Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  It is a book of life—and it makes the distinct contribution of a new dimension, a new aspect, to life. We argue whether literature is written by individuals or incubated by cultures, whether it springs from the lyric spirit or whether it is squeezed out from human misery in terms of protest. We may, indeed, argue whether Doctor Zhivago is an affirmation or an epitaph. But it is a book that you profit by having read, an exciting book, a book to the credit of individual man among the monoliths.

  Epitaph for the Beat Generation

  WELL, IT’S ALL over. Jack Kerouac has gone back to his mother on Long Island. Allen Ginsberg returned to the Village. Gregory Corso was last seen on the Champs-Elysées, bound for the Left Bank. And even that unreluctant radical old dragon of Beat Generation public relations, Kenneth Rexroth, has headed for the warmer waters of the Mediterranean, weary of the bombast.

  There was a time, of course, one summer (before the literary critics, in their pursuit of prodigies, discovered San Francisco), when we used to sit up all night in a furnished room on Heavenly Lane, playing chess on an orange crate and guzzling tequila from an old canteen; smearing ourselves with self and doing greasy battle over Baudelaire; spending our tortured souls in little midnight coins to buy the body or esteem of world-weary Mardous swathed in dirty serapes. When Sad Sam stood up on a table in Otto’s Grotto and blew God from a tiny gold trumpet, and we all read Robinson Jeffers and wrote novels and listened to the wild sad horns of the Pacific.

  Then: They published On the Road, and “Howl” was banned by the San Francisco police department, and Harper’s and the Atlantic, creaking their dusty kaleidoscopes across the Continent, trained them on North Beach. That was the ball game. Suddenly Ivy League colleges started inviting Ginsberg to read poetry to them, and slick magazines were printing Rexroth again, and Jack Kerouac came down from the mountains strangled by a crucifix, all over the front page of the New York Times (“The New York Times is as Beat as I am,” said Kerouac. “Thank God for the New York Times!”). Conspicuous consumptives from Boston University’s School of Fine Arts read bad poetry to worse jazz downstairs at The Rock, in Lou’s Pebble Room; and MacDougal Alley louts in black turtleneck sweaters and white tennis sneakers went running up Sixth Avenue shouting “Buddhism Zens Me!”

  Joyfully self-conscious America suddenly discovered its bohemian subculture—in coffeehouses and cold-water flats, congealed in city-slum coagulums reading Ionesco and pretending to be Rimbaud. Maybe America felt guilty about the middle class, about its apartment houses and its antiseptic sex life, about Social Security and the Book-of-the-Month Club. Maybe America was just bored with its suburbs. But whatever it was, America paid more than just attention to its pampered spawn. The Beats made more money than John the Ossified Man.

  Colleges threw seminars to discuss them, newspapers sent reporters to interview them, big magazines did photo-features on them, and little magazines published their poetry. America’s intellectuals gave up cultural Scrabble and hauled out all the old bogeymen about the Hero-Bum and the Fragmentation of the Modern World and The Failure of Communication and Aspects of the Anti-Social Revolution. Everything from homosexuality to heroin was back in style again.

  The Beat Generation was scrutinized to death. America clobbered it into submission with a kleig light. Its writers stopped writing, or tried to pass off narcissistic adolescent novels the publishers had rejected the first time around, e.g., Kerouac’s Doctor Sax and Maggie Cassidy. The perennial college sophomores unbuttoned their button-down collars, strapped on their sandals, and went running down the beach screaming “Moloch!” San Francisco looked more like the Dartmouth Winter Carnival than the American Left Bank.

  What did it all prove? Well, every sibling sociologist with a sampler kit could tell you one thing: it was a panicked flight from reality. It was the same thing as Marlon Brando on a motorcycle or Jimmy Dean in a sports car or Norman Mailer in the Partisan Review. It was sensation-seeking and anarchic. It was apolitical—the sort of Greta Garbo ideology of “I want to be alone.” The world owed us all a living, free wine, easy sex, and folding money. Responsibility had too many syllables and love was a dirty word. But was that all?

  It proved at least one thing more. That poetry, painting, music, and fiction are products of the individual. That the great American novel will be written by some antisocial SOB who can’t stand espresso and never heard of Wilhelm Reich—the guy who sits up all night at a typewriter and brings to his peculiar vision the discipline of form and the love of an educated heart. A generation may be disenchanted, but it takes a man alone to chronicle that disenchantment. Art-by-citadel won’t work. It’s in league with brainstorming and Groupthink and government-by-committee. Movements, Generations, Subcultures—these are the strewn carcasses of sterile imaginations, conjured up to explain lamely the why and how of genius. Nobody sees Saul Bellow at Rienzi’s or James Gould Cozzens at the Co-Existence Bagel Shop. Robert Frosts don’t run in rat-packs. Art is individual, the child of solitary individuals who wed their loneliness to their hope. It is sacrilege to call it by the same name as the sour song of displaced doughboys who stand on street corners strumming banjos, shouting at authority, and passing the tin cup.

  You see, we were having fun on North Beach before all this happened. Nobody took himself very seriously. It was a stage in the painful growth to a painful manhood. And the poetry-readings and the beer-drinking and the Baudelaire were all part of our slow trudge into maturity, into a world where men must accept the responsibility for their acts, where, eventually, perhaps, men come to that lonely room and face that typewriter and write that novel. But it couldn’t be that way. Nothing is ever slow in America. And that stench you smell from certain quarters is only the burnt wax from wings which ventured too near the sun. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—as I always say when I’m sad.

  Richard Nixon’s Six Crises

  LET ME MAKE it clear at the outset that I am not going to be objective. I am one of those people who are called “Nixon-haters”; somewhere along the line we feel that we personally have been somehow soiled by this man, and we become strident on the subject. So several of the propositions of this review are 1) that Six Crises establishes conclusively the contention that Richard Nixon has nothing to offer this nation but the cheap sort of second-rate sainthood he is here busy trying to manufacture; 2) that his book might more instructively have been titled The Death of a Salesman or Advertisements for Myself; and 3) that, in baring his soul, he has shown us just how empty he is inside. That, I think, is fair warning. Switch me off now if you were expecting a few pious remarks about the tragic collapse of Dick Nixon, or a long swoon of meditation on the loneliness of this misunderstood and pitiable man, or a tennis-court slap on the back for the little man who almost made it. I read and I review his book because I am fascinated by the flower of rot, and because I think that more interesting and instructive than Richard Nixon the success is Richard Nixon the failure. I think that more meaningful than the man of tricks is the man of tricks reduced to desperation.

  All right. We presume that in a democracy a certain number of hucksters, knaves, cowards, thieves, and assassins will, by virtue of cunning and accident of history, be elevated into high governmental posts and entrusted with responsibilities beyond their grasp. It is only a wonder that more of them don’t rise higher, that there is some sort of compensatory mechanism that so often brings them down and discards them, finally, in distaste. I find most interesting in this book those portions in which Richard Nixon relates his confrontation with that compensatory mechanism, and the absence of his self-knowledge at the time of that confrontation.

  In Six Crises Nixon triumphantly documents his inability to understand the unfolding of history around him. I refer initially to his conviction that all criticism of him is inspired by his anti-Communism. He quotes himself telling a crowd at a train station in 1952, just after the first reports of the Nixon fund, quote: “You folks know the work that I did investigating Communists in
the United States. Ever since I have done that work the Communists and the left-wingers have been fighting me with every possible smear. When I received the nomination for the vice-presidency I was warned that if I continued to attack the Communists in this government they would continue to smear me. And believe me, you can expect they will continue to do so. They started it yesterday.” Unquote. Or take his response to the hostile mobs which greeted him in Caracas. It was to bawl out the Venezuelan foreign minister. Nixon told the unfortunate man, quote: “If your government doesn’t have the guts and good sense to control a mob like the one at the airport, there will soon be no freedom for anyone in Venezuela. Freedom does not mean the right to engage in mob actions.” Unquote. Or after the incident at San Marcos University, where he had been stoned. Nixon asked an aide for a rundown on the reaction to his performance, and was told that almost all reports were favorable, but that Rubottom and Bernbaum, two Foreign Service men, had, and again I quote from the Nixon account: “expressed concern that the episode had embarrassed the Peruvian government and had compromised the goodwill effect of the entire tour. I blew my stack. I told Cushman to have Rubottom and Bernbaum come to my room immediately. He reported back that they were dressing for the state dinner that evening and would come when finished. I told him to have them come at once as they were. A few minutes later the two men appeared before me, half dressed. I ripped into them. I told them it was their right and obligation before a decision was made to advise me against the San Marcos visit. But once I had made my decision in a matter of this importance, it was incumbent upon them, as key members of my staff, to put aside their objections and to support me…. No loyal staff member could do otherwise.” Unquote. Nixon went on to disparage the Foreign Service in general for too often compromising with the Communists. “We, too,” he said, “must play to win. Too often what we try to do is play not to lose. What we must do is to act like Americans and not put our tails between our legs and run every time some Communist bully tries to bluff us.” Unquote. Well now, what did Rubottom and Bernbaum do to arouse such wrath? They hadn’t gone to the newspapers, or filed an official report, or complained to a superior; they had merely expressed an opinion. More importantly, we see here that the reduction of international conflicts to schoolyard tough-guy neighborhood heroics—a reduction Mr. Nixon often makes in his public addresses to the American people—that such a reduction is not simply a device he employs for public use, not simply a little bit of hypocritical legerdemain, but rather an accomplished simplemindedness he carries with him into the cud-chewing silence of his lonely thoughts. He really thinks this way. In the Soviet Union, faced by a belligerent Khrushchev who inveighed against the Captive Nations resolution just passed by Congress, Nixon notes that Khrushchev used Russian words which made even his translator blush. Says Nixon, and I quote: “It was on that ‘peasant’ note that my courtesy call on the leader of the world Communist movement came to an end.” Unquote. The word ‘peasant’ is placed in quotes by Nixon, an especially devastating bit of prose stylization. These are the things that Richard Nixon notices and remarks upon: the language of Khrushchev (indeed, the language of Harry Truman), the brown chewing-tobacco spit which ruins Pat’s new red dress in Caracas, the doubts of a staff member.

  Does he really grasp what’s going on? Ironically enough, he opens his book with this reference, I quote: “In April, I visited President Kennedy for the first time since he had taken office. When I told him I was considering the possibility of joining the ‘literary’ ranks [Nixon puts “literary” in quotes, like “peasant”], of which he himself is so distinguished a member, he expressed the thought that every public man should write a book at some time in his life, both for the mental discipline and because it tends to elevate him in popular esteem to the respected status of an ‘intellectual.’” Unquote, and “intellectual” of course is suspended dangling between another pair of quotation marks. Now, it seems obvious that Nixon intends here to expose Kennedy’s cynicism, and just as obvious, I think, that Kennedy was operating on several levels of irony at which Nixon has never even guessed. But Nixon wants desperately to be an intellectual; he takes it seriously. Theodore H. White reports that Nixon during the campaign turned to reporters with a rather desperate smile and said he was an intellectual, only nobody knew it. But this book makes it obvious that he isn’t an intellectual. It is not only the banality of style; that might be expected from the predigested prose that issues from ghostwriters. It is the inability to escape from the prison of self, to consider ideas in the abstract, to free himself for even a moment from the terrible demands of a wounded ego. The man has no self-confidence. It is the network of his lacerations which Mr. Nixon here explores—not world events—and all his army of little tin strictures on courage will not rescue him. Courage, anyway, is not the proud gesture, the single act, the glamorous setting-to. It is a quality of the man, a way of life, a grace and a dignity and a meaning which reside in every mood and act of a man. Nixon has dealt with six of the most important events of our postwar history only as they affected his personal fortunes, only as they raised his rating on the Gallup poll, or moved his critics to complaint.

  This egoism is all-intrusive, a wall-to-wall carpeting of self it is impossible not to step on. He is obsessively sensitive to the slightest rebuke. His ego, as it emerges from the pages of this book, is a large and delicate blooming flower of tender flesh; it must bask in continual light, it must be watered with regular praise, or it closes in upon itself, onto its inner silence, out of petulance and fear. So all reporters hate him and distort what he says; Communists and left-wingers all smear him; President Eisenhower is callous to his emotional needs; everybody is unfair. Illustrative of this insecurity is his compulsion for seizing upon praise and reporting it in his book. I list a few examples. In his introduction, he reports attending a Washington reception for Congressional Medal of Honor winners, shortly after his return from South America in 1958. Quote: “One of the guests of honor came up to me and, pointing to his ribbon, said: ‘You should be wearing this, not I. I could never have done what you did in Caracas.’ I answered: ‘And I could never have done what you did during the Battle of the Bulge.’ Perhaps we were both wrong.” Unquote. On p. 118, after the Checkers speech, Nixon reports the TV makeup man who said admiringly: “That ought to fix them. There has never been a broadcast like it before.” And he quotes Eisenhower, too, on p. 120: “I happen to be one of those people who, when I get into a fight, would rather have a courageous and honest man by my side than a whole boxcar of pussyfooters. I have seen brave men in tough situations. I have never seen anybody come through in better fashion than Senator Nixon did tonight.” On p. 149, after Eisenhower’s heart attack, Foster Dulles tells Nixon: “Mr. Vice-President, I realize that you have been under a heavy burden during these past few days, and I know I express the opinion of everybody here that you have conducted yourself superbly. And I want you to know we are proud to be on this team and proud to be serving in this Cabinet under your leadership.” On p. 202, after the San Marcos incident, Nixon reports Tad Szulc of the New York Times running alongside his car, shouting: “Good going, Mr. Vice-President, good going.” On p. 205, Nixon’s private aide Don Hughes asks: “‘Sir, could I say something personal?’ ‘Sure, go ahead,’ I said, still mystified. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I have never been so proud to be an American as I was today. I am honored to be serving under you.’” On p. 209, still in Peru, Nixon received a telegram from Clare Boothe Luce saying: “Bully.” On p. 227 Muñoz Marin embraces him and says: “You were magnificent in Lima and Caracas.” On p. 258, after the heroic battle with Khrushchev in the model American kitchen, a United Press reporter tells Nixon: “Good going, Mr. Vice-President,” and Mikoyan himself compliments Nixon—all painstakingly recorded. In the last long section of the book, devoted to the 1960 campaign, there are, of course, innumerable instances of people apotheosizing Nixon. He reports every one of them.

  All I can say is that I am glad such a mass of insecu
rity is not responsible for the conduct of our government today. Does that sound bitter? It is. Polite people in polite conversation tend to look at you as if you’re telling them a dirty joke when you happen to mention these days the name of Jerry Voorhis or Helen Gahagan Douglas. Just how far have we come when Richard Nixon can write: “I had come into this 1952 campaign well-prepared, I thought, for any political smear that could be directed against me. After what my opponents had thrown at me in my campaigns for the House and Senate… I thought I had been through the worst.” Unquote. The worm has really turned. Take the preposterous statement that he feels he should have spent more time “on appearance and less on substance” in the 1960 presidential campaign. This man has never been tortured by compunctions; he still isn’t. And I have no use for the pity peddlers who prowl about now dispensing sympathy for him. He deserves what he gets.

  Is his book interesting? Aside from exposing this terrible flower of ego, and from demonstrating that he isn’t equipped for high office, Six Crises isn’t a terribly interesting book. It gives us some insight into Eisenhower, unwittingly. We get a sense of the man’s paralyzing lack of decisiveness, his reluctance to deal with distasteful situations, his tendency, once some sort of action was forced upon him, to choose rash and wrathful means of self-expression. Even Nixon wouldn’t have been idiotic enough to dispatch two companies of Marines to the Caribbean when the vice-president had his public relations problems in Caracas. Then there are all those terrible Eisenhower platitudes which Nixon quotes with such officious approval, as if they dropped like silver coins from the Old Man’s mouth. Here are two examples of what Nixon refers to as Eisenhower’s maxims. On p. 177, Ike says: “A politician can always be counted on to have his mouth open and his mind closed,” and on p. 235, Ike says: “I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” One can imagine what life was like around the White House in those placid bygone days.