Reading for My Life Read online

  By journalist I mean no slur. If his autobiography lacks the literary elegance of Malraux’s Anti-Memoirs, it is more specific and engrossing; nor does K. wrap himself in the Gaullist sheet of “I Am a Historical Enigma.” If novels like Darkness at Noon (the Purge trials), Thieves in the Night (Palestinian terrorism), and Arrival and Departure (portrait of the revolutionary as a Jung man) are romans à thèse, they are still infinitely to be preferred to a bilious roman à clef like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins, which did a disservice to K., Camus, Sartre, and even Nelson Algren. If The Ghost in the Machine and Drinkers of Infinity suggest a lamentable lust on K.’s part for material proofs of his metaphysical raptures, at least he seeks proofs, instead of foaming at the mouth about lapwings and absolutes.

  A “Case History”

  Two of the four autobiographical volumes, Dialogue with Death and Scum of the Earth, were written immediately after a stint in a Franco prison during the Spanish Civil War and a stint in a French concentration camp two years later. They are timebound. But Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing deal with K.’s first forty years recollected in as much tranquility as such a man will ever permit himself. They add up, as he says, to “a typical case history of a member of the educated middle classes of Central Europe in the first half of our century,” one of those refugees for whom a new word had to be coined: “Stepmotherland.” Anger, anomaly, irony, and tragedy abound.

  Here is K. as a child in Budapest, precocious and paralyzingly shy; an engineering student in Vienna, torn between political action and contemplative sloth; a twenty-year-old Zionist emigrating to Palestine; a Mideast correspondent for the Ullstein newspaper empire; a science editor turned Communist in Berlin at the moment of Hitler’s ascendancy; the only reporter on a marvelous zeppelin expedition to the North Pole. To be followed by K. traveling in the Soviet Union during the famine years of the early thirties; working in Paris as a propagandist for the Willy Münzenberg apparat; seeking in Spain evidence of German-Italian collaboration with Franco; finding in Spain “the reality of the third order”; renouncing the Party, settling in England, writing his novels, surviving… unlike almost all of his friends, who die throughout these thousand pages at the hands of Hitler or Stalin.

  Whether he is brooding about language (he went from writing in Hungarian to German to English, not to mention Hebrew and Russian) or attitudes (“The mystic of the nineteen-thirties yearned, as a sign of Grace, for a look at the Dneiper Dam and a three percent increase in the Soviet pig-iron production”) or justice (“a concept of ethical symmetry, and therefore an essentially natural concept—like the design of a crystal”) or English prisons (“It was nice to know that you were at a place where putting a man to death was still regarded as a solemn and exceptional event”), K. is superb.

  Penchant for Action

  His inferiority complex, as Otto Katz told him, may be the size of a cathedral. And, as Orwell said, “The chink in K.’s armor is his hedonism.” But he was always where the action was, always scribbling, usually indignant. If his Cassandralike cries embarrassed his friends, they deserved to be embarrassed. (Just this month a magazine whose brows are not quite high enough to let it see much so wholly misses the point of Whittaker Chambers that Chambers, Koestler, Manès Sperber, Gustav Regler, Victor Serge, and André Gide might just as well have recorded their qualms in Quechua.)

  As for that rapture, that “reality of the third order,” it occurred to him while under a sentence of death in a Spanish prison. Its logic begins with Euclid’s demonstration that, in the climb up a numerical series of prime numbers, we shall never discover a “virgin”—the highest prime. Therefore, he concluded, “a meaningful and comprehensive statement about the infinite is arrived at by precise and finite means.” Should one object that such statements refer only to a man-made, not an infinite, scheme, one must still cope with K.’s undignified gallivanting after ESP as an antimaterialist proof. Mysticism: The last refuge of an infirm mind?

  No. K. rejects any variety of determinism, and had we lived his life, we would, too. But isn’t it possible to believe in choice without subscribing to the theistic swoon? Freud, a year before he died, granted K. an interview. Freud had never experienced the “oceanic feeling” nor seen the “invisible writing.” Says K.: “I wondered with admiration and compassion, how a man can face his death without it.” I submit, with admiration and compassion for the invaluable K., that we must all of us face our deaths without it, learning somehow to swim through what the existentialists have called a “vertigo of possibility.” We have to take the rap for our own freedom.

  Supergirl Meets the Sociologist

  FIRST, LET’S GET rid of the transsexual mash notes. According to Letty Cottin Pogrebin (“an unabashed man fan”) most men are “emotionally honest and uncomplicated … professionally realistic and straightforward … not devious or malicious in their personal relations … usually dependable confidants, lavish with praise, fair-minded, and seven and a half times out of ten they have fascinating intellects, interests, or opinions.” According to me, without women the world wouldn’t be worth living in; seven times out of ten, working women make better wives and mothers than the girl who settles for a tornado in her kitchen; and ten times out of ten, working women are more interesting than any other anybody. So much for the castrating feminist and all those hairy oafs who, never having graduated from the Cub Scouts, want for companionship a combination of Den Motherhood and Tupperwariness.

  What’s left? One side practicing karate chops, the other fantasizing about the primordial hunting party? Left is a society that wastes half its brains; a culture dividing its sexes according to work objects and play objects; a tax structure pinning women beneath a glass bell that is furnished only by a bed, an oven, and a diaper pail. (The daily $25 business lunch is tax-deductible; the daily $20 child care is not.)

  To that society, culture, and tax structure both Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Cynthia Fuchs Epstein address themselves in very different but superbly complementary books. Mrs. Pogrebin—if you read her book you will realize how silly it seems to refer to her so formally—advertises the satisfactions of a career in publishing, advertising, TV, newspapers, motion pictures, and the stock market for women. Mrs. Epstein—who acknowledges her husband as “my most spirited educator in the dynamics of role allocation”—explores why women have a hard time making it as doctors, lawyers, scientists, architects, and engineers.

  Presume a “Letty,” at nineteen a graduate of Brandeis; at twenty-one director of publicity, advertising, and subsidiary rights for Bernard Geis; at twenty-nine a lawyer’s wife, mother of three, happenstantially beautiful, loving every minute of it. Finishing her book, you want to mount a white stallion, gallop off, whisk her up, carry her to your castle where she can write your press releases, throw your parties, stun your friends, improve your mind. (Let’s not deceive ourselves: possession is nine-tenths of sexual fantasy.) Alas, she’s married. Then bottle her energy and sell it as pep pills; substitute her common sense for Muzak at all midtown business mausolea; feed her wit intravenously to Doctors Spock and Bettelheim; assign her to promote her book to the best-sellerdom it deserves.

  She’s Supergirl. How to Make It in a Man’s World is an enchiridion for young women who don’t want to deposit their brains in the sugar canister. “Anyone who doesn’t like travel, parties, tasteful surroundings, good food, and intelligent people should have her head examined,” she says, and then proceeds to spell out how to get paid for it. Whether the chapter is “The Helping Hand and How to Keep It Off Your Body” or “If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Get Back to the Kitchen,” she has more to say about sexual chauvinism, interoffice envy, the thoughtful boss, lying about your age, how to take a man to lunch—strategy—than Norman Podhoretz and Robert Townsend in triplicate. And her account of the time Brendan Behan tried to rape her is … mind-expanding.

  But what if you aren’t a Supergirl? Mrs. Epstein, assistant professor of sociology at Queens College and a pr
oject director at Columbia’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, weighs in with the grim facts. Women’s Place is sociology with a vengeance (tables, footnotes, clotted prose), but there is more hard data, perception, cross-cultural comparison, and historical grasp in this book than in any other tome on the Woman Question that I’ve ever seen. (Mrs. Pogrebin doesn’t mention the fact that publishers push bright young women into publicity instead of permitting them to become editors.)

  Beyond the Sex Curtain

  Mrs. Epstein looks at American child rearing, role conflict, the professions, women’s status in radical movements, the psychological consequences of piercing the Sex Curtain, and the ways that other countries cope with the problem. She isn’t as breezy as Mrs. Pogrebin—e.g., “To the extent that a status is institutionalized within a body of other statuses and there are definite prescriptions as to the total composition, and to the extent to which one social pattern (social circle and social customs) is integrated with another social pattern (occupation and mode of operation within the occupation), the range of other possible statuses will be limited”—but she cuts deeper.

  As of 1960, less than 10 percent of our lawyers, doctors, engineers, and scientists were women. (Eighty-five percent of our librarians, 97 percent of our nurses, were.) Women receive only 11 percent of all the Ph.D.s awarded in this country. Professional women are less than half as likely to be married as professional men. Mrs. Epstein explains why. It is an unsavory story. We should be doing better not only because society needs those female brains, but also because women happen to be people.

  In my family, there is one Ph.D. It doesn’t belong to me. There are two children. They are better than most. Betty Friedan may be right in interpreting sex bias as a means of preoccupying women with consumership. Mrs. Epstein may be right in deciding that “few middle-class women put the playthings of childhood behind them…. Their babies take the place of their dolls.” Mrs. Pogrebin may be right in contending that most women are bored and failure-fearful. One thing’s sure: Anyone still disposed to laughing off “Women’s Liberation” is stupid.

  Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

  THOSE RUMBLES YOU hear on the horizon are the big guns of autumn lining up, the howitzers of Vonnegut and Updike and Cheever and Mailer, the books that will be making loud noises for the next several months. But listen: This week a remarkable book has been quietly published; it is one of the best I’ve read in years.

  The Woman Warrior is itself anything but quiet. It is fierce intelligence, all sinew, prowling among the emotions. As a portrait of village life in pre-Mao China, it is about as sentimental as Céline. As an account of growing up female and Chinese American in California, in a laundry of course, it is antinostalgic: It burns the fat right out of the mind. As a dream—of the “female avenger”—it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword.

  For Maxine Hong Kingston, who was born in Stockton, California, there are two sets of ghosts. One set is Chinese legends, traditions, folklore, and always the unwanted girl child. The other set is Western, American, barbarian, the machine-myths of the Occident. Somewhere in between, like the poet Ts’ai Yen, she is a hostage. And it isn’t clear whether there is a place for her to return to, with her songs “from the savage lands.”

  The Warrior Woman trafficks back and forth between sets of ghosts, reimagining the past with such dark beauty, such precision and anger and sadness, that you feel you have saddled the Tao dragon and see all through the fiery eye of God. Then, suddenly, you are dumped into the mundane, into scenes so carefully observed, so balanced on a knife-edge of hope and humiliation, that you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Other writers come to mind—García Márquez, who also knows how to dress myth up in living flesh; or, thinking about warrior women, Monique Wittig, if she had a sense of humor and before she lapsed into balderdash.

  But this shuttling, on an electric line of prose, between fantasy and specificity, is wonderfully original. I can’t remember when a young writer walked up to and into every important scene in a book and dealt with it outright, as Mrs. Kingston does, without any evasions whatsoever. Or an old writer, for that matter: they have their avoidance tricks. It wearies a writer always having to be in the best form, compromising the least with difficult material, unruly characters. It doesn’t weary Mrs. Kingston. And Brave Orchid, the mother to end all mothers in this book, is more real to me than most of the people I see every day.

  Who is Maxine Hong Kingston? Nobody at Knopf seems to know. They have never laid eyes on her. She lives in Honolulu, nicely situated between Occident and Orient, with a husband and small son. She teaches English and creative writing. There is no one more qualified to teach English and creative writing.

  Edward Said’s Orientalism

  ONE OF THE reasons that Edward W. Said, Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, has written this book is that he himself was an “Oriental” child who grew up in the British “colonies” of Palestine and Egypt. His life is on the spindle.

  And yet the “Orientalism” of which he speaks is entirely Western. It is a “trope,” a “text,” and an “archive” compiled by Western scholars, linguists, novelists, social scientists, and colonial administrators from the eighteenth century on. It is “a cumulative and corporate identity” as well as “a distribution of geopolitical awareness,” a kind of multinational knowledge industry whose secret product is Western self-esteem. The Orient it invents in its laboratories—its museums and libraries—is one that denies the variety and reality of many nations, many peoples, many centuries, and countless individuals, including Mr. Said.

  Reviewing the Specialists

  Mr. Said, then, proposes to review the Orient of the Western Orientalists as if it were a book with a smarmy subtext, a subliminal anxiety, an anal compulsion to hoard and manipulate. From Antonio Gramsci, he borrows the notion of “hegemony” as “an indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West.” From Michel Foucault, he borrows the notions of “discourse” and “archaeologies,” while insisting, against Foucault, on the significance of the imprint of the individual. He seems also to have learned a methodological thing or two from his colleague Steven Marcus, who applied techniques of literary criticism to a fantasy life of Victorians and to the pamphleteering of an Engels. He might also have consulted The Tangled Bank of Stanley Edgar Hyman, which treated the works of Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Frazer as imaginative literature.

  He argues from the texts that we require such an Orient, hallucinated and nostalgic; that we need, psychologically, a changeless, dependent, and sexy Other in an existential equation that will prove the superiority of our science; that “Orientalism,” as cataloged and codified and distributed by Westerners, has been essentially racist, imperialist, and “almost totally ethnocentric.” It seems to me that his case is not merely persuasive, but conclusive.

  Consider, at random, the presumptions of Silvestre de Sacy, Ernest Renan, Schlegel, Fourier, Massinnon, H.A.R. Gibb, Disraeli, and Balfour, or, just metaphorically, the excesses of Goethe, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Nerval, Flaubert, Byron, Richard Burton, and George Eliot. We insist on the mystery, but it must be historical and long gone and inaccessible to contemporary Orientals who require our instruction in their duty. We remove, in fragments, ancient wisdom which we explicate.

  Explain, please, our ignorance and resentment of Islam. How long is this medieval hangover, this Constantinople of the fearful imagination, supposed to last? When we decided after the Enlightenment to be scientists instead of Christians, why was it that fledgling philologists decided that the Indo-European language group was superior to the Semitic, that one was “organic” and the other “inorganic”? How come, in the long history of imperialism, our Orientalists invariably condoned and conspired with the colonizers, “us,” against the colonized, “them”?

  Eden and Babylon

  Think of the baggage we take with us as tourists, as “tyrannical
observers”: the “Arab mind”; the “passive, seminal, feminine, even silent and supine” East; the cluster of images we associate with the “Oriental stage,” such as the Sphinx, Cleopatra, Eden, Troy, Sodom and Gomorrah, Astarte, Isis and Osiris, Sheba, Babylon, the Genii, the Magi, Nineveh, Prester John, Mahomet, Hanging Gardens, and cruel Turks and bad hygiene and dangerous sex.

  Especially sex, even with boys. To be sure, as Mr. Said observes, “in the Orient one suddenly confronted unimaginable antiquity, inhuman beauty, boundless distance” which confounded “European discreteness and rationality of time, space, and personal identity.” But sex, impossibly passive and guilt-free and therefore degenerate, was the coin of this imaginative realm, a displacement of political power, of scavenging. While we generalized about race, mind, culture, and nation, we masturbated.

  Mr. Said is partial, inevitably, to Islam and the Levant, and so India and China don’t get much notice. He is obsessed, understandably, with the British, the French, and the Americans, and so merely nods at the Germans, most of whom stayed home, anyway, to hallucinate. He scants Marx—see Reza Baraheni’s critique of the “Asiatic Mode of Production”—and ignores Freud, who would be easy for him. I wish he had put more of himself onto the spindle. His contempt for us is oddly shy.

  Nevertheless, Orientalism, in describing a quintessential treason of the clerks, is intellectual history on the high order of Alvin Gouldner’s The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, and very exciting. We are surrounded by “Orientalisms” of every sort from “the mind of the South” to childhood and madness and maybe even literary criticism. The ego of the tourist is imperial. No wonder we don’t understand what’s going on in Vietnam or Cambodia or Lebanon; we’ve never been there; we’ve only read about it.