BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : Chinua Achebe's 'British-Protected Child'

Chinua Achebe's sharp and inspiring essays:
The Education of a British-Protected Child

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / January 4, 2010

[The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays, by Chinua Achebe. (Knopf, October 6, 2009, 172 pp., $24.95)]

Here’s a contemporary writer of compelling fiction and non-fiction alike with whom I can really identify, and feel a sense of genuine comradeship. In part, that’s because he talks about the “Third World,” “imperialism,” and “neocolonialism” -- words that don’t seem to be fashionable in academic circles these days.

The writer’s name is Chinua Achebe, and while he was born in Nigeria, he has spent much of his life in the United States, teaching, writing, and observing American ways and American literature. His latest book -- The Education of a British-Protected Child -- is a collection of 16 sharp and inspiring essays about politics and language, oppression and the human spirit.

The essays are all written clearly and poetically. They express the perspective of a man of true wisdom, and not just learning or education, and, like the title itself, the essays embody a playful sense of irony. When he was a child the British didn’t protect him at all, he explains, and they didn’t bring democracy to Africa, either, he says. “British colonial administration was not any form of democracy, but a fairly naked dictatorship,” he says.

The author of Things Fall Apart -- one of the most widely read and best-known 20th-century African novels -- Achebe writes with a sense of compassion and partisanship too. He knows clearly which side he’s on -- the side of the oppressed against the oppressors -- but he also values what he calls “the middle ground -- that place where the human spirit resists an abridgement of its humanity.”

He goes on to say that this quality is “to be found primarily in the camp of the colonized, but now and again in the ranks of the colonizer too.” So, he acknowledges his intellectual debt to British scholars, such as Basil Davidson, the author of The African Slave Trade.

Achebe also gives a nod in the direction of my book, The Mythology of Imperialism, first published in 1971 and reprinted in 2009 by Monthly Review Press. “Mr. Raskin’s title,” Achebe writes, “defines the cultural source out of which Joseph Conrad derived his words and ideas.” Conrad’s work, he adds, “is grounded quite firmly in that mythology of imperialism which has so effectively conditioned contemporary civilization and its modes of education.”

It’s nice to be acknowledged by Achebe, if I do say so myself. What’s more, Achebe’s book provides useful tools for understanding the role of imperialism today, and the ways that individuals buy into it no matter what their skin color.

In an essay entitled “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration,” Achebe describes his own education in Nigeria in a school modeled on the British public school. As a boy, he read books about Africa and Africans by white authors such as John Buchan and Rider Haggard. Achebe came to identity with the white characters not the Africans. “I went through my first level of schooling thinking I was of the party of the white man in his hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes,” he says.

In the 1960s, of course, African Americans who thought they were of the party of the white man were sometimes called “Oreos.” I remembered that word and the image it conjures while reading Achebe’s book, and I thought also of President Obama.

Could it be, I wondered, that like the youthful Achebe, Obama thinks he’s of the party of the white man? And could it be that like Achebe he’ll have an awakening and a kind of conversion? Perhaps Mr. Achebe ought to send Mr. Obama a copy of this book, along with his brilliant first novel Things Fall Apart, which has helped to change the ways that readers around the world see Africa.

Perhaps our president will come to see, along with Achebe, that “Our humanity is contingent on the humanity of our fellows. No person or group can be human alone. We rise above the animal together, or not at all.”

[Jonah Raskin is the author of The Mythology of Imperialism (Monthly Review Press), and Field Days (University of California Press.)]

Find The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays, by Chinua Achebe, on Amazon.com.

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Robert Jensen on Christina Nehring : Conflicting Visions of Romantic Love

Christina Nehring. Photo by Russell Jacob / Philly.com.
Conflicting visions of romantic love:
A review of Christina Nehring's A Vindication of Love

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / July 21, 2009

[A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century. By Christina Nehring. HarperCollins. 336 pp. $24.99.]

Cristina Nehring's title marks the problem with her attempt to vindicate love and reclaim romance: Love needs no vindication, and we shouldn't be eager to reclaim the vision of romance she offers -- dark and dramatic, tortured and tragic, always a heroic individual endeavor. If humans are to survive and thrive in the 21st century, we will need a very different vision of love from Nehring's.

Many, myself included, would agree with Nehring's central point: There is something shallow and unfulfilling about the readily available, commodified sex so common in contemporary U.S. society, and something equally empty about the passionless paint-by-numbers relationships in which so many find themselves trapped.

The problem comes in her celebration of romance as constant, tumultuous, emotional struggle and tedious existential angst. Her prescription -- to intensify the erotic charge in romance and sex by celebrating and intensifying the domination/subordination dynamic -- is rooted in a misdiagnosis of the malady. Our warped sexual ethic derives directly from that dynamic, and we can't save ourselves by deepening our attachment to patriarchy.

Perhaps the term patriarchy -- the unequal share of power society accords to men and male concerns -- may seem old-fashioned. It's less commonly used than it once was to describe U.S. society, yet it remains useful: Men and male concerns still dominate the private and public spheres, and men's violence enforces that domination in a rape culture. The very idea of domination can become "natural": It can become accepted that society always will be hierarchical and that the best we can do is smooth off the rough edges and find our place.

Instead of eroticizing inequality, as Nehring suggests, there is no reason we can't eroticize equality. Feminist movements have long argued for a cultural shift toward a sexuality based on an egalitarian spirit, which doesn't rob us of passion but opens up new space for a different idea of passion.

Nehring regards feminism not as a social movement dedicated to the liberation that comes with the end of hierarchy and real equality, but rather as an impediment that mutes rather than enhances our emotional lives. She observes, correctly, that a woman's reputation as a thinker can be tainted by "an erotically charged biography" in a way a man's typically is not, but suggests that feminism, with its "antiromantic bias," must share the blame along with patriarchy.

But let's imagine a more radical feminism, one that rejects hierarchy and commits itself to real community -- couldn't that make possible a more meaningful kind of love? Nehring wants none of that political struggle; she insists on setting herself up as a heroic figure beyond politics who wants to lead us to a transcendental love and romance.

Although she draws most of her examples from literature, at the heart of Nehring's book is a failure of imagination. After describing power discrepancies as having a "magnetic force," as if they come from nature rather than human choices, she asserts that adult erotic relationships "thrive on inequalities of almost every ilk." That is true enough in a patriarchal society, but such inequality is neither natural nor desirable. Nehring can't seem to imagine life outside patriarchy's hierarchy: "It is precisely equality that destroys our libidos, equality that bores men and women alike," she writes. Trapped within such an ultimate victory of patriarchy, our imaginations atrophy and our choices narrow.

Nehring tries to package this capitulation as "transgression," but it feels like empty macho posturing. "Real transgression takes guts," she tells us, sounding like one of the guys in the locker room. This transgression transgresses nothing and, in fact, keeps us trapped. When the trap springs, the results are often brutal. Nehring offers us violent metaphors -- "When we fall in love, we hand our partner a loaded gun" -- but we should remember that the violence in relationships is often not metaphor but reality, with women most commonly the target.

On the book's last page, Nehring reveals that she bears "the bodily scars of a loss or two in love," including being "hospitalized by love." No details are offered, and she is under no obligation to provide them. But throughout this book, Nehring's own words contradict her thesis and hint that we should strive for something beyond her notion of love-as-heroic-quest. If such love is always tragic, maybe it's time to reconstruct love and romance rooted in different values.

I suggest an alternative title: A Vindication of Love Grounded in Equality and Community: Reclaiming Life. Not as snappy, but it highlights key ideas that would help us sort out our emotional and erotic connection to others. Love is more than the meshing of bodies in sex. Love is more than the acceptance of conventional relationships. But striving for something more doesn't have to mean glorifying domination and subordination, or accepting the brutality that flows from them.

There's a sadness at the core of this book that tells us much about the ultimate emptiness of romance as Nehring envisions it. What we need is a new conception of love: we need to rethink the community within which love happens. What would love-as-the-eroticizing-of-equality look like in a society that was defined not by hierarchy but by justice? We may not know that from experience, but we can try to imagine it.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009). This article was also posted at Philly.com. Robert Jensens articles on The Rag Blog are here.]

Find A Vindication of Love, by Chrintina Nehring on Amazon.com.

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BOOKS / 'We Lost the Vietnam War Because We Didn't Understand That They Were Poets'

A detail of “Guerrilla Warfare: A Surprise Attack,” 1966. To see several other images from “Mekong Diaries,” click here (PDF file). Graphic: Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum.
Christian Appy on ‘Mekong Diaries’
By Christian G. Appy / January 16, 2009

“We lost the war because the Vietnamese just flat out beat us. And we lost the war because we didn’t understand that they were poets.” I was offered this Delphic explanation of American defeat in Vietnam by Larry Heinemann, a novelist who survived some of the war’s fiercest fighting in 1967 and 1968 as a soldier with the 25th Infantry Division near the Cambodian border in Tay Ninh province. The inspiration for his enigmatic comment came years later when he revisited Vietnam and met a professor of literature whose wartime service included lectures on American writers to Vietnamese troops as they traveled down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Professor Lien told the young soldiers about Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

“Now what Vietnamese literature did the American military teach to you?” Lien asked in all sincerity. “I laughed so hard I almost squirted beer up my nose,” Heinemann recalls. He explained that American military training did not place a premium on the prose or poetry of any culture, even its own.

But how could poetry, or any kind of art, help explain one of history’s most astonishing victories? I think what Heinemann meant was that the Communist-led cause in Vietnam mobilized not just bodies, but souls. How else to explain the will of millions of Vietnamese to fight for years under unimaginably difficult conditions—under the most massive bombing in world history, in jungle camps and tunnels, on a diet of rice and cassava, for year after year after year. It was common for people to fight for five or even 10 years if they lived long enough. I met one man who was away from home for 29 years fighting the French and then the Americans. When he finally returned, his mother insisted that he show her a familiar mole on the back of his head to confirm that he was, in fact, her son.

To maintain morale, the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) deployed hundreds of artists, writers, actors, singers, photographers, puppeteers and dancers. These members of the “Literature and Arts” section of the military (Van Nghe) did not just visit combat troops, or lecture to them; they lived with them, moved with them, camped with them, and sometimes fought along with them. They were military artists in residence, only the residence was a war zone, not a campus. When combat was imminent they might move to the rear, but, when necessary, they picked up arms and fought, and died.

What a contrast to the morale-boosting efforts of the U.S. military. In his memoir, commander William Westmoreland, sounding very much like a corporate personnel manager, claimed that the morale of his troops remained high because they had a one-year tour of duty, a one-week R & R in an Asian capital like Bangkok, well-stocked PXs and other “creature comforts.” That, and an occasional USO show featuring Bob Hope and young starlets like Joey Heatherton and Ann-Margret, pretty much exhausted the command’s prescription for morale. Of course, the strongest morale is built on an enduring commitment to a clear and convincing underlying moral purpose, a cause, and the military was no more successful than U.S. policymakers at identifying a cause in Vietnam that could sustain the faith of its citizens and its soldiers.



Sherry Buchanan’s new book, “Mekong Diaries: Viet Cong Drawings & Stories, 1964-1975,” gives us a stunning look at some of the wartime art produced by the Vietnamese soldier-artists who served in the “American War” to drive out the U.S., topple the American-backed government in Saigon and reunite Vietnam. The book’s title is a bit misleading. This is not a collection of diaries. There are a few scraps of moving wartime correspondence and some wartime poems by Nguyen Duy, but this is, primarily, a collection of watercolors and sketches created during the war by soldier-artists.

To provide some context for the images, Buchanan has included several introductory essays and reminiscences from each of the 10 featured artists. The essays are written by Buchanan, a former features editor at The Wall Street Journal who now works independently on Asian art and culture, and two of her collaborators—Nam Nguyen (a Vietnamese-American who left Vietnam as a refugee in 1975 at age 7), and Nguyen Toan Thi, a war artist who was, until 2005, the director of the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum.

Most of the featured artists were born in southern Vietnam, and a number of them served in the war of resistance to French rule (1946-1954)—the First Indochina War—as well as the American War. After the Geneva Accords divided Vietnam in 1954, they “regrouped” to the North, where they received training at the Hanoi School of Fine Arts; a few trained in the Soviet Union as well. As the United States escalated its military intervention to prevent the collapse of the government it had backed in South Vietnam since 1954, Hanoi began to send artists on the four-month trip down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the southern “Front.” During the course of the American War, about 100 soldier-artists served with units of the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (the southern guerrillas known to Americans as the Viet Cong) and units of the People’s Army of Vietnam (the North Vietnamese army). Sixty-two of them died in the war.

Much of the art they produced during the war has been lost or destroyed. Many works that survive were stored in abandoned U.S. ammunition boxes—the driest and tightest containers the artists could find. After the war, what remained was tucked away in trunks and largely forgotten, in part because the postwar artistic establishment regarded most of it as crude and unfinished, created under duress with the most rudimentary supplies—with pencils, worn-out brushes or twigs, with inferior ink, children’s watercolor kits or dirt and saliva, on cheap paper, newsprint or cardboard. In the postwar era some of it was reworked into larger, more polished watercolor, lacquer and oil paintings, but the great bulk of it was ignored for many years. At least part of the explanation for its recovery has been the interest expressed in it by foreigners, especially American veterans, art collectors, scholars and tourists (and quite a lot has been sold to them).

Many of the works gathered here are simply beautiful—amazingly so given the conditions of their creation—the kind of art you could hang in a dining room without risk of distressing your dinner guests. Indeed, one of the most obvious things to say about this work is that it defies almost every common American or Western conception of war-related art. There is very little here that evokes the horrifying human, animal and physical wreckage of war that is the subject of Picasso’s “Guernica,” Goya’s “The Disaster of War” etchings, or Delacroix’s “The Massacre at Chois.” Nor does it resemble the searing and violence-haunted work produced by America’s Vietnam veteran artists and collected by the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum (examples of this art have been published as “Vietnam: Reflexes and Reflections,” edited by Eve Sinaiko and published by Harry Abrams Inc., 1998). Nor does it even resemble most of the propaganda poster art that was produced in Hanoi during the war and meant to celebrate the heroism and righteousness of “people’s war.”

Instead, most of it is surprisingly serene. For example, several watercolors feature an adolescent boy or girl sitting calmly on the ground. They look perfectly at ease with a tranquil, somewhat faraway gaze, posed as if on a picnic or a school outing with a hint of foliage in the background. The only indication that they are guerrilla fighters is the striking fact that they are holding automatic rifles. Yet, they are holding them as lightly and casually as you might hold a parasol. While a few images depict Vietnamese guerrillas aiming and presumably firing their rifles, there are no exploding bombs or napalm, no scenes of civilian massacres, no images of the bloody aftermath of battle, no severed limbs, no children screaming in agony or grieving mothers, certainly nothing resembling the images (mostly from photography) that most characterize American visual memory of the war. Nor, even, do they match Vietnamese accounts of the war’s harder realities.

Fragment from “Crossing Bas Sac River,” 1970. Graphic: Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum.

Looking at those calm, well-fed teenagers in the war art made me think of five women I met who had, as teenagers, volunteered to serve in the jungles of the Truong Son Mountains, building and repairing the many branches of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In the rainy season they were almost never dry. Sometimes they stood for hours up to their waists in water trying to damn rushing streams that threatened the trails. The work was backbreaking. Some girls were rendered infertile. Food was so scarce many became malnourished. Everyone eventually got malaria. It killed some. Most survived, but the disease made their hair fall out. Sometimes after a bombing attack they would form “dare to die” squads to defuse an unexploded bomb. One day, a bomb fell nearby and they had to dig five people out of a shelter that had suffered a direct hit. “We were on our hands and knees clawing at the dirt. Our arms were smeared with blood. There were five people in that shelter. Four of them just turned to porridge. We couldn’t tell them apart. Only one body was recognizable. That woman was holding her child so tightly we couldn’t separate them. We buried them together.” Finally, after years, the girls, now women, were able to go home. “Living in the jungle for so many years made us look terrible. After the war we came home hairless with ghostly white eyes, pale skin, and purple lips.”

How then can we understand what Sherry Buchanan fully acknowledges as the “romantic,” “dreamy” and “idyllic” quality of much of this art? As she points out, “Life in the damp, dark, snake-infested chambers of the Cu Chi tunnels is made to look cozy, with a scarf used as a pillow, a teapot, a bottle of rice wine.” By way of explanation, she and Nam Nguyen suggest that the serenity of the work reflects both an immersion in French-influenced art training along with a deeper Vietnamese cultural predisposition to seek mental peace amid physical and emotional turmoil. And even the length of the war may have reinforced a tendency toward a wishful, wistful art meant to deflect attention from the apparently endless hardship. “I didn’t want to portray suffering,” artist Thai Ha recalled. “You must keep on living an ordinary life to be able to fight a long war.”

There are important exceptions. In 1965, from Hanoi, Le Lam did some drawings of U.S.-supported torture based on reports from the South. One of them shows a woman lying on the ground, naked to the waist, with two snakes crawling out of her trousers and a third posed to strike her face, an image reminiscent of the torture inflicted by South Vietnamese soldiers on Le Ly Hayslip after she was caught spying for the Viet Cong (as described in her memoir, “When Heaven and Earth Change Places”).

And artist Huynh Phuong Dong told Buchanan, “As an artist, I went to record the agony of the war. My drawings are history through painting.” His scarlet and orange watercolor, “Crossing the Saigon River Late at Night,” has a kind of lurid turbulence that powerfully signals impending violence without directly depicting it. The same might be said of Vo Dong Minh’s pastels of the Tet offensive. And perhaps one reason we don’t see more images of combat scenes is that they have been eagerly snapped up by private collectors.

Even so, virtually all of this art avoids death and suffering. Dong’s work doesn’t really evoke much “agony”—the goal he claimed—and even Le Lam seems to dismiss the significance of his torture sketches: “A photographer documents atrocities, the artist must portray life.” Still, the serenity of the art remains puzzling. “What calmness of mind,” Buchanan wonders, “allowed them to create stunning landscapes and elegant portraits as B-52s dropped their arsenals?”

The question she poses circles back on itself, but perhaps extraordinary calmness is a key explanation of this art. As Quach Phong put it, “The soldiers liked to watch me draw. I was calm, it helped calm them down. They asked to have their portraits done in case they died. It made them feel part of history.” Pham Thanh Tam said something very similar: “They liked to have me around to watch me draw. It seemed to calm them, and make them feel special.” After a body of work was completed, the soldier-artists would have an exhibition. They would tie a clothesline between two trees and hang their work with clothespins. It doesn’t take too great a leap to imagine that an art exhibit in the middle of the jungle, in the midst of war, could have a powerful emotional effect.

Though the artists do not say as much, it is also surely true that there were clear orders from political officers to keep this art as positive and inspiring as possible. These were, after all, artists with a political mission. That they produced great work in spite of constrictions on subject matter is a tribute to their skill and passion. And it is also probable that many, if not all of the artists, shared the official desire to accentuate the positive. As Buchanan suggests, the artists’ personal beliefs and artistic vision seem to have “coincided with official propaganda.”

Regardless of why and how this art was produced, Buchanan was clearly drawn to it for the effect it might have on Americans. “If people could see these graceful images by the ‘savage’ Viet Cong,” she thought, “they would understand that war is a psychotic episode … not a policy choice to solve conflicts.” That’s dubious at best, I think, but it is certainly true that American culture has produced way too many cartoon images of the Vietnamese “enemy” as a ruthless and fanatical demon. As Gen. Westmoreland said, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. … Life is cheap in the Orient.”

And yet, does such an exclusive focus on Vietnamese serenity truly humanize them? My only concern is that it might invite us to an equally reductive conclusion: that the Vietnamese were, even in the midst of war, entirely noble and saintly. That is not unlike the image that surfaced in some quarters of the anti-war movement of the 1960s when valiant guerrilla revolutionaries were said to be so pure they “stole neither a needle nor a piece of thread from the people” (to use the Maoist expression). However disciplined and mentally serene, this was not a nonviolent revolution. Communist commanders ordered countless mass-wave attacks on U.S. and South Vietnamese bases, and their troops generally fought with extraordinary commitment. And, like soldiers in all wars, they could be utterly ruthless. One of them, a guerrilla fighter named Nguyen Thi Gung, was the only woman in her unit and one of its most celebrated members. She was given a decoration with the title “Valiant Destroyer of American Infantrymen.” She is not abashed about the killing she did: “I can’t imagine how many GIs I killed. After all, I detonated land mines and threw grenades, both of which could kill many men at a time.”

My point is that we need to consider the possibility that the romantic wartime art was not merely an escape from war, but served the war. Perhaps more effectively than the cant-filled propaganda of political speeches and poster art, these works may well have connected deeply with a people who undeniably believed they were participating in a sacred cause linked to a long history of struggles for national independence and unification. Vietnamese culture has a powerful strain of romanticism that coincides with other “isms,” sometimes serving them, sometimes not. Ho Chi Minh himself deeply reflected that strain. Consider this short poem he wrote in 1948 called “Full Moon in January.” It was written in the midst of war against the French:

Now comes the first full moon of the year

Rivers rise in mists to join spring skies.

We talk of strategy in high places.

Yes, sell the compass, come on the boat of the full moon.

Perhaps Heinemann’s right: We lost because we didn’t understand that they were poets.

[Christian G. Appy, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is the author of “Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides” (Penguin).]

Source / TruthDig

Thanks to Jeffrey Segal / The Rag Blog

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LITERATURE : Road Fatigue

The Beat Generation in the rearview mirror
By A.G. Mojtabai / July 11, 2008

Even from a distance, it was easy to guess that the clerk with the bowed head at BookPeople was reading behind the counter. Face to face, she was eager to share the title: Poetry As Insurgent Art by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Had I seen the Ransom exhibit on the Beats? she asked. Wasn’t it “awesome?”

A chorus of "awesome ... simply awesome" greeted me from the visitors book at the entrance to the Ransom exhibit, but also a scattering of distinctly dissonant notes (on behalf of the Beats’ abandoned wives and children), along with a murmur of bemused bewilderment: "Yes ... But is it Art?" and "Funny

My own feeling turned out to be a mix of all of the above, although proportioned differently and differently named. People of my generation use “awesome” sparingly, if at all, the word reserved to signify epic magnitudes or profoundest depths—not what we find here. Such an inflation of message and response strikes me as typical of the Beat phenomenon, though.

“On the Road with the Beats” has been on exhibit at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin since February and will continue to August 3. The scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, on loan from March until June 1, will have departed by the time of this printing. The occasion for the exhibit is the recently celebrated 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road.

"A generation in motion" is the exhibit’s organizing theme. According to the brochure:

"Pilgrims in search of a destination, [the Beats] crisscrossed the globe, from New York to San Francisco, Los Angeles to Mexico City, Tangier to Paris, Calcutta to London. ... Motion, improvisation, and process are driving concepts ... Experimental jazz and bebop prompted writers to stretch prose and the poetic line to rhythmic extremes. ... The painters known as the New York School inspired influential collaborative projects."

Originally a junkie term, “Beat” meant many things: desperate, wasted, down-and-out (beaten-down)—to which Kerouac added “beatific,” which he defined as being subject to bursts of “ragged and ecstatic joy.” To most people, mention of the Beats conjures up the small founding group of friends: Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady (better known as the fictional Dean Moriarty in On the Road), and Allen Ginsberg.

Much on the model of Ezra Pound’s relationship with the early modernist writers, Ginsberg served as editor, literary agent, and promoter for his friends. Ginsberg’s letters provide a guiding thread through their lives and the exhibit. The far fewer letters of Cassady are no less valuable. As love-focus and muse for both Kerouac and Ginsberg, Cassady was a pivotal figure in the movement. His letters were the inspiration for what Kerouac called “bop prosody”—his signature extemporaneous style.

Nowhere is the Beats’ self-mythologizing more blatant than in their depictions of Cassady. For Kerouac, his friend’s energies were beyond the natural, his countless transgressions proof of his superabundant life, “everything about him larger than life,” Kerouac wrote in one of his journals, published in Road Novels 1957-1960. Through Kerouac’s eyes, Cassady became saint, angel, archangel, “the holy con-man with the shining mind. ... the Holy Goof.” When Cassady stole a tankful of gas they needed to move on, it was a theft “that saved us, a divine theft ... Prometheus at least,” according to Kerouac’s journal entry. And, as Kerouac confessed, he always “shambled after [Cassady] as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time.”

Ginsberg added to this aggrandizement: “I have finally taught Neal,” Ginsberg wrote, “that he can do anything he wants, become mayor of Denver, marry a millionaire or become the greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he keeps rushing out to see the midget auto races.”

Cassady, however, was not unanimously liked or trusted by the other Beats. Having graduated from reform school into the streets, he was a consummate con-man, hustler, druggie, drunk, car thief (but only for joy rides and “kicks”), petty thief, and a sometimes-violent, indefatigable sexual adventurer with both men and women. Abandoned by his alcoholic father as a youngster, he had a sad start in life. On the Road repeatedly reminds the reader that the narrative is an account of the search for Neal’s lost father—a would-be archetypal quest for “the father we never found.” In point of fact, it does not seem that they searched very hard. Perhaps the father did not want to be fou

I visited the Ransom exhibit in April. Upon entering, I was immediately confronted with Kerouac’s famous scroll manuscript of On the Road lying in state. It was an attention-grabber—“This is the longest book I have ever seen,” in the words of an awed fifth-grader—and a visually arresting artifact in an exhibit that skillfully blends textual, visual, and aural elements. Sepia-toned and crumbling, venerable in its decrepitude and in the care expended on its preservation, it reminded more than one visitor of one of those ancient Dead Sea Scrolls.

A continuous stream of paper nearly 120 feet in length (the first 48 feet are unfurled in the Ransom display), the scroll was formed by taping pieces of tracing paper together. The idea was to facilitate continuous motion on the part of the writer. Typed at white heat speed during three weeks in 1951, the scroll offered Kerouac (stoked on massive doses of caffeine) a way to get the story out with maximum speed and without overmuch reflection. The tail end of the scroll manuscript was allegedly eaten by a friend’s dog, but it is possible that the scroll lacked an ending at the time. There was a long trek yet to come: The book as we know it took more than 10 years, counting Kerouac’s note-taking before hitting upon the scroll method, and six years of revision afterward as he struggled to get it published.

The scroll is a nonfictional account of five road trips taken by Kerouac with Cassady from 1947 to 1951. Real names are used. In the finally published novel, names are changed, sexual exploits are toned down, and some self-conscious flourishes are added.

“First thought, best thought” was Kerouac’s credo in creating the scroll. To which the answer must be: Well, sometimes ...

And sometimes not. I have trudged through the scroll, word after word, in a recently published book transcription. Although writing nonstop must have been a liberating breakthrough for the author, it presented a rather different experience for this reader. All five books, five journeys, are jammed together into a seemingly interminable single paragraph. Far from suggesting an open road or flowing river, the scroll creates a clotted, even static, feeling—a sense of congealed motion. Free of later embellishment for literary effect, some passages in the raw scroll version are stronger than in the final book version, though.



The most interesting artifact in the exhibit, to my mind, is a cheap, lined, spiral-bound notebook, one of Kerouac’s travel journals from 1949. It had been sold for $1,000 to a rare book dealer by the Beat poet Gregory Corso, who needed the money for heroin. The notebook can be leafed through in digital facsimile. What caught my eye were the intense reading lists, and a prayer for good times and bad, composed by Kerouac (a cradle Catholic) upon learning that his first book, The Town and the City, had been accepted for publication. The last page is filled with lists of crops for a farm Kerouac hoped to start up with Cassady, thinking it would provide a source of steady income and a healthful way of life.

On the whole, the exhibit struck me as long on literary developments arising from the Beat movement and wide in its exploration of outreach to other arts, but short on backstory. The Beats did not spring unaided from the ear of Zeus. True enough, as the Ransom’s narrative has it, the Beat movement was reactive to the repressive conformism and complacency of Cold War America. But it was also, and as truly, a continuation of long-standing American tradition. In the case of On the Road, arguably the iconic document of the Beat movement, the continuities are glaring. The open road, and before that the open frontier, had long been part of the American romance. The expansive thrust into unknown territory, adventure, the camaraderie of the open road, were—and are—cherished features of our nation’s traditional vision of itself.

The ancestors of On the Road are legion: Walt Whitman wrote the enabling charter. Twain sent Huck and Jim on a raft down a watery road. Melville had Ishmael and Queequeg light out for the open sea. Emerson counseled self-reliance; Thoreau, marching to a different drummer. And there is the long tradition of the picaresque in world literature.

From Beat to Beatnik to Hippie to Punk. Although the Beats are often conflated with the later hippies and thought of as political, they tended to be apolitical in the ’40s and ’50s. (During the ’60s, the activism of Ginsberg and others made for a somewhat different story.) Far from engaging the world, and despite all their world travel, the Beats remained largely clueless—not simply incurious and insensitive, but insensible: blind to the variety and complexity of lives other than their own. In an instant judgment that was really a prejudgment, Kerouac saw, and admired, Mexicans as “Fellahin ... the essential strain of the basic primitive,” brown toilers in the brown earth, “pure and ancient” earth figures, with “slanted eyes and soft ways.”

Even Mexico City was “one vast Bohemian camp. ... This was the great and final wild uninhibited Fellahin-childlike city that we knew we would find at the end of the road.”

In a missive to Cassady in 1957, Kerouac wrote of the locals in Tangier: “They are all hi, all wild, hep, cool, great kids, they talk like spitting from inside the throat Arabic arguments.”

This is sheer projection, of course, sweeping generalization that all but obliterates the individuals standing before him, professed admiration bordering on contempt.

A similar incomprehension is found in the Beats’ treatment of women. Women are perks of the road, ripe for the picking, thrilling for the moment, but afterward all too often bitter or clinging. Marriages are contracted, children conceived, and the boys in the club are off to their next great adventure. Escape from the complexities and responsibilities of the adult world, as much as anything else, seems to be the animating force of On the Road. Here are a few of many tip-offs: “Bitterness, recrimination, advice, morality, sadness, it was all behind him...” “Goodbye, goodbye. We roared off...” “Nothing behind, everything ahead...” To which Cassady characteristically added: “Wow! Damn! Whoopee! ... Less go, lessgo!”

At one point, even Burroughs was moved to write Ginsberg and explain why he had advised Kerouac against leaving on another jaunt with Cassady. His letter is cited in Jack Kerouac’s American Journey:

“Obviously the ‘purpose’ of the trip is carefully selected to symbolize the basic fact of purposelessness. ... To cross the continent for the purpose of transporting Jack to Frisco where he intends to remain for 3 days before starting back to N.Y. [is] a voyage which for sheer compulsive pointlessness compares favorably with the mass migrations of the Mayans ... [a] voyage into pure, abstract, meaningless motion ...”

Kerouac had a dream, and it surfaced from time to time, of having a home and a stable marriage. “I want to marry a girl,” he wrote, “so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old. This can’t go on all the time ... all the franticness and jumping around.” Instead, his marriages quickly dissolved, and he returned repeatedly to his mother’s house (which he disguised as his “aunt’s” house in his fiction). This was the only home he would ever know. He died in 1968 at age 47 from complications of alcoholism. By the late ’60s, the original friends had drifted apart, and Kerouac had dissociated himself from many of his followers.

The social norms that had so constricted the Beats had already begun to change in the ’50s in the aftermath of the Kinsey Reports. The novel Peyton Place was published and reviewed at pretty much the same time as On the Road. The doors to the counterculture had been opened.

The Beats were the heralds of change, though, and loud about it, refusing to lead Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation” or, in Kerouac’s words, to “go mad in recognized sanity.”

A Ransom visitor signed “Lady Mariposa” wrote this tribute to Kerouac: “Because of you I can be... Besos, mi Jack.” Today, in large measure because of the Beats, homoerotic love dares to speak its name. Along with all the writers who come after them, I am indebted to the Beats for their invigoration of the arts, for shattering the molds and enlarging the realm of what can be printed, sung, painted, and said. There has been a progression since then, however. Think of gangsta rap, of Bret Easton Ellis and the “brat-pack” writers of the late ’80s and the ’90s; think of Andres Serrano’s crucifix submerged in urine. “Transgression,” sometimes billed as the obligation of a true artist in the contemporary world, has become so widespread and predictable that it seems almost tame—trendy transgressive, if you will.

There is a muted undercurrent running through Kerouac’s writing. It is discernible in the travel notebook of 1949, where he recorded his plans for buying a farm and growing “sturdy” as well as “seasonal” crops, and in his recurrent daydream of finding the right girl, settling down, and resting his soul. It becomes impossible to ignore in the coda to On the Road, a passage so poignant and lyrical that it seems more sung than said:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it ... the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks, and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Blesses ... darkens ... cups ... and folds in. The prose slows down. After all that frantic rushing around, all that road going, the completion of Kerouac’s journey comes at a broken-down pier in Hoboken, near where he first set out, where he offers up this hymn to night, friendship, remembrance, and rest.

A.G. Mojtabai is the author of nine books, including the new All That Road Going. She lives in Amarillo.

Source. / The Texas Observer

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Books : Gore Vidal's Inconvenient Truths

Gore Vidal at his house in Malibu, Calif., in September 2006. Photo by Joshua Lutz/Redux.
"The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal" reminds us that this combative political provocateur is also one of our finest literary critics.
By Louis Bayard / June 23, 2008

"Is he still alive?" a friend asked me not long ago.

Casual observers might be excused for thinking of Gore Vidal in posthumous terms. A twilight pall suffused his most recent memoir, "Point-to-Point Navigation," which described the death of Vidal's longtime companion even as it ladled out retribution against longtime enemies. Many of those enemies have likewise passed on, and in recent appearances, Vidal has had to squeeze his proud, patrician figure into a wheelchair.

The old lion may be enfeebled, but he still has teeth. Doubters are referred to Deborah Solomon's recent New York Times Magazine interview, in which Vidal responded to the question "Were you chaste?" with a line that Groucho Marx might have coveted -- "Chased by whom?" -- and succinctly described his feelings on the death of William F. Buckley: "I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred."

In the course of what must have been a terrifying conversation, Solomon managed to ask Vidal why critics prefer his essays to his novels. "That's because they don't know how to read," he replied. By now he has schooled us in the dangers of conventional wisdom, but in this case, the conventioneers have it right. Vidal has never produced a great novel (though not for want of trying) because he was, from the start, an essayist manqué.

It was his misfortune, perhaps, to come of age in postwar America, when the novel was still the royal road to glory. His first book, "Williwaw," was published when he was still 19. Several more followed, among them the succes de scandale of "The City and the Pillar," one of America's first fictional depictions of homosexuality (and barely readable today). But the field-clearing fame that the young Vidal clearly hungered for, the kind his rival Truman Capote snatched up right out of the gate -- all this eluded him.

Vidal would later blame his arrested development on the homophobia of mainstream review outlets, especially the New York Times. (To this day, the Gray Lady remains high on his shit list.) But he would also write, revealingly, of William Dean Howells, who, unable to get his poems published, "went off the deep end, into prose." Something similar happened to Vidal. Unable to claim his seat in Valhalla by fictional means, he came at it subterraneously -- through the literary journal -- brandishing not a sword but a quiver of aphorisms, smeared at the tips with invective.

Vidal, of course, would go on to write a great many more novels, most of them historical, a good many of them bestsellers. What he could never do was convince us that we were reading about someone other than Gore Vidal. "Burr," to cite one of his best works, was lively and rebarbative, and yet there was no way to reconcile its cynical, astringent protagonist with the quixotic historical figure who leapt from folly to folly. Burr was, of course, Vidal. As was Lincoln, as was Grant. As was Myra Breckinridge (though, in retrospect, she might better be described as Vidal's countercultural alter ego, which may explain why she is the most persuasive of his fictional personae).

Vidal's essays, by contrast, have all the strengths of his novels with this additional grace: They don't have to make a show of inhabiting other minds. And so the qualities of the originating mind -- wit, phrasemaking, autodidacticism, a talent to inflame -- stand out all the more starkly.

For proof, we may call up "The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal," assembled by Jay Parini, the author's literary executor (more whiffs of the posthumous). That word "selected," of course, implies a certain amount of cherry-picking. Juvenilia, senilia, outmoded usages, casual tribalisms have all presumably been cast away. Or have they? To Parini's credit, more than enough remains to show why and how Vidal gets under people's skin.

There is enough, too, to show that Vidal was, in some respects, well ahead of his time. His defense of homosexuality as "a matter of taste" (in the midst of the '60s), his calls for limits on executive power, his attack on "the National Security State" ... these still walk the razor's edge of topicality. Mere weeks after the Iraq war was joined, Vidal was calling attention to the prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. Some 15 years before Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great," Vidal was declaring that monotheism was "the great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture."

He was not always so prescient. Taking his cues, probably, from Paul Ehrlich, he predicted that the entire planet would be overrun with famine by ... 2000. Some 28 years before that, he was declaring with great confidence that "the South is not about to support a party which is against federal spending ... Southern Democrats are not about to join with Nixon's true-blue Republicans in turning off federal aid."

But federal aid was the least of it. Southerners were breaking from the fold for cultural, not economic reasons, and American culture, in general, is one of Vidal's most notable blind spots. By his own choosing. Like Sinclair Lewis, he speaks of "our brainwashed majority," of the "hypocrisy and self-deception" that mark our "paradigmatic middle-class society." Unlike Lewis, he gives no signs of having actually lived there. The grandson of a U.S. senator, he was raised in privilege in Washington, D.C., and absconded as quickly as he could to Europe, sequestering himself for many years in a villa in Ravello, Italy, where he could get the right altitude on his native land.

But an aerial shot won't show you where all the bunkers are. No surprise, then, that wherever Vidal actually enters the bunker, his political reportage sparks to life. There's a deft analysis of Theodore Roosevelt that draws on conversations with Alice Longworth, and a wry and splendid take on his one-time pals the Kennedys ("The Holy Family," he calls them) that offers welcome ballast to the hagiographies of Schlesinger and Sorensen.

The old injunction to "write what you know" can be crippling for a writer of fiction, but for a writer of essays, it is close to an imperative. And there are clearly places Vidal hasn't been -- the corporate boardroom, for instance -- and things he doesn't know (though he doesn't always know it). His broad-brushed attacks on American power elites have earned him a reputation in many quarters for paranoia. In reality, he is simply vague (although vagueness is a prerequisite for paranoia). "The Few who control the Many through Opinion," he announces, "have simply made themselves invisible." A mercy for him, because he is excused from describing them at any length. He mutters darkly of "cash in white envelopes" and the "1 percent that owns the country" and the "elite" that is "really running the show." Beyond that level of signifying, he rarely ventures.

Which means that he can't exactly be proven right or wrong -- although history has done a fine job of vindicating him. If anything, the backroom corporate dealmaking of the current administration has shown that Vidal wasn't paranoid enough. We might venture to conclude, then, that he has been right more often than he has been wrong. The only problem is that he's often right for the wrong reasons. He disdains the U.S. power elite not because it oppresses the common man but because it savages his own vision of America, a history-steeped mythos that ignores (when it doesn't condemn) the multicultural realities of today's nation.

But if it's difficult to fix Vidal's standing as a political intellectual, there is no such difficulty in measuring his ability to read and assay literature. Indeed, the real contribution of Parini's collection is to remind us -- how exactly did we forget? -- that Vidal has been from the start one of our finest literary critics. Not simply because of those lancing quips. ("Might Updike not have allowed one blind noun to slip free of its seeing-eye adjective?" he wonders in a review of "In the Beauty of the Lilies.") But because the act of reading other people's books frees Vidal from having to swallow all the oxygen in the room. In much of his political writing, knowingness passes for knowledge. Here, that tends to fall away, and what's left is a man genuinely engaged with the matter at hand and willing to be changed by it.

In his long analysis of the French New Novelists, for example, Vidal cogently makes the case for theoreticians like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute before parting ways, reluctantly but firmly. "There is something old-fashioned and touching," he writes, "in [the] assumption ... that if only we all try hard enough in a 'really serious' way, we can come up with the better novel. This attitude reflects not so much the spirit of art as it does that of Detroit."

"The French mind," he adds, "is addicted to the postulating of elaborate systems in order to explain everything, while the Anglo-American mind tends to shy away from unified-field theories. We chart our courses point to point; they sight from the stars. The fact that neither really gets much of anywhere doesn't mean that we haven't all had some nice outings over the years."

There is a refreshing lack of doctrine in that judgment, and Vidal's strength as a critic is that he refuses to matriculate into anyone's school. An exhaustive study of the "Art Novels" of Barth, Barthelme and Gass leads him back to his first conclusion: "I find it hard to take seriously the novel that is written to be taught." But the road that leads him there is cobbled with dazzling insights. "I suspect that the energy expended in reading 'Gravity's Rainbow' is, for anyone, rather greater than that expended by Pynchon in the actual writing. This is entropy with a vengeance. The writer's text is ablaze with the heat/energy that his readers have lost to him."

With other authors, Vidal can be quite startlingly generous. I was surprised to learn that he considers Thornton Wilder "one of the few first-rate writers the United States has produced." Kudos are likewise extended to Italo Calvino and to Edgar Rice Burroughs (a boyhood favorite). Vidal almost single-handedly salvaged the fortunes of the late Dawn Powell, who, in his perfect formulation, "hammered on the comic mask and wore it to the end."

Vidal even has a grudging word or two for smut merchants. "By their nature," he writes, "pornographies cannot be said to proselytize, since they are written for the already hooked. The worst that can be said of pornography is that it leads not to 'antisocial' sexual acts but to the reading of more pornography. As for corruption, the only immediate victim is English prose."

On at least one occasion, as I recall, Vidal has confessed that his primary passion in life is not writing but reading, and judging from these deeply informed essays, I can well believe it. Others may suspect him of less pure motives. His social circle has been notable for its glamour, and his willingness to grant audiences to every reporter who comes calling has passed well beyond compulsion. Interviews, in general, bring out his very worst grandstanding impulses and goad him into his most insupportable statements (a bizarre defense of Timothy McVeigh, for instance, and the usual cockamamie theorizing about 9/11).

Vidal's well-documented reputation as a go-to provocateur has made it all too easy to overlook his astonishing work ethic: 24 novels, five plays, two memoirs, screenplays, television dramas, short stories, pamphlets and more than 200 essays. As this particular collection makes clear, Vidal writes to live. Approvingly, he recalls the final days of Edmund Wilson: "He was perfect proof of the proposition that the more the mind is used and fed the less apt it is to devour itself. When he died, at seventy-seven, he was busy stuffing his head with irregular Hungarian verbs. Plainly, he had a brain to match his liver."

Plainly, too, Vidal has a brain to match his self-regard. And late at night, when the blandishments of ego subside and a new book lies open in his lap, his lifelong, half-requited love for the novel still burns bright -- no matter that the novel itself is fading into insignificance. "Our lovely vulgar and most human art is at an end," he wrote in 1967, "if not the end. Yet that is no reason not to want to practice it, or even to read it. In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words."

Source. / salon.com

The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal at Amazon.com.

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