The Books That Mattered

by Frye Gaillard

  Standing alone on a flatbed truck, hunched against the cold, he told the crowd what had happened to King, and when the people cried out in disbelief he told them he understood how they felt:

  Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black—considering the evidence there evidently is that they were white people who were responsible—you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country in great polarization—black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

  Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend and to replace that racial violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love . . . My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

  Kennedy had reason to understand that despair, for until November of 1963 he had lived his life on behalf of his brother. He had been John Kennedy’s campaign manager, his attorney general and top adviser in the White House. Then came Dallas, and as Bobby climbed slowly from the depths of his grief, searching for some new meaning in his life, he identified powerfully with people who hurt—children going hungry in the Mississippi Delta, migrant workers eking out a living in California, American Indians on desolate reservations where there were simply no jobs at all.

  As it happened, I had met Robert Kennedy some two weeks before the death of Dr. King. He had come to Nashville on a campaign stop, and I was his student host that night, introducing him to a crowd of 11,000 people. On the drive from the airport to Vanderbilt University, I shared the backseat with Kennedy and John Glenn, the astronaut turned Ohio politician, while in the front seat were three local Democrats. These were prominent men in the party, eager to tell Kennedy what he should and shouldn’t say. This is a campus audience, they declared, so talk about the war as much as you want. But it’s also the South, so go a little easy on poverty and race.

  Kennedy listened briefly, then turned to me and asked without warning, “What do you think I should say?”

  I hesitated then told him I thought he should talk about the war, but also about poverty and injustice at home. I said it was true that in the South these subjects were hard but that was all the more reason to discuss them.

  “Thank you,” said Kennedy, with what I thought was the trace of a smile, “that’s what I’ll do.”

  A decade after all the ruined hope of that spring and Kennedy’s own death at the hands of still another assassin, I met David Halberstam at a party—a Manhattan book-signing for a mutual friend—and after it was over I told him how much I admired his work. Not only The Best and the Brightest, I said, but his earlier, lesser-known book about Kennedy. I told him of my own encounter with the candidate and how genuine and unaffected he had seemed—how he reveled, or so I thought, in rejecting the political advice of the pros.

  Halberstam listened to the story with interest, or at least with kindness, for the role of mentor came to him easily. “I think you should write it,” he said. When I finally did, I tried to make it good. The bar, after all, had been set very high.

  III

  I also met Willie Morris one time. On an evening in 1974, he was with Larry L. King at the Cellar Door, the listening room in Washington, D.C., where the finest folk singers in the country often played. The featured act that night was Mickey Newbury, one of King’s fellow Texans, best known for composing “An American Trilogy,” a medley of “Dixie,” “All My Trials,” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” recorded most movingly by Elvis Presley. I was working on a book on folk and country music, and had come to the club to hear Newbury. When I introduced myself before the show, Newbury was characteristically gracious, and invited me and my handful of friends to “come on over and sit with us.”

  “Us” turned out to be Willie Morris and King. I couldn’t have been more excited, for these were, after all, my journalistic heroes, but as soon as Newbury made the introductions I realized the evening might be an adventure. This was an especially bad time for Morris, not long after he resigned at Harper’s in a bitter dispute with the magazine’s owners—money men concerned with the bottom line, which at Harper’s had never been very good. But the writing, of course, under Morris was splendid, and when he finally left, unable to take the meddling anymore, most of the finest writers went with him.

  Later, all of them would recover—Morris, King, Halberstam and the others—turning out brilliant books for the rest of their careers. But the ending at Harper’s was painful and hard, and for Morris especially, always a connoisseur of good whiskey, it set off a period of drunken despair. This particular night came at the very depth of his despond. He was as wasted as any man I’ve ever seen, his eyelids drooping, his head slumping heavily toward his chest.

  “God damn!” he slurred as we were introduced. It was a phrase he would utter for the rest of the evening, every time, in fact, Mickey Newbury would finish a song. Deeply moved by the music, Morris would turn and put his hand on my knee, repeating his mantra as if it were something only he and I understood: “God damn!” When the concert ended—and it was stunning in its beauty—he managed to lurch to his feet and drape an arm around Newbury’s shoulder. “Mickey” he declared, and here it came again: “God damn, Mickey, you’re a poet!”

  In the greater scheme of things, I was never quite sure what the evening meant, or why I could never get it out of my mind. Certainly, it was a reminder of the human condition, how complicated and fragile it can be, and I suppose it was ballast for the hero worship that I might otherwise have fallen into. But maybe it was more, perhaps a lesson about artists and art and the alchemy that fascinated Albert Murray—truth and beauty from an anguished heart.

  The fiction writers had always understood it, and now Willie Morris and his band of brothers, whatever their foibles and feet of clay, had found the same magic in journalism, in their own understanding of the literal truth.

  5

  Darkness

  featuring:

  Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number and The Longest War—Jacobo Timerman

  Night—Elie Wiesel

  Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl—Anne Frank

  Slaughterhouse-Five—Kurt Vonnegut

  Hiroshima—John Hersey

  Also, Miep Gies, Abraham Heschel, Marshall Frady

  I

  In the spring of 1985 I did an interview with one of my journalistic heroes. Jacobo Timerman was the editor of La Opinion, an opposition newspaper in Buenos Aires, which had set out bravely in the 1970s to expose the excesses of the Argentine government. Timerman was not a native of the country. He spent his first five years in the little Ukrainian village of Bar, where a community of Jews lived with the ancient memory of genocide. In 1648, the Cossack chieftain Chmielnitski descended on the town and murdered all the Jews he could find. Writing in 1981, Timerman offered this history of Bar, and the way it shaped his view of the world:

  The community . . . assumed that something as brutal as the existence of Cossack murderers could only be God’s final test before the coming of the Messiah. So staunch was their conviction that in 1717 they constructed their Great Synagogue, receiving permission beforehand from the bishop. I attended that synagogue with my father, his six brothers, and all my cousins, and bear within me still a vague longing for those tall, bearded, unsmiling men.

  In 1941, when the Nazis entered Bar, they set that synagogue on fire, burning many Jews to death. All the other Jews of Bar plus others from the environs, including t
he Timermans . . . were killed by the Nazis in October of 1942. Some twelve thousand within a couple of days. My father, happily, had left Bar for Argentina in 1928.

  Growing up in South America, Timerman became a passionate Zionist, by which he meant not only the creation of a Jewish homeland—a necessity in the wake of Hitler’s Holocaust—but also a love of generosity and justice, a worldwide struggle for human freedom. “I became destined for that world I would never abandon . . .” he wrote, “that world, unique in its beauty and martyrdom, that mythology of pain and memory, that cosmic vision imbued with nostalgia . . .”

  Such irrepressible idealism pushed Timerman toward a career in writing, and for more than thirty years he plied his trade as a journalist—a political journalist in the broadest sense, for as time went by he became more and more absorbed in the struggle for human rights. By the 1970s, it was a dangerous preoccupation, for Argentina had splintered into violence, with right-wing death squads and leftist guerillas and a government that, in its struggle against terrorism, became terrorist itself. Depending on whose estimate you accept, somewhere between twelve thousand and thirty thousand Argentines simply disappeared, spirited away in the night, or sometimes in broad daylight, by sinister Ford Falcons with no license plates.

  As an editor, Timerman sought to expose the terrorists in his country—right-wing, left-wing, he didn’t really care; nor did he spare the Argentine military. In 1977, on an April morning at dawn, twenty men burst into his apartment and led him away in handcuffs. They threw him down on the floor of a car, a blanket tossed roughly over his head, and when they stopped, one of the men put a revolver to his temple. “I’m going to count to ten,” he said. “Say goodbye, Jacobo dear.” When the counting stopped the man simply laughed, but soon the torture began in earnest—beatings, electrical shocks, solitary confinement for weeks at a time, and still no charges against him were filed. But the most disconcerting thing, curiously enough, he thought looking back, was that his captors seemed to hate him for being a Jew. In Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, the first of two anguished books he wrote in the 1980s, Timerman offers this account of his torture:

  I keep bouncing in the chair and moaning as the electric shocks penetrate my clothes. During one of these tremors, I fall to the ground, dragging the chair. They get angry, like children whose game has been interrupted, and again start insulting me. The hysterical voice rises above the others: “Jew . . . Jew . . .”

  Timerman was eventually freed by his captors, in part because of the human rights intervention of U.S. President Jimmy Carter. In an interview in 1985, Timerman told me of his first meeting with Carter, a few years after his release: “We were looking at each other. We are almost the same height, and our faces were at the same level. I said to him, ‘How do you feel looking at my face, knowing that you saved my life?’”

  For Timerman it was a moment out of time, an instant when history doubled back on itself, and hope and justice became something real. But he had no illusions that it would last. “It was the first time, and I fear the last,” he said, “in this violent and criminal century that a major power has defended human rights all over the world.”

  In the years since, I’ve thought often about that quote, in part for what it says about Carter, a president who has never quite gotten his due, but also for what it says about the times. What a bleak assessment of the century in which we had lived. But Timerman, of course, was not alone in that view. For many Europeans the very notion of human progress died in the trenches of World War I, for this was when the face of warfare changed, when the machine gun—such an ominous juxtaposition of words—became every army’s weapon of choice, and in its clinical efficiency, undermined old notions of gallantry and courage.

  Patented in 1862 by an American inventor named Richard Gatling, this new kind of gun, by the turn of the century, could fire fifty rounds per second—a feat that the generals found hard to comprehend. As the battle lines were drawn across the face of Europe, the armies on both sides feinted and charged, just as armies had done in the past. This time, however, they were cut to pieces. On April 9, 1917, the British army under Douglas Haig launched an attack on the German lines and lost 160,000 men in a single battle. It was a catastrophic moment in human history, a war in which sixteen million people would die.

  It was, however, a mere foreshadowing of World War II, when the death toll would reach sixty million. Nearly twelve million died in the Holocaust, including six million Jews, and thus it should come as no surprise that the great Jewish writers would sketch the horror of the times so clearly. Jacobo Timerman was one of those writers, but there are others more well-known. Elie Wiesel, for example, was an Auschwitz survivor who first told his story in a book called Night, one hundred and eight pages of unrelenting horror that begins with an anecdote of denial. In 1942, when Wiesel was a boy in the Romanian town of Sighet, there was a Jew named Moshe whom the villagers regarded as crazy.

  “Jews, listen to me,” he would cry. “It’s all I ask of you. I don’t want money or pity. Only listen to me.” And then he would tell them what he had seen when the Gestapo carried him away to Poland: “The Jews . . . were made to dig huge graves. And when they had finished their work, the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion, without haste, they slaughtered their prisoners. Each one had to go to the hole and present his neck. Babies were thrown into the air and machine gunners used them as targets.”

  But the people in the village refused to listen. “And as for Moshe,” wrote Wiesel, “he wept.”

  Soon the people understood that this strange old man was telling the truth. But it was too late. In the spring of 1944, still half believing that nothing so terrible could really be happening, the Jews of Sighet were herded into cattle cars, eighty in every car, crowded there so tightly together that they had to take turns in order to sit down. After three days’ travel they came to Auschwitz, where they first saw the flames of the crematoria, first encountered the smell of burning flesh. On the fourth day, Wiesel saw flames leaping from a ditch and a wagonload of babies being burned alive. And then came the hanging, two adults and a child mounted on chairs.

  “Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked.

  At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over.

  Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting . . .

  Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive . . .

  For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed.

  Behind me I heard the same man asking:

  “Where is God now?”

  And I heard a voice within me answer him:

  “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on these gallows . . .”

  Elie Wiesel survived the tortures of Auschwitz and imposed a ten-year silence on himself before he tried to write about what he had seen. Even then, he had trouble finding a publisher, for who would want to read these terrible words? But he knew it was important that the story be told, for how could such atrocities be prevented in the future if the world didn’t know?

  And in fact the world was beginning to know, for a literature of the Holocaust—of these grisly, almost unfathomable times—was beginning to take shape around the innocent words of a teenaged girl. Anne Frank was thirteen when her Jewish family first went into hiding—her mother, father, older sister, and herself, seeking refuge with two other families in an annex above her father’s office. Otto Frank was a businessman in Amsterdam when the Germans overran the Dutch resistance and took control of the city. This was 1940, and there were rumors already of the terrible repressions taking place in Ge
rmany. But in Amsterdam things changed slowly. Frank continued to run his business, respected, even beloved, by his non-Jewish workers, especially his assistant Miep Gies.

  Miep and her husband Henk were part of a Dutch underground, seeking ways to resist the German oppressors, for they could see that things were getting worse. First, their Jewish friends were required to register in a special census, and a “J” was stamped on their identity cards; then a new edict required them to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing. That was often the way it happened: in city after city, as the German army swept across Europe, a slow, insidious imposition of rules, all aimed at setting Jews apart; then suddenly, a torrent of repression, ending in a violent roundup of Jews, and cattle cars rolling through the countryside.

  Sometimes, oddly, the roundups took an orderly form—a letter arriving at a particular household, ordering the deportation of a family, or sometimes even one member of the family. On July 5, 1942, such a notice came to the Franks, requiring that Margot, Anne’s older sister who was then sixteen, present herself for removal to a Nazi labor camp. Already, the family had been preparing a hiding place, expecting to move in another two weeks. But now, frantically, they were forced to disappear right away.

  Anne, by then, had begun keeping a diary, addressing her entries to an imaginary friend named Kitty. This was what she wrote on July 8:

  Dear Kitty,

  Years seem to have passed between Sunday and now. So much has happened, it is just as if the whole world had turned upside down. But I am still alive, Kitty, and that is the main thing, Daddy says.

  Yes, I am still alive, indeed, but don’t ask where or how. You wouldn’t understand a word, so I will begin by telling you what happened on Sunday afternoon.