Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  True at First Light is his “fictionalized memoir” of that African sojourn, published thirty-eight years after his suicide—a sad book and a bloated one, even though it was more than twice as long before his son Patrick shrunk it to this size. The Papa we meet in its pages is a Great White Hunter, a tribal chief, and a wiseguy medicine man. He drinks beer for breakfast; swigs gin from a Spanish double cartridge pouch after gunning down baboons; eats breaded cutlets of lion tenderloin; makes nasty remarks about John O’Hara, vegetarians, homosexual playwrights, and sherry-sodden and “syphilitic” Masai; satirizes religion by making up one of his own; masters the secret Kamba handgrip; reads Simenon in French; remembers Paris and the Rockies, Orwell and D. H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald and his old horse Kite; speaks babytalk to Mary and the natives, all of whom are infantilized, and bluster and blarney to his boozy white hunting buddies. He will get his leopard for Look magazine, as Mary will get her black-maned lion and marijuana tree for Christmas. But he will not, alas, because of local custom and propriety, ever get to sleep with Debba, his last chance for true “happiness.”

  No wonder he left this book in a drawer. I’m not saying that True at First Light is without grace notes. Although almost everybody talks as if translated from the Portuguese for a Dalton Trumbo screenplay about Spartacus or Geronimo, Hemingway did know how to listen to leopards and rhinos and the little boy he’d left behind. For instance:

  There are always mystical countries that are a part of one’s childhood. Those we remember and visit sometimes when we are asleep and dreaming. They are as lovely at night as they were when we were children. If you ever go back to see them they are not there. But they are as fine in the night as they ever were if you have the luck to dream of them.

  Still, the prose of stories like “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and “Hills Like White Elephants” compares with the prose of True at First Light as early photos of a vital Hemingway compare with snapshots of late Papa, trapped in the blubber of his celebrityhood.

  So he couldn’t escape his own cultivated image. No more vanishing acts from a marriage or an impasse: to Wyoming; to Spain; to the bush; to the sea; to bag another beastliness or kill the big fish. No more blaming his mother. No more bull. Only the black bottle and electroshock at the Mayo Clinic, after which he bagged himself. Like his own father, Papa ate a gun.

  Hanging out at the Century Club begins to seem a whole lot healthier, and Juneteenth a lot less shameless. Maybe we’re better off not knowing what’s in the drawers of writers who blinked off into radio silence. Maybe, for another instance, J. D. Salinger has the right idea.

  Salinger, who is fifty years older than his third wife, may still be writing in a magic tower full of peppermints and pipe smoke somewhere in rustic New Hampshire with the curtains closed against the mountain view. But he hasn’t published a story since 1966. According to his daughter Peggy, this is because he can’t stand criticism. Among the many other things her father can’t stand are country clubs, Ivy Leaguers, holidays, charity, white bread, soft butter, “primitive” art, “coarse” Negroes, “trashy” poets like Langston Hughes, “ignorant” languages like Spanish, as well as anything that’s “second-rate,” that isn’t beautiful or perfect (including all marriage and most women), anyone who interrupts his work (including his wives and children), and all the “parasites” who sponge off him (especially his wives and children).

  His daughter Peggy—Margaret A. Salinger—has written a memoir, Dream Catcher, that would break the heart even if her father weren’t the reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye. Perhaps there is a gene for splendid prose. She is a mother herself, an Episcopal chaplain, a graduate of Brandeis, Oxford, and Harvard Divinity School, a former garage mechanic and union organizer, a worker in a home for abused and abandoned children, and an occasional singer at Tanglewood in the Boston Symphony chorus. But, starting with childhood, she has also survived everything from bulimia to chronic fatigue syndrome, from hallucinations to dehydrations, from a scary abortion to postpartum panic attacks, from alcohol abuse to attempted suicide. Since that childhood, she has slept with one eye open, seeing UFOs and fairies. Now, she watches her own son, hoping like the Native American dream catcher hanging over his bed “to filter out the nightmares in its web and let the good dreams drip down the feather on his sleeping forehead.”

  But Peggy’s father is the author of Franny and Zooey. And Peggy’s mother did set fire to the house, cooking the gerbils. And the real-child Peggy could never be as perfect as the fictional Glass bananafish. So we read Dream Catcher as we read the Ian Hamilton biography and the Joyce Maynard memoir, obsessively seeking clues to the writer who came back strange from World War II, having married and divorced a Nazi. Who insisted that one young woman after another abandon her family, her friends, and her possessions for him as if he were a cult. Who only sleeps in beds pointed true north, and has been a serial True Believer in Zen, Vedanta, L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, Wilhelm Reich’s orgone box, Edgar Cayce, macrobiotics, and drinking urine.

  “What are you doing,” his daughter wonders, “that is so much more important than taking care of your kids and family?” The happiest she ever saw him was playing ringtoss with a dolphin. The only time he ever cried was when John Kennedy was shot. When she needed money for medical bills, he sent her a book by Mary Baker Eddy, a subscription to a Christian Science magazine about miracle healing, and a note saying she’d only get well when she stopped believing in the “illusion” of her sickness. Instead, she stopped believing in the illusion of her father.

  Well, fathers—

  It used to bother me that Ellison, in Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory, so seldom reviewed and never encouraged any of the other black American writers of his time, which was a long one. Ambivalence about Wright, who gave him his start, was one thing. Silence on the rest, so many of whom grew up nourished by his breakthrough novel, seemed downright hostile. And this is not to get into what isn’t any of my business—the continuing argument about the responsibility of black artists to themselves versus their obligation to an aggrieved community; about primitivism, stereotypes, street cred, protest novels, the black aesthetic, and art for art’s sake. I see no reason why Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, George C. Wolfe, Alvin Ailey, Bill T. Jones, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, Spike Lee, and Julie Dash shouldn’t disagree as much about fundamentals as any other miscellaneous bunch of extravagant talents, any other pantheon. Baldwin, speaking to white America, was certainly right when he said, “If I am not who you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.” And so was Toni Morrison, speaking to everybody: “The best art is unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.” And maybe, anyway, the best model for any modern literature is the letter of transit, the message in a bottle from exile, displacement, and dispossession. Aren’t all of us, even Ellison, homesick?

  I’m talking less cosmically, about teachers, mentors, friends. He seems almost to have felt that encouraging the children who cherished his example, and struggled with his shadow, would cost him some body heat. So he hibernated for the long winter, and sucked like Ahab on the paws of his gloom.

  But Juneteenth, so unlike and yet in surreal keeping with so much that’s happened in the last half century of African American writing, suggests those children got what they needed anyway. That Toni Morrison got sermons, jazz, the Civil War, the Reconstruction, magnanimity, and diaspora. That John Edgar Wideman got kinship, ancestry, basketball, deracination, Homewood, epiphany, Africa, and Caliban. That if Ellison neglected Martin Luther King, Jr., Charles Johnson would have to dream about him. And that a phantasmal version of Ellison himself shows up on the last page of Wesley Brown’s wonderful Darktown Strutters, in the person of the nineteenth-century minstrel Jim Crow, slyly ruining a photograph they’re trying to take at P. T. Barnum’s Southland theme park—a museum of the American distemper that includes
a NIGRA WENCH, a HEATHEN CHINEE, a DUMB SWEDE, a DRUNKEN MICK, a SHYLOCKING JEW, a MURDEROUS PAISAN, and a DEAD INDIAN. Jim Crow is supposed to be THE CONNIVING UNCLE TOM. But just as the powder goes flashpoof, Jim executes a brand-new fancy step: not there; long gone; you might even say invisible, but dancing somewhere on a coffin.

  Why Socialism Never Happened Here

  AT A FREE concert in Battery Park in New York City in the first spring of the twenty-first century, the British folksinger Billy Bragg observed between Woody Guthrie riffs that the only signs of socialism he had seen anywhere in these United States were the public library and the car-pool lane.

  If I were socialism, I’d have skipped this country entirely. Imagine an eye in the sky—a phoenix, a dove, a stormy petrel, or a Sputnik—on a scouting mission from the failed revolutions of 1848, or maybe the Paris Commune. Looking down, canting counterclockwise on its powerful left wing, what would it see? From sea to shining sea: long-distance loneliness… Deerslayers, cow punchers, whaling captains, and raft river rats… Greedheads, gun nuts, and religious crazies… Carpetbaggers, claims-jumpers, con men, dead redskins, despised coolies, fugitive slaves, and No Irish Need Apply… Land grabs, lynching bees, and Love Canals… Lone Rangers, private eyes, serial killers, and cyberpunks… Silicon Valley and the Big Casino… IPOs and Regis.

  Not exactly the ideal social space for a radical Johnny Appleseed to plant his dream beans. Early on in It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks quote the historian Richard Hofstadter: “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.” And late in the game the authors speak for themselves: “A culture can be conceived as a series of loaded dice,” in which “past throws” constrain the present. By then they have comparison-shopped on the Labor-Left all over the world, consulted everybody from Trotsky and Gramsci to Irving Howe and Ira Katznelson, and outlined, rehearsed, staged, critiqued, summarized, reiterated, rewound, rerun, and Mobius-looped every conceivable scenario. The odds, they conclude, were so steeply stacked against socialism in America that its defeat was “overdetermined.”

  Lipset professes public policy at George Mason University and is a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Marks professes political science at the University of North Carolina and directs its Center for European Studies. They are fair-minded, open-handed, flat-footed, and lily-livered (that is, value-neutral). They aren’t saying that socialism deserved to flunk our litmus test because there’s something wrong with it. Nor are they saying there’s anything right about it, either, unless its washout would help explain why we happen to be the only Western democracy without a comprehensive health-care system, the only one that doesn’t provide child support to all of its families, and the worst offender on economic inequality—with a greater gap between rich and poor than any other industrialized nation, double the differential of the next worst down the list; the richest nation in the world, where, nevertheless, one child out of every five is born beneath the subsistence line. What they do say is that almost everything exceptional and distinctive about America made socialism a harder sell here than it was in, for instance, Australia. And that the pigheaded behavior of American Socialists only compounded the problem.

  Be warned that Lipset and Marks say these things over and over again, after which they repeat them, in the approved reverse-gear style of academic monographs whose feet, like those of the legendary Mikea Pygmies of Madagascar, point backward to confuse their enemy trackers. And yet I can’t think of any crime scene Lipset and Marks haven’t dusted, nor any suspect they haven’t cuffed.

  The big picture is that, from the get-go, our “core values” glowed in the dark like Three Mile Island: an ethos of individualism, a weltanschauung of antistatism, and a blank check from God. We sprang full-blown from John Locke’s higher brow, a natural-born hegemony of bourgeois money-grubbers—unscathed by medieval feudalism (with its fixed classes of aristocracy and forelock-tugging peasants); exempt from nineteenth-century Europe’s ideological power-grabbing fratricides (by virtue of early white male suffrage, lots of land, waves of immigrants to assume the lousiest jobs while the native-born upwardly mobilized themselves, and a ragtag diversity that undermined nascent class consciousness while permitting the merchant princelings to play workers of different racial and ethnic backgrounds against each other in a status scramble); and insulated from revolting developments—insurgencies, mutinies, Jacqueries, even mugwumps and goo-goos—by a political system so partial to the status quo that it’s almost arteriosclerotic (a winner-take-all presidency, a fragmenting federalism, a bought judiciary, and a two-party Incumbent Protection Society).

  So everybody is measured by his or her ability to produce wealth, those who die with the most toys win, anyone who fails to prosper is morally condemned, and a vote for Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, John Anderson, George Wallace, Henry Wallace, or Robert La Follette—not even to mention Norman Thomas and Eugene V. Debs—is considered to be a waste of franchise.

  To be sure, we have had more than our fair share of labor violence. Otherwise, we would never have needed Pinkertons. One recalls, at random, the Haymarket riot, the Homestead strike, and the Ludlow massacre; Harlan County and Coeur d’Alene; steelworkers in Chicago and Detroit, textile workers in Lawrence and Paterson, dockworkers in San Francisco, rubber workers in Akron, and gravediggers in New Jersey: Joe Hill, Big Bill Haywood, Tom Mooney, Mother Jones, Molly Maguires, and Wobblies. But the most depressing chapters in It Didn’t Happen Here are devoted to a labor movement that had already internalized the all-American ethos of antistatist individualism before the first left-wing agitator explicated the first contradiction—a working class needing to lose a lot more than its chains. “I’m all right, Jack” and “Less Filling! Tastes Great!” don’t add up to “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

  Thus the whole idea of a labor party here, anything like those that developed in European nations or Canada and Australia, seems chimerical when we read how such radicals as the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World—more anarcho-syndicalist than socialist or Marxist—disdained reform politics every bit as much as conservative craft unionists in the American Federation of Labor. The AFL, in its turn, worked just as hard to protect the skilled jobs of its white native-born membership from a lumpenproletariat of African Americans and immigrants as it did to wring concessions from rapacious employers. (The AFL, until the Great Depression, actually opposed minimum-wage legislation, state provision of old-age pensions, compulsory health insurance, and limitations on the manly work week. Nor should we ever forget a 1902 pamphlet that Samuel Gompers wrote himself: “Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood vs. Asiatic Coolieism: Which Shall Survive?”)

  Or when we read how the Socialist Party, as fetishistic about doctrine as any Protestant sect, refused to join in coalitions with allies like the North Dakota Non-Partisan League, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, the Commonwealth Federations of Washington and Oregon, the Working Class Union in Oklahoma, or Upton Sinclair’s Campaign to End Poverty in California—and in many localities went so far as to expel, for “opportunism,” members who joined a union or, even worse, ran for office on a coalition ticket and won a municipal election. (Inconstant Debs, a five-time candidate for president on the Socialist line, was quoted famously: “There was a time in my life, before I became a Socialist, when I permitted myself to be elected to a state legislature, and I have been trying to live it down ever since. I am as much ashamed of that as I am of having gone to jail.”)

  Or when we read how the Depression-born alternative to the AFL, the more inclusive Congress of Industrial Organizations, alert to the possibilities of pro-labor legislation, nevertheless rushed into the co-opting embrace of F.D.R. so quickly and uncritically as to compromise its subsequent leverage on the Democratic Party, even after it was obedient enough to purge its own left wing in the late 1940s. (How prescient the old Socialist Norman Thomas seems now, having
warned back then that the New Deal was “an elaborate scheme for stabilizing capitalism through associations of industries that could regulate production in order to maintain profits.”)

  So much for solidarity. In fact, only once in this century did organized labor desert the Democratic Party, after its nomination of the antilabor John W. Davis in 1924. Which was also the only national election year when the Socialists made common cause with another party, the Progressives. And so La Follette got 16.6 percent of the vote. And so the Democrats, learning their lesson, made sure to nominate a prolabor Al Smith the next time around. And yet how soon the left forgot about the practical payoffs that can sometimes accrue from rejecting the “lesser evil” thesis. And so now organized labor and disorganized labor, too, are both on the wrong side of the candy-store window, looking in from the Dumpster as megamerging downsizers, flyboy bond traders, and multinational vulture capitalists eat the truffles and sodomize the sales clerks. The typical chief executive of a big company earns 170 times as much as the typical workers. One-third of the labor force earns less than fifteen thousand dollars a year. The average hourly wage adjusted for inflation is lower today than it was in 1973. The very definition of inflation has been helpfully “adjusted” to exclude food and energy. And politicians of both bought parties are in thrall to a Clairvoyant Master of the Temple of Karnak, a High Priest of the Hermetic Secrets of the Sacred Science of the Pharaohs, the Gnome of Fed: Alan (Chuckles) Greenspan.