Wodehouse could conceivably be faulted for poor judgment but he certainly didn’t deserve the vicious campaign launched against him in the British press.
Of course Wodehouse was saying nothing that wasn’t also entertained by many in the Western governing elites who had always yearned for Hitler to invade the Soviet Union, and who had been pro-fascist in the 1930s, at a time Wodehouse was making fun of British fascists with his portrait of Oswald Mosley, memorably satirized in the form of Sir Roderick Spode in another of Wodehouse’s best books, The Code of the Woosters. Many years ago I wrote an intro to a Random House reissue of this novel. Wodehouse wrote his best stuff in the late 1930s and 1940s. Bertie Wooster remains his greatest creation. Wodehouse was an extraordinary technician. His public school, Dulwich, also gave us Raymond Chandler. Both of them emigrated here, and forged prose styles that made use of a highly formalized mannerism, while remaining a supple and fluid language, like Shakespearean English.
October 13
From the typographical clamor raised in the New York Daily News, you’d have thought New York Press columnist George Szamuely had been caught committing satanic abuse in a day-care center. But it turned out that Szamuely’s great crime was to have taken too many books—580 is a number that shows up in the press reports—out of the New York University library, and been remiss in giving them back. The News and other newspapers have exultantly noted that Szamuely faces an overdue fine of $31,000, plus charges of grand larceny and possible jail time. John Beckman, described as a university spokesman, strutted through the news stories like some frontier sheriff twirling his six-gun: “Don’t mess with NYU librarians.”
Some of the news stories noted that among the books held by Szamuely was Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. It’s well-known that only Hungarians have the fortitude to grapple with this exhausting work. The last person I know to have read it thoroughly was my dear friend Nicholas Krasso, a student of Lukács who fled Budapest for England in 1956. We spent a lot of time together in the mid-1960s, and Nicholas was forever quoting from the Phenomenology, which he said was best studied under the influence of LSD. Poor Nicholas fell asleep reading one night, and died in the smoke caused by the cigarette that fell from his drooping hand. Hegel was probably on the bed somewhere, probably the London Library’s copy. What a fitting way for a copy of the Phenomenology to go!
Another of the books cited by the news stories—this particular one was on the AP wire—was Thoughts on Machiavelli. So, how many other NYU students have any interest in Leo Strauss? A simple test. If Szamuely pleads innocent and opts for a jury trial, as I very much hope he will, let his attorney make a pile of the books in the courtroom, and then, let the jurors note how many times these books had been checked out before the erudite Szamuely got his hands on them. Probably most of them sat ignored, awaiting the moment NYU decided to sell them off to a book broker.
NYU should be glad and thank Szamuely for freeing up its shelf space.
Szamuely may be charged with grand larceny. Two or three centuries ago, the standard was simple: Stealing books is not a crime unless the books are sold. There’s no evidence Szamuely was popping along to the Strand to flog off editions of Hobbes. He held those books for admirable reasons, such that a jury would understand. He needed them for the same reasons my shelves groan with volumes (Hegel’s Phenomenology included) I may never get to, may never re-read. To surrender them is to confess that, yes, I may die before I get around to reading Hegel properly, or all the dialogues of Plato, or all Balzac’s novels, or all the volumes of Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic; I may die before I write the column or the essay or the book that requires absolutely that these books be instantly to hand.
November 1
Riding the BART across to San Francisco, I heard two young black women who’d presumably got on the train at North Richmond, deep in conversation.
Girl #1: When I first heard something, my baby started to wake up, so I was patting him on his back, and we were talking for a few more minutes, and then I heard, “No, no, I ain’t got nothing, I ain’t got nothing. Stop!” Then I said, “Don’t that sound like Tony?” and my brother said, “Naw, girl,” and I said, “Yes, it does,” so I jumped off the couch and by this time they were already by my front door. Then I heard, “Oh man, come on, I ain’t got nothing.” Then I said, “Rich, get out there and help.” So I opened the door and he was laid down on my front doorstep.
Girl #2: Was he on his knees?
Girl #1: No, on his butt, kinda to the side with one of them on him with a shotgun pointed him and the other one was in front of him with a gun, so when I opened the door he put the gun in my face and I said, “Oh shit” and shut the door.
Girl #2: You looked at him and he looked at you?
Girl #1: Yes, I looked right at him. Then I shut the door back, and I got stuck. I was stuck. I didn’t know what to do. I said, “Oh my god, oh my god, shit.” Then I locked my door and heard someone say, “Take off you coat, punk, what yo got in yo pockets?” and Tony said, “I ain’t got nothing,” and they were hitting him. Then I don’t know if he got up by hisself or if they pulled him up and they keep saying, “Give me what you got, punk.” Tony said, “I ain’t got nothing, please don’t kill me, don’t shoot me.” Then they said, “Stop crying like a little bitch,” two times, then “What the fuck is you looking at?” two times too, and then Tony said, “Please, don’t kill me, don’t shoot me,” and one said, “Shut the fuck up.” Bop, Bop.
Girl #2: What’s bop bop?
Girl #1: A gun was fired and I didn’t hear Tony no more.
November 3
The Day of the Dead, aka Hallowe’en, posed the usual dilemma: What to wear?
For many years, back in my New York days, I would rent an alligator’s head from a store called—I think—Animals into People. It was heavy, but striking. Low types thought it amusing to stub out their cigarettes in my paper maché jaws. My brother Andrew used to caper on the dance floor as a penguin and his wife Leslie as a bear. Up in Petrolia, in the backwoods of northern California, alligator jaws are hard to come by, so for the past few years I’ve been hauling out black tie, tails and top hat.
But this year I was down in Berkeley and tails seemed too normal for dancing at Ashkenaz to the California Cajun Orchestra. In the end Barbara and I went as a pair of gypsies, two of seven I spotted in the course of the evening. Also popular were Arab sheikhs (three), nondescript Dracula look-alikes, earth goddesses too numerous to count, plus a dazzling cocktail waitress in fishnet tights, gripped all too firmly by a fellow in cut-price monster rig. Lucky brute. Those habituated to the baroque turnouts of the West Village or of the Castro, across the bay in San Francisco, will say this was pretty tame, and so it was. Half the point of the fancy dress is its comforting predictability: pirates, gypsies, Marie Antoinette, a couple of Abe Lincolns, a quartet of fortune tellers and the usual coven of witches. As a boy I was seldom out of skirts, either my school kilt or at home, a Victorian evening dress of which I was extremely fond, though my parents never evinced quite the same enthusiasm. Great was their relief when I laid aside the petticoats and bustle and pulled on the drainpipe pants and drape jacket of a mid-’50s rocker.
November 24
Amid the latest batch of Nixon tapes there’s a ripe one from May 13, 1971, recently described by James Warren in the Chicago Tribune. Discussing welfare reform with Haldeman and Ehrlichman the President snarls about the little Negro bastards, before remarking indulgently that “I have the greatest affection for them but I know they’re not going to make it for 500 years.” The leader of the Free World and his senior advisors then drift into a chat about homosexuality, occasioned by the President’s viewing of an “All in the Family” episode featuring Archie’s son-in-law, described by the Prez as “obviously queer, wears an ascot, but not offensively so.”
Nixon: “I don’t mind the homosexuality, I understand it. Nevertheless, goddamn, I don’t think you glorify it on public television, homosexua
lity, even more than you glorify whores. We all know we have weaknesses. But goddammit, what do you think that does to kids. You know what happened to the Greeks! Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo. We all know that. So was Socrates.”
Nixon: “You know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags. Let’s look at the strong societies. The Russians. Goddamn, they root them out.”
Mention of the morally robust Soviet Union prompts Nixon to contemplate its decadent antithesis, Northern California. He tells Ehrlichman, “San Francisco has just gone clean over.” (It’s unclear what they are referring to. Nixon would have been reading news reports about big anti-war demonstrations the day before. The President may have equated attacks on him with homosexual decadence.)
Nixon: “It’s not just the ratty part of town. The upper class in San Francisco is that way. The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time. It is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can’t shake hands with anyone from San Francisco.” It’s funny to think of Nixon at the Bohemian Grove’s summer bash on the Russian River, brooding about the fall of Greece and Rome, aghast at the annual revue in the which the flower of California’s ruling class lumbers on stage in tutus and melon-stuffed bras. Imagine his apocalyptic ravings to Ehrlichman if he could have foreseen the most exciting political race in this pre-millennial season, in which a black man and a homosexual are battling it out in a runoff for the mayoralty of San Francisco, a contest in which neither skin color nor sexual orientation is the paramount issue.
December 1
If a few thousand New York Times readers found themselves munching turkey with an extremely high salt content, it was surely the fault of that swag-bellied gormandizer, R. W. Apple Jr. A few days before Thanksgiving the Times ran a long piece by Apple describing a private dinner prepared for himself and his wife by Alice Waters, owner of the famous Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. The meal in question—a promo for Waters—was a Thanksgiving menu, and, as so often in the case of Apple’s food essays, left one amazed at the fact that his liver is still working. He should certainly bequeath it to the Smithsonian.
What caught my eye in the Waters recipe as relayed by Apple was the stipulation that the turkey be brined for seventy-two hours. Now, I brine meat from time to time, meaning one submerges the piece of beef or pork in a solution of salt, sugar and a few spices. One can also add sodium nitrite, to add a pleasing pink color to the meat, though health nuts say this saltpeter is a no-no. A week or so in the brine will give a four-pound chunk of meat a thoroughly salty taste, and even three days will definitely tilt it over into the “well-salted” category. But one can also brine pork just for twenty-four hours to give the meat an almost imperceptible zing, and this is surely what Waters had in mind with her turkey.
I brined a twenty-pound turkey raised by one of my neighbors, and was lifting it out of the crock, preparatory to spit-roasting it, when guests arrived from the Bay Area. I told them my suspicions about Apple’s seventy-two-hour edict, and they immediately reported that they’d been reading a recipe by Waters in one of the San Francisco papers, advising a twenty-four-hour turkey brining period. I’ve not yet run across a cookbook that advises a longer time.
The spit-roasting, incidentally, was a great success. The turkey revolved over its bed of coals and, even though the chestnut stuffing all fell out through the truss stings, the brined bird (which took only two and a half hours to cook to an internal temperature of 165 degrees at the deepest point of its splendid bosom) was hailed by our party of thirteen as the finest they’d ever consumed. It could have been the brine, or the spit-roasting, or the turkey’s pleasant circumstances—a wild hillside rich in seeds, summer grasshoppers and fall apples—or of course a mixture of all three.
December 8
Beyond the wildest hopes of the street warriors, five days in Seattle brought us one victory after another. The protesters—initially shunned and denounced by the respectable “inside strategists,” despised by the press, gassed and bloodied by the cops and national guard—shut down the opening ceremony, prevented Clinton from addressing the WTO delegates at the Wednesday night gala, turned the corporate press from prim denunciations of “mindless anarchy” to bitter criticisms of police brutality, and forced the WTO to cancel its closing ceremonies and to adjourn in disorder and confusion, without an agenda for the next round.
In the annals of popular protest in America, these were shining hours, achieved entirely outside the conventional arena of orderly protest and white paper activism and the timid bleats of professional leadership of big labor and environmentalists. This truly was an insurgency from below in which all those who strove to moderate and deflect the turbulent flood of popular outrage managed to humiliate themselves.
December 29
People wearied of millennial summings-up even earlier than they got bored with Y2K. Jeffrey St. Clair and I did put together our CounterPunch list of what we reckoned to be the best, or most influential, non-fiction books of the twentieth century first published in English. Adamic’s Dynamite, Architectural Standards, A Potter’s Manual, Gertrude Jekyll on gardening, Learning from Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Desert Solitaire, I Claud … All in all, about 120 books, at least half of which are out of print.
Probably the ones on our list I look at most frequently are the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary. Those who imagine the OED to be a nineteenth-century publication should know that by 1900 only the volumes covering A, B, C, D, E, F and H had been published. As a reader has already pointed out to us, the thirteenth edition of the Britannica is even better than the eleventh, containing all the material in the earlier one, plus useful stuff on World War I. I’d like to say that a century producing the eleventh edition and the OED can’t be all bad, but then again in both cases the animating force behind these vast projects was nineteenth-century energy and intellectual style.
People deploring the twentieth century usually imagine themselves in some more leisured epoch, maybe chatting with Dr. Johnson in a Fleet St. tavern or attending one of Sophocles’ plays in classical Athens. But on the law of averages one would more likely have been a half-starved peasant, then and now.
I thank my own stars I was presented to the world in the twentieth century, in 1941, by a Scottish doctor in a kilt angered at having his fishing interrupted by my mother’s labor. This was near Inverness and my father was in London, pondering how to get us out of that era’s version of Y2K, which was Hitler’s impending invasion. But Hitler never did make it, even though one of his rockets did for our house. The century has been good to me. So let’s wave out the millennium gracefully with a hearty adieu. Onward!
2000
January 15
Back in 1979 Tim Hermach, now fearless leader of the Native Forest Council and breathing the righteous air of Eugene, Oregon, was a businessman seeking commercial advantage. In 1979 this search took him to Little Rock, Arkansas, where his associate Tookie McDaniel said the swiftest way of getting a certificate of origin necessary for a rebar (reinforcing steel for construction) deal was by conferring personally with the new governor of the state.
In short order a dinner was arranged with young Governor Bill at the Little Rock Hilton. Tim recalls that they were scarcely seated before Bill was greeting a pretty young waitress in friendly fashion, putting his hand up her dress while announcing genially to the assembled company, “This woman has the sweetest cunt in Little Rock.”
Tim, an Oregon boy by origin, tells us he listened with burning ears and mouth agape as Bill talked of womanhood in terms of astounding crudity. Badinage notwithstanding, some business was transacted. Hermach tells us that Governor Bill “very openly, nothing shy about it, said words to the effect that our end use certificate would cost about $10,000,” said transaction being of a personal, informal nature. “Since ours was a $2 million deal, we didn’t care,” Tim recalls.
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Governor Bill also informed Hermach that they should go to the Stephens Bank the following day to complete all necessary arrangements.
These tractations concluded, Governor Bill repaired to the Hilton’s nightclub with boon companions, where they cavorted lewdly with sundry flowers of Little Rock before repairing to bedrooms in the upper regions of the hotel.
January 26
Before his election as state attorney general in 1976, Bill and Hillary had lived in Fayetteville, instructing youth at the University of Arkansas. To celebrate his marriage Bill had bought a small house, much disliked by his bride. Great was her relief when the voters’ nod compelled their removal to Little Rock.
Now the small house on California Boulevard had to be rented to supplement the modest income of Arkansas’ chief legal officer. Here’s an account of Bill as landlord from a woman who, back in those years, was the best friend of one of the first tenants to pay, in person, the monthly check to the state attorney general.
A Colossal Wreck Page 18
