he read the obituaries in bed, and if his own name was not among them, he got up and shaved.
Describing the simple accomodations that must be made in the morning in front of the mirror, the mirror in which he can barely see himself, there is always the matter of whiskers, teeth, and hair: "Parting my hair is such sweet sorrow."
Most of what he has to tell us, though, is that whatever it is that has him hurts, and he's troubled by how to deal with the hurt. He wants to be brave and stouthearted --- we all want to be brave and stouthearted; we certainly don't want to be accused of whining. But we have to run into the fine line between being brave and working overtime to hide the ache.
Many writers --- writers as diverse as John Hockenberry, Andre Dubus, and Ram Das --- refer to their post-disability world as "a new life." We would hope that Champlin, now an integral part of this brave new world, with his years of critical and intellectual discipline, will be able to offer insights that can be of benefit to others, to help those with AMD and other disabilities who try to make it through their days without bitterness, with love.
Dear RALPH: I have read your magazine and I am agog. I would like to subscribe so I can receive mailings of The Folio and help your efforts to better what's left of American letters. I understand that, upon request, you will also send me a free copy of A Cricket in the Telephone (At Sunset) --- poems from the late Fessenden Review. Please sign me up for: NAME: _______________________________________
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or maybe this is what he means to do.
He rides carefully into the burning town.
the window-grates blacken with heat. He rides by.
In the hills behind him there is a glow that is not the burning.
The Acropolis maybe. The Dome of the Rock.
has worn away. He has a shoulder-wound also, an old crescent scar.
Now his chest sweats, now his abdomen.
He is more agile than laughter.
behind him. They are leaving town or they're trailing him.
Either way it's too late.
wherever he looks, and this keeps him busy.
Maps and globes and civilizations not on fire.
he sees ashes, nails, explosions of glass.
From Uncertain Grace,
©2001, Copper Canyon Press
Medical Care During
The American Civil War
Frank R. Freemon
(Illinois)
and also pleads a little
a rather grey man, and so on and so forth, but still your father. The only one
you have, and that's something your irony can't change.
That cheap woman you're with may let off
fireworks in bed, I'm not an expert in such matters
and I'm sorry to mention it, but fireworks
go out and time is drying up and the summer is over and you are
not back. The summer is over the autumn is gone and what about you,
where are you? Shrouded in fog in limbo in the arms
of a whore. It's lucky your mother --- well, never mind. Don't hang up.
Just a minute. Listen to me: Dita is back here. In your room.
Sometimes, just in my mind's eye, I look at her and think,
my grandchild is drying up. Wait. Don't put the phone down. The autumn
is over and you are just mist. Last night I dreamed of my own father,
he was kneading dough, grunting hoarsely in Ladino, Stupido Albert,
asno, in ten more minutes se hizo bamets. This call
is already costing me a fortune, but there's one more thing I have to tell you:
under the same roof she is waiting and so am I. There is something not right
about this. The summer is over and the autumn is gone, the rain brings me
a smell of dust. Don't come back too late.
Amos Oz
©2001 Harcourt, Inc.
John Barth
(Avon)
Leven2@bellsouth.net
Francis Wheen
(Norton)
A True Story of the American Dream
Mawi Asgedon
(Megadee, Box 57060, Chicago IL 60657)
Of Abbie Hoffman
(Four Walls/Eight Windows)
A Writer's Struggle with Macular Degeneration
Charles Champlin
(John Daniel & Co.)
Box 7272
San Diego CA 92167
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