A Certain Idea of America, page 3
HATS OFF TO TOM WOLFE
May 17, 2018
“You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you had better.” That was Stephen Vincent Benét in 1941, in the Saturday Review of Literature, on the work of Scott Fitzgerald, who had recently died.
I thought of it on the death this week of Tom Wolfe. Not that he was ignored or forgotten, but we are coming to terms with his greatness in a purer, less guarded way than in the past.
He picked up American journalism and shook it hard, then he picked up the novel and shook that, too. He saw what was happening all around us, and he said that’s not “what’s happening,” that’s history—the social and cultural story of the great Hog-stomping Baroque America of the second half of the twentieth century, which was begging to be captured and finally was, by him, in a way no one else would or could.
He invented characters that presented us to ourselves. He had two masterpieces, The Right Stuff in nonfiction and The Bonfire of the Vanities in fiction. He issued one of the great literary manifestos: Stop your navel gazing, get out your notebook, there’s a world exploding out there.
His words entered the language. He fearlessly, brazenly faced up to America’s blood wars, its ethnic and racial rivalries, its merry bitterness. “Yo, Gober!” “He’s another Donkey, same as me.”
On top of that he strutted through the world like some crazed, antique peacock—the faded vanilla suits, the high-collar shirts, the polka-dot ties, the socks and handkerchief, the spats.
What a figure! When I heard the news, I thought of last November, at the New York Public Library’s annual gala. When I walked in he and Sheila, his warm, elegant wife, were seated alone as the party raged around them. I kissed them hello, they invited me to sit, and, twenty minutes later, after talk of Donald Trump, toward whom he was equal parts fair-minded, amused, and amazed, I left to join friends. Halfway through the room I turned back. Tom was gazing, bemused, at the crowd. “That’s Dickens,” I said to a friend. “That’s Zola.” There should have been a line waiting to meet him, to say, “I shook Tom Wolfe’s hand.”
I saw him now and then over many years and thought of him as Paul McHugh, a professor and psychiatrist who was his close friend, did. “He was warmhearted,” he said. Tom Wolfe had killer eyes but was not cold. There was sweetness there, and sympathy. He wrote of social status, and, as Dr. McHugh said, “he was especially great at deflating those whose position led them to the bullying of others.”
He worked himself hard. Dr. McHugh would call him and say, “I know I’m interrupting you.” Tom would reply, “Thank God!”
He suffered and was gallant. He’d had scoliosis when young, and an injury the past decade had left him with a spinal misalignment. He was bent sharply at the waist, his trunk tilted right. He was often in pain. His famous walking stick with the wolf’s head wasn’t only for fun and show, he needed it.
Imagine caring so much about how you presented yourself to the world, and facing that challenge. Imagine presenting yourself anyway, in part because it gives the world delight.
We met more than twenty years ago when we were thrown together as seatmates at a Manhattan think-tank dinner. The auspices were not good. I’d recently tangled with a close friend of his, and to make it worse I’d been in the wrong and knew it. Beyond that I was awed. I never told him, but my first book was half an homage to him: Bonfire and his manifesto, Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast, filled my soul. His prose had an anarchic, liberating impact. In one chapter I realized my puny self was in the thick of history. I set myself to describing the audio experience of Air Force Two, its curious, soft pulsating sound. GARRRUUUMMMM. “The engines weaving in and out; the air conditioned hum; the soft murmurings of power: I’m flying.” My editor was alarmed. Cut that: “People will think you’re imitating Tom Wolfe!” “I am imitating Tom Wolfe! It’s my homage!” He laughed. We kept it.
At the dinner, uncomfortable and awed, I turned earnest. Nothing’s more boring than that! Still, we were together, and did our best. At one point he started talking about what was happening in neuroscience. He was amused by the new pill that affects sexual mood—I think he said “sexual readiness”—it’s flying off the shelves! I said yes, but the pill that will be more popular, and which they’ll eventually make, will be the one that makes you fall back in love, because that will solve everyone’s problems. “He’s responsible and sweet but it’s just not enough!” “I don’t love my wife anymore!” That’s the pill that will really sell.
We giggled. He gave me a scrutinizing look and said, “You’re quite a woman.” I answered solemnly, as if considering the proposition obvious and the burden heavy: “Yes, I am.” He threw back his head, and we were off to the races.
The last time I saw him was almost three months ago, at the wedding of a brilliant young woman and a handsome man. The wedding party was in a fashionable restaurant in downtown New York. We were seated at a red leather banquette, where we had a Writer Moment. I looked out at the boisterous crowd—laughing, gesturing, talking over the din. I said, “Tom, this sound of the voices hitting the ceiling, the laughter—this reminds me of the description in Bonfire of a grand Park Avenue party or reception: ‘Their swimming teeth.’ ”
Tom got a look of immediate interest, a flush of approval. “Did I say that?” “You did.”
He laughed, like Oh, that was good.
I said I remember reading it and thinking, “Oh, I am in a presence.” He pressed my hand and held it for a moment.
Once the aged Tolstoy was in his sitting room, a fire in the fireplace. His daughter came in and said, “Papa, listen.” She read a page of a description of a great battle. He listened and said, “Oh, that’s good. Who is that?” She said, “Papa, it’s you. War and Peace.”
All writers forget. And the greatest and most prolific forget most.
This was a great man. And I see him now as I did a dozen years ago, again at a New York Public Library dinner. We met as we were leaving, walked through the lobby, parted at the door.
It was something to see that man going down the broad imposing steps, tricked out in the white suit, a flowing black cape, a big, broad-brimmed black hat worn at a tilt, the stick, walking carefully but with a certain flair, a certain élan, because he knew he was being watched because he was, let’s face it, Tom Wolfe. And I was watching, as he disappeared into the night, into the teeming city, going northward toward home.
Goodbye, Tom Wolfe. Oh, it was good to have him here, wasn’t it?
THOUGHTS ON THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND JOHN HAY AFTER THE RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE
March 24, 2022
John Hay had a warm mind and a cool heart. The secretary of state to presidents William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt (1898–1905) had two baseline gifts necessary for diplomatic achievement but not always seen together, a quick apprehension of the size and meaning of events and a subtlety and sympathy in the reading of human beings. A biographer, John Taliaferro, wrote, “His manners, his mind, and his conduct as a spokesman for a nation finding its voice on the world stage were nonpareil and pitch-perfect.”
As a young man Hay had been literary secretary to Abraham Lincoln; no one had worked closer with him day by day. He was in the White House the night Lincoln was shot and at his bedside the morning he died in the boardinghouse near Ford’s Theatre. In the years afterward he held high Lincoln’s standard in books and speeches, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1905, when Hay himself was dying, that he fully understood what Lincoln had been to him.
He had a dream, he wrote in his diary, that he had been called to the White House for a meeting with Roosevelt, but when he walked in the president was Lincoln. “He was very kind and considerate, and sympathetic about my illness. He said there was little work of importance on hand. He gave me two unimportant letters to answer. I was pleased that this slight order was within my power to obey. I was not in the least surprised at Lincoln’s presence in the White House. But the whole impression of the dream was one of overpowering melancholy.” At what was gone, and surely what Hay had lost.
History is human. We know this but our knowledge gets lost in considering other factors such as landmass, economic strength, weaponry, and energy sectors.
Here we get to our subject. In Hay’s years as America’s leading diplomat, no country vexed the patient public servant more, no nation drove him more to distraction, than Russia. I went back to Mr. Taliaferro’s excellent 2013 biography, All the Great Prizes, to quote some passages, and saw that I’d written in the margins, “It didn’t start with communism.” It didn’t start with Vladimir Putin. Russia has long bedeviled.
In the first years of the twentieth century the Russians were pushing to expand east, to extend their sphere and dominate trade and rail lines in Chinese Manchuria. They wanted to tax there. They wanted to secure the deepwater port at Port Arthur, where they had a naval base. They were moving to annex Manchuria. Japan felt its interest threatened—if Russia took Manchuria, it would move next on Korea.
When Hay protested Russia’s aggression, Russia responded with hurt feelings—how could you accuse us, we’d never hurt you. In time he told Roosevelt, “Dealing with a government with whom mendacity is a science is an extremely difficult and delicate matter.”
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 was a human disaster, with land battles bigger than Antietam and Gettysburg. Near the end, at the battle of Mukden, an estimated 330,000 Russian troops went up against 270,000 Japanese, with more than 160,000 casualties. Russia lost that battle, as it had most of its fleet at Port Arthur.
America maintained neutrality. “We are not charged with the cure of the Russian soul,” Hay wrote to Roosevelt. But all the way through he communicated with both sides, once comforting the Japanese ambassador, who had burst into tears. Privately Hay was disgusted by Russia’s cavalier aggression, and Roosevelt, who had just taken up jujitsu in his daily workout and felt a special rapport with the Japanese ambassador, was privately rooting for the underdog. He wrote his son Theodore III, “For several years Russia has behaved very badly in the Far East, her attitude toward all nations, including us, but especially toward Japan, being grossly overbearing.”
At one point President Roosevelt was so angry with Russia’s conduct that he was tempted to “go to an extreme.” Hay, who didn’t unload much, unloaded.
“Four years of constant conflict with [the Russians] have shown me that you cannot let up a moment on them without danger to your midriff. The bear that talks like a man is more to be watched than Adam Zad”—a reference to Kipling’s Adam-zad, the bear that walks like a man.
They were both blowing off steam. But Hay never wrote of any other country with the asperity he did of the Russians, and ever after he and Roosevelt called Russia “the bear that walks like a man.”
In the end Japan won and Russia was humiliated.
Here we see our parallels to today, which are obvious. Russia wanted something and went forward alone. A disapproving world expected it to crush little Japan and was shocked when it didn’t. As was Russia, which had overestimated its military and underestimated Japan’s spirit.
More than that, the war changed Russia. It spurred the 1905 revolution, which Lenin later called “the great rehearsal” for 1917. There were huge worker demonstrations, massive strikes, military mutinies. It was bloody. The people, peasants to urban intellectuals, rebelled, and the government almost fell, holding on only through new repressions and promises of reform.
Day by day the people of today’s Russia will come to hear about what has happened in Ukraine, will feel and absorb its consequences, will feel some embarrassment at what has happened on the international stage—all led by a leader who is detached from his people. They aren’t going to like it.
Something else happened in the Russo-Japanese War, and that was Tolstoy, the greatest man of Russia, its genius of literature and moral inquiry. He took to The Times of London for an essay. “Bethink yourselves,” he said to his countrymen. “Again war,” he said. “Again sufferings necessary to nobody, utterly uncalled for; again fraud, again the universal stupefaction and brutalization of men.
“If there be a God, He will not ask me when I die (which may happen at any moment) whether I retained…Port Arthur, or even that conglomeration which is called the Russian Empire, which he did not confide to my care, but He will ask me what I have done with that life which He put at my disposal.” He will ask if I have fulfilled his law and loved my fellow man.
“Yesterday I met a reservist soldier accompanied by his mother and wife. All three were riding in a cart.” The soldier had been drinking, the wife crying. “Goodbye,” called the soldier, “off to the Far East.”
“Art thou going to fight?” Tolstoy asked.
“Well, some one has to fight!”
“No one need fight,” said Tolstoy.
The soldier reflected for a moment. “But…where can one escape?”
That, Tolstoy said, is the heart of the matter. What journalists and officials mistake for patriotism—“for the faith, the Czar, the Fatherland”—is simply a spirited admission that one is trapped.
The families of the boys sent to fight, Tolstoy said, will think what he himself thinks: “What do we want with this Manchuria, or whatever it is called? There is sufficient land here.”
We end where we began. Do you know what American Tolstoy revered? Lincoln. Tolstoy thought him the greatest man in history.
Greatness sees greatness. I wonder who will be the Tolstoy, in Russia, of today?
THESE GENERALS WERE THE CLOSEST OF ENEMIES
May 24, 2018
On Memorial Day we think of those who served. Here let’s look at an old story about a military man’s affections. It’s the story of Lo Armistead and Win Hancock—close friends, career officers who’d served side by side in the U.S. Army. Then history took one of its turns and they wound up on opposite sides at Gettysburg, where one was killed by the other’s troops. It is one of the most moving tales of the Civil War, and is warmly told in Michael Shaara’s classic novel, The Killer Angels.
It’s a good story to have in our minds as coming years unfold.
In June 1863, 155 years ago, General Robert E. Lee’s seventy-thousand-man Army of Northern Virginia slipped across the Potomac River and invaded the North.
Brigadier General Lewis “Lo” Armistead, forty-six, was with him. Lo was an abbreviation of his nickname, Lothario, wryly bestowed because that’s what he wasn’t. He was quiet, considered shy, twice widowed, and from a family of fighters. Armisteads had served in all of America’s wars. Now and then something broke through his composure: Everyone in the Army knew he’d left West Point after breaking a dinner plate over fellow cadet Jubal Early’s head. Shaara: “He was an honest man, open as the sunrise.” And he was brave.
He was eventually based in Southern California, where his quartermaster, Winfield Scott Hancock, became his close friend.
Armistead was seven years older and from Virginia, while Hancock was from Pennsylvania, but they had much in common. Hancock had also attended West Point, though he graduated. Both had served in the Mexican War, both been lauded for gallantry and promoted to higher rank. Hancock was humorous and liked to paint. Years later, in his memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant would remember Hancock as “a man of very conspicuous personal appearance…. His genial disposition made him friends, and his personal courage and his presence with his command in the thickest of the fight won him the confidence of troops serving under him.”
By the end of the Civil War he too had a nickname: “Hancock the Superb.”
When the war came the officers of the U.S. Army had to decide where they stood. Hancock stood firm with the Union; Armistead went with the Confederacy. We don’t know all Armistead’s thinking but Shaara suggests some of it in his portrayal of the thoughts of Lieutenant General James Longstreet, also Armistead’s friend and under whom he served. Longstreet did not think much of “the Cause.” To Longstreet, “the war had come as a nightmare in which you chose your nightmare side.”
Shaara suggests Armistead saw it pretty much the same. But, unlike many on his side, Longstreet wasn’t in denial as to the war’s cause. “The war was about slavery, all right,” he said, in Shaara’s telling. That wasn’t why he fought, “but that was what the war was about.”
When the war came, Armistead, Hancock, and others had a gathering to say goodbye. Shaara imagines a soldier’s farewell: “Goodbye, good luck, and see you in Hell.” But to Armistead it was more than that: “They had been closer than brothers.” Tears were shed. In Shaara’s story, Armistead tells Hancock, “Win, so help me, if I ever lift a hand against you may God strike me dead.” In other sources, Armistead says, “Goodbye. You can never know what this has cost me.”
It was the last time they would see each other.
Some time afterward Armistead sent Almira, Hancock’s wife, a package to be opened in the event of his death.
Two years into the war, Gettysburg. Armistead heard that Hancock was there and asked Longstreet if he might see him. Sure, said Longstreet, if you can find his position, get a flag of truce and go on over. (This was not completely unheard of in that war: Opposing officers would find each other in field glasses and wave hello or tip their hats.)
But everything was too chaotic, nobody knew where they were, and it didn’t happen.
July 3 was Pickett’s Charge. Armistead was one of Major General George Pickett’s brigade commanders.
Lee judged the Union Army to be reinforced on the wings but soft in the center. That center was a long sloping field leading to a clump of trees at a ridge. He would send in fifteen thousand men and split the Union lines. It would be hard—a mile uphill, over open ground, with Union artillery trained on them behind a low stone wall. But the Confederate artillery would smash the Union artillery before the charge commenced. And then they’d break the Union line, and the Union.
