The Washington Post, by William McPherson

To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account

By Saul Bellow. Viking. 182 pp. $8.95

Saul Bellow's novels--The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift, among others--have just secured him the Nobel Prize for Literature. To Jerusalem and Back is his first book of nonfiction, and it is as full of paradox as the simultaneous "garrison state and cultivated society" he describes. Israel is "both Spartan and Athenian,'' he writes. "It tries to do everything, to understand everything, to make provisions for everything. All resources, all faculties are strained. Unremitting thought about the world situation parallels the defense effort. These people are actively, individually involved in history. I don't see how they bear it."

It cannot be easy, sitting on a scrap of sand at the edge of history immersed in history, caught between the Holocaust and the inscrutable, implacable future. "As an American" Bellow writes, "I can decide on any given day whether or not I wish to think of these [terrorist] abominations. I need not consider them. In Israel one has no such choice. There the violent total is added up every day. And nothing can be omitted. The Jerusalemite ... must, in fact, bear in mind four thousand years of Jewish history. The world has been thrown into thew arms and they are required to perform an incredible balancing act."

Of course, not all Jerusalemites are Jews. Many are Muslims who chose to remain when the divided city was united under the Israelis after the 1967 war. And a few are Christians. Most of the Christians and all of the Muslims are Arabs. Arabs as well as Jews are Semites, with similar physical characteristics. Their languages, Arabic and Hebrew, belong to the same family. One says shalom, another salaam, but rarely to each other, inasmuch as both words are used as a greeting meaning "peace." The situation, one can readily see, is complicated, made much moreso by a plethora of holy places sacred to one religion or another in a city that is holy to all three. Memories are long, and grievances carried from generation to generation. Grief, outrage, atrocity and horror pile up like the stones in the Walling Wall. Echoing Bellow, one might wonder how any of them bear it. Above all, there is the inescapable fact and ineffable horror of recent memory: the attempted systematic liquidation of the Jewish people.

With some or all of this in mind, Saul Bellow and his wife Alexandra went to Jerusalem late last year, she to lecture in mathematics at the Hebrew University, he to travel, read, listen, observe. They flew to Israel with some 200 Hasidim from a sweater factory in New Jersey. (Some of this book does read like a novel.) "I like them,'' Alexandra says. "They're so lively, so childlike .... I love their costumes." A youthful Hasid offers Bellow $25 a week for life if he promises to eat only kosher food. "You might find them a little hard to live with," Bellow tells Alexandra. "You'd have to do everything their way, no options given." When they arrive in Tel Aviv, Bellow and his seatmate take a final look at each other. "In me he sees what deformities the modern age can produce in the seed of Abraham," Bellow thinks. "In him I see a piece of history, an antiquity ... as if Puritans in 17th-eentury dress and observing 17th-century customs were to be found still living in Boston or Plymouth. Israel, which recelves us impartially, is accustomed to strange arrivals. But then Israel is something else again."

Israel turns out to be, among other things, a literary cornucopia, the fruits of which are offered in this book of observations, descriptions and conversations--with Prime Minister Rabin and Abba Eban, with Jerusalem's mayor Teddy Kollek, with Israeli Arabists and with the Arab editor of the largest Arab newspaper in Jerusalem; with bishops and barbers, scholars and masseurs, poets and taxi drivers; with almost everyone Bellow encountered; and back home with Secretary of State Kissinger and journalist Joseph Alsop, who wrote what Bellow took to be a threatening piece in The New York Times Magazine a year ago.

The news that Bellow hears is seldom good. It Is not only that the country is surrounded by hostile neighbors and the threat of war is ever present. It is also "poorly represented in Washington" ("the Washington job is the most important in all diplomatic assignments and yet inadequate people are continually sent over," says Bellow) and poorly governed at home. "The founding generation has no adequate successors," he writes. Taxes are heavy. The Israeli pound is dropping; the crime rate rising. "Everyone looks much shabbier and more harassed than in 1970." Exact figures are hard to come by, but emigration is a problem. There are so many young widows and parents who have lost sons in war that some psychiatrists have made their treatment a new speciality.

''The Middle East is the Spain of the Third World," an Israeli intellectual told me two years ago. "It is the testing ground of weapons for the great powers, and we are paying not in dollars but in human beings." "No one is at ease in Zion," Bellow writes. Israel is "a small state in perpetual crisis, ... forced to keep pace with the superpowers, to buy sophisticated arms at great cost and master them, to live in a condition of partial mobilization; it has to do business, to analyze correctly America's fiscal policies, the mood of the Congress, the powers of the American mass media. Out of pure need, for the sake of survival, it must immerse itself in American problems ... Israel must reckon with the world, and with the madness of the world, and to a grotesque extent. And all because the Israelis wish to lead Jewish lives in a Jewish state."

A simple wish, it would seem, and, after the nightmare of annihilation, an urgent need. But Bellow quotes from A History of Zionism by Walter Laqueur ("one of the ablest students of the Middle East"): "It was the historical tragedy of Zionism that it appeared on the international scene when there were no longer empty spaces on the world map." The land was already occupied, in part by Jewish settlers but largely by Palestinian Arabs who wished to remain there.

Since the establishment of Israel in 1948, the Palestinians have been living in their own diaspora (they call it the ahourba). The lucky ones are exiles in Europe or the United States. Some live quietly as citizens of Israel; some live in the towns and villages of the West Bank. But many of them live in refugee camps beyond Israel's borders and in the occupied territories, pawns in a game of power politics few of them probably understand but whose personal consequences they are well able to grasp. Unwanted by Israel, exploited by the Arab states, ministered to by UNRWA and various private charitable organizations, some of the refugee families have been in the camps for three generations. Sores that fester sometimes burst, and the tragic results are everywherevisible--in Lebanon today, in Munich in 1972, in the hearts of decent men.

An Armenian social worker I met on the West Bank, whose father was the oniy survivor in his family of yet another of history's atrocities (more than a million Armenians were slaughtered, many of them bludgeoned to death, by the Turks in 1915 and 1916), gives his son $3,000 a year, 65 percent of his own salary, for his education in the United States; his daughter, a medical technician, has already been educated and works now in this country. "I had planned for her to open a laboratory on the West Bank where medical technicians are extremely rare and badly needed," he says, "but she would rather live in your country. Who can blame her? But you see what has happened to my children? I have lost them forever." Something has happened to him, too. "Since the occupation in 1967 something I never knew has sprung up within me: I have learned to hate," he told me one bright and sunny morning in 1974 as we stood outside one of his "extracurricular" projects, a summer camp for refugee children. "I believe tremendously in the Arab cause. I lament apathy. Yet I do not want to be alive to see the Arabs strong enough militarily to occupy part of Israel. I have already seen enough atrocities in my lifetime."

"Nation-states have never come into existence peacefully and without injustices," Bellow writes. "At the center of every state, at its very foundation, as one writer recently put it, lies a mass of corpses." Elie Wiesel, the great chronicler of the European Jewish experience in our time, wrote in A Beggar in Jerusalem: "Wars follow and resemble one another; and death follows and resembles them.... Is there anywhere a love untainted by betrayal? ... Victory does not prevent suffering from having existed, nor death from having taken its toll. How can one work for the living without by that very act betraying those who are absent? The question remains open, and no new fact can change it. or course, the mystery of good is no less disturbing than the mystery or evil. But one does not cancel out the other. Man alone is capable of uniting them by remembering."

Meanwhile, the world wakens in the morning, ever hopeful. Bellow quotes with approval a proposal for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank that would recognize "the interdependence of the contemporary world.... The crucial issue would be the guarantees of military security and the prevention of terrorism." He mentions "a moratorium on weapons programs" suggested earlier this year by the Israeli ambassador in London as part of a proposal for peace discussions. ''The many billions of dollars saved by a disarmament agreement could be used for the resettlement of refugees and the development of the Middle East." The ambassador put forward a number·of other proposals, all of them sensible. If they were actually to be taken up, someone would surely receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Bellow is not particularly sanguine.

It would be ironic in the extreme if that part of the world we think of as the birthplace of Western civilization were to become its grave. Ironic but not unthinkable. "To those who have considered the twentieth century closely nothing is unthinkable," Bellow writes. The road to Bedlam runs through Belsen.

But there is another road, and another destination. Fawaz Turki is a young, impassioned Palestinian exile who four years ago published a remarkable journal of his frustration entitled The Disinherited, which attempted to isolate the Palestinian problem from the larger Arab-Israeli dispute. The book is, of course, highly partisan; Turki is full or outrage. Yet when it was reprinted in 1974 the new epilogue contained this description of a lecture Turki gave to a hundred middle-class Jewish men and women in Chicago, Bellow's city. "At the end of the meeting some people shake hands with me," he writes. "Some people are so warm. A middle-aged woman hands me ten dollars and asks me to 'give it to the refugees.' We are both refugees perhaps, and maybe for just one moment, we can transcend nationality and religion and culture and reach out to each other. A girl with long dark hair wants to know about Palestinian violence. She is earnest and touches my arm as we talk. She cannot understand all this violence, she says. She understands me, she says. I understand her too.'' The problem is to extend those moments.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Julian Grenfell: His life and the times of his death

By Nicholas Mosley. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 275 pp. $12.95

The Age of Innoncence, thank God, is dead, buried in an attic trunk with sepia photographs of men in boaters and moustaches, and women in long summer dresses, cinched waists and vast hats, posing with studied grace on manicured lawns in the late Edwardian afternoon. It died in the long night of the First World War--the Great War--in which more than eight million perished alongside the 19th-century idea of Progress.

In 1914, at the start of the war, the Kaiser as well as the King--everyone in fact--"knew what Glory was, and what Honor meant," Paul Fussell wrote in The Great War and Modern Memory, a much-praised study of the radical change in sensibility that allowed Ernest Hemingway to declare in 1929, 11 years after the war had ended: "abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates." "The innocents of the remote Great War," Fussell wrote, "those sweet generous people who pressed forward and all but solicited their own destruction," would not have known what Hemingway was talking about.

One of those who pressed forward to die was Julian Grenfell, a legendary figure in his time, the apparent embodiment of the Homeric virtues the English upper classes held most dear: a love of sport, a little learning, and a kind of graceful, insouciant approach to life that allowed one to sail blithely into death with a smile on the face--or so the myth went, and life did its best to conform. Julian could hunt and shoot. He could box and quote the Classics. He loved his mother--a great Edwardian hostess who might have been created by Henry James--with a passion that when burning strongest bordered on the incestuous, at the same time that he held many of her values in contempt. Yet he was nothing if not manly. "The Boxing Competition came off last night," he wrote his mother from Balliol College, Oxford. "I beat my first man to death in 1 3/4 rounds, and they had to stop the fight or I would have killed him outright." And he was an occasional poet, most remembered for a once very popular 46-line poem, "Into Battle," which made a brief bid for immortality in Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse. (It has been omitted from Helen Gardner's recent edition.)

The poem, about love of life in time of war, shows neither outrage nor irony, which explains its temporary popularity as well as its subsequent eclipse. Outrage, after all, has become commonplace--everyone's stock-in-trade--and irony so pervasive it is now our dominant literary mode and the distinctive mark of 20th-century consciousness. Paul Fussell dates this change in awareness to the First World War, specifically to one bright summer morning when English soldiers climbed out of their trenches and marched, wave after wave, to their slaughter. "The innocent army fully attained the knowledge of good and evil at the Somme on July 1, 1916," Fussel wrote. But Julian Grenfell wrote his poem a year earlier, a month before he died in May 1915 from a head wound incurred at the battle of Ypres. The poem was published in The Times of London the day after his death, and praised by Henry James and Winston Churchill, but it is more likely that Julian Grenfell will be remembered as the subject of Nicholas Mosley's fascinating, disturbing and ultimately very moving book, which seeks to give an account not only of the events of Julian's life but also of the engines of culture and psychology--and destruction--that drove it.

"The Grenfell family seemed to possess everything," Mosley writes--"intelligence, talent, charm, good looks, money; yet when war came they and their friends entered into it eagerly and most of the young men were killed as if death were their justification." Mosley, of course, wonders why, for Julian Grenfell was neither so young--he was 27 when he died--nor so innocent as most of those who went jauntily to battle as if the war were, in Osbert Sitwell's phrase, "a brief armed version of the Olympic Games." As a very young man, Mosley writes, Julian saw "some of the patterns that were driving his grandiose world to destruction; he tried to step aside--not just to rebel but to form different attitudes within himself and towards society. He saw the society around him based on ideals of competitiveness and self-sacrifice; that these were contradictory, and led to fantasy and disaster. He thought there might be a form of individualism free from both competitiveness and guilt; that this might be truly sociable. In the event, the values of the world in which he had been brought up defeated him: he accepted the war and even enjoyed it. He killed and was soon killed himself. But there is the impression that he, more than others, knew what he was doing. One of the insights he had regained was that, by standing back, a fate that could not be prevented need not seem desolating."

Mosley contends that war, the ultimate form of sport, proved the only resolution for those young men caught in the double bind between intellectual and poetic aspirations on the one hand and the stylized brutality honored by their class on the other; between conflicting ideals of competitiveness and self-sacrifice; between a fantasy world that did not seem to correspond to the world their eyes beheld but their minds could not acknowledge.

Whether Julian, more aware than most of his peers of the contradictions and inconsistencies of the life he lived, was actually able to give himself some distance from it, seems to me to be a moot, and now irrelevant point. The fact is that he was a remarkable young man who nonetheless found his apotheosis in war, like thousands of others. "I adore war," he wrote his mother a few months before he was killed. "It is like a big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic. I've never been so well or so happy." Julian was, of course, telling his mother what she wanted to hear. She who had seen her family, her friends and putative lovers inexplicably drop like the proverbial flies, could not bear unhappiness. She held to a "stubborn gospel of joy," even when Julian died with his hand in hers, when her second son was killed two months after, and when her third and last son died in an auto crash 11 years later, "smiling with his lovely look of love and trust, undismayed to the end." Just like Julian.

The real issue of this remarkable, original and insightful book is what happens "to the dark forces which exist in everyone when they are denied? And what, apart from denial can be done about them?" What, indeed? Mosley limits his answer to Julian's case, suggesting that "the ideals of the society around him were wrong not just in the way of morals but in that they had no content: it was fantasy that was bringing society to despair," and he shows how very far apart the Edwardian ideal was from the reality. The disparity between the real and the ideal is not confined to a particular time or place, of course, and any serious attempt to illuminate it deserves our serious attention. Nicholas Mosley does that brilliantly. To ask that he also make the two converge is to ask too much. 

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Lady Oracle

By Margaret Atwood. Simon & Schuster. 345 pp. $8.95

Beginning again. It is a common--indeed, universal--fantasy, flying on future hopes, rooted in past regrets, and fueled by fresh resolves, as in "Tomorrow I shall--." (Reader, fill in the blank.) One never tires of it. It comes up every morning like the sun and, it sometimes seems, sets about midafternoon as the awareness sinks in that one is not beginning again, at least not today, but for better and worse merely continuing--occasionally with a small variation or musical ornament, pleasing or dissonant as the case may be--the pattern of all the yesterdays. That epiphany may be the beginning of wisdom or the onset of age; perhaps both.

Margaret Atwood, to get to the point of this discursion, writes novels whose pervading theme is--yes--beginning again: old material but freshly and deftly arranged, which is what matters. The protagonist of her first novel, The Edible Woman, consumes her past in the form of a cake, thus freeing herself from it, at least symbolically. In her second, Surfacing, the literal surfacing of the protagonist from the waters of the lake in which her father had drowned represent her rising from death (the past) to life.

Eating and drowning are Miss Atwood's favored modes of escape. The protagonist of Lady Oracle, her third novel, casts off the shambles of her complicated past by faking her own drowning in the foul waters of Lake Ontario. Joan Foster, the wife of a humorless young academic committed to whatever radical cause is currently in fashion, is also the lover of a zany artist whose material--literally raw--is the ruined corpses of animals slaughtered on the highways. Joan is the slender shadow of a fat child who dreamed of dancing, however clumsily, as a butterfly while gorging on cream pies and whatever else came within her grasp. She is also the recently celebrated author of a book of poems of the same title as this novel, poems described as a cross between Kahlil Gibran and Rod McKuen. (Miss Atwood herself has published six volumes of poetry, none of which has been compared to Gibran or McKucn, at least to my knowledge.)

But Joan Foster is also a compulsive weaver of fantasies, teller of lies and keeper of secrets: about her formerly fat self, about her lover (known professionally as the Royal Porcupine, her family background, and her identity as the writer of costume Gothics under the name of Louisa K. Delacourt. The prospect of exposure of her secret lives forces her to escape, hence the staging of a sailing accident. Thus baptised and born again, she flies to Italy in an attempt to start with a clean slate. "I was an artist," she ruminates, "an escape artist. I'd sometimes talked about love and commitment, but the real romance of my life was tbat between Houdini and his ropes and locked trunk; entering the embrace of bondage, slithering out again.''

In this novel, as in life, true escapefrom the detritus of the past is as impossible as the notion is sometimes tantalizing. Joan Foster is a compulsive examiner of shards as well as a compulsive dreamer; the two are as irreconcilable and inextricable as Joan and Louisa. Her problem is that they must be reconciled. Facing the inevitability of his own imminent death, Hamlet observed, "The readiness is all." Facing the imminence of her own return to life--and to the unveiling of her various secret lives--Joan/Louisa observes, "The future doesn't appeal to me as much as the past, but I'm sure it's better for you. I keep thinking I should learn some lesson from all of this, as my mother would have said." The idea is similar, if not the tone. Joan/Louisa may no more escape the past, real and imagined, or evade the future than Hamlet his death, but by journeying into the ruins she may, possibly, rise above them.

Like her protagonist, Margaret Atwood is an artist, and artists are different from you and me, having learned--or been forced by a combination of psychic exigencies and natural abilities--to try to make the ideal real, the real ideal. Like the saints, they remain haunted by visions of perfection im· possible to attain but demanding to be strived for. So they clothe their fantasies in words or tones or colors, endeavoring to hammer the complex sensations of life--the old failures and fresh starts--into the sense and discipline of words or music or paintings.

Words are Miss Atwood's medium, and she uses them well. To lay out the seemingly bizarre skeletons of her novels may do them a disservice, particularly Lady Oracle. It is, in fact, a very funny novel, lightly told with wry detachment and considerable art. Disbelief is willingly suspended. Its plot is complicated but the novel is never confusing and if, in the end, it remains only tentatively resolved, so does life, except in the end.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

The Family Arsenal

By Paul Theroux. Houghton Miflin. 309 pp. $8.95

This, friends, is the end of civillzation as we know it. Descartes’s philosophical beginning--Cogito, ergo sum--has become in a mere 300 years Susan Sontag’s bang-up ending: Cogito, ergo boom! Or so it would appear after reading Paul Theroux’s The Family Arsenal, the most recent novel to bear the bad news. That this message is also the August selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club is an irony surely not lost on its author, whose own ironic sense is so corrosive one imagines he does not bleed so much as rust.

Not since Evelyn Waugh has a less endearing cast of grotesques been depicted with more scathing wit--a considerable achievement. The family of the title, a disparate group of disaffected revolutionaries and London lowlife, is bound together not by ties of blood or affection or even politics but by ennui and the very long arm of coincidence extended to its limit and perhaps beyond. The Dickensian accountant Mr. Gawber snorts with glee at "the only comedy: harmless error, unplanned and unexplained," while cheerfully wishing for "a cleansing holocaust." Radical, aristocratic Lady Arrow exults that the terrorized are the terrorists as bombs explode and her 15th-century Flemish masterpiece is ripped off. She never carries money so borrows from her cleaning woman, who does the only honest work in the book. She organizes theatricals--Brecht and Beckett--for delinquent girls ("it’s super fun") and is capable of exclaiming, "England’s prisons are full of splendid people." The enemy is the middle class (or maybe just boredom). Araba Nightwing, a Trotskyite actress, runs guns in drag, and loses the guns. Murf, a batfaced boy with teeth like dowels and "the political judgment of a tuna-fish,’’ walks around London muttering "boom widdy-widdy," dreaming of detonations. The noise turns him on. His girl Brodie, an alumna of Lady Arrow’s favorite prison, plants Murf's bombs in railway lockers; and Mayo, a daughter of the upper classes nebulously allied with the provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army, steals a portrait--her act of political terrorism--that the owner doesn't want but that her lover comes to see as a reflection of himself. Valentine Hood, an American ex-consul kicked out of Hue after popping a Vietnamese minister in the nose, is a quiet, opium-smoking American quite unlike Graham Greene’s bumbling do-gooder. He talks like a Humphrey Bogart character ("You’re wrong, sister") and sees the enigmatic portrait as "a masterpiece of action ... a perfect man," and himself as an avenging angel. His most important act is an aimless murder of a small-time crook. His most important insights eventually arrived at, are two: that "to act was to fail," and "kids need fathers," the latter meant ironically, of course.

It is a cast of misfits out of The Friends of Eddie Coyle by way of Graham Greene and The Beggar's Opera. They are a pitiable bunch, pitilessly but accurately depicted, children with "enameled souls," empty minds and bad teeih who got mixed up with the wrong family, one with an arsenal in a trunk upstairs. Hood "sat for a long time on the arsenal, smelling the stew, hearing the clank of Mayo in the kitchen and Brodie and Murf braying at the television. It was not disorder, it was the routine of any noisy family, an ordinary racket. This was a home, a family arsenal: safety was like remoteness, disturbance was elsewhere." (We have been told in another book that unhappy families are all alike.)

Disturbance is out there in London, not the tourist's London but a Dickensian city that stretches bleak and cheerless south of the Thames through a dark continent of power stations, gasworks, decaying rowhouses, abandoned cars and menacing graffiti. Its air thick with ruin, it is a fitting setting for Theroux's "drama of disorder." "All civilizations have an end," Theroux is quoted as saying in the latest issue of the Book-of-the-Month Club News. "This is a very interesting time to be here. You are not always in at the moment of collapse."

An American author born in Massachusetts just 35 years ago. Theroux's seven earlier novels had respectable notices and tepid sales. His travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar, was a bestseller last year. An expatriate, choosing now to live in London after several yeare in Africa, and Asia, his affinities are very English: the acerbic wit and baleful eye of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene's rich pessimism reduced here to arid scorn; Joseph Conrad’s menacing atmosphere, and the exile’s eye of Henry James. (His epigraph is from James’s novel of London anarchists, The Princess Casamossima.)

Yet for all Theroux’s elegant affinities, his obvious intelligence and mordant wit, his intricate plot and ear for dialogue, The Family Arsenal is not a satisfying novel. One admires the writing and the craft, which is, as Henry James might have! said, so magnificently there; but one can admire an artist's techniques--ingenious brush strokes--without much liking the whole picture, which in this case is a facile vision of despair that must come easier to expatriates than to those whom Theroux pities, the "people who are egoing to be there for the rest of their lives.'' The Family Arsenal, as explosive as a firecracker and sometimes as dazzling, is ultimately as chilling as dry ice.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

New & Collected Poems, 1917-1976

By Archibald MacLeish. Houghton Mifflin. 493 pp. $15; $25 limited edition; $6.95 Sentry paperback

Whoever said that our poets are not sufficiently praised is quite wrong; they're just not read, or read about, in the money-up-front, last-year's-flash-thls-year’s-paperback (next year’s fizzle) sense. Suicide helps--a head in the oven is big at the box office (and pace, Plath, Berryman, Roethke, Sexton, and all those agonized others). But after all, even the dumbest of us can add another year without strain, or so it appears, and mere survival gets short shrift unless, like the avuncular Robert Frost, poets muffle themselves in myth, which renders them harmless, comfortable and quiet as a national monument, to be swallowed like Librium, with the eyes open and the mind shut.

Take Archibald MacLclsh, the recipient of the Bollingen, a National Book Award, and three Pulitzers, two for poetry and one for a play. Another honor and he’d turn into a bowling trophy, up there on the shelf with all the others. If he were Japanese, he would be designated, now at 84, a National Living Treasure. Being an American, he gets to read to assorted oddballs at the Library of Congress (admission free).

Yet, there's something tenacious about poets. They hang on, limpet-like in the mind. And when they've hung on long enough they get collected--in MacLelsh's case not once but twice, in 1952 and again this season in a volume encompassing the work of 59 years. He’s certifiably OK; the cultural commissars have said so many times, which is nice but also a pity; he’s not ready for the mind's mausoleum.

For those generations of students who read Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry as some people read tea leaves, MacLeish is most but not necessarily best remembered for his Imagist poem "Ars Poetica" (1926), which ended with the famous dictum, "A poem should not mean/But be." He showed what he meant in a series of metaphors:

A poem should be wordless

As the flight of birds.

A poem should be motion-

less in time

As the moon climbs...

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a

maple leaf.

For love

The leaning grasses and two

lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean

But be.

There was a lot of romantic sighing over those paradoxical lines, none of which was "true," of course, and MacLelsh has gone on for another 50 years, continuing to violate his own dictum in hundreds of well-wrought poems, most of them unexceptional, a few of them memorable. He is a master of prosody and rhyme, adapting such alien verse forms as Dante’s terza rima in Conquistador (1932). a long, pseudo-epic about the conquest of Mexico as recalled by Bernal Diaz del Castillo in his old age, which reflects MacLeish's absorption with natural beauty and his continuing preoccupation with the passage of time, the coming of death, the meaning of the past:

Old... an old man sickened

and near death:

And the west is gone now:

the west is the ocean sky....

O day that brings the earth back

bring again

That well-swept town

those towers and that island....

MacLeish is a poet whose public reputation has dimmed his literary light. Like Wallace Stevens, an insurance man, and William Carlos Williams, a physician, he has pursued careers separate from his poetry: as a lawyer, as editor (of Fortune during the Depression), as Librarian of Congress. When he was appointed to that post in 1939 he was criticized by politicians who found this clearest of poets too obscure, and by academicians, who found him not obscure enough, comparing him to Robinson Jeffers and Carl Sandburg, with no compliment intended. Ho served the government as a propagandist during World War II, as an assistant secretary of state, and as a UNESCO delegate. From 1949 to 1962 he was Boylston Professor of English Rhetoric at Harvard. If ever there was an establishment figure, Archibald MacLeish is it. Among poetry circles, that's a handicap.

In an age that values poetic innovation above all, it is MacLeish's misfortune to be part of the tradition, not a creator of it. His early work reflects, often rather pallidly, the work of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and one hears echoes of Yeats and Villon, of Hopkins, even of Milton in his poems. There are, of course, worse echoes, and if he is not a strong original voice--not a Williams, a Stevens or an Eliot--he is a quiet, meditative one though seldom solemn, and his poems are built, like a cathedral, to last a while.

Besides, MacLelsh has never valued innovation for Its own sake. "It is this characteristic of contemporary poetry," he wrote in 1941, "which explains its failure to make recognizable to us our experience of our time. To write in faith and credit of such experience as ours, and to bring it to recognition, requires the responsible and dangerous language of acceptance and belief." Twenty years later he wrote, "To face the truth of the passing away of the world and make song of it, make beauty of it, is not to solve the riddle of our mortal lives but perhaps to accomplish something more."

Marvelous to say, he has done that, as in the poems published in Songs for Eve (1954), "Hemingway" ("The gun between the teeth explains./The shattered mouth foretells the singing boy"), "The Woman on the Stair" ("Time like the repetitions of a child’s piano/Brings me the room again the shallow lamp the love/The night the silence the slow bell the echoed answer"), "Epistle to Be Left in the Earth," "Definitions of Old Age," and in these lines from his splendid poem, "Hypocrite Auteur":

A world ends when its metaphor has died.

An age becomes an age, all else beside,

When sensuous poets in their pride invent

Emblems for the soul’s consent

That speak the meanings men will never know

But man-imagined images can show:

It perishes when those images, though seen,

No longer mean.

At times one feels while reading this long volume that there is less development here than accumulation-- which shows that feelings ought not always be trusted. Pile stone on stone year after year, and all of a sudden you’ve got a cathedral. And cathedrals were built because man, as MacLeish wrote in one of his poems, "is a creature to whom meaning matters."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

1876: A Novel

By Gore Vidal. Random House. 364 pp. $10

"American writers," Gore Vidal wroto in Two Stolen (1970), "want to be not good bit great; and so are neither." Whit-ever else may be said of Vidal--and there is a lot--he is a good writer, if American, and he works hard, considerably harder than his studied air of languid elegance would admit. (As a writer, he is as prolific as he is versatile. There have been, in 30 years, 15 novels ranging in subject from the Emperor Julian to a Hollywood transsexual, five plays, a volume of short stories, two books of essays, and many, many uncollected pieces.) Thcro ore worse things to say of a man. (And, of course, worse things have been said of him, many of them rather loudly on television or in print by Truman Capote, William Buckley, and so on--even by Vidal, whe regards himself with a gentler eye, but still cool and acerb, than he casts on Norman Mailer or on one or another Kennedy.)

Vidal might have added that American writers want to be stars, like his own Myra Breckinridge, and he would have been right. He himself ran for Congress in 1960 and basked for a time in the glory of Camelof before he turned his lance on the Kennedys and the Bouviers. (The occasion of Vidal’s departure from court is currently the subject of a lawsuit between him and Capote, who Vidal says has "made lying an art form--a minor art form.") On television he smiles in malevolent triumph while making outrageous and, if at all possible, ad hominem remarks to the simultaneous gasps and giggles of his audience. "I am at heart a propagandist," he says, "a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise." The world can expect more advice, for Vidal’s television season has come ground again. His new novel 1876 is being published this week, and the talk-show "hosts," most of whom wouldn’t know a book from a bagel they bit it, do know a winner when they see him on the cover of Time.

And there If no question that Vidal, who lately spends most of his time in Italy, has produced a winner in magnificently American terms. Before publication hia book is a best seller, its first printing of 75,000 copies exhausted and thousands more on order, a mlllion-dollar paperback deal, Book-of-the-Month for March--all that. All that money, in fact, and power--exactly what 1876 is about.

Charles Schermerhom Schuyler, a writer, returns to New York from 38 years in Paris, to secure a rich husband for his titled, widowed and broke daughter Emma, the Princess d'Agrigente, and to write about the American Centennial celebration and the scandal-ridden 1876 election, in which the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden won the popular vote but the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, sometimes known as "Rutherfraud," took the presidency in the electoral college; and succeeded the corrupt Grant. The novel we are reading is the journal Schuyler keeps, notes for the book he is writing about election, and an urbane and stylish piece of writing it is: "Why write any of this?" he asks, in one of the book's most graceful as well as poignant passages. "Why make a record? Answer: habit. To turn to words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round. Words translate and transmute raw life, make bearable the unbearable. So at the end, as in the beginning, there is only The Word. I seem to making a book of maxims."

Here is another one: “The strong devour the weak every time, and that’s the way of the world, and the law is just something you buy if you can, for it sure don’t apply to any man with the dollars to buy himself a smart lawyer ... and the judges, too, if he knows how." Vidal is especially concerned in 1876 with money and property as the underpinnings of power, and he is acutely aware of the crucial motivating role in our world. He is most sensible of the civilizing graces their posession can bring, the rapacity and greed the desire for them can induce, and the ugliness that can exist in their absence. "Your rich people here," Emma observes, glancing around Mrs. Astor’s opulent rooms, "positively glow with money, like northern lights." Not to have it is to be part of the horde of beggars, wounded veterans of Civil War, or of the army of "street rats," homeless children who live on their scavengings. (And yet--"Is there any word in English," Vidal asks, "quite so useful, so hopeful, so truly pregnant as yet?"--and yet, one must demur. Certainly to have money is to hold power; in 1876 to have $200,000 bought a seat in the Senate, $5,000 an appointment to West Point. But to lack money was not and is not necessarily to be powerless.)

Here is a third maxim, an antidote to the second, Vidal’s own faintly heard "yet": "I have always felt that somewhere in this corrupt and canting American society there still exists in certain men a sense of what the good society must be."

Mrs. Astor's table and the streets of New York and Washington, into which an occasional cow or goat may wander, come quite alive in 1876, more alive, in fact, than most of the individual characters, who suffer, like Emma, from an excess of Jamesian suggestion, or, like Schuyler, from just too much urbanity, wit and style. Others carry too great a burden of historical authenticity.

Finally, it must be said that Vidal's beautifully wrought--like a Buccellati dish--Italianate prose dazzles and glitters as brilliantly as the d’Agrigente diamonds on Emma’s bosom. Unfortunately, the prose, like the diamonds, is paste, an artful, cunningly contrived reproduction of what Henry Janies would call the real thing.

1876 is a sequel to Vidal's enormously successful Burr (1973) and, with Washington, D.C. (1967), makes a trilogy that, Vidal says, "records, in sequence, the history of the United States from the Revolution to--well, the beginning of Camelot." He is not a man to underplay his accomplishments, which he best summed up himself: a writer who wants to be good. And he is; leave the greatness to others.

(Courtest of The Washington Post.)