Ben Chester White

"I have a dream that even here in Mississippi justice will come to all of God's children."
-- Martin Luther King.1966


Addendum: in case you couldn't tell, I often read Reporting Civil Rights in a fit of rage. Anybody would -- the sheer injustice of treatment of black Americans through most of the 20th Century just boils the blood. Not just the fact that murder was rampant, but the fact that you couldn't do anything about it. That was one of the salient sticking points that lawmakers had to deal with in the Civil Rights legislation of 1957 and 1964; it didn't matter if you the muscle to catch abusers if all-white juries were just going to let them go.

Today's story about the sentencing of Ernest Avants for the 1967 murder of Ben Chester White is one more grim reminder of that evil system. The facts are grim enough:

[Federal prosecutor Jack Lacy], in his closing argument, described how three Klansmen, Claude Fuller, James Jones and Mr. Avants, hatched a plot to kill a black man so brutally that it would draw Dr. King away from other concerns, so that they could get at him.

Under the premise of searching for a lost dog, they lured Mr. White into their car with the offer of a strawberry pop and $2. "They stopped at a store, bought beer and drove Ben Chester White out of his life," Mr. Lacy said.

According to Mr. Jones, a long-dead witness whose testimony was read into the court's record, Mr. Avants blew Mr. White's head off with a shotgun after Mr. Fuller fired 15 to 18 bullets into him from an automatic rifle, murdering him in the back seat of a 1966 Chevrolet as he cried out, "Oh Lord, what have I done to deserve this."

The fate of Avant was the usual fate of white trash with a head full of booze and a bellyful of hatred:

He was acquitted in state court in 1967, despite the testimony of an F.B.I. agent who said that Mr. Avants had confessed to the crime, and he seemed destined to live out his life a free man.

Luckily for the prosecutors, the killing turned out to have taken place on federal land, allowing for a new trial. But it's disturbing to note, as the story points out, that this was the first federal murder trial, and the first to involve a victim who was not a civil rights hero or well-known casualty, like Medgar Evers, a civil rights hero in Mississippi, or the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing.

How many other Ben Chester Whites were blown away while their killers got off scot-free? How many more ghosts of Mississippi? How many more ghosts of the South, of the country in general?

My guess: too many to count.

Force and Counterforce

Reporting Civil Rights, Part One: American Journalism 1941-1963. Library of America. 996 pages. $40.00

Reporting Civil Rights, Part Two: American Journalism 1963-1973. Library of America. 986 pages. $40.00

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
-- Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"


Early in 1941, the United States began to feel the rumblings of a war that had been a long time coming, and which had nothing to do with Germany or Japan. In January of that year, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, sent out a call for 10,000 black people to march on Washington to demand an end to segregation in the armed forces and in the hiring of defense workers.
By June, President Franklin Roosevelt was beginning to feel the heat. Late in the month, he met Randolph halfway, with an executive order prohibiting discrimination among defense contractors, but not in the military. Randolph was sufficiently mollified to call off the march, understandably losing some supporters. It didn't matter. Within a few months, civil rights for black Americans would be the last thing on anyone's mind, except black Americans. On segregated military bases and in major cities, decades of suppressed rage were beginning to boil over.

The tension only torqued up when Johnny came marching home. Black soldiers who had defended their country against Hitler came home to find his spirit alive and well, especially on city buses. In February of 1946, within ten hours of being discharged from Camp Gordon, Ga., a black soldier named Isaac Woodard was riding home on a bus with some white soldier pals. When the driver thought they were getting too rowdy, he ordered the whites to sit up front. Woodard complained, and when the bus stopped in Batesburg, SC, the driver had him arrested. Accounts would differ on what happened after that, except that a police officer beat Woodard so badly that he was left permanently blind. In what would become South Carolina's first Civil Rights case, the officer was brought before federal court in Columbia. After deliberating for 28 minutes, an all-white jury let him go; Woodard had "resisted arrest."

It was a story that would be repeated many times in the years to come. The Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers Ð who would go on to become one of the early martyrs for the cause -- recalled how he too was beaten "within an inch of my life" on his return trip home, after refusing to move to the back of the bus. "Hell, I'd just been on a battlefield for my country," he said. The attack had it's effect: "After that, I was a different man."

James Baldwin wrote some years later: "The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War marks, for me, a turning point in the Negro's relation to America. To put it briefly, and somewhat too simply, a certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded. One began to pity them, or to hate them."

One black man, who would spend most of the war years in prison as a conscientious objector, chose neither. Bayard Rustin, a Randolph protege and a committed Gandhian, instead decided to test out non-violent civil disobedience at home. Boarding a bus in 1942 from Louisville to Nashville, he took a seat in the front and refused to move. When the bus pulled into Nashville, Rustin was greeted by a bevy of cops who beat, stomped, kicked and finally arrested him. Through it all, he refused to fight back, but still kept his wits about him long enough to win his case in court.

So begins America's longest struggle; one war ends, another begins at home -- along with the means to fight it, at least part way. Rustin would go on to convert a young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., to the philosophy of non-violence, and Randolph and Rustin would organize another March on Washington, with King in the starring role. Some 250,000 people would gather for the event -- 40 years ago this week -- and this time, it wouldn't be called off.

This is just part of the story assembled in this magnificent two-volume set of Civil Rights journalism from the Library of America, a wide-ranging if necessarily patchwork history of three troubled decades of American life. There's no way to summarize nearly 1,800 pages of text and over 150 writers, but one must try.

First of all, it brings together star journalists like David Halberstam, Garry Wills, John Hersey, Renata Adler, Harrison Salisbury, Joan Didion -- all working at the top of their game -- and the largely forgotten foot-soldiers who were there on the front lines, sometimes getting their heads broken. There's a great 1952 profile by James Poling on Thurgood Marshall, written before he got his halo, when he was the country's ablest and wiliest civil rights lawyer. Superb pieces by L.D. Reed and Ted Poston on the Montgomery Bus Boycott illustrate the sacrifices of all those involved, and how the white citizenry fought and lost: blacks went without jobs and car pools got ticketed, but the buses stayed empty until the city fathers capitulated. William Bradford Huie's highly influential Life magazine stories are here: his coverage of the 1954 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till for allegedly whistling at a white woman, and the 1963 murders of the civil rights workers Cheney, Schwerner and Goodman. The first volume nicely sequences three of the greatest hits together: Baldwin's "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind," Norman Podhoretz's response to it, "My Negro Problem -- and Ours," and King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," which still brims with the moral authority of "De Lawd," as King's followers called him.

There are great columns throughout by the late Murray Kempton, who could squeeze more truth out of a thousand words than almost any of his peers. Accounts from black reporters like Louis Lomax and Claude Sitton reveal the divisional rifts within the movement; one sees throughout that the NAACP didn't lead, it followed, and that groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) almost always took the initiative.

There are also first-hand reports from activists like Tom Hayden, Michael Thelwell, Anne Moody, Tom Dent, and Fannie Lou Hamer, as well as two students, Charlayne Hunter and James Meredith, who would find themselves at the center of separate whirlwinds -- in Mississippi and Georgia -- when they tried to attend college with white students. In an effort at balancing out the picture a bit, Tom Wolfe's "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" finds that smug but often hilarious little man having a high old time explaining how black radicals take advantage of white guilt.

Equally impressive are the on-the-spot accounts; although sometimes it's hard to tell if youÕre reading great writing or if a terrible event just wrote itself. There's Pulitzer Prize Winning Relman Morin, phoning in his story from a Little Rock phone booth as he watches the city turn into a war zone; Robert Richardson, another prize-winner for his reportage on the Watts riots; the photographer Bob Clark, also in Watts, telling what it's like to nearly get beaten to death by white cops. CORE leader James Farmer describes in riveting detail how he barely escaped from a Louisiana lynching.

Not every piece holds up. In this company, Robert Penn Warren's book-length Segregation does not justify all the space it eats up in Volume I; the same can be said for Pat WattersÕ piece on the Poor People's March in Volume II. The brilliant New Yorker critic Elizabeth Hardwick sounds completely out of her element in Mississippi, and Nora Sayre's gooey piece on the Black Panthers succeeds only in making her seem just the kind of white liberal Wolfe had in mind. There are also some lapses. Given the range covered, you can't help but wonder how the editors could have overlooked either Hubert Humphrey's 1948 pro-integration speech to the Democratic Convention, or the Dixiecrat revolt that came about as a result. The book also could have included an excerpt from Marshall Frady's book on Wallace, and maybe Rustin's "From Protest to Politics." But these are quibbles; as a whole, these books are a startling and sobering experience.

Of all the books' multiple impressions, two in particular stand out. One is that dramatic social change demands everything from the people involved, especially if they're going up against centuries of tradition. For anyone who wasn't there or has forgotten, account after account reminds you of how deeply segregation was woven into the fabric of the country, particularly in the laws and attitudes of the South, but by no means strictly there. This fact sometimes eludes the people writing about it. In HuieÕs story on the killing of the three civil rights workers, which involved the participation of a deputy sheriff, the Mississippi governor tries to downplay the death by saying such murders happen nightly in New York. Huie lectures in reply that murders in New York "are not the result of plans in which the police have participated." He was wrong; Lez EdmondÕs story on the 1964 Harlem race riot shows cops gripped by sheer homicidal rage, randomly beating and shooting blacks right and left.

In retrospect, the response of King Ð who stands astride these books like a colossus -- looks like a stroke of genius; he and his followers met violent hatred with a peace that confused and wore down their oppressors. They engaged by disengaging, and by disengaging they pulled the plug on the system.

The other thing that struck me wasn't so much a revelation as a stark reminder: when things heat up, the press doesn't just report the story; it becomes the story, unavoidably. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the press held a mirror up to America, and the face looking back only got more frustrated, more ugly.

In Montgomery, Alabama in 1961, a mob of thousands made no distinction between the Freedom Riders testing interstate bus segregation and the reporters on hand to cover them. Dan Wakefield, reporting for The Nation, was attacked by a band of hoodlums after leaving a meeting of the White Citizens Council during "Salute to Law and Order Night." Amidst the rioting in Oxford, Mississippi, as James Meredith tries to enter Ole Miss, a man with a gun walks up to the French reporter Paul Guilhard and kills him.

"Why can't you report the facts without romanticizing the Negro race?" a newspaper subscriber pitifully writes, after reading about school integration in Memphis. More to the point is the angry young woman who stares down a wire reporter in Little Rock, after a day in which whites had stormed the school and brutalized black students: "Why don't you tell the truth about us? Why don't you tell them we are a peaceful people who won't stand to having our kids sitting next to niggers?"

Just as they were affected by events, the press shaped them, too. Huie scored a coup in his coverage of the murder of Emmett Till when his magazine, Life, paid $4,000 to the exonerated killers to tell what really happened. Huie would also report on how he personally offered a reward for information in the murders of the three civil rights workers. Willie Causey, a black Alabama farmer, would find the future of his family seriously imperiled after telling Life magazine about the racial problems in his home town. James N. Rhea and Ben H. Bagdikian report on how they broke the law in Louisiana by entering an all-black nightclub. (The law of segregation cut both ways in many places; whites were forbidden from entering certain black businesses.)

Things really heat up, of course, with television; as both Robert Coles and David Halberstam point out, the racist tactics of Birmingham Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor (firehoses, dogs) and Selma Sheriff Jim Clark (nightsticks, random brutality) did as much for the movement as Dr. King. Every time "a bomb went off, a head smashed open," Halberstam writes, "the contributions would mount at King's headquarters." They werenÕt the only one, of course; counter productivity ruled the day in every state in the South, as well as in New York, Philadelphia and California. No matter how bad things got, how out of control, how incendiary, the elected officials and police were always there to make sure they got worse for everyone involved.

In the end, perhaps nothing so disproved the myth of white supremacy as white supremacists themselves. The following reflection by a young black girl in a newly-integrated school in Americus, Ga., in 1970 has the bell-like ring of common sense: "After all these years now, we realize that the whites are just human beings, not supermen without any faults or weaknesses. I can sit there and look at them now and think, `You're not like we been told -- you're no different from me.' Maybe this is what the whites have been scared of all these years, us catching on to the fact that there are some of them just as dumb as anything ever walked on two feet. Why, a boy in one of my classes, he just sits there all the time eating pencils."

A few months ago, I did something really insane: I joined the Folio Society.

Why would a raggedy beggar such as I, someone without so much as an ounce of class, aspire to such a bourgeois lot? Obviously, because I can’t read. Certainly I have no eyes for fine print. The deal here is the usual one, you get a pile of nice books for a few bucks, with a commitment of some kind I never bothered to read, which turns out to be four more books at prices way beyond my range.

Well, a deal’s a deal. I went through the catalogue and found the two cheapest volumes they had. One was Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, which I've always meant to read, and the other was called Diary of a Nobody, which is apparently some kind of a small classic of English wit. They were the cheapest books I could find and together, they cost about ... oh don't make me say it. I'm still in denial.

Anyway, today at lunch I finished reading the Greene novel and it's fantastic. I want to read it again, which is good considering it costs a week of lunches. It's about this 17-year-old mob leader named Pinkie, who manages to kill a down-on-his-luck journalist named Hale. The murder looks clean, except for two things. One is Ida, the good-hearted and big-breasted -- Greene never lets us forget that her tits could apply for their own zip code -- gal who sees Hale on his last day of life and suspects something fishy about his death. The other is Rose, a 16-year-old waitress who may have seen a little too much on the day of the crime. Pinkie isn't yet aware of Ida, but in Rose he sees something close to a soulmate. Rose is starved for affection and, Pinkie discovers, will do just about anything for love, even marry Pinkie so she doesn't have to testify against him. Not only that, she'll die for him, if that is what it comes to.

Brighton Rock reads like a suspenseful thriller, and I guess it is that; a thriller who went to Catholic School, and never got death, hell, sin, salvation, guilt or redemption from it's blood. The book is about damnation, more than anything else, the lure, perhaps, of inoculating yourself against the reality of evil by committing it. Something. Anyway, it's completely spellbinding and I hope to plow through its multifarious moral themes again real soon. Shit, I may even pay for it.

Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores in Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her.

Men on the Verge of an Emotional Breakthrough

I’m tempted to say Talk to Her is the best Pedro Almodovar film in years; unfortunately, I haven’t seen one in a few years, not even All About My Mother or Live Flesh. The last one I saw was The Flower of My Secret, and I don’t recall being all that impressed. But I saw most of his early work, which ranged from the good (Matador and Law of Desire) to the superb (What Have I Done to Deserve This? and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!). His break-through film, of course, was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and I was alone, among critics as well as in the theatrical audience, in either not getting the joke or just not thinking it all that daring or funny. (People wailed with laughter as I sat there stone-faced; not an uncommon happening with me and independent films. Laughter in an art theatre has such a self-consciously “with-it” ring to it.)

Talk to Her is a different case. This film about two men who are both involved with women in a coma brings to mind everything I ever liked about Almodovar: his playfulness, his wit, and his unashamed tenderness. The film explores with graceful agility a theme he has touched on in the past -- the degree of blind trust any romantic relationship requires -- and adds to it a new twist: the degree of imagination it requires, too, and the way in which love can and often does exist on a purely imaginary plain. Lest I forget, I must add that it has at least two scenes, possibly more, which I can safely say I’ve never seen in any other film. One is of a beautiful woman on the phone, telling a friend: "I’ve just taken an elephant-sized dump." The other involves a silent surreal movie within a movie that likely plays only in the brain of one of the characters, a movie in which a man is miniaturized by a scientific experiment and manages to crawl inside his wife’s vagina.

When we first meet Benigno (Javier Cámara) and Marco (Darío Grandinetti), they are strangers to each other, sitting in a theatre watching some avant-garde ballet where women dance blind on a stage that is full of empty chairs. As the women move about freely, a man on-stage serves as their spotter, hastily moving chairs out of the way so they won’t bump into them. In the next scene, Benigno, a male nurse, is describing the performance to Alicia (Leonor Watling), the comatose young beauty whom he serves as fulltime attendant. Alicia responds to nothing, and Benigno looks after her more than any lover ever could; he’s her man on the stage. He talks to her constantly, massages her face, bathes her, and cleans up after her periods.

Marco’s case is different. He is a journalist who is pursuing a female bullfighter, Lydia (Rosario Flores), in hopes of writing a profile. Both are just coming out of love affairs gone sour and wind up turning to each other, although in either case they are still obsessed by the people they left behind. Lydia, who seems to find her career a form of suicide as a way of spitefully destroying herself for an old boyfriend, also finds herself in competition with Marco’s memories of his old girlfriend. She wants to make Marco forget her; she wants them both to purge old loves from their brains.

When Lydia is gored by a bull, she winds up in both the same hospital and condition as Alicia. While Marco accepts the fact that Lydia is brain-dead, Benigno can’t accept the same fact about Alicia – mainly because she’s always existed for him on a somewhat untouchable, ethereal, and Freudian plane to begin with. The less there is to know, in other words, the more there is to love; the more love and imagination can work their own strange magic, can fill in a personality where there is none.

Between these two, Almodovar is rather naturally on the side of the romantic Benigno, but he doesn’t ask us to choose; in the end, he seems to say that love -- whether it’s a matter of passionate reality or yearning fantasy – is still love: still believing, still forgiving, still stronger than death.

I read a favorite Hawthorne story last night: "Wakefield." Odd tale about a man who takes a week-long vacation from his wife which turns into 20 years, eventhough he only moved to the next street over. He keeps telling himself all this time that he really ought to go back, but he just can't; instead, he watches his wife wondering where he's gone, watches her settle into an uncertain widowhood, wears disguises so he can pass her in the street and look in her face. He likes to watch, and becomes a little too addicted to looking at a home without him in it, looking at his domestic life in perspective, having what amounts to an out-of-body experience. His name is significant; he's like a Rip Van Winkle who never went to sleep.

Some quick thoughts on the Oscar nominees for Best Picture, except for the one I haven't seen yet:

* Chicago -- I was jazzed into seeing this -- as who could not be? -- by the wildly overenthusiastic praise of William Price Fox, whom I assume to be a knowledgeable movie fan, but who greets this movie like an adolescent girl. Pardon me if that sounds snotty; it's just that the adolescent girl I saw it with, my daughter, saw it with about as much joy as her dad did. It's a gloriously fun movie, no question, but the first thing you notice about it is the hovering spirit of Bob Fosse, who was not only responsible for helming the original musical, but who oiginated the very style of it over 20 years ago, in All That Jazz -- that whole life-is-a-musical set-up that everyone is fawning over. That and the way it has absorbed so many familiar ideas from other musicals. It's the best movie musical since Moulin Rouge, and in its own way it follows a similar format of musical sampling. Having said that, let me add that "The Cellblock Tango" and Queen Latifah's "Reciprocity" were dynamite, and that Catherine Zeta-Jones was a real revelation, much more so than Renee Zelklwiger, who has the face but not the body for this kind of role. Zeta-Jones has the kind of great energetic showbiz flesh that betrays little sign of effort; Zellwiger just looked too sinewy, like she'd prepped herself in way too many gyms for the roles. It was the 1920s, for heaven's sake; no one cared back then if you had been working out. Zellwiger is no Jean Harlow.

* Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers -- Okay, I saw it at Christmas, so my memory is a little dim. First off, this was my favorite part of the Tolkien story, which I didn't much care for; Tolkien is no writer. Still, Frodo and Samwise and the captive Smeagol reminded me of Anthony Mann's film The Naked Spur, where the bounty hunter Jimmy Stewart and Janet Leigh have a long, hard hellacious trail ride with the captured Robert Ryan, who is very good at working on the nerves of his captors. The trip in the book was more relaxed, less heavy than what came before or after; it was like a picaresque. As he demonstrated in Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson was the perfect director for this project; he may be the closest thing to a David Lean our age has to offer. He makes epics with a great amount of soul and passion, and the movie is captivating all the way through. I was a little didsappointed not to see the spider Shelob; hopefully she shows up next year.

* Gangs of New York -- What is it with Martin Scorsese? The projects get bigger, longer, classier, more ambitious and every single one bears some glorious example of textbook-perfect framing and cutting. And yet, his mojo hasn't really worked in years; he's trying too hard to be himself. Look at his best films -- Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull -- and you see movies in which you know without question that the director has invested a good deal of his own blood. In the films of the last decade or so, he just seems to be floundering. There are a lot of good things in Gangs, namely Daniel Day-Lewis as Bill the Butcher, but it's overlong and whatever points it made about race and religion didn't seem especially challenging. It's a bit of a bloody spectacle; bloody and strangely bloodless.

* The Pianist -- The first thing you notice: yes, this is a Polanski film. It has the same stylistic precision of Knife in the Water and Chinatown, the same pitiless searching gaze; you see it in Adrian Brody's eyes. This story of a master pianist who manages to survive through Hitler's ghettoization of Poland, losing first family, then friends, and finally spending a great deal of the movie by his scared, lonely, emaciated self, is a brutal picture but not a brutalizing one. There's a plenitude of Nazi violence in it, but it's never sensationalized, overy dramatized, or dwelt on at length. It keeps a perfect gaze and moves at an unhurried but urgent pace.

* Hope to see The Hours sometime soon.

And furthermore...

Zappone: Then that's what you shall have: irrelevance.

Me: No, irrelevance is what YOU will have when your socially-relevant books no
longer speak to anyone. They will just be mired in their own time, their
own Slough of What People Were Thinking Then.

Spam of the Week

A Mr. Chris Zappone sends the following:

Hi Rodney,

I am a member of the Underground Literary Alliance, a nationwide network of literary activists who want to make fiction matter again. We're sort of infamous here in NY because we "crash" literary events and challeng published authors to get more relevant instead of indulging in all their postmodern non-sense that doesn't really reach readers. For examples of their work, just look at www.mcsweeneys.net or www.eyeshot.net. We believe there are a lack of engaging, socially-relevant narratives about real world situations. We draw on zine writers and others marginalized by the nepotistic publishing world. Our latest action was at a New York reading a few weeks ago:
http://www.pagesix.com/pagesix/1575.htm
also written up on www.mobylives.com. (in the center middle column).
Our website is www.literaryrevolution.com.

Please be sure and cover the literary revolution, because literature, like so many other aspects of our culture, is in upheaval. People are looking for something different. And the ULA is agitating for change.

Sincerely,

Chris Zappone
ULA
NYC Bureau Chief

My reply:

I couldn't be less sympathetic with your cause if I tried.

I have no use whatsoever for relevance of any kind, particularly where literature is concerned.

Rodney Welch

Heavenly.

Mildly amusing article I wrote.

I re-read Roger Malvin's Burial last night and was quite impressed. It's a funny thing about Hawthorne. People despise him; sometimes I despise him. His writing is extremely ornate and pretty, sometimes wordy to no obvious point. But there is a point. A Hawthorne story or novel is like an exceptionally detailed painting where everything is very acute, where you can miss a lot if you read it quickly, or if you become impatient for it to move, and yet everytime I finish one of his stories, I know I've really been somewhere. The story by itself is sometimes clever, sometimes not, but with him I think the style is the story over and above everything else.

This and this arrived in yesterday's mail. I spent the evening thumbing through them. Kind of my idea of heaven, I guess.

Two thoughts on the no longer secret Michael Jackson affadavit:

One, if you read it straight through the sudden sexual allegations sound like they could, possibly, be made up.

Two, I found myself laughing every time I came across the words "Michael Jackson started to cry." This may or may not be as a result of my first contention, because it's hard to imagine a man crying because a 13-year-old boy won't let him French kiss him.

Then again, if it could be true of anyone, it would be true of Michael Jackson.

I always wondered what became of the Pirelli Calendar.

And I had such hopes.

Which twin has the Toni?

Tracy Flick Gets Over Herself

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. Alfred A. Knopf. 555 pages. $26.00.

Before I read Donna Tartt's second and latest novel, I read her first one, and I must admit I did so with my dukes up. The Secret History, from 1992, generated enough hot air to melt the Arctic Circle, let alone to invite skepticism.


Hear ye the blurbs. New York Newsday found it as "stony and chilling as any Greek tragedian ever plumbed." The Village Voice said Tartt has "a stunning command of the lyrical," and The Boston Globe likewise noted her "beautiful language," which among her many other talents "make her debut by far the most interesting work yet from her generation." Several reviewers picked up on the generational theme. The Miami Herald proclaimed that young Miss Tartt "has the ability to leave her literary contemporaries standing in the road," and Glamour dubbed her as "her generation's Edgar Allan Poe." Oddest of the blurbs was the one from the Philadelphia Inquirer, for whom the book proved "a journey backward to the fierce and heady friendships of our school days, when all of us believed in our power to conjure up divinity and be forgiven any sin."


That sounds like a pretty good description of what the reviewers themselves did. No question, the book -- about a group of Greek students at a small eastern college who become a little too involved in a pagan ritual, and eventually wind up killing one of their own -- is a page-turner of sorts. Personally, I put it down midway through, lost no sleep for two weeks wondering what would happen, and didn't pick it up again until I had read another book, twice. Still, it is thick with both motivation and moral sense, and in its own dim way it manages to suck some commercial juice from the Dostoyevskian terrors it conjures up, of doing the unthinkable and getting away with it.


And yet, and this has something to do with why I was glad to take a break from it, it's a distracting read almost from the beginning. Mere pages in, that "lyrical," "beautiful" voice begins to curdle. First of all, there's the problem with the narrator, who is not a convincing male; he talks like a girl who has read too much Keats. There's nothing hairy about him. I likewise easily tired of Tartt's campus-life fetishism, and her superficial student types, few of whom could be distinguished from each other. I found the student's teacher believable, but not the rest of the adults in the book; Tartt is at her lamest at the dead guy's funeral, when she tries to skewer a lot of all-too-familiar Southern California types.


Most annoying of all, though, are those tasteful details, showing many years of flipping through catalogues and magazines, that clot Tartt's prose; close little observations that bring to mind nothing so much as the face of a smug, preening tourist. There's the clock with "a little black mahout in gilt turban and breeches to strike the hours," the home with "Attic vases, Meissen porcelain, paintings by Alma-Tadema and Frith"; there's even the narrator's eye, which swells with Updikean chiaroscuro after he takes a punch, showing "the richest inks of Tyrian, chartreuse, and plum." She isn't always so blandly consumerist; sometimes she's just fatuous. A pair of cufflinks glint "in the drowsy autumn sun which poured through the window and soaked in yellow pools on the autumn floor -- voluptuous, rich, intoxicating." "A November stillness was settling like a deadly oxymoron in the April landscape." A reviewer was scribbling "shitty" in the margin of his paperback.


All the way through, I kept thinking of Tracy Flick, that gratingly self-absorbed straight-A student played to perfection by Reese Witherspoon in Alexander Payne's 1999 film Election. One never quite shakes the sense of Miss Tartt sitting at her desk, hand waving in the air -- I know! I know! I know! -- anxious to display her freshly-learned facts, while the reader, like the teacher played by Matthew Broderick, casts his eyes about the room hoping that someone else, anyone else, will pipe up.


Thankfully, Tartt doesn't spend near so much time fanning her tail in her new novel, The Little Friend. It doesn't live up to the hype of the cheering section -- it is neither "extraordinary" (Newsweek) nor "breathtaking" (Elle) -- and while Tartt has pared away her excesses she has developed at least one new one, a Nabokovian tic for parenthetical summary. The book also has a weak finish that probably didn't satisfy the author anymore than it does the reader. But I'm inclined to forgive these lapses because it is a focused, interesting and often very funny book that not only drills deep into the heart of childhood but puts Tartt in what seems to be familiar territory: the red-dirt Deep South of Faulkner and O'Connor. Tartt's Mississippi town of Alexandria has crumbling mansions, trailers and pool halls, doped-up white-trash layabouts, long-suffering black folk, and a deep strain of Christian grotesquerie: Sunday School blowhards, merciless church camps, holy-roller backwoods preachers whose faces are pock-marked with rattler bites, children reenacting the Last Supper in the back yard, and, at the local church, a stained-glass window which depicts a murdered local boy sitting at the foot of Jesus.


The book is set sometime in the late 1960s to early 1970s, although it's hard to say exactly when; indeed, Tartt seems almost deliberately confusing on this point, possibly to make the book seem as if it exists in some time warp of 30 years ago. There's never any reference to a current president, which would have helped; instead, there are a lot of murky references that jostle against each other -- "Dark Shadows" (which aired from 1967 to 1968) is on TV, and From Russia to Love (1968) is in the theater, but President Johnson and Martin Luther King seem to be somewhere in the past, and the "Class of 70" graffito on the local water tower is said to be fading. The past, as someone said, is another country; in this novel, it seems to be located on Planet Bizarro.


As was the case with The Secret History, a killer opening sentence pitches us into the center of the story: the death of nine-year-old Robin DuFresnes, who is suddenly missing amidst all the scurrying and planning for a Mother's Day dinner, and is soon found hanging from a tree. Twelve years later, the killer has still not been found and the death has become one of many unmentionable matters among the Dufresnes family, which includes Robin's surviving sisters Harriet, 12, and Allison, 16, their slovenly mother Charlotte, grandmother Edie, stalwart maid Ida Rhew, and a gaggle of dotty Southern aunts who live nearby. Of the lot, only Harriet, an infant when Robin died, is concerned with the lingering mystery. Robin is the hovering presence in her pre-adolescent world and -- her imagination fired by Treasure Island and tales of adventure -- she becomes determined to avenge him. With the help of her pal, Hely, who has not quite matured into a boyfriend, Harriet does a little detective work and figures the killer to be Danny Ratliff, son of a barbaric white trash clan. With the help of Hely and a few snakes, Harriet plots Danny's death with a child's remorseless zeal for good against evil.


Tartt is very good at mapping the worlds of these two families from either side of the tracks, and particularly the interior lives of Harriet and Danny, a young girl and a violent dope addict, both full of nerve and fear, both heading for a collision. Tartt has also developed a strong skill for the way people talk; the Ratliff crew reminded me of those sickos you meet in Elmore Leonard's thrillers, and Tartt hears them almost as well as Leonard does. She has really sharpened her wit, too; there are some hilariously dead-on portraits of Southern Baptist types, some of which were so funny I read them aloud to friends.


Unfortunately, the final showdown between Harriet and Danny is a little too stage-managed, and worse, Tartt decides in the last few pages that resolving the murder isn't all that important to begin with. Granted, Tartt denied us a wow finish in The Secret History as well, and it may be that unresolved sins are simply part of her Christian view of life in a fallen world where justice is not ours to distribute. Maybe by her next book, Tartt will iron out this kink in a satisfying way. As it stands, The Little Friend represents something of an advancement for a writer whose voice is getting a little less grating.

All dressed up and no place to go; Harold Bloom finds little to celebrate in the future of Western literature.

The Glory Has Departed

Review, from The State, October 9, 1994.

The Western Canon by Harold Bloom. Harcourt Brace. 578 pages. $29.95

As far as Harold Bloom can tell, it's all over for Western Lit, and there's no question who killed it.

Bloom, imperious Yale Scholar and champion poor-mouth, describes himself as a literary critic "in the worst of all times for literary criticism." Universities are bent on "destroying all intellectual and aesthetic standards," and in Bloom's neck of the woods, they're handing out English Department keys to the patriots of political correctness.

Now is the age of the "School of Resentment," when trendy bellyachers like Alice Walker sit cheek by jowl with Homer and Thucydides. Cultural mediocrity is in, genius is out, and Marxists, feminists, multiculturalists and New Historicists are in the catbird seat. It's too late for prayers: "The Balkanization of literary studies is irreversible."

For what it's worth, Bloom offers a selective ranking of great writers and a superior defense of why these "dead white European males" (and Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf and George Eliot) deserve their canonical thrones.

Highest in the heavens, of course, is Shakespeare. With Dante, he is the Western Canon. The others in the top echelon run from the predictable -- Chaucer, Milton, Gothe -- to the odd: Freud (yes, Freud) and some Spanish poet named Pessoa.

The book's already notorious appendix, surveying all of Western literature, is stranger yet. John Updike merits only one mention -- for The Witches of Eastwick, if you can believe that -- Vladimir Nabokov gets two, and a full five go to someone named Jay Wright.

What the great works all have in common is "strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates we cease to see it as strange." They also share Shakespeare, so forceful a presence any number of his artistic descendants have tried to cut him down to size. Freud, for example, had an obsession about Shakespeare's "real" identity. Bloom thinks he knows why: Shakespeare is the real father of psychoanalysis, and Freud's theories are just recycled Hamlet. Freud's Shakespeare problem amounts to an Oedipal complex, or as Bloom prefers it, a Hamlet complex.

Bloom urges us not only to understand this "anxiety of influence" (a previous Bloom title) but to stay focused on artistic sense, not ideology. This should be no problem for him, so vast is the range of his mythy mind. But along the way I began to wonder if Bloom's mix of churchy aestheticism and stony rationalism isn't an ideology of it's own. Bloom is rightly opposed to groups who want to shoehorn mediocrities onto the required reading list, but he isn't above putting these artists into the straitjacket of his own biases.

It's easy to come down hard on a book that offers itself as some kind of final word from on high. (The publishers even add to the pretension by putting Michaelangelo's The Last Judgment on the book jacket.) But the fact is I couldn't put it down. The Western Canon, like the Western Canon, is difficult and illuminating; a revelation and a warning from a most daunting Ancient Mariner. The book demands attention and repays it.

Moper's Ball: Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroiani in Antonioni's La Notte

Diary fragment from some years past:

I saw Antonioni's La Notte the other night at the Nickleodeon. It was like watching ice melt. You heard a lot of yawns, impatient shuffling in seats. The more generous viewers -- the intellectuals, I suppose, who wanted to be able to say they loved it -- seized on every possible laugh. One guy near me dozed off and I very nearly joined him.

Like L'Avventura, La Notte proceeds very much in "real time," and it has a daring, deliberate boredom to it. Life's gradual procession is deceptive; the real turmoil, the real cataclysms, are interior or psychological -- that's where the violence and action is. Any given minute from a person's life provides a DNA reading on the quality of that life. Yet so often when I watch one of his [Antonioni]movies I find myself wishing for a car wreck or a slap or a shout or a scream of anguish; everything is so cool, so "lifelike"; you wish for the liberation of purely visual violence.

There is that quote of Hitchcock's -- what is drama but life with the dull parts cut out? For Antonioni, the drama is in the dull parts. But in his best films, like L'Avventura or The Passenger, a sense of meaning and purpose bubbles up to the surface. And they are interesting. I didn't much like La Notte because of the ending, where Marcello and Moreau have this extended dialogue about their lives; it looked tacked on -- the director's way of rewarding the audience for its Herculean patience. It had some great "master filmmaker" stuff in it -- brilliantly composed shots and so forth. But that didn't cut it with me. All I noticed was the weight, the heaviness.

I didn't much like Blow Up either -- although it did put some good ideas in the heads of De Palma and Coppola.

The following are a few recovered reviews from years past that someone -- not you, perhaps, but someone -- may find amusing.


The Bearable Lightness of Short Lives

Saint Augustine by Garry Wills (152 pages)

Mozart by Peter Gay (177 pages)
Penguin Lives series. Lipper/Viking. $19.95 each.

Great lives are all alike; the rest of us are unaccomplished and unnoticed in our own ways. Read a few definitive scholarly biographies and see if you don't agree. After awhile, they all sound the same: each telling a rags to riches tale with reverent awe and a Tower of Babel of footnotes. With some hoarders of useless facts -- scholar squirrels, as Gore Vidal termed them -- the results can be truly painful to endure.

This is why the new Penguin Lives series, started earlier this year, is something of a relief. It is based on the proposition that great lives can also be good reads, especially if you have a writer who is not only economical but truly engaged by his subject.

Garry Wills, for example, historian and ex-seminarian, is the perfect choice to summarize the Bishop of Hippo. Wills ably and unhurriedly covers the saint's alleged preoccupation with sex, his lasting if often curious notions of free will, and his greatest hits: "time, memory, the inner dynamic of the self, the inner dynamic of God, the continual activity of God in the soul, first by ongoing creation and then by regeneration in grace."

Augustine was "considered peripheral in his day, a provincial on the margins of classical culture," Wills writes, yet he debated, worried, pulled apart and examined enough questions of human experience to fill 93 books (that we know of) and preserve 400 sermons (of the 8,000 he preached), usually working late into the night dictating to a slew of secretaries. In the course of a lifelong effort to justify the ways of God to man, he also laid the groundwork on free will that would later influence Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

"Who is weak, and I am not weak?" The apostle Paul's assertion (II Corinthians 11:29) was Augustine's motto; to know one's own weakness, one's own capacity for evil, is to know humanity. Augustine's own life-defining sin was a seemingly "motiveless" crime, when he and some other boys stole some worthless pears they didn't really want. But, Augustine discovered, there was a motive, the motive of group psychology, which he would recall later as he dealt with early church schisms.

Wills is fascinated by Augustine but he's honest about him too: while religious intolerance was a fact of life in the fourth century world, Wills points out that Augustine supplied a "theory of suppression" that would leave a "dangerous legacy" to future generations. The Lord Himself said "Compel them to come in," and for Augustine that basically meant saving heretics by any means necessary save death.

And yet, Augustine -- who famously had a child out of wedlock prior to his conversion -- was a model of restraint in other areas of human failing. He drew a line between what C.S. Lewis, nearly 1600 years later, called man's animal and diabolical selves. "Sins of calculation, cold acts like lying, were what he most castigated -- Satanic sins," Wills explains. "For sins of the flesh (which Satan, having no flesh, could not commit), his own experience did not make him intolerant but compassionate."

Peter Gay takes a more thematic approach with his life of Mozart. Rather than going from start to finish, he looks at this oddball from several overlapping sides: his close relationship with an overpowering and jealous father; his service at the hands of several patrons, none of whom knew quite what to make of him; his strong sexual appetite and rather weird anal fixation; his spendthrift ways; and, of course, his virtually lifelong gift for composing immortal musical works in no time at all. Like Shakespeare, he worked quickly and exhaustively, and he absorbed everything around him.

Mozart's father, Leopold, himself an accomplished musician, recognized his son's genius early on, and naturally took it upon himself to manage it. The relationship of the two has long been a matter of intense psychological scrutiny; Leopold realized there was little room in the life of a genius for more than one close relationship, and he tried to make sure it was him. Mozart had other ideas, of course, and their tumultuous relationship was permanently rent by his marriage to the 19-year-old Constanze. Leopold not only never accepted her, he never "showed the slightest interest in Mozart's children, or the slightest sympathy for the couple's distress at losing four of them in short order."

It was a good marriage nonetheless, Gay writes, as both Wolferl and Constanze seemed to spend every spare minute doing the wild thing. When work forced him to be away, Mozart wrote warmly horny letters home, full of longing for her "beautiful little ass," barely controlling his "little boy" that yearned to enter her "beautiful nest."

The comforts of the flesh no doubt came in handy, as both spent themselves into poverty. Yet the worse things got, the better. Where other composers blazed brightly in youth and faded, Mozart just kept getting better. The last years of his life were dreadful; they were also the years of the magisterial Symphony No. 41 ("Jupiter"), written in 16 days, and the elegant final Requiem.

Of Mozart's alleged rival Antonin Salieri, Gay has rather little to say, except that the main contention was between Leopold and Salieri, and that envy, such as it was, was on Mozart's side; he would have loved the kind of awards and honors the popular Salieri received, as well as the favoritism of Emperor Joseph.

Mozart's actual death remains a mystery; Gay suggests he was a victim of 18th Century medical ignorance,where bleeding was the standard practice and no one bothered to sterilize instruments. Gay is skeptical about Mozart's alleged burial in a pauper's grave. He thinks Mozart might not have wanted a lavish funeral -- which hardly sounds to me like Mozart at all.

Wills and Gay are able to get a lot in a small space because they are fans with a natural grasp of what's important and a lively way of presenting it. The weekend I spent in the company of these books left my own mind ablaze with interest.

(Yes, I know, a weak ending. Maybe I was in a hurry.)


Rushdie's Stories

East, West: Stories by Salman Rushdie. Pantheon Books. 214 pages.
$21.00.

East and west, London and India, imagination and reality; for Salman Rushdie, they are worlds apart and as close as next door.
Six years ago, as we all know, they collided. Rushdie, a native Indian living in London, was sentenced to death by Iran's
Ayatollah Khomeini for writing a novel.

They collide again in this debut collection. These stories, set in India, London, and both, show Rushdie's imaginative debt
to both cultures. The "East" stories are simple and conversational, the kind you might hear from a street-corner
philosopher in Baghdad. The "West" stories are more "postmodern": wildly imaginative, if a touch obscure. Either way, Rushdie is a
master fantasist.

In "Chekhov and Zulu," maybe the best story in the book, a couple of Trekkies become involved in a covert government plot.
The ending is pure magic: the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi becomes a losing battle between the Starship Enterprise and the
Klingon Bird of Prey.

"At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers" is less a formal story than a meditation on art and commerce. Dorothy's magical shoes
are up for bid from everyone, real and fictional: movie stars, hangers-on, E.T., a lost character from a Waugh novel, and
religious fundamentalists, who (like the protestors of The Last Temptation of Christ and Rushdie's The Satanic Verses) want the shoes only to destroy them. They all grapple for the shoes that can take them "home," which -- as Rushdie can surely attest -- is the most imaginary concept of all. (Consider the title of his collection of criticism: Imaginary Homelands.)

Home also figures in "The Courter," where the alienation of an Indian nanny is mirrored by the narrator. The two cultures are
like ropes around his neck: "I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, I kick. Ropes, I do not choose between you. Lassoes, lariats, I
choose neither of you, and both. Do you hear? I refuse to choose."

I was less impressed with "Yorick," in which a descendant of Hamlet's fool tries to tell what really happened way back in
Elsinore. And a story about Christopher Columbus's lust for Queen Isabella doesn't add up to much, despite a profusion of minus and
equal signs that indicate dialogue.

Although this is Rushdie's first collection of stories, the short fiction form is hardly new to him. His hyper-plotted novels
casually wander from story to story, place to place, high culture to popular, fact to fantasy.

East, West is the work of a first-class tale-spinner, a man whose multi-levelled mind is God's own private mystery.

(Okay, so the last line was a direct steal: yes, it was Nicholas Cage's description of Laura Dern in Wild at Heart. It sounded good at the time, and I was certain no one would notice. No one did. No one read it.)

P.J. O’ROURKE

All The Trouble in the World by P.J. O'Rourke. Atlantic Monthly
Press, 341 pages. $22.

Are Republicans funny?

Okay, it's a dumb thing to ask. Prosecution will rephrase the question. Is there such a thing as a funny Republican humorist?

Quick answer: Not Limbaugh. Rush is a party mouthpiece; all ideology, donkey snorts and no punchline. Watching him is like
watching old footage of Herman Goering, all twelve chins jiggling with glee as Uncle Adolf entertains the Reichstag with FDR jokes.

So who else is there?

My nominee is P. J. O'Rourke, a self-described ex-draft dodger and unreconstructed Republican. He's bitter, insolent, bratty,
cynical, self-deprecating, and basically user-friendly. And he makes me laugh out loud. He's Limbaugh with a human face.

O'Rourke's standard bully pulpit is before the unconverted: Rolling Stone, where rock and roll and left-wing politics go hand
in hand. O'Rourke knows he has to be entertaining if he's going to preach capitalistic plunder to Generation X.

Here is O'Rourke, summing up the Gen X mood of prevailing despair: "The whole world is rotten. Everything stinks. Nobody
loves me. Everybody hates me. My name is Legion. I'll be your server tonight. The special is worms."

In this new collection, O'Rourke returns to his favorite subject: international strife, and his favorite target: social
reformers. Stops include Bangladesh (not as bad as they say), the Amazonian rain forest (chigger hell), Haiti (a model health plan,
oddly enough) and Somalia (believe what you've heard). He even visits the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro -- a weekend jaunt to
shoot fish in a barrel.

In Bangladesh, he finds that weepy concern about overpopulation misses the point. The problem isn't too many people, but a government that squanders most of its country's fertile soil on jute, or twine fiber. Not only that, he notices that population comptrollers always get most exercised over bloated non-white bellies.

"Fretting about overpopulation," he decides, "is a perfectly guilt-free -- indeed, sanctimonious way for `progressives' to
be racists."

In Rio, he watches in awe as Earth Summiteers find an unlikely ally in Fidel Castro.

"We throw these bastards out of the door of human liberty and back they come through the window of ecological concern. Here is
old Busy Whiskers -- puffy, aging, abandoned at the door of Marxism, a back-number tyrant and ideological bug case who has
reduced the citizens of his own country to boiling stones for soup. And now he's a friend of the earth."

But like H.L. Mencken, to whom he is often compared, O'Rourke's sour humor doesn't always cancel his stupidity. For
O'Rourke, pollution is a perfectly acceptable by-product of prosperity. "Screw the rights of nature," he snarls. "Nature will
have rights as soon as it gets duties."

Did I say Limbaughism with a human face? Make that a cartoon rat's face. Whatever. P.J. O'Rourke is the funniest Republican
alive.

He shot me, and it felt like a kiss.

Now he's "reclusive and eccentric" -- and those are the least of his problems. Unfortunately, today's stories do not include my personal favorite of the Spector and guns legends, which dates from the time he was working with John and Yoko. According to the story, Lennon was in a sound-proof booth, hooked up to headphones, when Spector for some reason fired one of his guns in the air. Lennon reportedly threw off the headphones and screamed: "Phil, if you want to kill me, kill me, but don't mess wid me fookin ears -- I need `im!"

Crimes and Misdemeanors -- Religious and Aesthetic

You don’t have to be Catholic, or even one who keeps up with current scandal, to find El Crimen del Padre Amaro a virulently anti-Catholic film; powerful, well-acted, moving, but also prejudiced and somewhat hateful, with a deliberate calculation to shock the faithful.

Like Luis Bunuel before him, director Carlos Carrera has a taste for staging mise en scene of somewhat ornate blasphemy, juxtaposing objects in a way meant to agitate and provoke. Scene: A somewhat insane parishioner has a communal wafer placed on her tongue; instead of eating it, she puts it in her purse, takes it home and feeds it to her sick cat. Scene: a girl in confession admits to thinking about Jesus when she masturbates. Scene: the priest of the title has sex with the same young girl, then shrouds her naked body in a cloth made for a statue of the Holy Virgin.

I know nothing about Carrera or screenwriter Vicente Leñero, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn they are the products of a Catholic education and the film is a purgative – as L’Age d’Or no doubt was for Bunuel. It's this seething anger that threatens to throw the film off-balance, almost from the beginning.

In books and movies of this sort, troubled religious figures often go from naive innocence to cynical experience; they arrive at a parish or church full of good intentions, see wrongdoing, and find either that they are powerless to overcome it or are affrected by its pernicious influence. The young Father Amaro (Gael García Bernal) of Carrera's film, on the other hand, has his illusions shattered from the start, and becomes a hypocrite without all that much of a struggle. We are not long into the film before we discover that Father Amaro's superior is having an affair with a local widow, and that he is involved in money laundering for the local drug lord in hopes of financing a new clinic. Father Amaro not only proves a steady help in this regard, but he also takes advantage of a young girl who is in love with him -- in both cases, almost without a thought.

The point of view is clear -- the church denies its priests a passionate existence, and as a result forces them to hurt others: the girl becomes pregnant and Father Amaro seeks out the services of a backstreet abortionist -- the result of which gives the film a downbeat ending where the irony is all too easily earned. Father Amaro learns nothing from his sins, apparently because he's a full-fledged member of a brutal, corrupting, castrating institution that only turns its adherents into misshapen cretins.

In fairness, the film does make a passing attempt at objectivity; contrasting the main story of a young priest who prospers by hypocrisy, a subplot involves the struggle of a good priest who preaches liberation theology and tries to protect his peasant parishioners from the local drug lords. But that doesn't amount to much more than an attempt to achieve balance by ideological means, since the only good priest in the movie is a staunchly liberal one. In other words, this is a film that tips the balance in the director's own favored direction, giving it a rank whiff of smugness.

P.S. Another Bunuel note. The corrupt mayor in the film is played by Pedro Armendariz, Jr.; his father was a popular leading man in Mexico, perhaps best known here for the title role in Bunuel's El Bruto.

So that's why he's always referred to as a "reclusive gun nut."

Looks like the shit's about to hit the fan over the Columbia disaster.