“He fell with a thud to the ground and his armor clattered around him.” —Homer War Music, called by its author, Christopher Logue, an “account” of four books of the Iliad of Homer, is not a minor event. Its reception both in its native England, and now here, has been enthusiastic. For, English writing, especially in verse, may not generally...
Francophobia on the Right
Several years ago in Paris I was surprised to find young pamphleteers outside the Hotel de Ville (or “Chateau Chirac” as an acquaintance would say) shouting out, “Down with the bearded, sold-out socialists!” When I told friends at home, they seemed incredulous. After Reagan bombed Libya I remember that the people of England and West Germany, our supposed allies, demonstrated...
Sums of Disenchantment
Zulfikar Chose was born in Pakistan, grew up in British India, emigrated to England in 1952, and since 1969 has taught in the English department of the University of Texas. He is married to a Brazilian and has enough knowledge of South America to write novels set there. This is his 10th novel. He has also published a collection of...
Seclusion in the Mountains
Gary Hart has withdrawn to the seclusion of his Rocky Mountain home, claiming that the nation’s press, led by the Miami Herald, invaded his privacy. Donna Rice, an aspiring actress suddenly in the limelight, is spending most of her time denying to any reporter who will listen that there was anything immoral in her relationship with Hart. The national media,...
The Price Of Free Verse
“A post in our times,” wrote Thomas Love Peacock, “is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community.” What Peacock meant by civilized community is not too hard to guess: that rational, humane, progressive society of Britain and Northern Europe, which Peacock’s eccentric friends—Shelley, Coleridge, and Byron—all seemed bent on destroying. Poets were barbaric, because they continued to celebrate heroic violence and...
State of the Literary Essay
As a literary form, the essay was once thought to be doomed as the novel is said to be in its perennially announced demise. The familiar essay, in particular, brought to its classic perfection by Charles (“Elia”) Lamb in the early 19th century, still finds some continuity today in our many personalized newspaper columns and even in the irreducible TV...
Some Place in Time
“Rural areas are shrinking, accents are becoming less distinct, and Southerners are being tamed,” writes Pete Daniels of the changes which have transformed the agrarian nation of Davis and Lee into the modern South. Daniels may have his feet planted firmly in earthy Southern history, but there has not been a concerted demand by creationists that six-day creation be presented...
James Burnham, R.I.P.
He was a controversialist. As a literary critic he argued with T.S. Eliot, and as a Trotskyist he quarreled with Trotsky himself. Almost alone among the ex-Communists, he made the full journey to a conservative world view, and before his death he returned to the Catholic faith. He wrote many books, some of which will not be soon forgotten: Congress...
Spetsnaz
This month I am reporting from London on the recent publication here of what is undoubtedly one of the most important books ever written on the subject of totalitarian expansionism. I offer this judgment because, although the accident of birth and intellectual curiosity have made Soviet Russia a subject of special interest for me, I have never read anything as...
A Soviet Psychosis
As Mikhail Gorbachev moves forward in his role as the new Vozhd of the USSR, he must take pride in a unique achievement. In a few years, he has managed to internationalize a Russian word—glasnost—and by its repeated use at home and abroad has dazzled the world with miracles that have yet to materialize. Whatever great reforms he pulls out...
Lillian Hellman, True and False
“Female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage.” —Shaw In a recent issue of The Nation, John L. Hess complains about the current flow of books demythologizing the venerated martyrs of the American left. So what if new historical research suggests that the Rosenbergs (or at least one of them) were actually guilty? So what if the same is true...
Doggerel In a Good Cause
As editor of the Literary Review, I am afraid I have formed rather a low opinion of the nation’s poets. Every week 20 or 30 offerings arrive through the post, and I often glance at them before handing them over to the magazine’s saintly, long-suffering poetry editor. With amazingly few exceptions, these “poems” are prosaic, confused, derivative, usually hard to...
Plummeting Rates
America’s fertility rates plunged in the early 1970’s, falling well below the minimal Zero Population Growth (ZPG) of 2.1 children per American woman. Never before has this happened to the nation while enjoying peace and relative prosperity. But a decisive rebound in the birthrate does not seem likely in the near future, given the widespread use of contraceptives, the legalization...
The Myth of Learning Disability
In advertising, it’s called weasel type, those tiny bits of typography which explain the nut of the matter (Offer expires on May 31, 1997. Employees of XYZ Corp. are ineligible). So, here goes the weasel type of this discourse. I am not a teacher. Nor am I a mother. Not even a research scientist, a sociologist, a social worker, a...
The Hammer of Hunger
“Every scarecrow secretly desires to terrorize.” —Stanislaw Lee When, from time to time, a responsible official in the United States suggests we employ our abundance of food as a “weapon” in our struggle with Communist totalitarianism, a clamor of protest arises from one end of the country to the other. But when the Communists wield food—or its lack—as a lethal...
A Poetics of the Mundane
A year or two before Ann Beattie’s breakthrough second novel, Falling in Place, a cartoon appeared in The New Yorker showing a crowd of people, dressed in evening gowns and suits, drinks in hand, milling around what looked like an outdoor cocktail party with nearly all of humanity in attendance. The caption read simply: “Woodstock: Tenth Reunion.” During the 70’s,...
Equal Opportunity Killer
It’s hip to be square—Huey Lewis’ new gospel—may have been announced prematurely. George Michael has a different message: “I can’t think of a better question for a 13- or 14-year-old child to be asking than ‘What does monogamy mean?'” Michael is a part-time child psychologist better known as a pop singer who was once the bigger half of a duo...
A (Pardon the Expression) Baccalaureate Address
The irrepressible John Towne tells us what he really thinks of higher education. Something to offend nearly everyone. I want you to know I share your disappointment that nobody you really care about and wanted could be here to make this speech. Sorry that Gary Hart is indisposed. Alan Alda was too busy and so was Gloria Steinem. As for...
Resisting in Berlin
“The (anti-Hitler) conspiracy failed,” wrote the late Willi Schlamm, himself a refugee from Nazism, nearly 30 years ago. “But the list of names of those whom a maddened Hitler hanged after the failure reads like a Gotha of Germany’s famous military families. . . . They are names which, if the truth indeed prevails, will join the short list of...
Advice to a Postulant-Professor
If I could tell every first-year graduate student in America one thing, it is this: The campus is not a calling, it is just another career. If university teaching serves your purposes, come and join us. If not, follow your star in a different firmament. In graduate school, learn in order to sell your knowledge and make a living. And...
Government Jerky
My husband, a beef jerky afficionado, tells me that C & I Jerky, Ltd. makes some of the best he’s ever tasted. Ileene Nodland and Cheryl Knutson produce it themselves in Dunn Center, North Dakota, which had 170 residents during the 1980 census and has fewer now. Knutson started out making her special venison jerky, and then the two neighbors...
Marilyn and Gloria
“Love-making is radical, while marriage is conservative.” —Eric Hoffer One day in the early 70’s, I read a magazine article in which Gloria Steinem was reported to have said that she would have no problem continuing her work as a writer should she ever have a baby—she’d do her writing when the baby napped. I can’t recall the date I...
Scientific American Goes to Moscow
Who is Mr. Piel? He is an American, a Harvard graduate (1937 magna cum laude), and a journalist who has devoted his career to the promotion of public understanding of science. From 1947 to 1984 he was president and publisher of Scientific American and is now its chairman. (In 1984 his son, Jonathan Piel, became editor.) He is a former...
Fightin’ Words
Perhaps you heard something of the furor evoked down here a couple of years ago when it was reported that a speech pathologist in Chattanooga, one Beverly Inman-Ebel, was conducting a class for those who wished to shed their Southern accents. (That’s how the news stories put it. One could as well say, of course, that they wanted to acquire...
Mother’s Darling
Hannah Lehmann is one of six children in a wealthy. New York, Orthodox Jewish family headed by a somewhat caustic, undemonstrative mother and a father whose concern is business. Hannah is obsessed with her mother, who never loved her enough, but whom Hannah cannot leave, forgive, or stop thinking about. Years, lovers, and psychiatrists do not help her. “My mother...
Protestant Polities, Religion, and American Public Life
“Every sect is a moral check on its neighbor. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.” —Walter Savage Landor When English Protestants fled their native land during Mary’s reign, many of them ended up in John Calvin’s Geneva. Additional refugees found a home in other Reformed cities in southwestern Germany. Lutheran lands, by contrast, were far less hospitable...
A Half-Open Mind
“The discussion is concerned with no commonplace subject but with how one ought to live.” —Plato During the month of June, Allan Bloom’s observations on the state of American education climbed their way dramatically toward the peak of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Why would such a book engage a mass readership? Bloom’s prose is neither light nor...
Old Attitudes Die Hard
Gunnai Myrdal came as the featured speaker at the annual meeting of the Lutheran Council in the USA—yet another public atheist called to give moral guidance to yet another demoralized band of American religious leaders. I saw his presence as a godsend. In a sense, he was to be my dissertation project. The chance to serve as his aide-de-camp and...
How I Expanded My Mind
A few weeks ago I went to Munich to see a dentist. The meaning of that experience had not dawned on me in all its vastness until recently. The very word “travel” is repugnant to me. I have never used it to describe my movements, since I always feel I am going somewhere for a reason (at times, admittedly, rather...
Viva la Musical Comedy
A few months before I saw the musical Les Miserables—actually a few months before it opened at the Kennedy Center last December—I heard it. The show’s publicist had sent me a tape of the London version. When I first listened to it, I felt disappointed. It sounded more than a little like Evita, with the strongest passages or the catchiest...
The Third World Revisited
“Sixty thousand blacks are annually embarked from the coast of Guinea, never to return to their native country; but they are embarked in chains; and this constant emigration which in the space of two centuries might have furnished armies to overrun the globe, accuses the guilt of Europe and the weakness of Africa.” —Edward Gibbon Among the few writers who...
A Propaganda Team Works A Small Town
Posters around town said there would be a meeting about Nicaragua at the local senior center. The speaker, “Director of the Municipal Art Gallery” in a large California city, was going to show slides taken during her recent two-week tour of Nicaragua. It, of course, turned out to be a propaganda session. She had gone to Nicaragua not as an...
The Righteousness of Rock?
The Fox Theatre—a grand movie palace of Detroit’s 1920’s, which is now used primarily as a venue for acts that won’t fill an arena—contained a chronologically mixed crowd in mid-March. Paul Young was in concert. Young, a slightly chubby, baby-faced British singer (he appears, to borrow a line from Elvis Costello, “teddy-bear tender and tragically hip”), uses the vocal style...
Between Two Worlds
Reflecting on his upbringing in Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul denies cultural identity to his part of the Caribbean: “Nothing bound us together except this common residence.” Indeed, the area called Caribbean is constantly redefining itself. Its tongues include English, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Its population shows large deposits of Chinese and Indians as well as African blacks. Island status, often thought...
Hawkeye Econ 101
“Directions for Iowa’s Economic Growth” ought to be required reading for every local and state government body, to say nothing of the boys in Washington (the less said about them, the better). Drafted by a University of Iowa research team under the direction of the Iowa Department of Economic Development and the Planning and Research Bureau, the 82-page document illustrates...
Stargazers
The political left’s deconstruction of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” into an ICBM closing on a child’s bedroom window is only the most memorable of the assaults on the Strategic Defense Initiative since it was announced by President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983. But the ever-shifting tactics also point up the failure of an anti-SDI strategy to emerge. As Dr....
Monumental Folly
The other day I got a “Dear Friend” letter from Malcolm Forbes asking for a contribution to the Reagan Presidential Library. It raises all sorts of questions. For instance, does Malcolm Forbes really think of me as a friend? Where has he been all this time? A friend in need is a friend indeed, Mr. Forbes, and I’ve got two...
Sense and Sensibility
It is a rare American poem, this late in the 20th century, that dares to be understood. Jane Greer’s slim volume, Bathsheba on the Third Day, is full of such poems, which give this first book a mature heft and solidity. The maturity should not be surprising. Jane Greer is the founding editor of Plains Poetry Journal, and her own...
Making Love
Making Mr. Right directed by Susan Seidelman written by Floyd Byars and Laurie Frank Orion Pictures Perhaps it’s living in New York that makes me like Making Mr. Right. Susan Seidelman’s latest (she did Desperately Seeking Susan with Madonna, remember) is just one step up from farce: a lighthearted comedy of manners and sexual politics. As in many of the...
The Pterodactyls of Lima
“Whitman can sing confidently and in blithe innocence about democracy militant because American Utopia is confused with and indistinguishable from American reality.” —Octavio Paz, Walt Whitman As we left for Ayacucho, Lucho Monasi Cockburn took out his machete from under his car seat and put it between the two of us. “It’s a bad road,” he said and looked at...
The War of Mexican Aggression
” . . . As honest men it behooves us to learn the extent of our inheritance, and as brave ones not to whimper if it should prove less than we had supposed.” —John Tyndall Much in the news recently, especially in the Southwest, is the problem of illegal immigration from south of the border. Another frequent subject of media...
The World According to St. Mugg
If we are to believe today’s pundits—an awfully big “if”—there are many global crises threatening the 20th century. Nuclear weapons and overpopulation currently top the list. Unfortunately, it sometimes seems that there are only two available responses. The first is the “liberal” response, which assumes that mankind already possesses the tools and skills to repair the world: If only people...
Letter From Calexico Report From California’s Berlin
Calexico is a North American town of roughly 16,000 situated directly on the Mexican border, 120 miles southeast of San Diego, in the warm and sunny Imperial Valley, where agriculture will always be the most abundant business; but Calexico differs from other towns along that extended border in being the suburb of a Mexican city, Mexicali, with its population of...
An Invisible Man
“I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.” —Samuel Johnson The late Louis Lomax, columnist and television personality, had delivered a lecture at Ferris State College, Michigan, when there arose in the audience a large, militant, black activist. “Lomax,” said this challenger, grimly, “do you call yourself black?” “Do you want that...
Boomtown Philosophers
Why is it that America has noticed the “Boom” in Latin American fiction but has ignored Latin American philosophy? One obvious reason lies in the unavailability of translated texts. While novelists have energetically and strategically combined efforts to publish translations of their works in the United States, nothing of the sort has happened in Latin American philosophy. This anthology, part...
Universities and Students of South America
By 1921, a few years after the Bolshevik revolution, students at Argentine universities had begun to agitate for equal rights with professors and were demanding the same rights for the cleaning staff. It sounds like the spring of 1968 in Paris and Columbia University, but in South America it was old stuff by then. Students there have been perhaps even...
Government Of, By, and Against the Public
Although it is widely believed that persons who oppose big government are sympathetic to large businesses and have no compassion for the little guy, no such logical connection exists. Democratic governments, as the author points out, respond to the interests of large, well-organized, and well-financed groups. Big business learned to induce governments “to further their interests at the sacrifice of...
The Silent Invasion
“It is surely arguable that during the third century of American existence the main problem of this nation will be—it already is—that of immigration and migration, mostly from the so-called Third World.” —John Lukacs Last year the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) apprehended 1.8 million illegal aliens along our southern border—less than half the number who tried to enter. This...
The “Contragate” Hearings
The “Contragate” hearings have been a poor substitute for daytime soap operas and do not begin to match the thrills of Watergate. Perhaps it is because we have heard them before: arrogantly inarticulate congressmen scoring points off frightened bureaucrats, an administration that turns to private contractors to carry on apparently illegal activities, and an imperialist Congress eager to seize control...
Source of Great Expectation
The Reagan Court has been a source of great expectation for conservatives. If only a few more superannuated justices would retire (or die), then we could have the court’s unchecked authority in our own hands. A favorite target of pious hopes and voodoo dolls is the apparently senile Thurgood Marshall. An example of tokenism at its worst, Marshall has consistently...