If Words Could Kill

www.foreignpolicyjournal.com

Ever since WikiLeaks became a household name this past summer, following the release of 77,000 secret U.S. documents relating to the ongoing occupation and destruction of Afghanistan, many American politicians and pundits have been calling for blood. Despite then-top military commander General Stanley McChrystal’s own admission in March of this year, the U.S. military in Afghanistan has “shot an amazing number of people” even though “none has ever proven to be a threat,” the ire resulting from the activities of WikiLeaks is directed at the whistle-blowers themselves, rather than at those actually implicated in war crimes as shown by the leaked documents.


Wikileaks founder Julian Assange
In their eternal allegiance to government secrecy, aggressive imperialism, and American exceptionalism, numerous WikiLeaks’ critics have been outraged over the publication of U.S. government documents. While accusing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of everything from espionage to terrorism to treason (Assange isn’t a U.S. citizen), they hold him responsible for the deaths of both soldiers and civilians and have even publicly suggested and supported threats to assassinate him.

The U.S. State Department claimed that the release of classified cables would “at a minimum…place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals”, and Attorney General Eric Holder stated his belief that “national security of the United States has been put at risk. The lives of people who work for the American people have been put at risk. The American people themselves have been put at risk by these actions that I believe are arrogant, misguided and ultimately not helpful in any way.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has described these hysterical reactions to WikiLeaks release as “fairly significantly overwrought” due to the continuing slow and calculated release of over 251,000 previously secret and classified U.S. diplomatic cables (fewer than 1,500 cables have been released so far). Still, there are increasing calls not only for Assange’s indictment, but also explicitly for his murder.

On November 29, Fox News‘s Bill O’Reilly declared on air that those responsible for the leaked documents are “traitors in America” and that they “should be executed,” adding “or put in prison for life,” as a dismissive afterthought.

The next day, Bill Kristol, in a The Weekly Standard article entitled “Whack WikiLeaks,” urged the United States government to “neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are” and hoped for a glorious, unified bipartisan effort “to degrade, defeat, and destroy WikiLeaks.” One need only recall what Senator Lindsey Graham said in early November about “neutering” the Iranian government to get an idea of Kristol is talking about.

Sarah Palin chimed in on Facebook, writing that Assange “is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands” who should be “pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.” This very urgency was mentioned in a presidential debate in October 2008 by Palin campaign opponent Barack Obama, who made the following promise to Americans: “We will kill bin Laden; we will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.” One can assume that Palin meant that the WikiLeaks founder should be hunted with a similar kind of lethal force ...

On the same day, another 2012 Republican presidential hopeful wished for the assassination of Assange. Former Arkansas governor and Fox News host Mike Huckabee, speaking at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library, told reporters, “Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason, and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty.” Huckabee, who was signing copies of his new children’s book, “Can’t Wait Till Christmas!” at the time, was presumably referring to U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who is accused of providing WikiLeaks with the classified documents and is currently being held in intense solitary confinement the brig at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia. Manning has been locked up in Quantico or five months now, after spending two months detained in a military jail in Kuwait. Manning, like Assange, has not been convicted of any crime. Kids, Christmas, and Capital Punishment. Thanks, Mike!

Fox News national security analyst Kathleen McFarland urged the United States to declare WikiLeaks a terrorist organization, kidnap Assange, and try him in a military tribunal for espionage. Furthermore, McFarland, who served in the Pentagon under the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations and is currently a “Distinguished Adviser” at the Iran-hating/Israel-advocating think tank The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, agreed with Huckabee that Manning should be charged and tried as a traitor for exposing American war crimes, criminal negligence, and diplomatic duplicity. “If he’s found guilty,” she wrote, “he should be executed.”

Also on November 30, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) – whose contradictory motto reads Securing America, Strengthening Israel – addressed the WikiLeaks release by musing whether the U.S. government would “try to hang Manning from the nearest tree?”

In a post on the right-wing website Red State on December 1, a commenter by the moniker “lexington_concord” fantasized about Julian Assange receiving the Abe Lincoln treatment. “Under the traditional rules of engagement he is thus subject to summary execution,” he writes, “and my preferred course of action would be for Assange to find a small caliber round in the back of his head.”

The following day, Washington Times columnist Jeffrey Kuhner published a vitriolic attack on Assange, whom he accused of being “an anti-American radical who wants to see the United States defeated by its Islamic fascist enemies.” Other goals Kuhner ascribed to Assange included the humiliation of America “on the world stage, to drain it of all moral and legal legitimacy – especially regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Kuhner wrote that Assange “is aiding and abetting terrorists in their war against America,” and suggested that the Obama administration “take care of the problem – effectively and permanently” by treating Assange as an “enemy combatant” and “the same way as other high-value terrorist targets.” It is no surprise, therefore, that Kuhner’s column was entitled “Assassinate Assange.”

Though it may seem strange that a Montreal native like Kuhner is disappointed that “America is no longer feared or respected,” he is not the only Canadian to harbor such violent visions of Assange’s murder. Tom Flanagan, a senior adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said plainly on the Canadian TV station CBC, “I think Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something.”

Speaking with Chris Wallace on Fox News, former House Speaker and paid Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich said on December 5 that “Julian Assange is engaged in warfare. Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed is terrorism. And Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism.” As such, Gingrich suggested, “He should be treated as an enemy combatant and WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively.” If recent history is any indication, as an enemy combatant Assange would most likely be either murdered in his own country by U.S. soldiers and air strikes or kidnapped, tortured, and indefinitely imprisoned in inhumane conditions without charge or trial.

LEAKING II

One has to wonder how it feels to see one’s ineptitude or stupidity revealed in the world press. But if this whole episode is considered in the light of normal behavior, it is not what has been revealed but what still might be revealed that must frighten the good folks who govern us.

It’s like a Mob story. So, Sakvatore has snitched, says the Capo, so what’s next?

The importance of this or that leak is a matter of where you are and what you are hiding.

Take such juicy topics as the CIA budget for ‘covert actions’ in Pakistan. It would certainly be interest to read the memoranda (presidential and otherwise) that set out this ‘outsourcing’ of military action to our intelligence agency. Could that other shoe drop?

Or supposing that a-leak-to-come outlines all the links between Halliburton and the cabal headed by Dick Cheney?

The public (and even the government) absorbs the leaks we have already seen, but frantic must be those about which nothing is known. Yet. Imagine our embassy-bunker in Belgrade when the footloose Holebrook – de mortuis nil nisi bonum must prevail here – was acting as architect of a Balkan war that he so nobly later brought to Dayton and peace. Would there be indiscretions in the wrong hands about Austrians equipping the breakaway Slovenes? With weapons shipped via Portugal? Or is there a record of Elie Wiesel’s abortive ten limousine relief expedition to Sarajevo, subsequent to his visit to the CIA’s headquarters in Belgrade?

I am, of course, only speculating. But then so are those who anxiously await further revelations, and so is our government, which is doing all it can to prevent such information from being made public. Wikileaks differs from history only by its capacity to reveal documents for which historians have to wait decades, or even centuries. It is showing us history as it is being made and still hot stuff. The Dread factor is at work.

10.xii.10

I remember first coming across Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ in New City or Sneden’s landing back in the days when Mike Wallace was still a ferocious reporter and Burgess Meredith a semi-reired nice-guy actor. Everyone spoke well of Scott and – as I was an avid reader on matters Indian, from Louis Bromfield to Somerset Maugham, from the miraculously funny G. S. Desani to Narayan and Chaudhuri, not excluding Tagore of E.F. Forster – I too read him, and with pleasure.

More recently I watched the 14 episodes of Granada’s ‘Jewel in the Crown’, an account of the love-hatred relationship between the British and the Indians. Intermixed with newsreel footage from Movietone, it is focused on that very difficult task, understanding. To know a country, you have to understand it; the failure to do so (‘Only connect’, wrote Morgan Forster) cost European nations their colonies throughout the world. The films, which contain some marvelous character-parts by Eric Porter and Peggy Ashcroft, were an anatomy of that misunderstanding: seductive in their portrayal of a three-hundred-year-old cohabitation, rueful in the depiction of the disintegration of the India that had been

But what weighed principally in my mind was the role of memory in retaining both love and insult. It is something ingrained in all of us. A wife leaves citing three instances of brutality or disregard; every detail she can go through, and does, in detail. Ask her about the years of marital hapiness and its very every-dayness she cannot really recall. Grudges are lodged ,in the safety-box of the mind; the good is amorphous in its benevolence..

In nothing is this as true as in the relationship between colonizer and colonized.

ON LEAKING

Curious, isn’t it, that leaks such as the Woodward/Bernstein ‘Deep Throat’ ‘revelations’ are the stuff of which heroes are made, and others, because they reveal the extraordinary ineptitude of our government (and our political appointee diplomats, that is big Party givers), should incur the righteous wrath of the government?

Leaking is, after all, a time-honored occupation in American life, and Wikileaks is no more than a platform. The IRS will actually PAY you to leak info on your neighbor’s hidden income. There’s many a politician who’d still be riding high with illegal nannies without leaks. But as politicians consider that the sky is no limit, the leak is a last line of defense. Would you not really like a leak inside Halliburton? inside Dick Cheney’s machinations? Without leaks, would Ollie North still be fixing things in Central America?

I am not a Conspiracy Theorist, so I won’t go so far as to say that the CIA sent two bimbos out to compromise Mr. Assange. Sweden is a country with very advanced views on sexual equality, and I am not surprised by the charge, as yet unproven.

But I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that the moves against him by the government, via Amazon, PayPal, Mastercard & so on, can hardly be viewed as innocent. The free and open Web is a menace to all governments and these are but the first moves by states to curb freedom of information. All politics is about concealing the real reason why a bridge must be built, a war waged, or public enquiry be avoided. Open discussion based on information is anathema to Big Government.

As the Republican leader has been reported to have said, if the Patriot Act can’t stop Wikileaks, we’ll change the Patriot Act so that we can! The worrying element in this is that not just our government can do this, but that obviously the political class around the world also can. By co-ordinating their actions they can bring down Wikileaks, and anyone who thinks that they would not be happy, too, to control the Web, lives in Cloud Cuckoo land. Big pharma attacks and closes down foreign competition, copyright-holders track down and extinguish downloads. That is the real world we live in now.

It happens that WWW, for all its weaknesses, is one of the greatest advances in Information since the Renaissance. To keep politicians’ and governments’ hands off it is the first battleground of the 21st century. We should all be girt for the fight. My cheque is on its way to Wikileaks: if I can find out how to pay it in.

Story-telling

The trouble with the Past is that we have to invent it. If you’re a Cherokee (or a Creek or Seminole or any of the other Indian nations we have degraded and wiped out), your history needs to be re-staged by contemporaries dressed up in rags and tatters. The same would be true for the life of small-town America that was such a subject in my youth. Illustrated by Norman Rockwell and others, the foibles of the local dentist or the adventures of two boys and a dog – all of which pastoral fantasies were already in the middle decades of the last century memories of their creators’ own childhoods – no longer have any real existence beyond television or cinema re-creations. In my own youth, people would still say, ‘Now, old Joe was a real character!’, and relate to you what made Joe distinctive, or the event in which he was involved that forever defined him in the minds of his neighbors. It was called story-telling, and it too has vanished.

But Albert Payton Terhune (in a Pompton Lakes ‘comment’, a reader notes sadly that Terhune ‘gave pleasure to three or four generations of readers’), Marilynne Robinson, and for that matter Wright Morris, Edgar Lee Masters and many others are the ball of wool from which most of us can imaginatively recover the small-town America that was. It is probably as much a lie as Fennimore Cooper’s tales, but it survives because it takes the place of what once was. It is, therefore, very much a part of the way in which America defines itself. Ike and Harry knew that world, but Richard Nixon was probably a manga comic imposed on us. Foreigners are always fascinated by the fenceless yards of New England houses, and no one builds Keep Out walls like the French. In England, a man’s home is his castle. Americans have had more space. Murder takes place ‘on the road’, not where butlers roam and Poirot sniffs.

Back from my slumber

A NOTE ABOUT TroL & TRL BOOKS


The Editor regret to inform subscribers, contributors to #22 and others that TroL itself is suspended for at least a few weeks more. The Editor is temporarily unable to perform his usual duties as other matters, of a personal nature, compel his entire attention.




THE IRISH QUESTION

Like much of Europe, where the air has turned bitterly cold and the general economy is in a state of crisis, Ireland is suffering. As in London, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, Paris, Athens and Brussels, civil servants, students, farmers, unions are demonstrating with the usual folderol: overturned buses, burning cars, placards, breakings-and-entries and so on. The police is reacting firmly and the Euro-Wallahs are meeting hither and yon.

The sources of the trouble are, however, quite evident. Most of us know that we should not spend more than we earn or what we have in the bank, in investments, etc.. The European Union, like the United States, does not seem to recognize this odd little fact.

On the same day in which all the above hullaballoo was going on, the BBC showed us the spanking new headquarters of the EU’s Diplomatic Services, and through it walked the absurd figure of Lady A, a professional Nobody appointed to the post of Foreign Minister of the E.U.. Explaining how useful and necessary it was for the EU to have a Foreign Ministry was a little man from Malta, a little country most of us probably had not often thought of as a member of the Union. He said, with a shrug, that his country couldn’t afford to maintain too many embassies abroad. That is understandable, as Malta does not have a pool of experienced diplomats. Or a pool of much else. It is a lovely place, but its population is only slightly over 400,000.

If we turn our minds back to Eire, those of us who follow such things will remember that Ireland is the country that regularly coaxed enormous subventions for an agriculture largely based on pigs, whether or not those pigs existed except on paper – rather like the olive trees in Italy that turned out to be imaginary. Germans, who like their Schwein, had bought up much of Ireland’s old estates; international companies had stepped in with spanking headquarters to exploit cheap native labor, the banks had a heyday lending left, right and center, the government couldn’t do enough for its people, so it employed civil servants by the hundred thousands. And now that the vultures are hovering overhead, there are protests. The basic sales tax (a regressive tax if there ever has one) is to rise to 27%. Hell, I would protest myself.

All of Europe overspends, as we do. Households are perforce thrifty in bad times, but Lady A. is not a housewife. She can afford to be as profligate as are members of the European Parliament or any of Sepp Blatter’s buddies at FIFA or, for that matter, our own members of Congress, or any bank you care to name. The 89 Greeks who use a notorious rail line with 600 civil servant jobs attached to it, may now have to walk. Such is Austerity. But will the civil servants be disappeared? Will the endless meetings of our World Leaders be curtailed? Where will the Photo-Ops come from? What will all those colorful troops who parade for and are inspected by our leaders do in their spare time? Back and forth doth Hillary Clinton scurry making her pronouncements; the Vice of the Maltese Turtle must be heard in the land.

And British students protest at having to pay ten grand for Oxford and Cambridge, while paying forty Big Ones for a high school education at American universities too many to name?

So queries Candide.

24.xi.10

ALARUMS IN THE EXTREME ORIENT

The last time I looked, that Far East – nothing like our own empty Far West – contained about three quarters of the world’s population. You would not be surprised, in what was Bombay and Peking or Colombo, in Jakarta, Hong Kong or Calcutta, to find yourself unable to move for the human press. In a restaurant I visited, the kitchen walls were hung with ducks drying; they served, they said, twenty thousand of them a day. Even given the sense of Japanese order, a square foot of pavement is honored if occupied; in Beizhing, if you took a car, eighty thousand bikes settled in front of you at every traffic light.

In those conditions, I take it that taking pot shots at a sparsely-populated island is good fun; it would relieve the tension. All the above places – everything East of Iran – have not had a moment of peace since at least a decade before their old colonial masters or their even more ancient imperial families, were removed from the scene. The wars fought in that vast territory have been among the most cruel mankind has ever endured, the longest-lasting and the most perilous to civilian populations. All of which I take to be consonant with extreme population pressures.

I don’t think, then, that it is insane, eccentric or racist, to point out that our tiny and rapidly- diminishing population of whites, is hardly likely to have any great influence on a part of the world that not only outnumbers us by a factor of about ten to one, but is also outgrowing us economically and entrepreneurially. For we are not talking here of a bunch of illiterate peasants; the populations of Asia are in fact part of our own DNA. Chess and mathematics are not ‘white’ inventions, though effective civil government and respect for the Law are. Nor so I believe that inventiveness is a ‘white’ trait. And it is becoming daily more evident that as entrepreneurs and capitalists, we are being outpaced by Asia.

So the idea that the Burmese government, the Sri Lankan, the North Korean, the Afghani and so on can and should accommodate themselves to that Johnny-come-lately ‘democracy’ strikes me as fatuous. We ourselves – in part due to our own large and miscegenated population – submit to constant weakening of the very stuff which once made us a proud nation. How can we expect to influence, shape or otherwise ‘interfere with governments which have vastly different problems from ours, whose populations (like those of the Indian sub-continent) required a bloody civil war and partition to come into independence? What experience do we have that could possibly be adapted to conditions in China or Afghanistan? These people do not even think as we do, much less act as we think they should. They neither can, nor should. The business of government is to keep any population in some sort of order, for anarchy is an even greater disaster than repression. This, Ireland, Greece and most of the European Union is beginning to understand. After all, soon enough, their demographics will soon rid them of those who dreamt up the Enlightenment.

Personally, I dread the Mass in any form. I suspect most governments and politicians do so too. But in Asia masses die, daily; and are replaced. Mao was a horror as vicious and corrupt as Hitler or Stalin, but the tasks faced by these governments today are not so very different from those that brought to power those totalitarianisms. Students riot in London and are not killed. That is good. If they riot in Asia they may well be killed, that is not good. I strongly believe in circumspection, and cultivate my own garden while I may.

A New Week

I am sure you will have been as delighted as I was to learn that la cuisine française, the French tradition of bang-up meals, convivial families around the table, the proper placing of cutlery and glass, has joined the Mediterranean diet and flamenco as a part of UNESCO’s ‘intangible world heritage’, the . . .er, less visible (say than the pyramids of Gaza or Stonehenge) part of what should be recognized as invaluable to our universal culture.

Over the years, I have had the pleasure of meeting many of the distinguished gentlemen who work at UNESCO. In fact, you bump into them pretty much everywhere. It is, after all, a pretty cushy job, and there are several posts available for each and every country, however uncultivated or unscientific it may be. Our own rep is Mr. David T. Killion; Kazakhstan’s is the mayor of Altana. Mr. Killion’s qualifications reflect his passion for legislative drafting in Congress; of our Kazakh, rather less is known. The Venezualan rep is Ms. Jennifer Josefina Gi y Laya, who is also the Bolivarian Minister for the People’s Power for Education.

These are largely working pols, God bless them. It is down below that the plums are distributed: the translation, the conferences, the working groups, the sub-contracts and arcane sub-divisions. One such was the acronymic group (French member, the appropriately named Yannick Vin) that met recently in Nairobi to deliberate.

Most of UNESCO’s sites are, as well know, as dead as those celebrated in Ozymandias:

‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
. . .boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

So, I fear, are these new, intangible ones. The last traditional French meal I ate (then with my French wife) was over a partage. The family property having been sold, what was left was to be redistributed, and argued over, at a crowded table. Such meals and such a cuisine are still to be found, but at a Parisian brasserie as lately as this summer, most diners watched the TV. How many French restaurants still have, by the Cashier, the boxes in which regular diners’ napkins were preserved from day to day?

Great efforts are made in Italy (and far fewer in places of catastrophic eating like Greece) to preserve the varieties of the Mediterranean diet, the ingredients simple and good. But it does require effort: to find or produce.

As for flamenco, the less said the better. The authentic stuff probably died at about the same time Garcia Lorca, an aficionado, was killed. Oh, there are still Sevillian ladies about to twirls their skirts and clack their castanets. But like most of my life, such expressions of culture as part of daily life are long gone and UNESCO cannot but despair.

Perhaps it should take up causes that can be salvaged? Paper bags in markets, books that don’t fall apart on reading, ocean liners, railways that go everywhere, marriage itself, thrift, respect?

Thoughts of the day

I note with pleasure that Mr. Tsiolkas’ ( 'much-acclaimed’ seems to be the epithet of choice) novel, The Slap! has been nominated for one of the Bad Sex awards. He should certainly be awarded the prize, for the sex in the book is what debases what is otherwise a fair-to-good anatomy of Australian society. The plot is simple, its working-out consistently interesting: man at party slaps an obnoxious child, eight characters react differently to the ‘outrage’. Unfortunately, to find out their attitudes towards the incident, the hippy, the pc, the perp, etc., you have to wade through pages of tediously detailed sex amongst them.

From my limited experience, though I do have a number of friends in Australia, I do not believe this to be a national trait; I suspect it may be generational or, worse yet, personal to Mr. Tsiolkas, in which case he’s got a problem.

My view is that all explicit sex in fiction is boring in the extreme. It has been eschewed by every major writer since literature began. Anna Karenina did not exude, drip, sigh, exclaim, sweat, smell or otherwise pass on the intimate details of her unhappy affair.

I have always liked that article of the French Code which addresses the atteinte à la pudeur of minors: literally, an assault on their (supposedly) inherent modesty. We also badly need a prize for Immodesty: Lady Gaga, James Ellroy & Co.. For what we call today ‘celebrity’.

Commonplace Books

There is much to cull from reading. Writers often kept Commonplace Books ,in which they recorded what they found striking or needing further explanation. There are a multitude of such things in Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia. He obviously notes everything down, as I have for years. He picks up on Jorge Luis Borges defending himself from accusations of kow-towing to the military regime’s by saying, No leo los diarios! I don’t read the papers! He recalls Cocteau with this cautionary tale: ‘There was once a chameleon whose owner, to keep it warm, put it on a gaudy Scottish plaid. The chameleon died of fatigue.’

You can pick this stuff up anywhere.

The departing British Prime Minister is reported to have said, ‘I don’t regard any sex as pleasant.’ But then Isaac Babel claimed that he had made love to the ‘understandably unbalanced wife of Yezhov [the Nasty who headed the old Soviet Secret Police] and almost everyone who slept with either of the Yezhovs was shot in early 1940.’

I think there is a lesson in those two statements, but I don’t know what it is. For those of you who wonder, there is the Lewis Carroll defense. Children some to those who know ‘the simple art of giving them their whole attention.’ That one happens to be true, and all too few do.

I close with a wonder from the excellent Juan Ribeyro: ‘a new President has been elected. He doesn’t smoke, drink, gamble or womanize.’ This is worrying: ‘It would terrify me to be governed by a man who was won a prize for virtue.’

Some Thoughts on the Day

I had occasion today to correspond with a former student – he must now be thirty-something – who wished to go on to an MFA. Would I recommend him? I’ve done that for literally hundreds of students, who are a faithful bunch and after all have their way to make. But in this case, I growled, Writers Workshops and MFA problems are a plague and a pestilence. It is thanks to them that an excrescence like the New York’s Forty (or was is twenty) Young writers got cobbled together. They take up literary space, these people do; they chat, they tweet, they Face and above all they log-roll.

So I vented to the young man. I said that when I wound up in one, in Iowa, sixty years ago, it was because they laid on some money for me, which I lacked. I met a lifelong friend, Paul Engle was a generous prairie-fed maecenas, Robert Lowell shambled through poetry, the most talented boy in the program, Bob Shelley, killed himself, and Dylan Thomas blew through town, drunk, to get his teeth fixed. I was a lousy writer at 21 and Iowa didn’t do anything for me, or for anyone, at the time. It offered fellowship at a time when literature was taken seriously.

That is no longer the case. The joints proliferate the way literary festivals do, What can an MFA program offer but replicas of what the failed writers who staff them (or the occasional ‘name’) think is good writing? True writers know the art is unteachable. What a still-young writer needs is to write, to put stuff out, to get rejected; to read a lot; to learn what it is to tell a story that someone else will want to read; to know a lot, languages (plural) especially, so that his diet is not just stuff spawned from MFA programs; to see the real world and forget his own little special self.

Still, I will write his letter: the way he wrote his reply suggested he may know that already.



The University of Maryland and one other stateside institution, back a kind of ‘medical’ program offered by something called the Ibero-Americal University with its seat in Costa Rica. In this country where there is no real education or culture, such ‘universities’ spring up like hollyhocks. This is now quite common. Our universities are now just marketers, and the underdeveloped countries are the ‘huddled masses’ of the day: ripe for academic exploitation.

-----------------------------------------------

My London bookseller, John Sandoe, is usually very good to me. I patronize them because they have taste, because all writers should support independent booksellers, because they deserve our custom (at full price). I buy most of my books in England because I like well-produced books as objects, too, and America now binds in plastic, uses heavy paper, and is otherwise unattractive.

When I go into Sandoe’s, I let each of its staff pick a book I might like. They have batted at about .800, which is pretty high. Until this last time, when they passed off on me two novels that were complete disgraces. Both of them, of course, bore the usual accolades, Thomas Leverett’s The Exchange-Rate between Love and Money (which the Guardian found ‘dazzling) was simply unreadable. On the first page I was offered Frito, who’d ‘heard about this amazing thing love, had been trying to score for some years – He’d painted a target on every girl he met and shot himself out of a cannon at them, but none ever withstood the impact.’ Anyone who thinks that has anything to do with love is simply a smart-aleck. I did twenty pages of that one and then fled.

The second, Simon Mawrer’s The Glass Room (‘a thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry’) had an unbearably turgid story line – a Jugendstil house – to which, as in those epitomies of history published by earnest divines in the nineteenth century, a set of ‘characters’ were marched through. There were Nazis and Jews and artists and women who smoked cigarettes in elongated holders, venal servants and nasty little communist bureaucrats. None with any life whatever.

That one I read all the way through. The author was so goddam earnest I would have felt it lacking in charity not to wave goodbye to him at the end.

Blog is up again

Apologies to my readers. It was not a good summer and I was ill and uncommunicative.

Also it seemed the Blog needed re-thinking.

It is now more a journal of what goes through my mind that I think might be of interest to others.

IRELAND & THE TROUBLES

I re-read as I read, a lot. Last week five novels by William Trevor, who is by a long shot the best living writer in English. Fools of Fortune which alas I will finish today, made me reflect the Great War, the Spanish Civil War in the mid-‘Thirties, and the more recent dismemberment of Yugoslavia are cut of the same cloth. They can’t be extirpated from Irish, Spanish or Serb memories; injustices, follies, were committed during these events and there will forever be family connections to those acts and crimes. They will all have lost something valuable.

The big totalitarianisms of the past century, in contrast, were vast, impenetrable and anonymous. It was talk one heard, or other peoples’ memories. The fouler for that, but not so personal.

OF BURMA

My memory was jogged by hearing of the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. An old friends from my Sunday Times days, Mihir Bose, had made me read a little twentieth century Burmese history, in which his father – mysteriously killed in a plane flying to Japan – played a part. If I remember rightly, this fetching lady’s father was the head of Burma’s communist party, which thought it better to collaborate with the Japanese invader than submit to British rule.

The lady cannot, then, be said to spring full-blown from. Jove’s brow. There, too, there is a family history.

It is curious that in moments of euphoria, democracy and whatnot, all sense of history is lost. Does anyone remember anything?

FROM SUBLIME TO RIDICULOUS

Now there is to be a Library (or something) Prize for homosexual literature for the young. Will it be literature, which is just that, with no adjective preceding it?

WHY FOOLS RUSH AND THE SMART WAVER

It took some time to get the actual words our President used in the press conference after the recent election. Here is the gist of what interested me:


“There is a inherent danger in being in the White House and being in the bubble. I mean, folks didn’t have any complaints about my leadership style when I was running around Iowa for a year. And they got a pretty good look at me up close and personal, and they were able to lift the hood and kick the tires, and I think they understood that my story was theirs. I might have a funny name, I might have lived in some different places, but the values of hard work and responsibility and honesty and looking out for one another that had been instilled in them by their parents, those were the same values that I took from my mom and my grandparents.

“When you’re in this place, it is hard not to seem removed. Those letters that I read every night, some of them just break my heart. But nobody is filming me reading those letters. And so it’s hard, I think, for people to get a sense of, well, how is he taking in all this information?”

A President who can both think and feel can’t be all bad. I’ve known presidents and nabobs and big shots, and there’s a part of most people that wants power. But ultimately my observation is in accord with Lord Acton’s. Exercising power over others will kill you. You live by it, you die by it. It is the biggest bubble there is: when no one’s left who dares say, ‘I don’t think you should do that.’ Power deletes thought in those around you.

I thought it was a pretty remarkable thing to say to the nation.

THE WORLD CUP BLOG FROM TROL

INTRODUCTION



Those who know this magazine and its Editor are aware that he has always been deeply involved in and written a great deal about Sports. Given the absolutely desperate level of writing about football (the world game, not the NFL which he also cherishes) as evinced by Sports Illustrated (the most ignorant), USA Today, ESPN, etc., this blog may also serve as a sort of corrective. It has been written day by day for a Polish newspaper and e-mailed to a few friends. Why deny it to others?

It is available here in reverse order: that is, the most recent report is also the first.

GOSSIP BEFORE ARMAGEDDON (July 1)

Should you think there are enough dictators about football, here's
fresh news for you:

1. The Paramount Chief (Sorry, President) of Nigeria, that excellent
footballer, has banned the entire Nigerian team from all competition
for two years. For dishonoring,the Nation! I truly love that, but do
not think that England is likelly to follow suit.

2. Ashley Cole, Chelsea and England fullback was so indiscreet to his
friends as to say that he 'hated England and its fans'. At least here
is a case of a player saying what he really thinks. I do not take it
for granted that athletes, in football or elsewhere, are intelligent.
They are bodies and minds hired for a decade and then replaced. The
new Italian team coach, Prandelli, was on holiday in Zanzibar during
the early stages of the World Cup. He took reading matter with him:
Jorge Luis Borges and Jean-Paul Sartre. That qualifies him in sporting
circles as a raging intellectual. In the US, that would be enough to
disbar him from public office.

But Ashley Cole? Well, most of the talk about him is about girls. Now, then, ex, current, future. All of them exceedingly boring. A good player on the way down.

3. Now that is certainly popular with the tabloids, so maybe it is not
so nutty to suggest that David Beckham should take Capello's place as
England's manager. Besides falling apart and faking injury during a
previous WC, the appointment of another cheat to a high position in
football would go down well in certain quarters. You could say Beckham fits. With Maradona, Henry, Zidane and company

4. Does anyone know the whereabouts or destinations of North Korea's
vanquished team? The last batch 'disappeared'. Or should that ve, 'were disappeared'?

5. I read in the Colombian press an urgent question: as Brazil is the
host nation in 2014, does that mean that South America will have only
four 'other' teams in consideration? Answer: So far, yes. Given the
number of football associations on that continent, S. America already
has the hghest proportion of participants.

6. Of the nineteen referees still in action (or available), few are
notable for their performances. Larrionda (Spain) and Rossetti (Italy)
have been tossed for egregious mistakes, though Rossetti was far less
at fault. But one other sent home was Swiss, Massimo Busacca. He
doesn't know why. No one does. There are suggestions that he was sent
home for daring to put the South African team out too soon.

7. Final Expectoration: by one C. Ronaldo, at or near the TV cameras.
They are not pleased with the Glamor Boy in Portugal. His predecessor,
Luis Figo, says the lad lacks respect for the team, the game and his
nation. The special one, Jose Mourinho, rushed to his aid, as he does
with all his players. If the team loses, Mourinho explained, I am to
blame; if it wins, the credit is theirs. More polish than spit there,
Joze!

.

MAGAZINE BUSINESS

TYhe Editor is currently in Europe obsessing with the World Cup. Regular business with be restored in late August.

We expect to launch TRoL books in the Fall. The first list will be advertised here.

ISRAEL AND 'HUMANITARIAN' RELIEF

Imagine, if you will, that along the Cote d'Azure of France some goodly portion of the Arab population of France -- perhaps rightly inflamed by the secular state's banning of the burkha -- has been running an enclave that includes Cannes. These French Palestinians, once citizens of France, have refused participation in the central (Israeli) government. They and metropolitan France have been at intermittent war for some years, especially since elections on the Enclave brought a more radically Islamic government to power. You may, and should, assume that there are rights and wrongs on both sides, and that the blockaded Enclave is suffering as a result of a French blockade.

Now imagine that five ships are organized to create a propaganda coup by friendly Islamic powers, not to speak of various do-goodies, and that these ships should -- despite endless warnings and alternative offers -- head straight for Cannes and are headed off by French troops (the famous paras) and in the resultant melee, ten allied Muslim men (mostly Turks) should be killed. Would France be condemned?

The parallel is fairly consistent with reality. I know of no tenet of international law that proscribes a sovereign state's defense of its own integrity. The blockade may be poor policy; it may even by some thought to be immoral, but it is certainly not illegal if a state of war exists between the Enclave and France. I have no doubt that there is suffering on both sides, but what state can tolerate being under constant attack? Who would support France if it failed to protect its own citizens?

Since its founding in 1947, Israel has fought many wars to preserve its integrity. It is a tiny country surrounded by hostile states. The Enclave's international 'support' has come only from other Islamic states: and from the academic Left and other elements of the old pro-Arab elements in the UK Foreign Office. Four ships were boarded safely, one was not. Those on board that fifth ship -- does it matter who fired first, when we know who first resisted the boarding? -- knew what the consequences of resistance would be. And resisted.

In a politically correct world, the ensuing brouhaha is predictable and no less wrong.

THE TRoL REVIEW OF OLD BOOKS

Here is a new and untimely feature: taking a look at books that I would guess are not much looked at.



Matthew Josephson: The Politicos, 1938



Lately I've asked a cross-section of friends and correspondents to name US presidents between U.S. Grant and the turn of the twentieth century. The record of correct answers belongs to a gent who was raised in Brooklyn's public schools in a period when kids still got educated. He reeled off four names. Most people are lucky to get one or two -- though Polk is a popular nominee, perhaps because no one can remember a damned thing about him. Wrong, however: his merited oblivion is pre Civil War.



Here is the Rogues' Gallery:



Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley.



It is possible they have been erased from memory because all but one of them (Cleveland) were Big Business Republicans in what constitutes a period of our history -- that of the Robber Barons and the political Bosses -- that we would rather forget.



I re-read these books because I thought I discerned a certain relevance between the aftermath of the Civil War and our own post-1989 world, the connecting thread, in a word, being Greed. As a kid coming to America in 1939, that was not a word I associated with the United States. Generous, yes; Greedy, no. Well, , we've come a long way, Baby!



The chances are that Josephson was a bit of a Lefty. During the New Deal, this was no crime. He is not much a man of words, but of hard facts: how the Republicans struck unionists from the rolls; how it contrived to defeat Andrew Johnson, because he thought the question of Negro suffrage was amatter for the several states; how that block of votes led to a party seizing control of the state, while leaving enfranchised Negroes nothing and sustaining, for electoral purposes, a military occupation of the southern states; how offices were bought and sold; how the thirty years of Republican dominance was maintained by funds handed the party by the trusts in an equable quid pro quo; how petty officials, beneficiaries of party patronage were taxed at election time; how the federal budget was regularly robbed by the party and its patrons -- in other words, all the sordid details of corruption and influence-peddling.

I don't think any of us need to be told that hypocrisy is a much-practiced art -- for politicians, the very heart of the matter is how they will be perceived. Nothing new about that. As professors of cant, few can equal the great Massacusetts abolitionists. On behalf of their mills they could see that the industrial supremacy of the North would best be advanced by the destruction of the agricultural South, hence abolishing its slave-owning economy, in the name of 'freedom', was something that would greatly benefit their own growth. It was a clarion-call of patriotism that did the job, and for forty-odd years, Republicans were nicely able to run the country without the southern-based Democrats: in the name of the Union.

And? you may well ask.

Well, I seem to detect in all that more than a whiff of What is good for General Motors is good for America: especially if we bail out the former and set the lawyers loose on the enemy -- those bloody Asians who actually own our country: a form of conduct which can only benefit the Lawyer Empire based on Tort. Back in the happy days of good business government (not Halliburton but the railroads, the iron barons, the whiskey circle) someone thought up a good caper: take over what is now the Dominican Republic; the only constraint was the notion that it wasn't really worth (financially) taking over. Oh, I am perfectly sure that making BP pay to clean up its mess in the Gulf has nothing whatever to do with the oil interests that governed, and still govern, our policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to speak of Iran. Very sure.

Reading old books puts you in old places. I commend the practice.

Next: Felix Frankfurter.

THE SIMPLE ARITHMETIC OF VOTING

There are some very simple facts about the recent UK elections that I think bear reflection; on this side of the Atlantic they are clearly not very well understood.

1. This is a 'hung' parliament, which means that no one party has a clear majority. Despite television's attempt to dumb us all down, UK voters were not choosing between three party leaders, Messrs Cameron, Brown and Clegg, but among 650 distinct parliamentary seats, most of them contested by between six and ten-plus candidates.

2. The final results were, in terms of seats: Conservatives: 306, Labor: 258, Liberal Democrats: 57, Others: 28.

3. In terms of popular votes, the results were: Conservatives: 36.1%, Labor: 29%, Liberal Democrats: 23%, Others: 11.9%.

4. Conclusion: A little over 1/3 of the popular vote is not a democratic mandate for a conservative government. Thus, two possibilities exist: (1) A coalition between one or more parties, or (2) a minority government which can be overthrown by any adverse vote.

5. If popular votes are what counts, then these offer tantalizing possibilities. Assuming that the 'Others', a host of nationalist parties, would split evenly (a big assumption), the two major coalitions possible would be: Conservative 36.1% + Liberal Democrats 23.0% + Others 6% would give Mr. Cameron the theoretical backing of 65.1% of votes cast. The alternative alliance would be: Labor 29% + Liberal Democrats 23% + Others 6%, or 58%. If politics were simple, that would suggest the first alternative would form the government, and in all probability, it will.

Buried in all this simple arithmetic is the main Liberal Democrat argument that the current first-past-the-post electoral system (winner takes all) is unfair. In this, they are absolutely correct. In fact, the Conservative 36.1% of the overall vote produced 47% of the seats; for their 29% of the vote, Labor got 39.6% of the seats; while for their 23% of the vote, the Liberal Democrats got only 8.7% of the seats.

Does this mean that it takes four times as many popular votes to elect a Liberal Democrat than a Conservative. NO! It just means that in a number of constituencies, a shift of a few hundred votes would have produced a far different result.

We are a first-past-the-post nation, and our system is every bit as inherently unfair as the UK system. But ours is a presidential system; the UK's is not. And God bless the UK system for that. The Prime Minister may have a cozy home at 10 Downing Street, but it has no swimming pool in the basement, its own tennis court, Air Force One and the kind of worship and importance we offer our president, worthy or not. When he goes to work, the PM is simply the chair of a cabinet meeting and the titular 'head' of his party. Unlike a president, he does not have to appear among the rowdies of the House or the Nodders of the Senate to advance his legislation.

One might think that Mr. Clegg's troops are the ones with the greatest grievance, and that is indeed so. That is why their part in any possible alliance rests on a 'reform' of the UK electoral system, so that the popular vote is better reflected in the distribution of representatives.

Here, another vital factor comes into play. Under the UK system, and most European systems of Proportional Representation, a government may fall when it is unable to obtain a vote of confidence on a critical piece of legislation, such as the Budget. The US government cannot fall. A president may fail to get his budget (or anything else) passed a dozen or more times; he and his legislators perforce have to work things out. That is because president and legislators have set terms of office, which is something Mr. Clegg would like to see, and I would not.

The UK's current system has its faults, but it also has many advantages: (1) it is very local and therefore responsive to the problems of each constituency; (2) it is fallible, and may readily be punished (by the dissolution of parliament) if its legislation is faulty or out of touch with public opinion -- how many times in the past year wished we could have a snap election and rid ourselves of certain noxious legislators? --; and (3) the absence of set terms means that election campaigns do not start the moment a legislator is elected, but are limited to thirty days, which essentially means that money has far less of a chance to influence the result.

The faults of PR are obvious. Italy, for instance, can be so unstable that as many as three governments may (and have) fall within a month. On the other hand, Italy's president is no monarch: as Messrs Sarkozy and Obama seem to think they are. The Italian president is trotted out to cut ribbons, inspect honor guards, and receive political leaders in search of forming a government -- functions performed ably, in the United Kingdom, by H.M. the Queen.

Could it be that democracy itself has its faults, and that it is, as was famously said, the worst possible form of government except for all the others?

LITERARY MAGAZ,INES

http//thefastertimes.com/fiction/2010/04/27/a-new-literary-magazine-ranking


This is a quite nifty and intelligent attempt to do the impossible.

It started out as a ranking and then became a list. In the earlier version, TRoL managed to be in the fifth tier, which I guess you might call the Honorable Mentions. In the subsequent listing, we are still there.

The author's criteria for selection seem to me sound, at least in part, the question being 'If you were a writer, to whom should you try to flog your merchandise?' The objective of most writers being to get themselves published, notice and (possibly) paid, there are an awful number of variables in the mix, but this is an honest attempt to give advice.

Here are some thoughts on the subject:

1. I don't think Pushcart or O.Hara awards are a sound basis for scoring. I know I wince when I have to send copies to Pushcart, though their hearts are undoubtedly in the right place. At best, publication in Pushcarft (and yes, we have won some, I think), is a sign of competence: not of originality or significance. As for O. Hara, I pass. I know nothing about it.

2. The fundamental error is that the list of magazines is parochial. TRoL is an international magazine. We publish the best literature we can find. Oddly enough, it's been some time since America led in the field, so we have to find mss among the French, the Italians, the Poles, the Russians, the Latin Americans and so on. Most of the magazines listed are pretty monoglot.

3. There is a generational gap among magazines, which is related to circulation, location, gossip and trivia. TRoL is my ninth magazine, and when I look back over a sixty-year career in the field, I think I can safely say that the anthology (Saul Bellow & Keith Botsford: Editors, available from the Toby Press) of this magazine and its predecessors, is ample evidence of our quality. But we are probably not as up to date as some. We just do our work. We don't Facebook or Twitter.

4. There are also peculiarities to TRoL which go unacknowledged in such a listing. We are the ONLY magaz,ine I know of that will publish texts up to book-length; we are the ONLY magazine that consistently revisits, in the Archives section, literature that has been forgotten or unjustly neglected.

5. The purpose of the listing is weighted towards magazines to which writers should submit. We are committed to publishing a magazine in which the intelligent Reader, be he writer or not, can find a sense of discovery.

6. It needs also to be said that in the magazines listed, some are commercial, and most are subsidized. TRoL owes nothing to anyone. We don't have 'student' readers, or juries to select what gets published. We don't apply for grants. One old man does all the work and foots the bill. I guess that makes us, however estimable, relicts.

AFGHANISTAN, AGAIN

The Italian bi-monthly LIMES, edited by Lucio Carracciolo, is perhaps the one absolutely indispensable geopolitical magazine in existence: well-informed, independent, clearly written by a world-wide array of expert scholars, and accompanied by excellent maps, it has -- despite its substantial sale -- only one serious defect: it is written in Italian, meaning that it is not as widely read as it deserves to be, in western intelligence circles.

Its current issue, on Afghanistan, raises some very interesting questions. I am quite sure that our 'authorities' know all about such questions; the problem is that we the citizens and voters, probably do not. Here, as a public service, I offer just one of many snippets in the issue: on the parlous question of Osama bin Laden.

To be completely transparent, let me state that I have been among the 'correspondents' of LIMES for at least the past twenty years.

The extract below is from an article by Margherita Paolini about Pakaf ( Pakistan/Afghanistan), in the author's words, the 'key' to the whole Afghan problem.

"The declared objective of the United States is, as a pre-condition for their political re-integration, to obtain from the Taliban a definitive guarantee that they have broken off their relations with Al-Qaeda. If this refers to the Zawahiri-bin Laden group of the second half of the 1990s, progressively reprived of its leadership from 2002 on and deprived of its political audience by decision of the ISI [the Pakistani intelligence agency] after 2004, there would be no problem. That Al-Qaeda belongs to a remote past. Just this last September [2009] Mullah Omar declared that the Taliban was willing to do so, and that the only remaining issue in its negotiations with the United States was the date by which foreign troops would leave the country, as in Iraq (the preferred model for Pakistan).

"If on the other hand the United States refers to the terrorist activities of other groups operating under the Al-Qaeda banner -- such as Paklistani groups -- and these other groups may not even be named, then the problem remains. The danger of such groups and their infiltration into the Pakistani government was clearly shown in the David Coleman Headley, alias Daud Gilani, affair. The son of a diplomat and at home in the right circles in the United States, Gilani was able to plan in detail the acknowledged attacks in Mumbai.

"In this context, the American challenge to terrorism, with its current intelligence strategy amd without an unconditional structural collaboration with the Pakistani government and the ISI, risk becoming as dangerous a pantomime as it was under Bush.

"The question as to whether Osama bin Laden is dead or alive is another oddity. It's not so much a matter of the videos and tape-recordings themselves, most of them quite obviously fake, but of their content, which in no way corresponds to Osama's known ideology: especially in regard to keeping the umma unified against its enemies, the United States, Israel and those nations in the Islamic world who betray Islamic principles. It was always a bin Laden priority not to exacerbate or broaden the religious divide between Sunni and Shia Islam. The exact opposite is what happen in Iraq with Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, whose true patrons are to be found among Sunni intengralist ideologues who consider Shiites heretics, a stance which coincided perfectly with Pakistani jihadism.

"Bin Laden was most probably liquidated in December-January 2001-2002 when Osama was residing in the secret hospital of the Binori madrasi in Karachi. The appropriate person, whom bin Laden trusted, was to hand: Omar Said Sheikh, who co-ordinated relations between Osama and the ISI (and who also turns up in the Bhutto assassination). This Omar was cited by the FBI as the man responsible for the killing of the American journalist Pearl; he was tried in Pakistan and condemned to death to take him out of American hands. The death-sentence was never carried out. In fact, Omar Said, safe in a military prison in Rawalpindi, was able to follow the Mumbai attacks and sought to precipitate a crisis between India and Pakistan with counterfeit telephone calls (using British sim cards) to isolate both the Pakistani president, Zardari and the Indian Foreign Minister Mukherjee. His objective, quickly frustrated, was to transfer Pakistani troops from the tribal areas to the Indian frontier.

"Sooner or later, Omar said will be freed if the lead terrorist in the trial of the Al-Qaeda Seven, the Pakistani Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, admits to being himself responsible for the murder of Pearl."

FLASH STUFF

When I first got wind of something called 'flash fiction', I had to ask about to find out what it was. The Republic is a backward sort of place when it comes to what is fashionable in New York.

In case my readers are no more trendy than I, let me explain: flash fiction is a new fad designed for the dumb who write with their thumbs. Short, very short, even exiguous 'stories' a few lines long. They've sprouted like weeds, get distributed on the Net and sent to all and sundry like so much literary spam. I have been sent several score in the last week alone.

This would not matter had it not been brought to my attention that our Contributing Editor, James Wood, had written in praise of someone called Lydia Davis. I could not check this out, for I do not subscribe the The New Yorker. I used to, but my copies never arrived. Supposing the report to be true, and knowing James, I have to believe the woman has something going for her. And if she doesn't, it is also true that any critic can have his idiosyncrasies, and if you're as good a reader and as thoughtful a critic as Mr. Wood, so be it. After all, there are people who think Alberto Manguel is Hot Stuff.

Now it turns out that Harper's -- once a solid, even stollid magazine -- has published some FF. I read but one, so banal and inane I had to read its 40 words or so several times to see if it did not contain a coded message of great import. No, it didn't. It was what it appeared to be: boy, girl, two kids and the perfect life.

I think this form has great potentiality for porn. You read it here first. Flash Porn. I offer the first (though not to Harper's):

He didn't know where to put it. He tried a flower poet; it broke. The mare bolted. Then came Amanda.

I particularly like the double entendre in Amanda coming.

As any fifty pieces of this rubbish could be written in an hour and sent --for instance to the once rigorous Farrar, Strauss & Giroux -- let the Creative Imagination flow freely! There's nothing difficult about writing. Or flashing. Whether you open the mental, or the trouser zip.

Oh no! Not you, James!

REALITY CHECKS IN ARIZONA

I don't often agree with TRoL Contributor Anis Shivani (See 'Huntsville') -- he belongs to a committed Left most sensible people have long seen as irrelevant, if not positively dangerous. But in the present ,nstance Shivani is dead right, and the fact that his posting is from Huffington should deter no one from reading him.

There is also one other thing we share. We are among the many people who are disillusioned, disappointed and disenchanted by the president for whom we all had some affection and many hopes. It's doubtful that we can reach the man in his present eminence. Nonetheless, the message must be impressed on him: that not A SINGLE ONE of his campaign promises -- from Guantanamo through health reform or Afghanistan -- HAS BEEN KEPT. Not one.

Maybe some of this is due to Republican obstructionism, maybe some of it due to the inherent inefficiency of our legislative branch, but the blame must fall squarely on Obama himself: a man of charm and intelligence, but just another standard politician making hay while the sun still shines.

When it comes to Arizona's new immigration policy, I urge you to read Shivani's post below.

IMMIGRATION A L'ARIZONA

THE HUFFINGTON POST

'Obama and the Arizona Immigration Law'

Anis Shivani

Posted: April 24, 2010 01:57 PM

The key provision to worry about in this repressive legislation is the idea that anyone illegally present in the state of Arizona broke the law. Law enforcement is authorized to go after people who are suspected of committing this misdemeanor.

Yet in the Schumer/Graham immigration plan being touted by Obama, the central idea is to make undocumented immigrants accept that they "broke the law." What does this mean? Admit that they committed a misdemeanor? Or a felony? Forever after be branded as criminals, and lose certain rights or privileges attached to citizenship?

Obama never said a word in support of the humane Gutierrez legislation introduced in the House in December 2009. As expected, he got behind the far more punitive Schumer/Graham plan.

Arizona has only taken the (im)moral lead from the White House and taken it to its logical, extreme conclusion.

At no point in the last year and a half have Obama and his people tried to change the tone on immigration. Raids continue. Deportations are at record levels, despite the presumably far smaller flow of immigrants due to the depressed economy. The idea of criminality has become completely intertwined with immigration. The administration makes no attempt to sever the connection; instead, it emphasizes it at every turn.

Schumer/Graham want a biometric identity card for all Americans. Arizona is just trying to do it in a clumsy, manual, heavy-handed way. The idea is the same. Brown people are to be suspected from the get-go until they can clear their name.

The Arizona law is the natural outcome of caving in to xenophobia and exaggerated fears of terrorism at the federal level. Sure, Arizona is crazy, reprehensible, self-destructive. They'll bring ruin on their own economy, for one thing. But the feds are no less insane and "misguided," to use Obama's own language.

This is the price to pay for a year and a half of indifference to constitutional procedures. In an environment where the federal government continues to operate secret prisons, refuses to end the Guantanamo principle, and doesn't unequivocally separate itself from torture, why should the Arizona law be any surprise?

It's been Obama, far more than Bush, who has successfully implemented the idea at the practical level that local law enforcement is the appropriate agency to enforce immigration laws. Janet Napolitano, former Arizona governor, is firmly behind the idea. Yet they act surprised when Arizona formalizes the principle.

Instead of prospectively warning Arizona of having to face the full brunt of the law, Obama calmly announces that his administration will look into possible illegality. Sure, let things take their course, and meanwhile use the opportunity to tout your own criminalizing piece of legislation.

What "reform" can we expect at the federal level? It won't just be Arizona immigrants having to admit they broke the law. It will be all undocumented immigrants. It's okay if Obama presents it as "reform."

LITERARY SQUABBLES

Friends send me links to the small wars insistently being waged on the many battlefields of literature. One such received yesterday revealed -- shock! horror! -- that the editor of Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR), one Ted Genoways (an old Immigration mis-hearing of Genovese?) had published his own work, that there are subsidies involved, and that he is grossly overpaid (any editor who is paid at all is overpaid is my opinion) because he is a buddy of higher-ups at the University of Virginia. The link was to a pleasant site belonging to the West Coast magazine Zyzzyva, http://Zyzzivaspeaks.blogspot.com/2008/09/ted-genoways-inserts-himself.html.

I can't say I'm a regular reader of the VQR, nor of its editor's poetry. To the specifics of the case I am therefore blind -- though aroused to hear that this editorial machinery is supported in the five-zero range by that illustrious university. Mr. G. may be a good poet or he may be a bad one; the principle is the same. Editors can do as they damned please. But is this editor the fons et origo of his journal? or has he a master, the university? If the latter, he can only do as he damned pleases if he doesn't offend his master.

Now, largely speaking, universities and university presses are gentle if reluctant masters. All sorts of universities have both magazines and presses, and if they were not intellectual softies, it's hard to beieve that their publications departments -- always expensive and hugely overstaffed -- would survive. Where in this hard world of ours would a real press exist, were it not in the cozy confines of the Academy? I consider it one of the great achievements of John Silber at Boston University to have stonewalled any attempt to create such a press, though he did pass over a couple of journals such as Agni. It is likely that having once been defrauded by the late William Phillips into acquiring what was left of the Partisan Review, he didn't wish to be bitten a second time. And Agni never had more than a modest subsidy -- nothing like the VQR.

What I find especially picturesque about VQR lies in the notion that literary magazines require editorial "staff time', peer reviews, or what the Kenyon Review 's editor sententiously calls an "Editorial Tree". How many editors does it take to 'edit' a poet?

I just don't see how anyone would be startled by the ambiguities of Mr. Genoway's publishing himself. All good editors who are also writers write in their magazines. It is an essential part of their functions. Readers and subscribers are entitled to know how qualified the editor is to pass judgment on what they are given to read. If he should happen to express a fancy for one of the current voltigeurs -- say a Paul Auster -- tant pis, too bad. The high wire is a tricky place for literary toddlers. It isn't as though literary log-rolling were anything new: the Scratch Principle works up and down the literary ladder. That's how writers plan their rise, while other writers plan their rivals' fall.

PRESS

A Mr. Dana Milbank, a columnist at the Washington Post, feels seriously aggrieved that the press was excluded from the meetings of the forty-odd heads of state meeting in Washington to discuss nuclear proliferation. Good grief! The boys and girls who so entertain us with questions when they are admitted, had to do without their sandwiches and peanuts?

I have attended press conferences and such events for decades: so puerile and provincial were the questions asked -- not to speak of the answers given -- that I made myself a rule: where the press goes (whether in their scores or their hundreds) there go not I. To admit the press to such occasions is to exclude diplomacy, which is a personal matter. I never felt I had any entitlement to information; I had to overhear gossip, to question friends, to move about in the shadows, to talk to assistants and assistants to assistants to get what I wanted. And what I wanted was not some handout, but a feel for the event and the people involved.

This whine from Mr. Milbank, on behalf of media to whom no one pays serious attention, is particularly absurd when the subject discussed is clearly one in which (a) high risk is involved. and (b) the President could be expected to discuss, openly, such intelligence information as he had. Kowtowing to our dim press and even dimmer television is one of our fatal mistakes. Good reporters are discreet and have long-standing relationships with people who move about in government circles. When both sides -- press and the state -- have built up relations of mutual respect, then reporting and governing both become better. All that a reporter needs to know is much more likely to come over a good dinner with a trusted source than from any number of press conferences.

The sad truth is that our reporters have largely become adversaries, and not very good ones at that. That is not how you get invited to the high table. For that, you have to be interesting in and of yourself, have decent manners, and know your place.

POLAND

The few people who read The Republic Letters -- which in the current issue published Josez Czapski's account of Katyn -- will be able to view some (but not all) of the terrible ironies involved in the crash, at Smolensk, of a plane carrying Poland's president and much of its political leadership. My Google News, ever quick to be utterly superficial, headed its lead story with the headline that we needn't worry: the stock market would quickly recover. Well, that's nice to know.

Regardless of the lives and histories of the 97 people who died in the crash -- the political leadership in Poland is not that different from our own, consisting in equal portions of self-importance and a Faustian bargain with that elusive commodity, power -- that the crash should have taken place where and when it did is catastrophic. It re-awakens old wounds: the destruction of Poland's elites by the Soviet Union (precisely what the fatal flight was to commemorate); the criminal annihilation of Poland in 1939 by Hitler and Stalin; the miserable self-destruction of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, so ill-planned that it was doomed to failure; the utter failure of Poland's allies to meet their treaty obligations; the Soviet army encamped on the right bank of the Vistula watching Warsaw being razed to the ground; and the horrors of being so long -- from 1945 to 1989 -- relegated to a satrapy of Russia. Worst of all, the Polish tendency to hallow, internally, in its very soul, the worm of Doubt: are they the only people in Europe to be continually mocked by fate and by some inner failure?

As I wrote in a letter of condolence to my many Polish friends -- since Saul Bellow's death I have far more friends and equals in Poland than in the debased culture of the United States -- 'In Poland one does not "make" politics; one dies of it.

This is what Marek Bienczyk wrote back from Warsaw:

'The symbols flutter about us like recycled rags; it's hard not to think of them. On the other hand, I am enraged: not just a catastrophe, as you say, but yet another piece of Polish fatuity: the plane should never have tried to land in those conditions. But time pressed, the ceremony was to start in a half-hour, the pilot (perhaps urged on by the president) made his decision.

"The nation reacted y doing what it does best: candles lit, hymns, endless masses of people, priests on TV, debates: unde malum? Who's to blame? Forms of extreme masochism, the same old romantic resentment: what is bad shall be turned to good; we must be angelized, become living angels. It drives me crazy. Five minutes of thought, postpone the ceremony for three hours and not land. It was another Warsaw Uprising: doomed to failure,

"Yes, of course, I went out in the evening and lit my own candle."

NATIONAL ANTHEMS

So I watched an unremarkable Opening Day game at Fenway.

By now I am innured to what happens to that most akward anthem every written, the Star Spangled Banner. Babes wreck it in halter tops (what would you expect from Miami?), rock-stars distort it for a few hundred thousand, and sometimes you still get it straight: from Marine bands, little kids, fresh-faced sopranos and the like. Most of this is pretty disgusting, but then our anthem is no great shakes anyway. If it brings tears to your eyes, it must be nostalgia. I mean, compared with the bersaglieri quick-stepping through the operatic Italian anthem, the Marseillaise (which has a residual meaning -- Get your guns out, Citizens!), the delicious harmonies of the Dutch or God Save the Queen, the words and music of our anthem are pretty stinky.

So awful in fact are they that they too have become part of the entertainment industry. They tell the poor guy or girl, go out there and do what you can with it. Well, last night, in the seventh inning, we got an old crock from Aerosmith, fresh from rehab and with a well-scrubbed daughter by his side, doing what he could with its rival, God Bless America, a treacle tart for which I have no appetite whatever. I can fairly report two things about Mr. Tyler's performance: drugs or no, he can neither sing nor speak English. Yekh! Those sprawling nasal vowels, those indeterminate high notes, those worn and abused vocal cords!

In the eighth inning we were treated to one Neil Diamond and his Slick Chestnut, Sweet Caroline. The man wouldn't excel accompanying a palm court orchestra at the Plaza or, for that matter, leaning on a piano somewhere South of Liberace. But he was utterly harmless and amiable: a little like the Sox and their owner.

The crowd seemed entranced; but then who ever said that Sox fans were a discriminating lot?

We are an odd lot, those of us who can remember that a certain solemnity came with our national anthems. Solemnity and respect. However wretched the blasted anthems are -- try the Argentine on for size, which goes on and on! -- I ask you to consider what would happen were any of our bimbos, or Mr. Tyler, to 'sing' the Marseillaise on Bastille Day! Come on, Citizens, reach for your guns!

PRIESTS AND PAEDOPHILIA

I have no intention to open a debate on the Church and sexual abuse.

I would merely like to ask how many New York Times or Guardian readers or reporters have been employed in the care of deaf, destitute or orphaned children: as volunteers, in the name of charity?

When Italy became a state in 1870, one of the first acts of the new national regime was to abolish all church institutions -- whether astronomical observatories, orphanages or homes for Incurables. The result was a huge burden on the state and its tax-payers. What is astonishing is not that some priests failed in their duty of care, but that all religious institutions should be stigmatized for the errors of the few: as though such abuse did not exist in state instututions.

Selfless charity is a gift: that some abuse it is horrid and reprehensible. But it happens. Shall we have, perhaps, a bringing to account of those who operated the Gulag? Would we rather personally man institutes for deaf children? How many bed-pans have the pampered press emptied recently?

I particularly enjoy, however, the 'official' Jewish response to the sermon by Pope's preacher which compared the atacks on the Church to the Holocaust. There seems to be a gold standard for suffering out there: screw Rwandans, abused children in Eire, the citizens of Zimbabwe: only the Jewish extermination counts. It's incommensurable.

I beg to differ. All human suffering is and should be shared by all. It is all wrong. There are no world records in suffering or death.

DRUG QUEENS, OLLIE NORTH & AFGHANISTAN

It was not at all reassuring to drop in on CNN last night and find that ageing figure of other splendid American external policies, Ollie North, interviewing the lady boss of the DEA -- The Drug Enforcement Agency -- in some picturesque landscape in a rural area of Helmand province in Afghanistan (from which my son returned after six months of harrowing duty.) It had been freshly 'reconquered' (and of course would soon enough return to its earlier status.)

The lady in question wore some sort of bulge about her middle, presumably bullet-proof, and, prompted by Ollie, managed to smile wanly as she said that her visit was made in the hope of 'interdicting' the opium crop in that part of the world.

Why?

For several thousand years opium, or its derivative, morphine (laudanum) has been the analgesic of choice. Like most other 'natural' drugs -- coca leaves, quinine, etc. -- opium will not harm you. Their chemical derivatives -- heroin, cocaine, atropine -- can and will kill you if you use them to excess. Nor is addiction to opium per se in any way harmful. It is a peaceful drug, and in my parents' house in London there was no social approbrium of any kind attached to its consumption: as Sherlock Holmes well knew, or Harold Acton, that remarkable historian, who died peacefully in his nineties after life-long use.

One would think that the United States, which invented Prohibition and its accompanying gang wars, would have learned something since the early 'Twenties. But not so. Nor has President Calderon in Mexico yet learned the lesson. Ban something, anything, and its price will go up; and if it is made scarce, the wrong sort of people will make more money. What has happened in Ciudad Juarez just across the border, is a direct result of the DEA's 'war on drugs'.

The end-buyer (oh, what a surprise!) is largely an American. A report in BOMB, that chi-chi mag in the Big Apple, details the platinum-haired art-dealers and others of the trendy set, passing the powder about with the hors d'oeuvres. It is sold right on school property. To the User, no harm comes -- one day his nose will rot, but he wasn't worth much to start with.

Before the DEA it was otherwise. Opium at least was available at a reasonable price in your local pharmacy, which kept a register, and sold no more to any addict than the quantity his addiction called for. We knew who smoked it, because we saw him at dinner parties: not zonked out, but fresh from writing, say, Kubla Khan.

The US Embassy in Bogota is the second largest in the world. We have so much diplomacy in Colombia? No. Because the DEA is there, living the life of Reilly. Meanwhile, the speedboats from Colombia drop off their commercial cocaine a few hundred meters from my beach. Our local drug sub-king, Edwin, owns the town I live in. His twelve-year-old son drives a car on the highway and on the beach in front of my house. Both are illegal of course, but no one will say boo to Edwin. He's just a local business-man. But he and the rest of them make their money straight from the DEA.

In Persia, opium was (and is) a source of poetry and pleasure; in New York, the only poetry lies in the money made by the dealers and the only pleasure lies in the swank of those platinum-haired twits as they snort. What was not a problem in my youth is now a Problem writ large. Who created it? the Prohibitionists.

GENOCIDE: ARMENIA & TURKEY

Now that the poh-faced Swedes, along with their colleagues in the House Foreign Affairs Committee -- no doubt aroused by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose constituency contains a large and vocal Armenian contingent -- have delivered their marvelously self-satisfying verdict that , the events in Turkey during the Great War of 1914-1918, merit the word 'genocide', some little clarification would seem necessary. The word, a relatively new one, is much bandied about, but just how stable is our definition?

Over many years of teaching I would like to offer a strict definition which, if enshrined in international law, might serve some more useful purpose than labeling states or individuals responsible for acts which we all find deplorable, which do fit in under other sanctions of international law, such as war crimes, but should not be labeled genocide.

Here is the definition I favor:

Genocide is the systematic mass murder by a legitimate state of its own citizens, not for what they do but for what they are.

What fits?

First, and only so far, the German extinction of its Jewish population, whether accomplished within its borders or transported to other countries. The Hitler government in Germany was that of a legitimate state; the killing was massive; it was systematic and not sporadic, and Jews were its victims because they were Jews, something they could not avoid being.

What does not fit?

The undoubted crimes committed against Turkey's minority Armenians. This was sporadic, not systematic; it has not been proved to be enshrined in state legislation; the crimes can best be seen as acts of war and should be condemned as such -- as akin to the massacres on both sides during the Spanish Civil War or the conflicts in Rwanda.

The Pol Pot regime in Cambodia meets all the criteria save for one: theirs were the crimes of an illegitimate government.

Was the Soviet elimination of its Kulaks genocide? No. Though it often resulted in the death of its victims -- as the Gulag killed off its dissidents, real or imagined -- it was not conceived of as a mass killing.


More difficult is the case of non-German nationals, specifically Jews, who were indiscriminately slaughtered on the orders of the German government. It can be argued that Polish, French or Norwegian Jews were involved in acts of war (resistance) to German occupation. Their killing is certainly a war crime, but I would rather keep the definition of genocide as rigorous and restricted as possible, for only the clearest definition of such crimes against humanity can prevent their recurrence.

If this definition appeals to readers, I humbly request that they copy it on all available links so that it may be discussed widely. And may the Swedes and our beloved representatives come to grips a real, usable definition of the word.

RAY CHANDLER

Chandler was always a classy writer, and his correspondence should be made required reading not just for writers' workshops but for various Nobel laureates of recent years, who strike me as utterly deprived of the common sense without which they are destined to the world of coteries.

In 1949 he wrote as follows:

I have always thought it one of the charms dealing with publishers that if you start talking about money, they retire coldly to their professional eminence, and if you start talking about literature, they immediately yank the dollar sign before your eyes.

I would remind younger readers that in 1949 publishers could still read and write.

NEWS, SORT OF

TRoL #21 is now out. When our subscribers around the world receive their copies and the bookshops that carry the magazine have been suppplied, we expect to have under fifty copies left for new subscribers. I urge anyone interested in the magazine to e-mail us as soon as possible. We deliberately do not over-print copies. We ran out of #20 within the first week. The three copies in my possession are from subscribers who have moved without telling us.

If you click on our logo above, you will be sent directly to the magazine's main site. Copies will be mailed out to new subscribers or re-subscribers in order of receipt.

It is easier and quicker for payments to be made out directly in the Editor's name and sent to our accountant, Mr. Sidney Williams, at 29 Cunningham Rd, Wellesley MA 02481.:

********

You will note two new icons to the right, announcing the publication of the first two volumes of my autobiography; a third will follow by the summer.

I regret to say that copies are not available. This first edition was published for 'family and friends' in editions of 65 and 50 copies.

I have to admit that what was designed as a 'private' edition, due to take me as far as my twenty-first year, 1949, has now been circulated in so many xeroxes and has aroused so much interest, that bits and pieces have either been published or are about to be published abroad, and that my original aim of a private early life has been entirely subverted. I did not anticipate this. Clearly, however, the volume of letters I have received, including from people who do not know me at all, has touched a nerve. Without exception, those readers closest to me have urged that I not stop there, but continue -- I am currently at work on FRAGMENTS IV (1951-1953). And though I have lost all faith in publishers, I am now more or less compelled to submit it to them. At which point, I suppose copies will become available.

LUNACY & RESPECT: THE BECK CASE

I have to admit I am not accustomed to see raving lunacy on my telly. Extremes, yes; but insanity? However yesterday afternoon, at the appointed hour, there was Mister Glenn Beck, a misplaced Isaiah to Tea Party America, literally foaming at the mouth. While I am accustomed to his rant, as I am to the general Fox/Murdoch bias, I cannot recall ever having seen such extreme, frothing-at-the-mouth disrespect of an American president.

There, behind the president, was Mr. Obama himself, explaining his policy on the stimulus package; nearer us, was Beck, his head obscuring the president -- at whom he gesticulated wildly and very personally. Did Obama really believe all the guff he was putting out? Was he a conscious liar or just an ordinary cheat? This went on for several minutes before, mercifully, we reached one of Fox's many breaks.

Now, when I came to America from Europe in 1939, one of the first things I learned was that an elected leader was, whatever one's own opinions or whether one had voted for him, entitled to some respect for his position as president. I had to learn this because in the British parliament, frontal attacks on the prime minister of the day are common; they are a part of the severity of debate in parliament. But even there, there are rules, and a Speaker to enforce them.

So far as I know, or until Mr. Beck unveils himself as a candidate for public office (alongside Madame Palin?), he is a private citizen. As such, he is entitled to have his opinion stated in public. That is free speech. But is he also entitled to incendiary opinions? to direct physical challenge to the President? Not, I think, in the crowded theater of our politics, in which crying 'Fire!' can lead to panic.

Is the majority of the country, which voted for Mr. Obama, a worthless bunch of dolts for so doing? Has anyone yet elected Mr. Beck?

I do not say this as one who believes that our president has divine right on his side, such as kings could claim to have; I say it as someone who believes that the man has a right, while in office, to our respect: because, for better or worse, he represents all of America. Many have been the presidents for whom I had scant respect, but I would not, ever, have thought of assaulting any of them phsyically: not even on a screen. If they were elected president, the people had spoken; and if he turned out to be a rotten president, the people was in a position to remove him.

Without that inherent respect for the office, whoever the incumbent, democracy quickly falls into mob rule. This Mr. Beck encouraged -- indeed lampooned. Awful as the 'left' channel is, it not show a desire to punch a president in the face, or impose its own talking heads on Obama's. That may be especially important when the president is the first black to hold the office and is also transparently -- whatever his failures -- a decent and intelligent human being. That does not merit to be dissed, for it is also as dangerous as crying 'Fire!' in a theater can be.

MURDEROUS TENURE: AMY BISHOP

She may have been, she may be, a kook, have lactose problems, have shot her brother or not, the two hard facts are: that Prof. Bishop killed several of her colleagues and that she had been denied tenure. I am not much interested in the killing itself -- Amy Bishop is far from being unique in wanting to kill the departmental colleagues who refused her tenure -- but the whole question of tenure is one that sorely need re-thinking.

I take it as stipulated that tenure at the university level -- dreamt up decades ago to protect the market place of ideas and to protect a teacher's right to utter unpopular opinions -- has long been little more than a guarantee of lifetime employment for professors, regardless of the quality of their teaching, their research or their contribution to the education of the young. And I would further stipulate (from long experience in university teaching) that the first thought of the members of any departmental committee engaged in assessing a colleague's suitability for tenure is, how would granting tenure to X affect me. One might accept a brilliant young man or woman as an instructor or even an Assistant Professor -- such people don't take much of the budget -- but as a colleague for life?

The process is slow, it is laborious -- department, provost, president, trustees -- and much more likely to reflect mediocrity than to promote excellence. As we know from the electorate at large, like favors like: women will vote for women, minorities for minorities, and dullards for dullards. The last thing any university department wants is someone who will rock their cozy craft. A productive scholar is an implicit criticism of the unproductive; a reputation outside the department arouses envy.

In the most recent case I can recall, a composer of genuine musicality, much loved by his students, much performed outside of the university's own concert halls, was denied tenure for fourteen years. The composers on his committee all, save one, knew their own talents were more modest; the candidate did not fit the kind of music which forms the current (outdated) orthodoxy of composition classes. The musicologist member thought the matter through and saw that more students were now studying to be composers than considering such arcanae as the manuscripts of seventeenth century Spaniards. The teachers of various instruments wondered whether a composer might upset the way in which they recruited profitable paying students from Taiwan, and so on down the line.

University departments are now, as the nation is, a set of interests. They are like Greek civil servants: better the country should flounder than take a cut in pay.

I don't offer this as a pretext for Professor Bishop's acts, nor is it necessarily so that she was unfairly denied tenure. I merely suggest that the criteria for the granting of tenure are so arbitrary and the results so obviously damaging to education, that perhaps the system out to be scrapped. Unless this is done, dumbing down, useless publications, PhD mills, plodders reading their one text year after year, our universities will continue to decline into the high schools they have become, the talent pool of our universities will fail to be steadily enriched, and the young faculty be forced to conform to the prevailing opinion of their seniors rather than infuse their students with the love of learning that is the only justification for the existence of universities.

WRITER BIOGRAPHIES: WILSON, HAMSUN, MAUGHAM

I have before me three not very good biographies of writers. I read them because I am a writer and because lives are always interesting. Also because I have long been a foot-note, a mention, ot a contributor to the biographies of writers whose lives have crossed with mine.

The first, Lewis Dabney's remaindered Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (FSG), is a professional job, drably written, and Wilson happens to be one of my household gods -- as who could fail to be who actually read Edward Everett's Gettysburg Address? Wilson was a compulsive diarist and a far better stylist than Dabney, but his introspection was faulty; he looked outwards, not inwards, dabbling in autobiography via his fiction, which Dabney does not admire but I do. The second, Selena Hasting's The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (John Murray), about a writer who 'made it' with his books but not with his life was intended to be boffo stuff but is actually an avid study of a professionally selfish and priapic monster that fails even to inform us to what gender within the homosexual world he belonged. The third, Ingar Sletten Kolloen's Knut Hamsun Dreamer and Dissenter (Yale University Press), abridged and Englished by 'acclaimed (by whom?) translators Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik' makes a real hash (Yale should be ashamed of its editing) of a fascinating and quite mad writer.

What reduces all three of these biographies is, of course, the current mantra that human lives are driven by their sexuality -- a gross example of which was a much-praised work on poor Flaubert, a long masturbatory fantasy of the biographer's. In none of these books will you learn much about those with whom they had their amorous or amoral relationships -- for the good and simple reason that such matters are a closed book, one read, at best, only by one of the partners.
Wilson was a wencher, a plump, not overly attractive and overbearing non-lover of anyone but himself. His signal failure to connect derived from the unhappy fact that he was a Writer, and writers are unfit companions or spouses to all but their own fantasies. As Maugham romps with (or through) his various catamites and rival predators, while marrying and even procreating (once) for the sake of respectability, what you see is not what he or they felt, but how useful this patch, 'twixt the fleet and the urinal, was to his stated goal of making enough money to be able to flaunt it. As for Hamsun, so muddied is the tale told, that it is hard to imagine why any woman would even approach him, much less marry him. Power was his game, power and control, and as we should know from history, the lust for power is really a death-wish: real power, like celebrity, wipes out the self.

For writers, maybe alas! sex is the least interesting aspect of their lives, and not one of these biographers has very much to say about our art. They are clearly not writers themselves, so perforce they deal with the trade: how many kroner Hamsun or Maugham earned, how Wilson made his way up into the higher journalism. This part is quite riveting and shows, if that is needed today, just how craven and parasitical most publishers and critics are.

Of course, all three were public figures, and their public selves, their use of their childhoods, their families, their friends, make very good reading indeed. Wilson presided over the demise of those standards -- learning, style, languages, reading -- which put American letters on the map. As much a literary historian as a critic, his range and scholarship put our age to shame. Maugham was long the most-read writer of his day, and it was a lot better stuff than the Da Vinci fraud. Why was he so? Ms Hastings has her theories, which are largely WSM's theories -- that he acknowledged his second-ratedness. But there are few writers (and none among the books in college courses or workshops) better equipped to teach the young writer his craft. Ever acutely aware of the Reader, careful not to intrude, he is the absolute master of narrative and was (as all writers must learn) a compulsive listener, an eavesdropper of high quality. Hamsun, of whose many novels only a very few are translated into English, was not of much credit to himself, but was a self-made writer and a self-destroyer. It must be said that as a writer of the Right, the extreme right, he doesn't fit the mold. Hunger is not a novel one reads for pleasure, something that Maugham dispenses in tight little dollops. The Growth of the Soil, on the other hand, is touching in its agrarian innocence. That he was a convinced Nazi, a friend and follower of Quisling, bothers me not at all. So were many; many too were communists. The mob likes to be led by the nose, by fashion, by ambition. What does bother me is his reason for so being, which is a madman's view of a paradise lost. There is no paradise to be lost, and no new Caesar to lead us back there. And who plays Follow the Leader is responsible for the destruction the leader wreaks -- be he Hitler, Stalin, Murdoch or the latest Pop Star. Writers owe it to their art to have discernment. Hamsun alone paid the penalty.

Lives are the building blocks of history; who we are is every bit as important as what we do. Great literary biographies or autobiographies -- Tchaikovsky's, Paul Leautaud's journals,
Michelet, Berlioz, Benvenuto Cellini -- exist and illuminate: the place, the time, the art. They are a great literary form. In all these I mention, there is not a word about Sex. About which even the smartest of us knows nothing at all, there being nothing to be known.