Another difference distinguished Billy from many of his wartime friends and enemies. Although the newly respectable did not suddenly acquire scruples Another difference distinguished Billy from many of his wartime friends and enemies. Although the newly respectable did not suddenly acquire scruples and cleanse society of its iniquities, they did rely less on violence to advance their fortunes. But Billy remained a gunman, coiled to defend himself or project his will through violence.
Failing in his bid for respectability, the Kid remained the consistent rebel. His criminal escapades, especially as they began to gain him notoriety, affronted and challenged the establishment. In contrast to Dolan, Riley, Matthews, and others who had initially created such turmoil, Billy continued to make trouble. Perhaps men like Judge Bristol, District Attorney Rynerson, and even Governor Wallace saw in the Kid's contempt for conventions and defiance of authority a disquieting reminder of their own pliant ethics and questionable actions. Whatever their motives, they singled him out for special treatment and ultimately, together with his comrades Bowdre and O'Folliard, saw that he paid for his insolence with his life.
Billy the Kid died as America enthusiastically plunged into the Gilded Age. The transformation of an agrarian nation into an industrial giant launched a frenzy of material acquisitiveness that corrupted national institutions with the same ethical laxity so conspicuous on the frontier. Jimmy Dolan and his friend Rynerson would have felt entirely at home in Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall or even in Grant’s White House. Only in a quick reliance on violence did the frontier differ from the nation as a whole in the relentless quest for power and wealth, and then it was largely a difference of degree.
The twin specters of corruption and violence remained embedded in American culture, periodically to surface separately or in tandem. Whether originating in the frontier experience or in some dark stain in the American character, they continue to find ambiguous expression in the legend of a youth who lived both. More than a century after his death, Billy the Kid still rides boldly across America’s mental landscape, symbolizing an enduring national ambivalence towards corruption and violence.
For a life that ended at twenty-one, that is a powerful and disturbing legacy....more
“To see the Hell’s Angels as caretakers of the old ‘individualist’ tradition ‘that made this country great’ is only a painless way to get around seein“To see the Hell’s Angels as caretakers of the old ‘individualist’ tradition ‘that made this country great’ is only a painless way to get around seeing them for what they really are - not some romantic leftover, but the first wave of a future...The Angels are prototypes. Their lack of education has not only rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy, but it has also given them the leisure to cultivate a powerful resentment, and to translate it into a destructive cult which the mass media insist on portraying as a sort of isolated oddity...”
“The Angels’ collective viewpoint has always been fascistic. They insist and seem to believe that the swastika fetish is no more than an anti-social joke, a guaranteed gimmick to bug the squares...if they wanted to be artful about bugging the squares they would drop the swastikas and decorate their bikes with the hammer and sickle. That would really raise hell on the highways...”
One of 1968's "shocking" bestsellers that is now a bit of a slog. (As Couples is to Updike; interestingly, the longueurs of both novels are attempts aOne of 1968's "shocking" bestsellers that is now a bit of a slog. (As Couples is to Updike; interestingly, the longueurs of both novels are attempts at Joycean stream of consciousness.) But Myra's voice is memorable, and that counts for something....more
Epic poems are wearisome, Poe said. This is a work of genius - but I'm relieved to be done. Epic poems are wearisome, Poe said. This is a work of genius - but I'm relieved to be done. ...more
Read this for the superbly nasty Warren Bogart, a villain righteous in his contempt, critically intricate in his abuse, and for that worthy of the narRead this for the superbly nasty Warren Bogart, a villain righteous in his contempt, critically intricate in his abuse, and for that worthy of the narrator's single sympathetic glance his way. Charlotte Douglas, his ex-wife, is the kind of female character Didion is known for: numb, baffled, drifting in and out. I don't find characters like Charlotte very interesting, but Didion does milk a kind of poetry from their stunting and disappointment, their air of unfulfillment; and Didion's portraits have at least a documentary value, as we're littered with Charlottes, women who had an illusion of an idea of themselves at, say, age 19, but who soon hit a rock, and in the subsequent years allow their spouses and lovers to talk over them, talk for them, while she warbles ineffectually over the souvenirs of youth. ...more
Grisly and surreal. Japanese bombers turned the US Battle Fleet - several spic-and-span warships of state, so clean under a tropical sun shining throuGrisly and surreal. Japanese bombers turned the US Battle Fleet - several spic-and-span warships of state, so clean under a tropical sun shining through white deck awnings - into labyrinthine tombs, zones of industrial disaster, poison pockets of chemical menace. Also, as sites of mass carnage, these wrecks shat on the democratic conceit of individuated sailors as sons of families and hopeful citizens - "Join the Navy, Learn a Trade"- and the religious conceit of a named headstone over identified remains. Raymer and the other divers worked in total darkness, felt their way in an oily murk; they were guided by topside tenders explaining the lucid ship's plans through the helmet phones; they risked their lives in every descent to make working, personal surveys of the collapsed decks, the bubbles of explosive gases, the jagged traumas of metal, the clusters of bloated bodies being eaten by crabs, and the absurdly comical bricolage of debris. And, of course, they recovered tons upon tons of shells and still-usable equipment, and righted and dewatered the salvageable ships (there's a war on, you know, and every bullet counts). Raymer is often funny, ribald; he doesn't pretend he and his team weren't also twenty-one year olds thinking of pussy and booze. He describes youthful insouciance and antic shore liberty with nice dirty immediacy, but also describes the daily work so finely that the shadows of later reflection fall just where they should....more
St. Aubyn does not, at least in this first book of the series, write especially well from the child’s point of view – and so the notoriously autobiogrSt. Aubyn does not, at least in this first book of the series, write especially well from the child’s point of view – and so the notoriously autobiographical rape is somehow less horrifying than it ought to be. Otherwise this is perfect, if at times slight. The prose is cool and pointed. The dialogue is almost never boring. The Melrose marriage made me think of The Portrait of a Lady but the Osmond figure is a real aristocrat, who augments Osmond’s cultured and covert emotional aggression with barbaric seigneurial outrages. An American poseur, Osmond could imitate aristocracy's fine aesthetized contempt, but not its primal license: to kill and fuck with impunity. Benedetta Craveri said that when the French nobles could no longer be warlords they became tastemakers. David Melrose is one such versatile monster – bel esprit and naturel grafted on a rapist bully. His conversation is intricate blood-sport. He poisons or subdues everyone around him. He will menace you, with his penis or his manners.
His disdain for vulgarity included the vulgarity of wanting to avoid the appearance of being vulgar. In this more esoteric game, he recognized only a handful of players...
St. Aubyn invokes the licentiousness of the emperors – Suetonius is David’s favorite reading and the psychology of Caligula a dinner party discussion – but the controlled cruelty of the Nazi doctors is not far behind.
David held the burning tip of his cigar close to the ants…the ants twisted, excruciated by the heat, and dropped down onto the terrace. Some, before they fell, reared up, their stitching legs trying helplessly to repair their ruined bodies. “What a civilized life you have here,” Bridget sang out as she sank back into a dark-blue deckchair.
Disinherited and defiant of his family David had found in medicine a salaried excuse for experimental sadism and lofty diagnostic contempt – and he practiced until he married a wealthy American woman, Eleanor, who having surrendered her money to this titled brute now cowers in a cave of booze and pills, her bathroom a “pharmaceutical paradise,” while he belches fire outside. It’s the plot of a typical bodice-ripper – adventurous naïveté, meet restraintless privilege - but set a decade after the first, fun ravishing, and with, you know, realistic, bored spouses – and helpless offspring. I knew I had to read St. Aubyn when Alan Hollinghurst called him “terrifyingly good.” This went down easy. On to volume 2!
If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end.
Sebald was talkiIf we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end.
Sebald was talking about flying over densely settled areas, but to read the compressed chronicle of a thousand year empire is also to view our species from a great height, and the experience offers just as frightening a vantage. From the heights of historical survey, from the distance of many centuries, the professed, the “higher” motivations and justifications barely reach our ears. “Christendom” as a united bloc of believers seems a fantasy; or a joke, an easy irony; as “democracy” will one day be; and all we can see are the compulsive collisions of states; the borders receding, the borders advancing; the cities built by some, and torn down by others; the usurpers and regicides ascending supposedly sacred thrones (each Byzantine emperor was acclaimed “equal to the Apostles”); the political entities in their periods of strength exploiting and devouring, in their periods of weakness exploited and devoured by others; the universal wolf. (Sir Philip Sidney said a great conqueror is but the momentary “cock of this world’s dunghill.”) Just as we fly over cities knowing that human beings are guiding those toy cars and emitting that industrial smoke, so also do we scan each war-filled page knowing that thousands of people, way, way down there – slightly clouded over by “battle was joined” or “the looting lasted three days” – are being raped and robbed and murdered; or are raping and robbing and murdering.
And that last ditch narrative, of “Decadence,” is story we Band-Aid over our confusion, a story that does not clarify our situation – does not point a direction or describe a momentum. Norwich’s remark that the pivotal catastrophe of Byzantium - defeat by the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert in 1071 - occurred three centuries before the Emperor became a vassal of a different Turkic state, the Ottomans (by which time the Seljuk order had been shattered in its turn by Tamburlaine’s Mongols), and four centuries before the Empire finally, cinematically “fell” (Constantine XI, last emperor and namesake of the millennium-distant founder, when he saw the Turks had breached Constantinople's land walls cast off his purple robes and led a last desperate charge, his body never to be identified or recovered*), made me pull down my copy of Richard Gilman’s Decadence: The Strange Life of a Epithet, in which I saw that I had once underlined this:
One begins to suspect that whatever “decadence” may be it plays a scapegoat role as a word, an ascription. And it serves, it seems, to cover up our ignorance of, or refusal to see, how the world operates in one of its deepest dimensions independently of what we call cause and effect…History is not a chronicle of discrete events or epochs, nor is it to be understood in categorical ways. Everything connects. The reason “decadence” will not do as a description of Rome is that it does injustice to both her past and her future; she did not wind down, she did not disappear, nor did she bring down upon herself her own fate. Fate was there, and fate is another word for change.
-----
* He was long thought to slumber in a cave, awaiting the hour when he would reconquer Constantinople/Istanbul for Christianity. What is it with Eastern Orthodoxy and agelessly slumbering heroes? The 18th century Russian field marshal and scourge of the Ottomans Aleksandr Suvuorov was also believed to sleep deeply within a mountain, to awake in the Motherland's hour of greatest peril. This belief was so durable and widespread that during WWII Red Army soldiers were propagandistically conflated with Suvorov's shade:
Like Ségur's account of the retreat from Moscow and Grant’s Personal Memoirs, Pushkin’s History of the Pugachev Revolt narrates a welter of insane shiLike Ségur's account of the retreat from Moscow and Grant’s Personal Memoirs, Pushkin’s History of the Pugachev Revolt narrates a welter of insane shit – axe-armed peasant mobs, the flaying-alive of corpulent gentry, total civic breakdown in which “the simple people did not know whom to obey” – in an coolly “classical” style; that is, a style terse and spare, unemphatic, unshockable, and above all, swift. Pushkin moves the story along, records but does not dwell on the bizarre; merely hints at the picturesque. An example: the Russian cavalry, pursuing Pugachev’s nucleus-band of mutinous Cossacks across some desolate stretch of the steppe, stops to interrogate the area hermits. The hermits! Pushkin records what the hermits said – and that’s all. The cavalry rides on. The only thing he tells us about the hermits is where they directed the cavalry. Undescribed, they simply point the way to the narrative’s next phase. I’m sure Pushkin could have colored them in – he knew the Imperial archives inside and out, and did months of fieldwork in the formerly rebellious regions – but his style would not admit such indulgent atmospherics. Not that I’m complaining. The styles of Ségur, Pushkin, and Grant ache with the suggested, the not-fully-pictured; and I like that ache, especially in Grant, whose style puts the plain yet cryptic man of contemporary accounts in the room with you.
Mirsky said that Pushkin was, at heart, too much the eighteenth century classicist narrator to analyze the social conflict behind the Pugachev revolt to ttwentieth century satisfaction. Certainly – but this book contained plenty to trouble the chauvinist. Czar Nicholas I, Pushkin’s personal censor, demanded the original title, The History of Pugachev, be changed to The History of the Pugachev Revolt — because “a rebel,” he said, “could not have a history.” Nicholas’s reaction is understandable, but like all autocrats he plugged one leak merely to open another. To reduce Pugachev to his real stature as an opportunistic bandit is the raise the question of his opportunity. And Pushkin is very clear that his opportunity was the fundamental discontent of the propertyless:
Pugachev was fleeing, but his flight seemed like an invasion. Never had his victories been more horrifying; never had the rebellion raged with greater force. The insurrection spread from village to village, from province to province. Only two or three villains had to appear on the scene, and the whole region revolted. Various bands of plunderers and rioters were formed, each having its own Pugachev…
Ironically, Pushkin’s romance of the revolt, The Captain’s Daughter, with its attractive, at times honorable, and charismatically central Pugachev, lets the Czarist state off the hook. It only fleetingly mentions the series of mutinies, going back decades, of the Cossack and other steppe horse tribes that had entered Russian service as guards of empire's fluid frontiers with the Ottoman sultan and the Shah of Persia, only to find themselves oppressed and robbed by local Czarist officialdom. The Captain’s Daughter also says nothing about a significant portion of the Pugachev hordes, the “factory peasants,” serfs uprooted from the land and made to toil in the mines, foundries and arsenals of the military-industrial base Peter the Great established to equip the armies and fleets of his new, modern, European state. The social changes wrought by modernizing Peter fascinated Pushkin, and appear in all the modes he wrote in -- lyric, prosaic, historical.
So yeah, highly recommended. A swift and economical account of a rebellion astonishing in its duration, scope, and ferocity.
The first third of Miami seemed to promise nothing more than amusing reportage—when drug traffickers go house-hunting they look for private water acceThe first third of Miami seemed to promise nothing more than amusing reportage—when drug traffickers go house-hunting they look for private water access; Tony Montana became a mythic hero almost the instant Scarface premiered—but then it began to hit much harder. Didion is so good that any subject she takes up seems her destined one, the exclusive focus of her brooding brilliance; but reading Miami I was tempted to narrow things down and say she’s truly in her element among covert missions and counterrevolutionary conspiracy, and at her very best when relating brutal ops to the amnesiac innocence projected by our actor-leaders, when contrasting the frank machismo of Washington’s surrogates with Washington’s own circular, coquettish language of power—“a language in which deniability was built into the grammar.” Her presentation of the fraught marriage of the “sacrificial and absolutist” Cuban politicos and pragmatic, desultory Imperial Washington makes this book a keeper.
In many ways, Miami remains our graphic lesson in consequences. “I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana,” John F. Kennedy said at the Orange Bowl in 1962…meaning it as an abstraction, a rhetorical expression of a collective wish; a kind of poetry, which of course makes nothing happen. “We will not permit the Soviets and their henchmen in Havana to deprive others of their freedom,” Ronald Reagan said at the Dade County Auditorium in 1983, and then Ronald Reagan, the first American president since John F. Kennedy to visit Miami in search of Cuban support, added this: “Someday, Cuba itself will be free.”
This was of course just more poetry, another rhetorical expression of the same collective wish, but Ronald Reagan, like John F. Kennedy before him, was speaking here to people whose historical experience had not been that poetry makes nothing happen.
Perhaps what I mean to say is that Didion writes particularly well about politics— because, I now see, with a glance back to her famous 1960s-themed collections, she is really a connoisseur of the fantasies fermenting in our rhetoric—rhetoric that can be taken literally or deployed symbolically, instrumentally—and she has a deep appreciation of personalities and subcultures for whom political speech is an exhilaration, a medium of metaphysics.
That the wish to see Fidel Castro removed from power in Cuba did not in itself constitute a political philosophy was a point rather more appreciated in el exilio, which had as its legacy a tradition of considerable political sophistication, than in Washington, which tended to accept the issue as an idea, and so to see Cuban exiles as refugees not just from Castro but from politics. In fact exile life in Miami was dense with political distinctions, none of them exactly in the American grain. Miami was for example the only American city I had ever visited in which it was not unusual to hear one citizen describe the position of another as “Falangist,” or as “essentially Nasserite.” There were in Miami exiles who defined themselves as communists, anti-Castro. There were in Miami a significant number of exile socialists, also anti-Castro. There were in Miami two prominent groups of exile anarchists, many still in their twenties, all anti-Castro, and divided from one another, I was told, by “personality differences,” “personality differences” being the explanation Cubans tend to offer for anything from a dinner-table argument to a coup.
This urge toward the staking out of increasingly recondite positions, traditional to exile life in Europe and Latin America, remained, in South Florida, exotic, a nervous urban brilliance not entirely apprehended by local Anglos, who continued to think of exiles as occupying a fixed place on the political spectrum, one usually described as “right-wing” or “ultraconservative”…Still, “right-wing,” on the American spectrum, where political positions were understood as marginally different approaches to what was seen as a shared goal, seemed not to apply. This was something different, a view of politics as so central to the human condition that there may be no applicable words in the vocabulary of most Americans. Virtually every sentient member of the Miami exile community was on any given day engaged in what was called an “ideological confrontation” with some other member of the Miami exile community…
Reminds me of Nabokov’s complaint that Western Europeans and Americans always pictured exiled Russians as former ladies-in-waiting to the Czarina or reactionary, monocle-wearing counts—when, as just one sample of the complexity of that emigration, Nabokov’s paternal grandfather had been Minister of Justice to one Czar; his father had been imprisoned by the next Czar, and then assassinated in Berlin by royalist fellow exiles; and though descended from a deeply anti-Semitic aristocracy, his wife was Jewish, as was his closest literary associate, an editor prominent in the Socialist Revolutionary party, anti-Lenin. I don’t like Castro and can think of few figures more tiresome than Che Guevara, but I have always found it all too easy to picture many of the first-generation Cuban exiles as rightist goons; but now, perhaps no less facilely, I see them in the long roll of “freedom fighters”—“terrorists” when the wind changes—trained and temporarily utilized by the United States, promised much, and then strung along, diverted, their struggles, causes, and plucky wars of independence supported and fulsomely publicized only while it was expedient to do so. I thought of the black soldiers who bled for the Union only to be abandoned to sharecropping and Jim Crow; the Native American scouts and guides who ended up on reservations just like the tribes that resisted; the Cuban and Filipino nationalists whose brief interval of independence from Spain was quashed by their North American allies and “liberators”; the mujahedeen at grips with the Soviets; the Iraqi Shiites and Kurds after the first Gulf War. ...more
Quite bad. When it comes to the heroine (or patient or inmate), Germinie, based on their real-life housekeeper, an irreproachable retainer posthumouslQuite bad. When it comes to the heroine (or patient or inmate), Germinie, based on their real-life housekeeper, an irreproachable retainer posthumously revealed to have stolen money and wine to fund a secret life of debauchery and support a rogue’s gallery of gigolos, the Goncourt brothers have command of but two styles: that of a detective baldly noting the comings and goings of a mark under surveillance; and that of a smug old timey psychologist, righteous with phrenology or eugenics, composing a floridly prejudiced case history of some helpless imbecile. Some pages of the novel are downright repulsive in their condescension—but instructively so. This novel showed me what the delicate, and deeply humane, clinical-lyrical balance of Madame Bovary looks like in less talented hands, when reduced to a merely generic feature of “realism” or “naturalism.” Germinie Lacerteux is congeneric with Madame Bovary—both “the story of what the French call déchéance, the relentless moral and physical destruction of an individual”—but the Goncourts’ have little of the vulnerability and empathy that make Flaubert’s narrative absorbing and his heroine a person you know. (“Madame Bovary, c’est moi”—Flaubert told Jules and Edmond about the stomach pains and crying jags that afflicted his writing of Emma’s death scene, a revelation for which the brothers had nothing but contempt.) The Goncourts seem content to pass along all the Late Romantic maxims of human perversity, while remaining uninterested by, or incapable of, the portrayal of humans behaving perversely. They maintain a fastidious distance from scenes, from characters interacting; so much action is merely summarized, neatly packaged, recounted at a gossipy, speculative second-hand. Germinie is dead on the page—this novel is not a bit more interesting than the entries in the Journal devoted to her original, Rose.
And yet...Germinie Lacerteux has its pleasures. Germinie’s wastrel lovers, for instance. I was on the point of laying the book aside when the advent of Jupillon, the androgynous momma’s boy, sponging prole dandy and tavern idol, convinced me to keep at it. Jupillon is no more vivid a character than Germinie, but he twitches with a vile animation when touched with the Goncourts’ galvanic misanthropy. A glovemaker’s apprentice who works in the shop window, he preens and pouts while on view to the passersby, and at night, in the music halls, where he’s petted and plied with drinks by fishwives and shawl-menders and depilatresses, parades “certain dubious elegances—hair parted in the middle, locks over his temples, wide-open shirt collars revealing his whole neck,” his sexless features “barely penciled with two moustache-strokes.” He gets tons of women pregnant. The Goncourts also have a great eye for landscape, from shabby suburban resorts—
It was one of those woods like the old Bois de Boulogne, dusty and baked, a banal, deflowered resort, one of those places of miserly shade where people go to stroll at the gates of big cities—parodies of forests, full of wine-stalls and where, in the undergrowth, are found slices of melon and the bodies of suicides
—to a grimy, infernal, streetwalkers’ Paris, where “the glow from a street-lamp ooze[s] over the livid plaster of the houses” and every prospect includes a hospital, a slaughterhouse, and a cemetery; a kerosene-lit surgical amphitheater, Le Sang des bêtes, the pauper’s anonymous pit. And as befits two of France’s great collectors of bibelots and objets d’art (in 1880 Edmond published La Maison d’un artiste, a loving and lyrical inventory of his collections), historian-aesthetes whose genius was perhaps better suited to the conjuring of ghosts from eighteenth century ephemera than the creation of contemporary characters (their art criticism is awesome), the Goncourts know how to poetically shadow everyday objects. Here’s the villainous currency Germinie has scraped-together to pay a man to take Jupillon’s place in the Army draft:
And releasing the corners of the bit of linen, she spread out what was inside: onto the table flowed greasy bank-notes stuck together at the back and pinned together, ancient louis d’or rusted green, hundred-sous pieces that were all black, forty-sous pieces, ten-sous pieces, poor people’s money, money-box money, money made dirty by dirty hands, crumpled in a leather pocket-book, defaced in a cash-desk full of small change—money that smelt of sweat.
I feel strange recommending a 1-star book, but people who like the famous Goncourt Journal and remain curious about the novels whose neglect the brothers bemoan will definitely get something out of Germinie Lacerteux; as will fans of Zola, perhaps—the brothers were always bitching that the younger and more celebrated Zola plagiarized them. I’m inclined to believe Zola improved what he stole, but I haven’t read him. Need to get on that. At the very least, everyone should read Pages from the Goncourt Journal. ...more
We cannot change the hearts and minds of those people…but we can make war so terrible, make them so sick of war, that generations would pass away befoWe cannot change the hearts and minds of those people…but we can make war so terrible, make them so sick of war, that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it. (General Sherman). That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know…
A History of Bombing is a history of aerial bombardment--the most indiscriminate, politically punitive, and frankly terroristic style of fighting—in three hundred and ninety-nine vignettes. Lindqvist calls his book “a labyrinth with twenty-two entrances and no exit,” each entrance a narrative or an argument that concludes with a vision of humanity’s certain savagery, and probable doom. “Follow the threads,” he invites us, “put together the horrifying puzzle, and, once you have seen my century, build one of your own from other pieces.”
My favorite entrances are those on the newly-invented airplane as an instrument of colonial control, and as an inspirer of European fantasies of effortless global subjection and loftily sanitary extermination (like all such colonial fantasies, they would blow back on Europe). The airplane enters warfare as a colonial policeman. “Pilot as policeman, bomb as baton.” The legality of bombing civilians was discussed only insofar as it threatened to be practiced in Europe; for the savages, wholesale chastisement. The first air raid came in 1911, when an Italian flier leaned from his fragile contraption to toss a few hand grenades over a Libyan oasis thought to conceal a fractious tribe. After World War One, aerial bombing was a relatively cheap way for cash-strapped powers to put down native rebellions—or, to at least flatten the villages where Iraqi, Indian, Burmese or Yemeni insurgents might harbor. Sir Arthur Harris flew in the Afghan War of 1919, which ended after a single demoralizing airstrike (our dronemakers can only sigh); during World War Two, as head of RAF Bomber Command, Harris would burn down Hamburg, Dresden, and fifty-nine other German cities, confident at each take-off of Hitler’s imminent surrender.
The generals liked the efficiency of air raids, colonial ministers their cheapness—while the men of letters dreamt of airships, death rays, and the immolation of the coloreds. Lindqvist is distinctive in his knowledge of science fiction, and of the casually genocidal racism therein. Dreams of a purifying fire from above predate the first military use of aircraft. “[F]antasies of genocide lay in wait for the first airplane to arrive,” he writes. “The dream of solving all the problems of the world through mass destruction from the air was already in place before the first bomb was dropped.” Almost as a rule of the genre, airpower porn of early twentieth century science fiction features the complete extermination of the Chinese—“the yellow armies of Heathendom”—from on high. The feared swamping of the white man by dusky hordes? Pow! Zap! Solved! World War One, though, makes cracks in European confidence. In many of the bestselling novels of the interwar period London and Paris are “bombed back to barbarism,” are bombed—in Anderson Graham’s The Collapse of the Homo Sapiens (1923) and Desmond Shaw’s Ragnorok (1926)—by vengeful Asians and Africans who’ve learned Western technology at wrong-headedly inclusive liberal universities and who then turn Europe's glittering boulevards into flashbacks of the traumatic trenches where giant rodents batten on heaps of dead.*
As distasteful as Lindqvist finds such writing, you can really hear the vomit rise in his throat as he describes the apocalyptic survivalist sci-fi produced by Americans during the Cold War. This sub-genre combines the traditional exterminations (America nukes Red Chai-nuh, and its own ghettos) with the joyous destruction of the West’s liberal society, from the wreckage of which lopes that fearsome and ridiculous creature, the Reinvigorated White Man. “As soon as the little wife has died in the blast, the husband is free to be Tarzan, hunting in the great luxuriant forests that soon grow up in the ruins of Manhattan.”
People between the wars had been afraid to be bombed back to barbarism—to filth, starvation, and the rats. But during the postwar period, especially for American men, barbarism began to look promising…Paradoxically, a military technology that had divorced destruction from every personal characteristic of the individual created dreams of a future where the courage, manliness, and physical strength of an already-vanished world were still decisive.
I wonder what Pynchon has to say about all this. Where I live, the season of torrential snows draws nigh, and I dream of withdrawal to a yet-more-northerly cabin, for a month, with an armful of assorted whiskies and Gravity’s Rainbow. The “tumultuous privacy of the storm” (need to read more fucking Emerson, too) is perfect for deep, hibernal reading.
________
* “Apart from the distraught behavior of the people themselves, the most striking change in the natural order of the cities during the weeks after a devastating raid was undoubtedly the sudden and alarming increase in the parasitical creatures thriving on the unburied bodies. The conspicuous sparsity of observations and comments on this phenomenon can be explained as the tacit imposition of a taboo, very understandable if one remembers that the Germans, who had proposed to cleanse and sanitize all Europe, now had to contend with a rising fear that they themselves were the rat people.” (W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction)
I assume Sebald wants us to recall the Jews-as-rats montage from the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew. How’s that for irony!
A must for disaster junkies, fans of slow breakdown and group degeneration—anyone who can’t get enough of that horrible sorting which leaves some of tA must for disaster junkies, fans of slow breakdown and group degeneration—anyone who can’t get enough of that horrible sorting which leaves some of the shipwrecked with their wits and capacity for teamwork, others with nothing but predacious urges and a callous despair. Also a plum if you like Romanticism. Once the retreat from Moscow begins, every page is a canvas of Delacroix or Géricault: pathetic calamities under exotic skies, in turbulent colors.* (Negligible cannibalism, which is a surprise, but there are cities in flames, emptied jails, starving plundering mobs; and Ségur does infant-clutching dashes across ice floes in the pitch dark better than Mrs. Stowe.) And “Bonaparte”—the British favored his surname, that of a swarthy stage villain if you imagine the Duke of Wellington’s pronunciation—is fascinating, better than all his Byronic copies and duplicates; grandiose in optimism and in fatalism, in paralysis and in combat; here an emperor sighing and sluggish amid his entourage, distracting himself with long dinners and pompous reviews in the courts of the Kremlin—as the first flakes fall—there a reinvigorated chieftain waving his sword and marching in the snow, rallying the Old Guard to fight a way through the blizzard and the Cossacks (though Ney is the hero, the conspicuous individual of the retreat).
Defeat is the graspable handle NYRB Classics has given this abridgement of General Philippe-Paul de Ségur’s Histoire de Napoléon et de la Grande-Armée pendant l’année 1812, published in 1824. In his original two volumes, Ségur interleaved tedious statistics and technical disquisitions in archaic military French with a vivid memoir of Napoleon and the Russian campaign that incensed hardcore Bonapartists. A few years after publication, Ségur fought and was wounded in a duel with another of the emperor’s former aides. I had to work to imagine this book as a scandalous takedown or tell-all. While Ségur did not think Napoleon a faultless demigod, he did see him among the Great Men, with exceptional (if fallible) powers of concentration and self-mastery, a majestic (though volatile) pride, and (usually) decisive timing; the hubristic human genius, in short; the hero fated to fall. And Ségur’s view of the Russian campaign as a clash of higher and lower civilizations is no less mythic, and really quite chauvinist. Russia was still the barbarous domain of superstition and slavery, whatever Napoleon’s political overreach and blunders in the field. Its greedy lords scorched the earth to keep Enlightenment from the priest-ridden, icon-bludgeoned serfs, and its generals resorted to guerilla tactics because cowed by the puissance of the Grande Armée. Ségur even calls the Russians the spectators, not the authors, of the army’s woe.
Ségur’s history/memoir was a major source of War and Peace (and of more obscure works by Chateaubriand and Hugo). It is a salute to Ségur’s dramatic craftsmanship that Tolstoy lifted whole scenes from the Histoire, even as he sought to correct the book’s Great Man bias and disdainful picture of the Russian people at war. It is a ridiculously entertaining narrative. I love that the action is a welter of insane shit, yet the style remains terse, sententious, and the figures classically posed—just the style you'd expect from a remnant of the old military nobility (as Louis XVI's Minister of War Ségur’s grandfather appointed a fifteen-year-old Napoleon to the École Militaire) and a writer whom Baudelaire, after visits among the grayhead Academicians, called a Romantic Tacitus, Xenophon with a glaze of le pathétique. I’m also grateful to Ségur for interesting me in War and Peace. That novel has never been high on my list of Tolstoy priorities, certainly far below Hadji Murad, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and a badly needed return to Anna Karenina; but now in bookstores I heft copies and sample translations, while wishing I had nothing to do but read.
---------- *To choose from literally hundreds of examples…Marshal Ney’s rearguard of the retreat, like the army as a whole, was a core of still-disciplined units marching in formation amidst a desperate horde of unarmed, leaderless stragglers scrambling about in unrecognizable tatters of uniforms. This is what happened when Ney was cut off and attacked:
Our unarmed stragglers, still numbering about three thousand, were terrified by the noise. This herd of men surged madly back and forth and rushed into the ranks of the soldiers, who beat them off. Ney succeeded in keeping them between himself and the enemy, whose fire the useless mass absorbed. Thus the timid served as a protection for the brave. Making a rampart of those poor wretches for his right flank, the marshal moved backward toward the Dnieper, which became a cover for his left.
Having nothing better to do…I read two old journals. High spirits and weather reports recede into the background, and what emerges are two astonishingHaving nothing better to do…I read two old journals. High spirits and weather reports recede into the background, and what emerges are two astonishing contests, one with alcohol and one with my wife. (1968)
That sounds like what I read. Until Cheever gets sober—1975—the entries of this 5% selection alternate, fairly neatly, between marital standoffs in an atmosphere of alcoholic cafard, and lyrical-libidinous celebration of life, love, nature and consciousness. The gin-soaked husband and the leaping faun are always overtaking one another:
An unseasonably warm day: fevers in the blood. I walk with Frederico. The sense of odors, exhalations, escaping from the earth is volcanic. The country stirs like a crater. The imperative impulse is to take off my clothes, scamper like a goat through the forest, swim in the pools. The struggle to sustain a romantic impulse through the confusions of supper, the disputes, the television, the baby’s bath, the ringing of the telephone, the stales of the dishpan, but I have in the end what I want and I want this very much.
(1960)
John and Mary will end the night in separate rooms, in front of different TVs, she determinedly aloof, he checked out on whiskey and Seconal; but come morning he’ll feel the rush of resumed consciousness, he’ll be very horny, he’ll be primed to write a story or chop firewood or ski the mountains in the morning light—until, of course, the bottles in the pantry begin to sing; and another night comes on, and with it “the struggle to recoup some acuteness of feeling, the feeling that some margin of hopefulness has been debauched.”
Though it is a tender and intelligent reminiscence of Cheever, Updike’s review of the Journals underrates their literary importance. He says the four hundred pages of undated, unannotated entries frazzle the brain, and the emotional circularity “depresses the spirit.” (Behind Updike I see the ghost of Henry James, frowning over the Goncourt Journal: “It may be an inevitable, or it may even for certain sorts of production be an indispensable, thing to be a névrose; but in what particular juncture is it a communicable thing?”) Reading the Journals after decades of admiring the stories, Updike found only rawness and repetition, and missed, I think, the daring thing Cheever made: a confessional voice, candid yet solipsistic, and spooked by itself. The voice of an isolated, amnesiac or unreliable narrator—but autobiographical. With Humbert Cheever might say, “This then is my story…At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe.” What Cheever did not care to probe is the relational context of his life. Mary Cheever, for instance, appears as a totally enigmatic figure, a stranger who shares his house; and because her habits and moods, her comings and goings, are only externally described, they make an artful, irreducible mystery. Cheever’s older brother Fred—perhaps the most significant relationship on his life—was trying to drink himself to death in the same years. Their parallel paths of alcoholic suicide intersect here and there, and Fred is suggestively, memorably glimpsed, though never examined in any depth. The vagueness of Mary and Fred, and their never-more-than-glimpsed histories with Cheever, may be creations of the editing; but this morning I read Colm Tóibín on Cheever’s novels—“in his stories he could create a tragic, trapped individual in a single scene or moment; he had a deep knowledge of what that was like…but he struggled so much with the novels simply because there were vast areas of himself that he could not use as a basis for a character dramatized over time”—and I said aha!
These journals are worth reading because Cheever was the site of intense contests—between spleen and ideal, responsiveness and ennui, “between what I dream and what life has made me” (Pessoa, whose Book of Disquiet shares with these journals a cultivated monotony, a speculative temper ruled by tedium); between straight and gay, although “straight” doesn’t convey the nearly aesthetic ideal of conventional domesticity fashioned and worshipped by this surplus son of Depression-broken gentility, no more than “gay” captures the utter loss of status and identity, the submersion of selfhood in a troglodytic carnality, that Cheever’s hateful and paranoid society taught him to associate with men loving men. They are also worth reading simply because they show a great writer watching his world. From start to finish the prose is chiseled and luminous. Cheever described writing as the “bridge of language, metaphor, anecdote, and imagination that I build each morning to cross the incongruities of my life”—and his journals were a mode of writing impervious to hangovers. They were thus the daily exercise of his devotion. Among the saddest entries are the last, as they taper off toward death from cancer. “For the first time in forty years I have failed to keep this journal with any care. I am sick. That seems to be my only message.” “I have climbed from a bed on the second floor to reach this typewriter. This was an achievement.” Accepting the National Medal for Literature two months before his death, Cheever affirmed that “a page of good prose remains invincible.” “All the literary acolytes assembled there,” Updike writes, “fell quite silent, astonished by such faith.”
Thunderstorms, polished air; the light seems honed, buffed, and, late in the day, strikes from a low angle. I swim at around four, but the poignance of a swimming pool in September seems to have lost its legitimacy for me. The pool is real enough and the crux, the truth of a humid afternoon. There are leaves in the water these days. I am the last swimmer. The wind in the leaves is highly vocal. The light is pure and very elegiac. I enjoy swimming at this time of year. The water is in the sixties. The stones are warm and I lie naked on them. Happy, happy. (1970)
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