Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  10.

  Pilgrimage to The New York Times

  The Friday-morning commuters into the center gather, as is their ancient custom, before their great civic monument, The New York Times, there to commune with the latest transactions of the Spirit of History as made manifest in all the words and deeds of living and dying men fit to print. On great slabs of stone, lead, and zinc, words and pictures appear and disappear, different ones every day, different yet somehow reassuringly familiar. It is as though—the slabs seem to tell us—a certain constancy of purpose motivates the Spirit, even when perverse, bringing a kind of fragile episodic continuity to the daily debris of human enterprise, a “handle” as they say on the Great White Way, though it’s not certain whether this is thanks to the Spirit or to The New York Times’s monumental sign language. TURKS URGE GREEKS / TO RUSH BALKAN TIE. PANAMA AND FRANK / SEE KAYE ON FILM. FAVORITISM REFUTED / IN WESTERN PEA SALE. It is a kind of hunting magic, a talisman against the terrible flux: men fear only surprises, HOLY NAME PARADES IN BROOKLYN.

  Some have broken fast, some do so now before the monument. Symbolic foods appropriate to the sober occasion are taken: eggs, smoked flesh, the seeds of living things, uroboric bagels and doughnuts, sustenance drawn from swollen teats, SENATE GROUP FOR OLEO IN NAVY. British Girls Advance, PRODUCERS TRAIL MARY MARTIN. There is a ceremonial drone of wheels on rails, clicking turnstiles, respectful murmurings and rustlings, rhythmically accented by sudden hornblasts and whistles, the wheeze of air brakes, the blowing of noses, the clatter of dishes and whump of doors, a man asking for tickets, CHINESE STAB AT 6 U.N. POINTS. The Milkman Is Slipping. RELIGIOUS FREEDOM WEEK BACKED, EXECUTED GERMAN / A JOBLESS PAINTER. The worshipers move methodically among the slabs, breaking bread and sipping hot stimulants, muttering the traditional responses, snorting and farting, momentarily losing themselves, absorbing the positional metaphors that will preserve the earth’s gravity one more day and stay their own panic. PLANTS DISPERSED / TO FOIL BOMBINGS. BRONX PASTOR’S SON GETS CALL. Weddings, murders, mergers, wakes. Recipes and riots, batting averages and book reviews. The Cold War between Uncle Sam and his enemies, hot wars in the bushes. Ominously, the world chooses to publish today The Art of the Checkmate, and Frankenstein, say the slabs, is being reissued. Reissued?

  VERY RECENTLY, 19 COPIES OF THIS BOOK WERE LITERALLY BURNED. Shadows cloud the pilgrim faces as they learn that the French World War I ace who shot down seventy-five Bosch planes from his old Spad biplane is dead, but the shadows are dispersed a moment later by the revelation that Ruth Hussey has had a daughter after two sons. Martha Raye is obtaining a divorce from Nick Condos on the grounds of extreme cruelty. The communicants try to imagine this cruelty and wonder if they will be able to watch some of it tonight in Times Square.

  Or whenever. If ever. There is a pervading unease here at the monument this morning: something is wrong, every responsible voice in the nation has been insisting the executions had to take place last night and they didn’t, and now even The New York Times, ordinarily impervious in its grandeur to common panic, must acknowledge that the nation needs these deaths and needs them soon, for as Arthur Krock announces, deep inside the maze:

  The operation of justice in the United States is subject to inordinate delays, anyhow, and the Communists have already taken full advantage of this in the Rosenbergs’ case to injure the reputation of the judicial system here with our friends abroad and otherwise make effective anti-American propaganda. By granting the stay, and on the grounds he gave, Justice Douglas has enabled the enemies of this nation to besmirch it further….

  They read that as a consequence of Justice Douglas’s action the Supreme Court is today in special emergency session—CASE SEEN IN PERIL—and that before it the associate counsel for the atom spies has said of the New York Supreme Court Justice Irving Saypol that “there never was a more crooked District Attorney in New York than the one who tried the Rosenbergs!” Perhaps, they conclude hopefully from this, the Phantom has overreached himself. ROSENBERGS MAY FIGHT / INDICTMENT IF DEATH / SENTENCE IS UPSET. Circumscribing all these speculations: the picture of a man sweating behind bars in a B. Altman & Co. advertisement (“Are you facing a 90-day sentence?”‘), a movie review of Devil’s Plot, and a floor-level peek up the skirt of a woman strapped into the seat of a Colonial Airlines plane to Canada. Father’s Day ads for sizzling steaks. “The Mighty Atom” is dead. TONIGHT AT 8:30. “Something to fit every taste.”

  Which is to say, information is one thing, The New York Times another. One does not assimilate data in a trance. Communion services are essentially tactile, not cognitive, a confrontation of life with life. What compels the attention and taps the wellsprings of prophecy on these pilgrimages is not this announcement that little Arlene Riddett, 15, of Yonkers, won the girls’ championship in the 28th annual marbles tournament in Asbury Park, New Jersey, nor that picture of two East Berlin demonstrators throwing stones at Russian tanks on Leipzigerplatz, but the fact that these things touch each other. There are sequences but no causes, contiguities but no connections. The government of Argentina orders the price of theater tickets cut by 25% and the President of the United States is given a large toy model of Smokey Bear. The execution of an unemployed housepainter in Berlin takes shape beside the report that a new collection of wall coverings and shower curtains offers a variety of choices to homemakers who wish to decorate the bathroom: BATH WALLPAPERS / ARE EASY TO CLEAN. “Panorama” is one of the wallpaper designs, made up of impressionistic scenes of the country against a background of abstract motifs reminiscent of ancient calligraphy. Design as a game. Randomness as design. Design ironically revealing randomness. Arbitrariness as a principle, allowing us to laugh at the tragic. As in dreams, there is an impressive amount of condensation on the one hand, elaboration on the other. Logical relationships are repressed, but reappear through displacement. There are pictures of shower curtains with cats carrying umbrellas in their tails. The housepainter’s wife said her husband had merely left home that rainy morning to collect his unemployment check. He had a bad cold and planned to come straight home. Handy Man of High Degree. “Shot through with compassion and humor…” Advertisements for airconditioners, summer suits, and umbrellas provide the setting for the crash of the Globemaster IN FIERY SPIN NEAR TOKYO. Cool and carefree as a breeze, SOME UNUSUAL WAYS WITH COLD SOUP. The news that 905 MORE CAPTIVES / ESCAPE FROM CAMP is paired with an ad for UNITED HUNTS. Send them off to camp looking their nicest after a trip to Best’s Children’s Barber Shop.

  There are those who commune directly with the words, caressing them blearily with their sleepy eyes or swallowing them like antacids, leaning against the slabs for support whenever the earth should rock, but doubting they represent anything more than themselves. Others gamely seek the space between, likening these cryptic hoarstones to clues in the daily crossword puzzle (and look what’s there today, first clue, 1 Across: Burning Tree activity), signals in an ordered maze, a possibly more or less ordered maze. And perhaps that was why—the tenacious faith in the residual magic of language—this monument was erected in the first place: that effort to reconstruct with words and iconography each fleeting day in the hope of discovering some pattern, some coherence, some meaningful dialogue with time. But so enormous a shrine is it, so prodigious a task just to keep the translation of gesture into language flowing, that all consciousness of any intended search for transcendence must long ago have disappeared and been forgotten, leaving all visionary speculations to the passing pilgrim. Yet even this extravagant accretion of data suggests a system, even mere hypotyposis projects a metaphysic. “Objectivity” is in spite of itself a willful program for the stacking of perceptions; facts emerge not from life but from revelation, gnarled as always by ancient disharmonies and charged with libidinous energy. Conscious or not, The New York Times statuary functions as a charter of moral and social order, a political force-field maker, defining meaningful actions merely by showing them, conferring a special power on those it touches, creat
ing the stations of life that others might aspire to. And why not? How else struggle against entropy? PACE AT WESTBURY / TO MIGHTY GRATTAN. N.Y. Life Officers to Be Elevated. WASHINGTON ANGRY. Fail to Find a Bomb in School. HOUSE PURCHASED / FOR WORKING GIRLS.

  They often come here, working girls, prowling in the Classifieds, searching for fairy godmothers, magic carpets, the secret name of that gold-spinning gnome. Bombers poke about, open-faced and friendly, looking for targets. Politicians, too. Pensioners and passing tourists. Uncle Sam also comes from time to time, mostly just to show off. And the Phantom, though he never shows his face, can often be glimpsed in the dark shadows behind the slabs, exposing his hindend and farting damply. Judge Irving Kaufman, like so many, comes here out of duty, essentially oblivious to the Phantom’s impieties, seeking what he would think of as a balanced view. One eye on New York, the other on the World. Tammany Hall is his metaphorical link, just as it is Irving Saypol’s. Governor Tom Dewey, whose connection is the Republican Eastern Establishment, those same International Bankers who have put Dwight David Eisenhower in the White House, rushes here daily, shoulders bulled forward, fists clenched, chewing his moustache, ready for a fight, looking down his nose, or up his nose, at panic-stricken creatures like Mayor Vincent Impellitteri or Mother Luce (her son TIME whistles through here like a thief in the night). As for Eisenhower, he snorts in amusement at all this misplaced sanctitude and steers clear—a man could lose hours in such twaddle; but his Vice President, Richard Nixon, does come here often, pretending disdain (all right, so it’s the famous organ of the Eastern Establishment, it’s not that big), yet not without awe and a certain practiced self-effacement. After all, he is something of a stranger here, and he understands and respects the codes for sojourning in alien lands. Not so, Joe McCarthy. He parades through like a peacock, sporting all his medals, and jabbing his stubby fingers in outrage at any signs of pink stains on the face of the monument (some say these odd blotches are the blood of Innocents, others claim that Roy Cohn and David Schine come at night and sling them there, but most are confident that the Senator knows what he’s shouting about).

  Even the Rosenbergs turn up. Disparagingly, fearfully, yet eagerly. A sign perhaps…? Ethel wanders dreamily through the entertainment section, purses her lips disapprovingly at the fashion ads, falls into a quiet trance before the Letters to the Editor. Julius, more faithful—a regular dues-payer, in fact—presents himself diligently at Page One every morning at ten o’clock, pressing his nose against the great slabs, frowning through his wire-rimmed spectacles at all this irrelevant history, weeping softly to himself to see such monumental dignity conferred on a world so mad. These bitter tears blur his weak vision, and he is left with little more than the vague sense of a great gray threat, remote, impenetrable, yet for that all the more menacing. Often enough, through his tears, he has discovered himself here on these slabs, or someone they said was himself (“the accused,” they call him, but the words keep melting and blurring on him, and what he sees there is “the accursed”), but he has not recognized his own image, grown gigantesque, eviscerated, unseeing: it’s like looking into some weird funhouse mirror that stretches one’s shape so thin you can see right through it. He used to think that if he could just find his way onto these tablets everything would be all right, but now he knows this is impossible: nothing living ever appears here at all, only presumptions, newly fleshed out from day to day, keeping intact that vast, intricate, yet static tableau —The New York Times’s finest creation—within which a reasonable and orderly picture of life can unfold. No matter how crazy it is.

  Oh, he shouldn’t be surprised, he’s a Marxist and has nothing but contempt for the bourgeois capitalist press, yet paradoxically he is also somehow an Americanist and a believer in Science and Freedom and History and Reason, and it dismays him to see cruelty politely concealed in data, madness taken for granted and even honored, truth buried away and rotting in all that ex cathedra trivia—my God! something terrible is about to happen, and they have time to editorialize on mustaches, advertise pink cigarettes for weddings, and report on a lost parakeet! Ah, sometimes he just wants to ram the goddamn thing with his head in an all-out frontal attack, wants to destroy all this so-called history so that history can start again. But even if he martyred himself like that, what would it amount to? just another thread in the fabric, another figure in the eternal tableau, one more little exemplary parable for the hucksters to amuse themselves by, sell a few more books and papers. So much for terrible happenings, good intentions. Two years ago, he came here and stole away, on July the Fourth, a copy of the Declaration of Independence. It was very heavy. Perhaps he thought he could beat down his cell walls with it. But though he pressed his whole body against it until it turned yellow with his fear, he was unable to read what it said. He tried to pretend, but he got mixed up. “It is interesting to read these words,” he wrote bravely to Ethel, “concerning free speech, freedom of the press and of religion in this setting. These rights our country’s patriots died for can’t be taken from the people even by Congress or the Courts.” Perhaps, he would often think, squinting helplessly at the quirky script, I need new glasses.

  Today, in any case, he is not here, they are not here. Their cells have been stripped and so have they, and they have been moved into the Halfway House in anticipation of the Times Square spectacular, and subsequently, though they will presumably miss this, their own climactic hour on the great slabs. Ethel is now clothed in terrycloth slippers and a cheap green dress with white polka dots, a frowzy second cousin to the one the model’s wearing on Tablet 25; Julius has been dressed in a loose T-shirt, buff-colored slippers, and fresh khaki pants. Nevertheless, the Rosenbergs have not lost hope; in fact, they feel pretty certain they’ve won the day, and all these execution warm-up rituals are just one more last-ditch effort by the government to frighten them into confessing. Well, it won’t work.

  But if the Rosenbergs are absent this morning, they are not missed. No one is missed here. Or recognized either. For curiously, these same slabs which bring pilgrims together each morning in meditation and wonder, creating a fund of common tropes and expectations, also somehow isolate them. The demand made by these tablets on the faithful is quite literally monumental, and they often experience the illusion suffered by mystics throughout the ages: the Spirit, annunciating reality, displaces it, and the tangible world dissolves even as it is being proclaimed. Thus, one may need to read here tomorrow what momentous events were transpiring just behind the slab one stood before today. People press themselves against the Father’s Day advertisements and crisis tabulations, fail to notice the people leaping out of buildings, girls being raped on subway platforms, the colliding traffic. They vibrate before the reported joy of the Rosenbergs at news of their stay and the editorial on moustaches (Julie’s has been shaved off), but cannot see the crowds gathering outside the Supreme Court building, the writing on the subway walls: OBJECTIFICATION IS THE PRACTICE OF ALIENATION!

  Ah, this strange eventful History, witness of the times, the light of truth and a tissue of crimes, the true poetry, distillation of Rumour, mockery of human affairs, chart and compass, this whimsical prophet with his face turned backwards, reciting the manners, the pursuits, the peoples, and the battles of the race. “Aghast I stood,” Pope once said, though ignorant of The New York Times, “a monument of woe!” RAIL LABOR CHIEFS / ATTACK EMPLOYERS. Greeks Repulse 3,000. MARIE IS REJECTED / AS FRENCH PREMIER. Rhee Rebuffs Eisenhower. PARAKEET ELUDES JAY. POLO GROUNDERS / TRIP REDLEGS. REDS ACCUSE US. Double Jeopardy. F.B.I, ENTERS CASE. Eternal Son and Patrol Triumph. DAVID AND GOLIATH: A miracle of fit and flattery. Remember, too, that in Hitler’s Germany it started by burning books in the streets…and ended by burning people in the ovens of Buchenwald. ‘Wishful Thinking’ Seen. SOVIET GUNS / CALM SECTOR…

  Then an Atomic Thriller

  This is a story about what might have happened if the Russians had planned to set off an atomic bomb at the Coronation Naval Review that took
place at Spithead last Monday….

  Spithead, Goliath, Frankenstein, Eternal Son: as always, it is names that provide resonance to the experience of the daily pilgrimage. Guilmartin, Frauenglass, Finerty, and Krock. Kirk. Ike. Braque. Bortz, Bricker, and Bobo Olson. If anything on these slabs is sacred, it is these names. It’s an ancient maxim of the tribe: If you violate the name, you violate the man. Even if he is dead. In the old days, before The New York Times, if you wished to destroy a man, you inscribed his name on a pot and smashed it. Or stuck a clay image with a pin. Now you attach his name to a sin and print it. Such an act is beyond mere insult or information, it is a magical disturbance of History. It is a holy act and an act of defilement at the same time. It may bring peace and prosperity, it may result in madness and disaster. Is Alger Hiss a Communist? Is Joe McCarthy a Fascist? Is Justice Douglas a Traitor? Is Richard Nixon a Farting Quacker who dreamt of selling his pajamas at Coney Island? What matters is: where are such questions being asked? The great experience of the twentieth century has been to accept the objective reality of time and thus of process—history does not repeat, the universe is not changeless, masses dissolve and slide through the fingers, there are no precognitions—and out in that flow all such assertions may be true, false, inconsequential, or all at the same time. Such things are said every day, and no marvels ensue. But The New York Times transforms this time-process into something hard and—momentarily anyway—durable: it is as if these slabs, these great stone tablets, were being hurled out into the timestream, causing the river evermore to eddy and swirl around them. And thus the danger. Envoûtements have been known to destroy the priests who practiced them: the keepers of The New York Times, though fascinated by the possibilities, are cautious, and they do not stray often into this dreadful domain. Ike’s hard-on is not here this morning. Instead, they report that Dutch Schoch is hopeful. Universal-International wants Ruth Roman to share the adventuresome life with James Stewart in “The Far Country.” Timothy J. Doody has entered bankruptcy proceedings. The President had breakfast with Bridges, Dirksen, Magnuson, and Dodge. RHEE IS ASSAILED BY HAMMAR-SKJOLD. They hie to the world where the commonplace unfolds, the place of freedom and property and ease and security, the land of the more or less likely. They celebrate the names—Sinclair Weeks! Virgil Trucks! Bojangles Robinson and Jabbo Jablonski!—but they avoid the sorcery, the terrible center, the edgeless edge. Louis Appelbaum will be buried today. Okay. And Barfield, Bluhm, and Carrie Batt. BERKMAN—Joseph. You are always with us. Jeremiah Troup. Teresa Love, Eva Roller, and Kathryn Ripberger. Sacred stuff, to be sure, but ritualized. QUICK START FOR MISS SWIFT. Catch Ma Perkins at 1:15. No breakaway wildness, no terrible conjurations, just the easy knell of names in mild parade. General Withers Burress. Coach Callow. Nero. Ifu-de. MISS BAREA LAMB / BECOMES FIANCEE. Marie Trotzky. Corliss Lamont and Licurgo Costa. Leo Tolstoy. Walt Dropo. Sugarfoot.