On Grief and Reason: Essays

You are exiting this place, members of the class of 1989. You are entering the world, which is going to be far more thickly settled than this neck of the woods and where you'll be paid far less attention than you have been used to for the last four years. You are on your own in a big way. Speaking of your significance, you can quickly estimate it by pitting your 1,100 against the world's 4.9 billion. Prudence, then, is as appropriate on this occasion as is fanfare.

I wish you nothing but happiness. Still, there is going to be plenty of dark and, what's worse, dull hours, caused as much by the world outside as by your own minds. You ought to be fortified against that in some fashion; and that's what I've tried to do here in my feeble way, although that's obviously not enough.

For what lies ahead is a remarkable but wearisomejour- ney; you are boarding today, as it were, a runaway train. No one can tell you what lies ahead, least ofall those who remain behind. One thing, however, they can assure you of is that it's not a round trip. Try, therefore, to derive some comfort from the notion that no matter how unpalatable this or that station may tum out to be, the train doesn't stop there for good. Therefore, you are never stuck—not even when you feel you are; for this place today becomes your past. From now on, it willonly be receding for you, for that train is in constant motion. It will be receding for you even when you feel that you are stuck ... So take one last look at it, while it is still its normal size, while it is not yet a photograph. Look at it with all the tenderness you can muster, for you are looking at your past. Exact, as it were, the full look at the best. For I doubt you'll ever have it better than here.

Profile of Clio

I never thought it would come to this, to my speaking on his­tory. But as concessions to one's age go, a lecture on the sub­ject appears inevitable. An invitation to deliver it suggests not so much the value of the speaker's views as his perceptible moribundity. "He is history" goes the disparaging remark, referring to a has-been, and it is the proximity of an individ­ual to this status that turns him, sometimes in his own eyes, into a sage. After all, those to whom we owe the very notion of history—the great historians as well as their subjects—are the dead. In other words, the closer one gets to one's future, i.e., to the graveyard, the better one sees the past.

I accept this. The recognition of mortality gives birth to all sorts of insights and qualifiers. History, after all, is one of those nouns that can't do without epithets. Left to its own devices, history stretches from our own childhood all the way back to the fossils. It may stand simultaneously for the past in general, the recorded past, an academic discipline, the quality of the present, or the implication of a continuum. Every culture has its own version of antiquity; so does every century; so should, I believe, every individual. Consensus

Delivered as the Huizinga Lecture at the University of Leiden in 1991.

on this noun's definition is, therefore, unthinkable and, come to think of it, unnecessary. It is always used loosely as an antonym to the present and is defined by the context of discourse. Given my age as well as my metier, I should be interested in those antonyms, in each one of them. At my age and in my line of work, the less palpable a notion, the more absorbing it is.

If we have anything in common with antiquity, it is the prospect of nonbeing. This alone can engender the study of history, as perhaps it did, because what history is all about is absence, and absence is always recognizable—much more so than presence. Which is to say that our interest in history, normally billed as the quest for a common denominator, for the origins of our ethics, is, in the first place, an eschato- logical, and therefore anthropomorphic, and therefore nar­cissistic, affair. This is proved by all sorts of revisionist quarrels and bickerings that abound in this field, thus re­calling a model arguing with an artist over her depiction— or a bunch of artists in front of an empty canvas.

Further proof of this is our predilection for reading— and the historians' for producing—the lives of Caesars, pha­raohs, satraps, kings, and queens. These have nothing to do with the common denominator, and often not much with ethics either. We go in for this sort of reading because of the central position that we believe we occupy in our own reality, because of the illusion of the individual's paramount consequence. To that one must add that, like biographies, those lives are, stylistically speaking, the last bastions of realism, since in this genre stream-of-consciousness and other avant-garde hopscotch techniques won't do.

The net result is the expression of uncertainty that be­devils every portrait of history. That's what the model fights over with the artist, or the artists among themselves. For the model—let us call her Clio—may think herself, or her agents, more resolute and clear-cut than the way historians paint her. Yet one can understand historians projecting their own ambiguities and subtleties upon their subject: in the light—or rather, the dark—of what awaits them, they don't wish to seem like simpletons. Generally known for their longevity, historians, by showing scruple and doubt, turn their discipline into a kind of insurance policy.

Whether he realizes it or not, the historian's predica­ment is to be transfixed between two voids: of the past that he ponders and of the future for whose sake he ostensibly does this. For him, the notion of nonbeing gets doubled. Perhaps the voids even overlap. Unable to handle both, he strives to animate the former, since by definition the past, as a source of personal terror, is more controllable than the future.

His opposite number, then, should be the religious mys­tic or the theologian. Admittedly, the structuring of the af­terlife involves a greater degree of rigidity than that of the pre-life. What makes up for this difference, however, is their respective quests for causality, the common denominator, and the ethical consequences for the present—so much so that in a society in which the authority of the church is in decline, and the authority of philosophy and the state are negligible or nonexistent, it falls precisely to history to take care of ethical matters.

In the end, of course, the choice that one's eschato- logical proclivity makes between history and religion is determined by temperament. Yet regardless of the com­mandments of one's bile, or whether one is retrospective, introspective, or prospective by nature, the inalienable as­pect of either pursuit is the anxiety of its validity. In this respect, the fondness of all creeds for citing their pedigree and their general reliance on historical sources is particularly worth noting. For when it comes to the burden of proof, history, unlike religion, has nobody to turn to but itself.

(Also, unlike creeds, history to its credit stops cold at geo­logy, thus demonstrating a degree of honesty and its potential for turning into a science.)

This makes history, I believe, a more dramatic choice. An escape route trying to prove every step of the way that it is an escape route? Perhaps, but we judge the effectiveness of our choices not so much by their results as by their alter­natives. The certitude of your existence's discontinuity, the certitude of the void, makes the uncertainties of history a palpable proposition. In fact, the more uncertain it is, the greater its burden of proof, the better it quells your escha- tological dread. Frankly, it is easier for an effect to handle the shock of its inconsequence, easier to face the unavoidable void, than the apparent lack of its cause (for instance, when one's progenitors are gone).

Hence that vagueness in the looks of Clio, whether she is decked out in ancient or in fairly modem garb. Yet it becomes her, not least because of her femininity, which makes her more attractive to the eye than any bearded Pan- tocrator. It should also be noted that, younger though she is than her sister Urania (who, being the Muse of Geography, curbs many of history's motions significantly), Clio is still older than any being. As large as one's appetite for infinity may be, this is a good match for the life everlasting, should it go in for numerical expression. What's particularly un­palatable about death is that it negates numbers.

So it is as Clio's admirer that I stand before you today, not as a connoisseur of her works, let alone as her suitor. Like anyone of my age, I may also claim the status of her witness; but by neither temperament nor metier am I pre­pared to generalize about her deportment. The metier es­pecially conspires against my expanding on any—particularly any absorbing—subject. It trains one, albeit not always sue- cessfully, to make one's utterances succinct, sometimes to the point of appearing hermetic and losing either one's au­dience or, more often, the subject itself. So should you find some of what is to follow too breezy or inconclusive, you'll know whom to blame. It's Euterpe.

Now, Clio of course also has a knack for brevity, which she displays in a murder or in an epitaph. Those two genres alone give the lie to Marx's famous adage about history oc­curring first as tragedy, then as farce. For it is always a different man who gets murdered; it is always a tragedy. Not to mention that once we're employing theatrical terminol­ogy, we shouldn't stop at farce: there is also vaudeville, musical, theater of the absurd, soap opera, and so on. One should be very careful about metaphors when dealing with history, not only because they often breed either unwar­ranted cynicism (like the example I just quoted) or ground­less enthusiasm, but also because they obscure—almost without exception—the singular nature of every historical occurrence.

For Clio is the Muse of Time, as the poet said, and in time nothing happens twice. Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of that theatrical metaphor is that it ushers into one's mind the sense of being a spectator, of observing from the stalls what transpires on the stage, be it a farce or a tragedy. Even if such a state of affairs were really possible, that in itself would be a tragedy: that of complicity; that is, a tragedy of the ethical kind. The truth, however, is that history does not provide us with distance. It does not distinguish between the stage and the audience, which it often lacks, since mur­der, for one thing, is almost synonymous with the absence of witnesses. Let me quote the poet's—W. H. Auden's — invocation of Clio a bit more fully:

Clio,

Muse of Time, but for whose merciful silence Only the first step would count and that Would always be murder ...

Since everything that happens in time happens only once, we, in order to grasp what has occurred, have to iden­tify with the victim, not with the survivor or the onlooker. As it is, however, history is an art of the onlookers, since the victims' main trait is their silence, for murder renders them speechless. If our poet is referring to the story of Cain and Abel, then history is always Cain's version. The reason for putting this so drastically is to assert the distinction be­tween fact and its interpretation, which we fail to make when we say "history."

This failure leads to our belief that we can learn from history, and that it has a purpose, notably ourselves. For all our fondness for causality and hindsight, this assumption is monstrous, since it justifies many an absence as paving the way to our own presences. Had they not been bumped off, this benefit of hindsight tells us, it would be somebody else sitting here at our table, not exactly ourselves. Our interest in history, in that case, would be plain prurience, tinged perhaps with gratitude.

And perhaps that's exactly what it is, which would put us on a somewhat bland ethical diet; but then we were never gluttonous that way to begin with (for we accept the erasure of our predecessors to the point at which we should perhaps take history out of the humanities altogether and place it squarely with the natural sciences). The other option is to distinguish between fact and description, treating each his­torical event as Clio's unique appearance in human quarters, triggered not by our formal logic but by her own arbitrary will. The drawback in this case is that, placing as high a premium on rationality and linear thought as we do, we may panic, and either collapse as ethical beings or, more likely, dash for a further Cartesian rigidity.

None ofthis is desirable or satisfactory. To accept history as a rational process governed by graspable laws is impos­sible, because it is often too carnivorous. To regard it as an irrational force of incomprehensible purpose and appetite is equally unacceptable, and for the same reason: it acts on our species. A target cannot accept a bullet.

Characteristically, the voice of our instinct for self-preser­vation comes out as a cry: What are we to tell our young? Because we are the products of linear thought, we believe that history, whether it is a rational process or an irrational force, is to dog the future. Linear thinking, to be sure, is a tool of the instinct for self-preservation; and in the conflict between this instinct and our eschatological predilection, it is the former that always wins. It is a Pyrrhic victory, but what matters is the battle itself, and our notion of the future amounts to an extension of our own present. For we know that every bullet flies in from the future, which, in order to arrive, has to wipe out the obstacle of the present. That's what our notion of history is for, that's why interpretation is preferred to fact, that's why the irrational version is always dismissed.

It is hard to argue with an instinct; in fact, it is futile. We simply crave the future, and history is here to make that claim, or the future itself, legitimate. If indeed we care so much about what we are to tell the young, the following should be done. First, we should define history as a summary either of known events or of their interpretations. In all likelihood, we'll settle for the latter, since every event's name is itself an interpretation. Since interpretations are unavoid­able, the second step should be the publication of a chron­ological canon of world history, in which every event would be supplied with a minimum number of interpretations— say, conservative, Marxist, Freudian, structuralist. This may result in an unwieldy encyclopedia, but the young about whom we seem to worry so much will at least be provided with a multiple choice.

Apart from enabling them to think more enterprisingly, such a canon will render Clio more stereoscopic, and thus more easily recognizable in a crowd or a drawing room. For portraits in profile, three-quarters, or even full face (down to the last pore, in the manner of the Annales school) in­variably obscure what one may hold behind one's back. This sort of thing lowers one's guard, and this is how history usually finds us: with our guard down.

The main attraction of such a canon is that it would convey to the young the atemporal and arrhythmic nature of Clio. The Muse of Time cannot, by definition, be held hostage to one's homemade chronology. It's quite possible that from time's own point of view the murder of Caesar and World War II occurred simultaneously, in reverse order, or not at all. By throwing many interpretations at any given event simultaneously, we may not hit the jackpot, but we will develop a better grasp of the slot machine itself. The cumulative effect of using such a canon may have peculiar consequences for our psyche; but it surely will improve our defenses, not to mention our metaphysics.

Every discourse on history's meaning, laws, principles, and whatnot is but an attempt to domesticate time, a quest for predictability. This is paradoxical, because history nearly always takes us by surprise. Come to think of it, predictability is precisely what precedes a shock. Given the toll it normally takes, a shock can be regarded as a sort of bill one pays for comforts. The benefit of hindsight waxing metaphysical will explain this preference as an echo of time's own tick-tock monotony. Regrettably, time also has a tendency to sound shrill, and all we've got to echo that with is mass graves.

In this sense, the more one learns history, the more liable one is to repeat its mistakes. It's not that many a Napoleon wants to emulate Alexander the Great; it's just that rationality of discourse implies the rationality of its sub­ject. While the former may be possible, the latter is not. The net result of this sort of thing is self-deception, which is fine and absorbing for a historian but is often lethal for at least a part of his audience. The case of the German Jews is a good example, and perhaps I shoulddwell on it a bit. Above all, however, what tricks us into making mistakes by learning from history is our growing numbers. One man's meat may prove to be a thousand men's poison, or else it may prove not to be enough. The current discourse on the origins of black slavery is a good illustration.

For if you are black, unemployed, live in a ghetto, and shoot drugs, the precision with which your well-heeled re­ligious leader or prominent writer apportions the blame for the origins ofblack slavery, or the vividness with which they depict the nightmare it was, does little to alter your plight. It may even cross your mind that were it not for that night­mare, neither they nor you would be here now. Perhaps this sounds preferable, but the genetic scramble in such a case would be unlikely to end in oneself. Anyhow, what you need now is a job, also some help to kick the habit. A historian won't help you with either. In fact, he dilutes your focus by supplanting your resolve with anger. In fact, it may cross your mind—well, it crosses mine—that the entire discourse on who's to blame might be simply a white man's ploy to prevent you from acting as radically as your condition re­quires. Which is to say, the more you learn from history, the less efficiently you are likely to act in the present.

As a data bank for human negative potential, history has no rival (save, perhaps, the doctrine of original sin, which is, come to think of it, that data's succinct summary). As a guide, history invariably suffers from numerical inferiority, since history, by definition, doesn't procreate. As a mental construct, it is also invariably subject to the unwitting fusion of its data with our perception of it. This leaves history as a naked force—an incoherent, nonetheless convincing, an­imistic notion; between a natural phenomenon and Divine Providence; an entity that leaves a trail. As we proceed, we better give up our high Cartesian pretenses and stick to this vague animistic notion for want of anything more clear-cut.

Let me-repeat: whenever history makes her move, she catches us unawares. And since the general purpose of every society is the safety of all its members, it must first postulate the total arbitrariness of history, and the limited value of any recorded negative experience. Second, it must postulate that, although all its institutions will strive to obtain the greatest measure of safety for all its members, this very quest for stability and security effectively turns society into a sitting duck. And third, that it would, therefore, be prudent for society as a whole, as for its members individually, to develop patterns of motional irregularity (ranging from erratic foreign policy to mobile habitats and shifting residences) to make it difficult for a physical enemy or a metaphysical enemy to take aim. If you don't wish to be a target, you've got to move. "Scatter," said the Almighty to His chosen people, and at least for a while they did.

One of the greater historical fallacies that I absorbed with my high-school ink was the idea that man evolved from a nomad to a settler. Such a notion, echoing rather nicely both the intent of the authoritarian state and the realm's own highly pronounced agrarian makeup, immobilizes one com­pletely. For nailing one down, it is second only to the phys­ical comforts of a city dweller, whose brainchild this notion actually is (and so is the bulk of historical, social, and political theories of the last two centuries: they are all the products of city boys, all are essentially urban constructs).

Let us not go overboard: it is obvious that, for a human animal, settled existence is preferable and, given our grow­ing numbers, inevitable. Yet it is quite possible to imagine a settled man hitting the road when his settlement is sacked by invaders or destroyed by an earthquake, or when he hears the voice of his God promising him a different place. It is equally possible to imagine him doing so when he detects danger. (Isn't God's promise an articulation of a danger?) And so a settled man gets moving, becomes a nomad.

It is easier for him to do this if his mind is not stamped all over with evolutionary and historical taboos; and as far as we know, the ancient historians, to their great credit, pro­duced none. Becoming a nomad again, a man could think of himself as imitating history, since history, in his eyes, was itself a nomad. With the advent of Christian monotheism, however, history had to get civilized, which it did. In fact, it became a branch of Christianity itself, which is, after all, a creed of community. It even allowed itself to be subdivided into B.C. and a.d., turning the chronology of the B.C. period into a countdown, from the fossils on, as though those who lived in that period were subtracting their age from birth.

I'd like to add here—because I may not have another opportunity—that one of the saddest things that ever tran­spired in the course of our civilization was the confrontation between Greco-Roman polytheism and Christian monothe­ism, and its known outcome. Neither intellectually nor spiritually was this confrontation really necessary. Man's metaphysical capacity is substantial enough to allow for the creeds' coexistence, not to mention fusion. The case ofjulian the Apostate is a good example, and so is the case of the Byzantine poets of the first five centuries a.d. Poets on the whole provide the best proof of the compatibility, because the centrifugal force of verse often takes them well beyond the confines of either doctrine, and sometimes beyond both. Were the polytheism of the Greeks and Romans and the monotheism of the Christians really that incompatible? Was it necessary to throw out of the window so much of B.c.'s intellectual achievement? (To facilitate the Renaissance later?) Why did what could have been an addition become an alternative? Could it be true that the God of Love could not stomach Euripides or Theocritus, and if He couldn't, then what kind of stomach did He have? Or was it really, to use the modern parlance, all about power, about taking over the pagan temples to show who was in charge?

Perhaps. But the pagans, though defeated, had in their pantheon a l\l use of History, thereby demonstrating a better grasp of its divinity than their victors. I am afraid that there is no similar figure, no comparable reach, in the entire well- charted passage from Sin to Redemption. I am afraid that the fate of the polytheistic notion of time at the hands of Christian monotheism was the first leg of humanity's flight from a sense of the arbitrariness of existence into the trap of historical determinism. And I am afraid that it is precisely this universalism in hindsight that reveals the reductive na­ture of monotheism—reductive by definition.

That we've broken their statues,

that we've driven them out of their temples,

doesn't mean at all that the gods are dead . . .

So wrote a Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy, two thousand years after the reduction of history from—let's think of the young in this room!—stereo to mono. And let us hope that he is right.

And yet even before history got secularized—in order to become merely scientific—the damage was done: the up­per hand that was gained by historical determinism in the course of those two thousand years gripped the modern con­science tightly and, it seems, irreversibly. The distinction between time and chronology was lost: first by historians, then by their audience. One can't blame either of them, since the new creed, having grabbed the places of pagan worship, shanghaied time's metaphysics, too. And here I must go back to where I sidetracked myself with my own aside, to nomads and settlers.

"Scatter," said God to His chosen people; and for a long time they did. That was actually the second time He spoke to them about moving. Both times they obeyed, albeit re­luctantly. The first time, they had been on the road for forty years; the second time, it took them a bit longer, and in a manner of speaking, they are still in progress. The drawback of being in progress for so long is that you start to believe in progress: if not in your own, then in history's. It is about the latter that I'd like to comment here, on one of its recent examples; but first I must issue a few disclaimers.

The historical literature about the fate of Jews in this century is vast, and one shouldn't aspire to add anything qualitatively new to it. What prompts the following remarks is precisely the abundance of that history, not its want. More pointedly, the reason for these remarks is a few books on the subject that recently came my way. They all deal with the whats and the whys of the wrong that was done to the Jews by the Third Reich; and they are all written by profes­sional historians. Like many books before them, they are rich in information and hypothesis; moreover, like many that will no doubt come after them, they are stronger on objec­tivity than on passion. This, one should hope, expresses the authors' professionalism as historians rather than the distance from these events accorded to the authors by their own age. Objectivity, of course, is the motto of every historian, and that's why passion is normally ruled out—since, as the saying goes, it blinds.

One wonders, however, whether a passionate response, in such a context, wouldn't amount to a greater human ob­jectivity, for disembodied intelligence carries no weight. Moreover, one wonders whether in such a context the ab­sence of passion is nothing but a stylistic device to which writers resort in order to emulate the historian or, for that matter, the modern cultural stereotype, a cool, thin-lipped, soft-spoken character inhabiting the silver screen for the better part of the century in a sleuthing or slaying capacity. If that's the case—and all too often the imitation is too con­vincing to feel otherwise—then history, which used to be the source of ethical education in society, has indeed come full circle.

In the end, however, most of these thin-lipped folk of the silver screen pull the trigger. A modern historian doesn't do anything of the sort, and he would cite science as the explanation for his reserve. In other words, the quest for objectivity of interpretation takes precedence over the sen­timents caused by what is interpreted. One wonders, then, what is the significance of interpretation: Is history simply an instrument for measuring how far we can remove our­selves from events, a sort of anti-thermometer? And does it exist independently, or only insofar as historians come and go, i.e., solely for their sake?

I'd rather let these questions hang for a while; otherwise I'll never get through with my disclaimers, let alone with what they are meant to precede. To begin with, I'd like to point out that the following remarks are in no way motivated by my identification with the victims. Of course, I am a Jew: by birth, by blood, but not—alas, perhaps—by upbringing. That would be enough for a sense of affinity, except that I was born when they, those Jews, were dying, and I was not very cognizant of their fate until quite late into my teens, being pretty much absorbed by what was happening to my race, and to many others, in my own country, which had just defeated Germany, losing in the process some 20 million of its own. In other words, I had plenty to identify with as it was.

Now, I mention this not because I have caught the bug of historical objectivity. On the contrary, I speak from a position of strong subjectivity. As a matter of fact, I wish it were greater, since for me what happened to the Jews in the Third Reich is not history: their annihilation overlapped with the burgeoning of my existence. I enjoyed the dubious comfort of being a witless babe, bubbling sweet bubbles while they were going up in smoke in the crematoria and the gas chambers of what is known these days as Eastern or Central Europe, but what I and some friends of mine still regard as Western Asia. I am also cognizant that, had it not been for those 20 million dead Russians, I could have iden­tified with the Jewish victims of the Third Reich in more ways than one.

So if I sometimes peruse books on this subject, I do it largely for egotistical reasons: to get a more stereoscopic picture of what amounts to my life, of the world in which I found myself a half century ago. Because of the close, indeed overlapping parallelism of the German and Soviet political systems, and because the penal iconography of the latter is rather scarce, I stare at the piles of corpses in my life's background with, I believe, a double intensity. How, I ask myself, did they get there?

The answer is breathtakingly simple: because they were there. In order to become a victim, one ought to be present at the scene of the crime. In order to be present at the scene of the crime, one ought either to disbelieve its probability or to be unable or unwilling to flee the premises. Of the three, it is the last, I'm afraid, that played the major role.

The origins of this unwillingness to move are worth pondering. This has been done many times over, yet less than the origins of the crime. This is so partly because the origins of the crime appear, to historians, to be an easier proposition. It is all ascribed to German anti-Semitism, whose lineage is habitually traced, with varying degrees of enterprise, to Wagner, Luther, and further down to Eras­mus, the Middle Ages, and generally to the Jews-versus- gentiles business. Some historians are prepared to take their audience all the way back to dark Teutonic urges, straight into Valhalla. Others are content with the aftermath ofWorld War I, the Peace of Versailles, and Jewish "usury" against the backdrop of Germany's economic collapse. Still others lump all these things together, adding at times an interesting wrinkle, such as linking the virulence of the Nazis' anti- Jewish propaganda, rich in vermin imagery and references to Jewish hygienic habits, to the history of epidemics and their relatively small toll among the Jews in comparison to the main ethnic stock.

They are Lamarckians, these historians; they are not Darwinists. They appear to believe that affiliation to a creed can be passed on genetically (thus approximating one of Ju­daism's main tenets), that the same goes for attendant prej­udices, intellectual patterns, and so on. They are biological determinists moonlighting as historians. Hence a straight line out of Valhalla into the bunker.

Had the line been that straight, however, the bunker could have been averted. The history of a nation, like the history of an individual, consists more of what's forgotten than of what's remembered. As a process, history is not so much an accretion as a loss: otherwise we wouldn't need historians in the first place. Not to mention that the ability to retain doesn't translate itself into the ability to predict. Whenever this is done—by a philosopher or a political thinker—the translation almost invariably turns into a blue­print for a new society. The rise, the crescendo, and the fall of the Third Reich, as much as those of the Communist system in Russia, was not averted precisely because it was not expected.

The question is, can the translation be blamed for the quality of the original? The answer, I am tempted to say, is yes; and let me succumb to this temptation. Both the German and the Russian versions of socialism sprang from the same late-nineteenth-century philosophical root, which used the shelves of the British Museum for fuel and Darwinian thought for a model. (Hence their subsequent confrontation, which wasn't a battle between good and evil but a clash of two demons—a family feud, if you will.)

An earlier fertilizer, ofcourse, was the splendid French showing in the eighteenth century, which kept the Germans flat on their back militarily and intellectually long enough to develop a national inferiority complex, which took the form of German nationalism and the idea of German Kultur. With its incoherence of elevation, German Romantic idealism, initially a cri de coeur, pretty soon turned into a cri de guerre, especially during the Industrial Revolution, since the British were better at it.

Consider, then, Russia, which had even less to show for itself than Germany, and not only in the eighteenth cen­tury. It was a case of an inferiority complex squared, since it proceeded to emulate Germany in every conceivable— no, available—manner, producing along the way its own Slavophiles and the notion of a specifically Russian soul, as though the Almighty distributed souls geographically. To put it cutely, the cri de coeur and the cri de guerre merged in the Russian ear into le dernier cri; and it was out of an inferiority complex, out of provincialism—always keen on the latest—that Lenin set out to read Marx, not out of a perceived necessity. Capitalism in Russia, after all, was just raising its first smokestacks; the country was predominantly agrarian.

But then you can hardly reproach either one of them for not reading other philosophers—say, Vico. The mental pattern of the epoch was linear, sequential, evolutionary. One falls into that pattern unwittingly, tracing a crime to its origins rather than to its purpose. Yeah, we are that kind of hound: we would rather sniff out ethics than demography. The real paradox ofhistory is that its linear pattern, a product of the self-preservation instinct, dulls this very instinct. Be that as it may, however, both the German and the Russian versions ofsocialism were informed by precisely this pattern, by the principle of historical determinism echoing, after a fashion, the quest for the Just City.

Literally so, one must add. For the chief trait of the his­torical determinist is his disdain for the peasantry, and the setting ofhis sights on the working class. (That is why in Rus­sia they still refuse to decollectivize agriculture, putting—lit­erally, again—the cart before the horse.) A by-product of the Industrial Revolution, the socialist idea was essentially an urban construct, generated by deracinated minds that identified society with the city. Small wonder, then, that this brainchild of mental lumpen, maturing with an enviable logic into the authoritarian state, amplified the basest prop­erties of the urban lower middle class, anti-Semitism first of all.

This had little to do with the religious or cultural his­tories of Germany or Russia, which couldn't be more dif­ferent. For all the vehemence ofLuther's rhetoric, I honestly doubt that his largely illiterate audience bothered much about the substance of his ecclesiastical distinctions; and as for Russia, Ivan the Terrible in his correspondence with the runaway Prince Kurbsky proudly and sincerely proclaimed himself a Jew and Russia, Israel. (On the whole, had religious matters really been the root of modern anti-Semitism, its ugliest head would have been not German but Italian, Span­ish, or French.) And so for German revolutionary thought ofthe nineteenth century, no matter how wildly it oscillated on the subject of the Jewish expulsion or Jewish emanci­pation, the legal result, in 1871, was the latter.

Now, first and foremost, what happened to the Jews in the Third Reich had to do with the creation ofa brand-new state, a new social and existential order. The thousand-year-long Reich had a distinctly millenarian, fin-de-siecle ring to it— a bit premature, perhaps, since the siecle was only the nine­teenth. But postwar Germany's political and economic rub­ble was a time as good as any for starting from scratch. (And history, as we remarked, doesn't set much store by human chronology.) Hence the emphasis on youth, the cult of the young body, the purity-of-the-race spiel. Social utopianism meets blond bestia.

The offspring ofsuch an encounter, naturally, was social bestiality. For nothing could be less utopian than an Ortho­dox—or even an emancipated and secularized—Jew; and nothing could be less blond. One way to build something new is to raze the old, and the New Germany was that sort of project. The atheistic, future-bound, thousand-year-long Reich couldn't regard three-thousand-year-old Judaism as anything but an obstacle and an enemy. Chronologically, ethically, and aesthetically, anti-Semitism just came in handy; the aim was larger than the means—larger, I am tempted to add, than the targets. The aim was nothing less than history, nothing less than remaking the world in Ger­many's image; and the means were political. Presumably their concreteness, as well as that of their targets, was what made the aim less abstract. For an idea, the attraction of its victim lies in the latter's helping it to acquire mortal features.

The question is, Why didn't they run? They didn't run because, first, the dilemma of exodus versus assimilation was not new, and fairly recently, only a few generations before, in 1871, it seemed to have been solved by the emancipation laws. Second, because the Weimar Republic's constitution was still binding and the air of its freedoms was still in their lungs, as well as in their pockets. Third, because the Nazis at the time could be regarded as an understandable discom­fort, as a party of reconstruction, and their anti-Semitic out­bursts as a by-product of that reconstruction's hardship, of its straining muscle. After all, they were the National So­cialist Workers Party, and the swastika-clutching eagle could be seen as a provisional phoenix. Any one of these three reasons taken separately would be sufficient not to flee the premises; but the inertia of assimilation, of integration, lumped them all together. The general idea, I imagine, was to huddle together and wait until it all blew over.

But history is not a force of nature, if only because its toll is usually much higher. Correspondingly, one can take out no

134 I J О S E PH B R О D S K Y

insurance policy against history. Even the apprehensiveness of a people with a long record of persecution turned out to be a lousy premium: its funds were insufficient, at least for a Deutschebank. The claim submitted by both the doctrine of historical determinism and by the creed-sponsored mental climate ofProvidence's general benevolence could be settled only in human flesh. Historical determinism translated itself into a determination of extermination; and the notion ofProv­idence's general benevolence, into a patient waiting for a Storm Trooper. Wouldn't it have been better to benefit less from civilization and become a nomad?

The dead would say yes, though one can't be certain. The living will certainly cry, No! The ethical ambiguity of the latter response could be glossed over, were it not based on the false perception that what happened in the Third Reich was unique. It wasn't. What took twelve years in Ger­many lasted for seventy in Russia, and the toll—in Jews and non-Jews—was almost exactly five times higher. With a little industry, one may presumably establish the same ratio for revolutionary China, Cambodia, Iran, Uganda, and so on: the ethnicity of human loss makes no difference. But if one is loath to continue with this line of reasoning, it is because the similarity is too obvious for one's liking, and because it is too easy to commit the common methodological error of promoting this similarity to the rank of admissible evidence for a subsequent law.

The only law ofhistory, I am afraid, is chance. The more ordered the life ofa society or an individual, the more chance gets elbowed out. The longer this goes on, the greater the accumulation of disfranchised chance, and the likelier, one would think, that chance will claim its own. One should not attribute a human property to an abstract idea, but "Re­member that the fire and the ice/Are never more than one step away/From a temperate city; it is/But a moment to either," said the poet, and we must heed this warning, now that the temperate city has grown too big.

As the spelling out of the laws of history goes, this one is the closest. And if history is to be admitted into the ranks of science, which it craves, it should be aware of the nature of its inquiry. The truth about things, should it exist, is likely to have a very dark side. Given the humans' status as new­comers, i.e., given the world's precedence, the truth about things is bound to be unhuman. Thus any inquiry into that truth amounts to a solipsistic exercise, varying only in in­tensity and industry. In this sense, scientific findings (not to mention the language to which they resort) that point toward human inconsequence are closer to that truth than the con­clusions of modern historians. Perhaps the invention of the atom bomb is closer to it than the invention of penicillin. Perhaps the same applies to any state-sponsored form of bestiality, particularly to wars and genocidal policies, as well as to spontaneous national and revolutionary movements. Without such awareness, history will remain a meaningless safari for historians of theological bent or theologians with historical proclivities, ascribing to their trophies a human likeness and a divine purpose. But humanity of inquiry is not likely to render its subject human.

The best reason for being a nomad is not the fresh air but the escape from the rationalist theory of society based on the ra­tionalist interpretation of history, since the rationalist ap­proach to either is a blithely idealistic flight from human intuition. A nineteenth-century philosopher could afford it. You can't. If one can't become a nomad physically, one should at least become one mentally. You can't save your skin, but you can try for your mind. One should read history the way one reads fiction: for the story, for the characters, for the setting. In short, for its diversity.

In our minds we do not usually hook up Fabrizio del Dongo and Raskolnikov, David Copperfield and Natasha Rostova, Jean Valjean and Clelia Conti, though they belong to roughly the same period of the same century. We don't do this because they are not related; and neither are cen­turies, except perhaps dynastically. History is essentially a vast library filled with works offiction that vary in style more than in subject. Thinking of history in a larger manner is pregnant with our own self-aggrandizement; with readers billing themselves as authors. Cataloguing these volumes, let alone trying to link them to one another, can be done only at the expense of reading them; in any case, at the expense of our own wits.

Besides, we read novels rather erratically; when they come our way, or vice versa. We are guided in this activity by our tastes as much as by the circumstances of our leisure. Which is to say, we are nomads in our reading. The same should apply to history. We should simply keep in mind that linear thinking, while it is de rigueur for the historian's trade—a narrative device, a trope—it is, for his audience, a trap. It is awful to fall into the trap individually, but it is a catastrophe when it happens collectively.

An individual, a nomadic individual especially, is more on the lookout for danger than the collectivity. The former can turn 360 degrees; the latter can look in only one direc­tion. One ofthe greatest joys ofa nomad, ofan individualist, is in structuring history in one's own personal fashion—in cobbling one's own antiquity, one's own Middle Ages or Renaissance in a chronological or achronological, wholly idio­syncratic order: in making them one's own. That is really the only way to inhabit the centuries.

We should remember that rationalism's greatest ca­sualty was individualism. We should be careful with the supposedly dispassionate objectivity of our historians. For objectivity does not mean indifference, nor does it mean an alternative to subjectivity. It is, rather, the sum total of subjectivities. As murderers, victims, or bystanders, men in the final analysis always act individually, subjectively; and they and their deeds should be judged likewise.

This robs us of a certitude, of course, but the less of that the better. Uncertainty keeps an individual on guard, and is generally less bloodthirsty. Of course, all too often, it makes him agonize. But it is better to agonize than to organize. On the whole, uncertainty is more true to life itself; the only certain thing about which is that we are present in it. Again, the main trait of history, and of the future, is our absence, and one cannot be certain of something one was never a part of.

Hence that vague look on the face of the Muse of Time. It is because so many eyes have stared at her with uncer­tainty. Also, because she has seen so much energy and com­motion, whose true end only she knows. And ultimately, because she knows that had she stared back openly, she would have rendered her suitors blind, and she is not without vanity. It is partly owing to this vanity, but mainly to the fact that she has nowhere else in this world to go, that on occasion, with that vague look on her face, she walks into our midst and makes us absent.

Speech at the Stadium

Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the Holy Book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.

At any rate, if this place is the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, that I remember, it's fairly safe for me to assume that you, its graduates, are even less familiar with the Good Book than those who sat on these benches, let's say, sixteen years ago, when I ventured afield here for the first time.

To my eye, ear, and nostril, this place looks like Ann Arbor; it goes blue—or feels blue—like Ann Arbor; it smells like Ann Arbor (though I must admit that there is less mar­ijuana in the air now than there used to be, and that causes momentary confusion for an old Ann Arbor hand). It seems to be, then, Ann Arbor, where I spent a part of my life— the best part for all I know—and where, sixteen years ago, your predecessors knew next to nothing about the Bible.

If I remember my colleagues well, if I know what's

Delivered as a commencement address at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1988.

happening to university curricula all over the country, if I am not totally oblivious to the pressures the so-called modern world exerts upon the young, I feel nostalgic for those who sat in your chairs a dozen or so years ago, because some of them at least could cite the Ten Commandments and still others even remembered the names of the Seven Deadly Sins. As to what they've done with that precious knowledge of theirs afterward, as to how they fared in the game, I have no idea. All I can hope for is that in the long run one is better off being guided by rules and taboos laid down by someone totally impalpable than by the panel code alone.

Since your run is most likely to be fairly long, and since being better off and having a decent world around you is what you presumably are after, you could do worse than to acquaint yourselves with those commandments and that list of sins. There are just seventeen items altogether, and some of them overlap. Of course, you may argue that they belong to a creed with a substantial record of violence. Still, as creeds go, this one appears to be the most tolerant; it's worth your consideration if only because it gave birth to the society in which you have the right to question or negate its value.

But I am not here to extol the virtues of any particular creed or philosophy, nor do I relish, as so many seem to, the opportunity to snipe at the modern system of education or at you, its alleged victims. To begin with, I don't perceive you as such. After all, in certain fields your knowledge is immeasurably superior to mine or anyone's ofmy generation. I regard you as a bunch of young, reasonably egotistical souls on the eve of a very long journey. I shudder to contemplate its length, and I ask myself in what way I could possibly be of use to you. Do I know something about life that could be of help or consequence to you, and if I do, is there a way to pass this information on to you?

The answer to the first question is, I suppose, yes—not

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so much because a person of my age is entitled to outfox any of you at existential chess as because he is, in all probability, tired of quite a lot of the stuff you are still aspiring to. (This fatigue alone is something the young should be advised on as an attendant feature of both their eventual success and their failure; this sort of knowledge may enhance their savoring of the former as well as a better weathering of the latter.) As for the second question, I truly wonder. The example of the aforementioned commandments may discourage any com­mencement speaker, for the Ten Commandments them­selves were a commencement address—literally so, I must say. But there is a transparent wall between the generations, an ironic curtain, if you will, a see-through veil allowing almost no passage of experience. At best, some tips.

Regard, then, what you are about to hear as just tips— of several icebergs, if I may say so, not of Mount Sinai. I am no Moses, nor are you biblical Jews; these are a few random jottings scribbled on a yellow pad somewhere in California—not tablets. Ignore them if you wish, doubt them if you must, forget them if you can't help it: there is nothing imperative about them. Should some of it now or in the time to be come in handy to you, I'll be glad. If not, my wrath won't reach you.

1. Now, and in the time to be, I think it will pay for you to zero in on being precise with your language. Try to build and treat your vocabulary the way you are to treat your checking account. Pay every attention to it and try to increase your earnings. The purpose here is not to boost your bed­room eloquence or your professional success—although those, too, can be consequences—nor is it to turn you into parlor sophisticates. The purpose is to enable you to artic­ulate yourselves as fully and precisely as possible; in a word, the purpose is your balance. For the accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neu­rosis. On a daily basis, a lot is happening to one's psyche; the mode of one's expression, however, often remains the same. Articulation lags behind experience. That doesn't go well with the psyche. Sentiments, nuances, thoughts, per­ceptions that remain nameless, unable to be voiced and dissatisfied with approximations, get pent up within an individual and may lead to a psychological explosion or im­plosion. To avoid that, one needn't turn into a bookworm. One should simply acquire a dictionary and read it on the same daily basis—and, on and off, books of poetry. Dic­tionaries, however, are of primary importance. There are a lot of them around; some of them even come with a mag­nifying glass. They are reasonably cheap, but even the most expensive among them (those equipped with a magnifying glass) cost far less than a single visit to a psychiatrist. If you are going to visit one nevertheless, go with the symptoms of a dictionary junkie.

z. Now, and in the time to be, try to be kind to your parents. If this sounds too close to "Honor thy mother and father" for your comfort, so be it. All I am trying to say is, try not to rebel against them, for, in all likelihood, they will die before you do, so you can spare yourselves at least this source of guilt if not of grief. If you must rebel, rebel against those who are not so easily hurt. Parents are too close a target (so, by the way, are sisters, brothers, wives, or husbands); the range is such that you can't miss. Rebellion against one's parents, for all its I-won't-take-a-single-penny-from-you, is essentially an extremely bourgeois sort of thing, because it provides the rebel with the ultimate in comfort, in this case, mental comfort: the comfort of one's convictions. The later you hit this pattern, the later you become a mental bourgeois; i.e., the longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually

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uncomfortable, the better it is for you. On the other hand, of course, this not-a-single-penny business makes practical sense, because your parents, in all likelihood, will bequeath all they've got to you, and the successful rebel will end up with the entire fortune intact—in other words, rebellion is a very efficient form of savings. The interest, though, is crippling; I'd say, bankrupting.

3. Try not to set too much store by politicians—not so much because they are dumb or dishonest, which is more often than not the case, but because of the size of their job, which is too big even for the best among them, by this or that political party, doctrine, system, or a blueprint thereof. All they or those can do, at best, is to diminish a social evil, not eradicate it. No matter how substantial an improvement may be, ethically speaking it will always be negligible, because there will always be those—say, just one person—who won't profit from this improvement. The world is not perfect; the Golden Age never was or will be. The only thing that's going to happen to the world is that it will get bigger, i.e., more populated while not growing in size. No matter how fairly the man you've elected will promise to cut the pie, it won't grow in size; as a matter of fact, the portions are bound to get smaller. In light of that—or, rather, in dark of that— you ought to rely on your own home cooking, that is, on managing the world yourselves—at least that part of it that lies within your reach, within your radius. Still, in doing this, you must also prepare yourselves for the heartrending realization that even that pie of yours won't suffice; you must prepare yourselves that you're likely to dine as much in disappointment as in gratitude. The most difficult lesson to learn here is to be steady in the kitchen, since by serving this pie just once you create quite a lot of expectations. Ask yourself whether you can afford a steady supply of those pies, or would you rather bargain on a politician? What­ever the outcome of this soul-searching may be—however much you think the world can bet on your baking—you might start right away by insisting that those corporations, banks, schools, labs, and whatnot where you'll be working, and whose premises are heated and policed round the clock anyway, permit the homeless in for the night, now that it's winter.

4^ Try not to stand out, try to be modest. There are too many of us as it is, and there are going to be many more, very soon. Thus climbing into the limelight is bound to be done at the expense of the others who won't be climbing. That you must step on somebody's toes doesn't mean you should stana on their shoulders. Besides, all you will see from that vantage point is the human sea, plus those who, like you, have assumed a similarly conspicuous—and very precarious at that—position: those who are called rich and famous. On the whole, there is always something faintly unpalatable about being better off than one's likes, and when those likes come in billions, it is more so. To this it should be added that the rich and famous these days, too, come in throngs, that up there on the top it's very crowded. So if you want to get rich or famous or both, by all means go ahead, but don't make a meal of it. To covet what somebody else has is to forfeit your uniqueness; on the other hand, of course, it stimulates mass production. But as you are running through life only once, it is only sensible to try to avoid the most obvious cliches, limited editions included. The notion of exclusivity, mind you, also forfeits your uniqueness, not to mention that it shrinks your sense of reality to the already- achieved. Far better than belonging to any club is to be jostled by the multitudes of those who, given their income and their appearance, represent—at least theoretically—un- 144 I J О S E PH B R О D S K Y

limited potential. Try to be more like them than like those who are not like them; try to wear gray. Mimicry is the defense of individuality, not its surrender. I would advise you to lower your voice, too, but I am afraid you will think I am going too far. Still, keep in mind that there is always somebody next to you, a neighbor. Nobody asks you to love him, but try not to hurt or discomfort him much; try to tread on his toes carefully; and should you come to covet his wife, remember at least that this testifies to the failure of your imagination, to your disbelief in—or ignorance of—reality's unlimited potential. Worse comes to worse, try to remember how far away—from the stars, from the depths of the uni­verse, perhaps from its opposite end—came this request not to do it, as well as this idea of loving your neighbor no less than yourself. Maybe the stars know more about gravity, as well as about loneliness, than you do; coveting eyes that they are.

5. At all costs try to avoid granting yourself the status of the victim. Of all the parts of your body, be most vigilant over your index finger, for it is blame-thirsty. A pointed finger is a victim's logo—the opposite of the V sign and a synonym for surrender. No matter how abominable your condition may be, try not to blame anything or anybody: history, the state, superiors, race, parents, the phase of the moon, child­hood, toilet training, etc. The menu is vast and tedious, and this vastness and tedium alone should be offensive enough to set one's intelligence against choosing from it. The mo­ment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything; it could be argued even that that blame-thirsty finger oscillates as wildly as it does because the resolve was never great enough in the first place. Mter all, victim status is not without its sweetness. It commands compassion, confers distinction, and whole nations and con­tinents bask in the murk of mental discounts advertised as the victim's conscience. There is an entire victim culture, ranging from private counselors to international loans. The professed goal of this network notwithstanding, its net result is that of lowering one's expectations from the threshold, so that a measly advantage could be perceived or billed as a major breakthrough. Ofcourse, this is therapeutic and, given the scarcity of the world's resources, perhaps even hygienic, so for want of a better identity, one may embrace it—but try to resist it. However abundant and irrefutable is the evidence that you are on the losing side, negate it as long as you have your wits about you, as long as your lips can utter "No." On the whole, try to respect life not only for its amenities but for its hardships, too. They are a part of the game, and what's good about a hardship is that it is not a deception. Whenever you are in trouble, in some scrape, on the verge of despair or in despair, remember: that's life speaking to you in the only language it knows well. In other words, try to be a little masochistic: without a touch of mas­ochism, the meaning of life is not complete. If this is of any help, try to remember that human dignity is an absolute, not a piecemeal notion; that it is inconsistent with special pleading, that it derives its poise from denying the obvious. Should you find this argument a bit on the heady side, think at least that by considering yourselfa victim you but enlarge the vacuum of irresponsibility that demons or demagogues love so much to fill, since a paralyzed will is no dainty for angels.

6. The world you are about to enter and exist in doesn't have a good reputation. It's been better geographically than his­torically; it's still far more attractive visually than socially. It's not a nice place, as you are soon to find out, and I rather doubt that it will get much nicer by the time you leave it.

146 I J 0 S E PH B R 0 D S K Y

Still, it's the only world available: no alternative exists, and if one did, there is no guarantee that it would be much better than this one. It is a jungle out there, as well as a desert, a slippery slope, a swamp, etc.—literally—but what's worse, metaphorically, too. Yet, as Robert Frost has said, "The best way out is always through." He also said, in a different poem, though, that "to be social is to be forgiving." It's with a few remarks about this business of getting through that I would like to close.

Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those—in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can't escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you re­ceived at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists; most likely they are counting on your being talkative and relating your experience to others. By himself, no individual is worth an exercise in injustice (or for that matter, in justice). The ratio of one-to-one doesn't justify the effort: it's the echo that counts. That's the main principle of any oppressor, whether state-sponsored or autodidact. Therefore, steal, or still, the echo, so that you don't allow an event, however unpleasant or momentous, to claim any more time than it took for it to occur.

What your foes do derives its significance or conse­quence from the way you react. Therefore, rush through or past them as though they were yellow and not red lights. Don't linger on them mentally or verbally; don't pride your­self on forgiving or forgetting them—worse come to worse, do the forgetting first. This way you'll spare your brain cells a lot of useless agitation; this way, perhaps, you may even save those pigheads from themselves, since the prospect of being forgotten is shorter than that of being forgiven. So flip the channel: you can't put this network out of circulation, but at least you can reduce its ratings. Now, this solution is not likely to please angels, but then again, it's bound to hurt demons, and for the moment that's all that really matters.

I had better stop here. As I said, I'll be glad if you find what I've said useful. If not, it will show that you are equipped far better for the future than one would expect from people of your age. \Vhich, I suppose, is also a reason for rejoic­ing—not for apprehension. In either case—well equipped or not—I wish you luck, because what lies ahead is no picnic for the prepared and the unprepared alike, and you'll need luck. Still, I believe that you'll manage.

I'm no gypsy; I can't divine your future, but it's pretty obvious to any naked eye that you have a lot going for you. To say the least, you were born, which is in itself half the battle, and you live in a democracy—this halfway house between nightmare and utopia—which throws fewer obsta­cles in the way of an individual than its alternatives.

Last, you've been educated at the University of Mich­igan, in my view the best school in the nation, if only because sixteen years ago it gave a badly needed break to the laziest man on earth, who, on top of that, spoke practically no English—to yours truly. I taught here for some eight years; the language in which I address you today I learned here; some of my former colleagues are still on the payroll, others retired, and still others sleep the eternal sleep in the earth of Ann Arbor that now carries you. Clearly this place is of extraordinary sentimental value for me; and so it will be­come, in a dozen years or so, for you. To that extent, I can divine your future; in that respect, I know you will manage, or, more precisely, succeed. For feeling a wave of warmth coming over you in a dozen or so years at the mention of this town's name will indicate that, luck or no luck, as human beings you've succeeded. It's this sort of success I wish to you above all in the years to come. The rest depends on luck and matters less.

Collector's Item

еъ*

If you sit long on the bank of the river, you may see the body of your enemy floating by.

—Chinese proverb

I

Given the lunacy this piece deals with, it ought to be written in a language other than English. The only option available to me, however, is Russian, which is the very source of the lunacy in question. Who needs tautology? Besides, several of the assertions I am going to make are, in their turn, quite loony, and best checked by a language that has a reputation for being analytical. Who wants to have his insights ascribed to the vagaries of some highly inflected language? Nobody, perhaps, save those who keep asking what language I think or dream in. One dreams in dreams, I reply, and thinks in thoughts. A language gets into the picture only when one has to make those things public. This, of course, gets me nowhere. Still (I persevere), since English isn't my mother tongue, since my grip on its grammar isn't that tight, my thoughts, for example, could get quite garbled. I sure hope that they don't; at any rate, I can tell them from dreams. And believe it or not, dear reader, this sort of quibbling, which normally gets one nowhere, brings you straight to the core of our ston\ For no matter how its author solves his dilemma, no matter what language he settles for, his very ability to choose a language makes him, in your eyes, suspect; and suspicions are what this piece is all about. Who is he, you may wonder about the author, what is he up to? Is he trying to promote himself to the status of a disembodied intelligence? If it were only you, dear reader, inquiring about the author's identity, that would be fine. The trouble is, he wonders about his identity himself—and for the same reason. Who are you, the author asks himself in two languages, and gets startled no less than you would upon hearing his own voice muttering something that amounts to "Well, I don't know." A mongrel, then, ladies and gentlemen, this is a mongrel speaking. Or else a centaur.

II

This is the summer of 1991, August. That much at least is certain. Elizabeth Taylor is about to take her eighth walk down the aisle, this time with a blue-collar boy of Polish extraction. A serial killer with cannibalistic urges is appre­hended in Milwaukee; the cops find three hard-boiled skulls in his fridge. Russia's Great Panhandler makes his rounds in London with cameras zeroing in, as it were, on his empty tin. The more it changes, the more it stays the same: like the weather. And the more it tries to stay the same, the more it changes: like a face. And judging by the "weather," this could easily be 1891. On the whole, geography (Euro­pean geography in particular) leaves history very few options. A country, especially a large one, gets only two. Either it's strong or it's weak. Fig. 1: Russia. Fig. 2: Germany. For most of the century, the former tried to play it big and strong (at what cost is another matter). Now its turn has come to be weak: by the year 2000 it will be where it was in 1900, and about the same perimeter. The latter, Germany, will be there, too. (At long last it dawned on the descendants of

Wotan that saddling their neighbors with debt is a more stable and less costly form of occupation than sending in troops.) The more it changes, the more it stays the same. Still, you can't tell time by weather. Faces are better: the more one tries to stay the same, the more it changes. Fig. 1: Miss Taylor's. Fig. 2: one's own. The summer of 1991, then, August. Can one tell a mirror from a tabloid?

III

And here is one such, of humble strikebreaking origins. Ac­tually it is a literary paper, The London Review of Books by name, which came into existence several years ago when The (London) Times and its Literary Supplement went on strike for a few months. In order not to leave the public without literary news and the benefits of liberal opinion, LRB was launched and evidently blossomed. Eventually The Times and its Literary Supplement resumed operation, but LRB stayed afloat, proof not so much of the growing diversity of reading tastes as of burgeoning demography. No individual I know subscribes to both papers, unless he is a publisher. It's largely a matter of one's budget, not to mention one's attention span or one's plain loyalty. And I wonder, for in­stance, which one of these—the latter, I should hope— prevented me from purchasing a recent issue in a small Belsize Park bookstore, where I and my young lady ventured the other day on our way to the movies. Budgetary consid­erations as well as my attention span—alarming as it may be of late—must be ruled out: the most recent issue of the LRB sat there on the counter in full splendor, its cover depicting a blown-up postal stamp: unmistakably of Soviet origin. This sort of thing has been enough to catch my eye since I was twelve. In its own turn, the stamp depicted a bespectacled man with silver, neatly parted hair. Above and underneath the face, the stamp's legend, in now-fashionable Cyrillic, went as follows: Soviet Secret Agent Kim Philby (1912-1988). He looked indeed like Alec Guinness, with a touch perhaps of Trevor Howard. I reached into my pocket for two one-pound coins, caught the salesboy's friendly glance, adjusted my vocal cords for some highly pitched, civilized "May I have . . . ," and then turned go degrees and walked out of the store. I must add that I didn't do it abruptly, that I managed to send the boy at the counter a "just changed my mind" nod and to collect, with the same nod, my young lady.

IV

As we had some time to kill before the show, we went into a nearby cafe. "What's the matter with you?" my young comrade-in-arms asked me once we sat down. "You look like . . ." I didn't interrupt her. I knew how I felt and ac­tually wondered what it might look like. "You look, you look . . . sideways," she continued hesitantly, tentatively, since English wasn't her mother tongue either. "You look as if you can't face the world any longer, can't look straight in the world's eye," she managed finally. "Something like that," she added, just in case, to widen the margin of error. Well, I thought, one is always a greater reality for others than for oneself, and vice versa. What are we here for but to be observed. If that's what "it" really looks like from the outside, then I am doing fine—and so, perhaps, is the bulk of the human race. For I felt like throwing up, like a great deal of barfwas welling up in my throat. Still, while I wasn't puzzled by the sensation, I was surprised by its intensity. "What's the matter?" asked my young lady. "What's wrong?" And now, dear reader, after trying to figure out who the author of this piece is and what its timing, we've got to find out also who its audience is. Do you remember, dear reader, who Kim Philby was and what he did? If you do, then you are around fifty and thus, in a manner of speaking, on your way out. What you are going to hear, therefore, will be of little import to you, still of lesser comfort. Your game is up, you are too far gone; this stuff won't change anything for you. If, on the other hand, you've never heard of Kim Philby, this means that you are in your thirties, life lies ahead, all this is ancient history and ofno possible use or entertainment value for you, unless you are some sort of a spy buff. So? So where does all this leave our author, the question of his identity still hanging? Can a disembodied intelligence right­fully expect to find an able-bodied audience? I say, Hardly, and I say, -Who gives a damn.

v

All of this leaves our author at the close of the twentieth century with a very bad taste in his mouth. That, of course, is to be expected in a mouth that is in its fifties. But let's stop being cute with each other, dear reader, let's get down to business. Kim Philby was a Briton, and he was a spy. He worked for the British Intelligence Service, for MI5 or MI6, or both—who cares about all that arcana and whatever it stands for—but he spied for the Russians. In the parlance of the trade, he was a mole, though we are not going to use that lingo here. I am not a spy buff, not an aficionado of that genre, and never was; neither in my thirties nor even in my fifties, and let me tell you why. First, because espionage provides a good plot but seldom palatable prose. In fact, the upsurge of spy novels in our time is the by-product of mod­ernism's emphasis on texture, which left literature in practi­cally all European languages absolutely plotless: the reaction was inevitable but, with few exceptions, equally execrable.

Still, aesthetic objections are of little consequence to you, dear reader, aren't they, and that in itself tells the time as accurately as the calendar or a tabloid. Let's try ethics, then, on which everyone seems to be an expert. I, for one, have always regarded espionage as the vilest human pursuit, mainly, I guess, because I grew up in a country the ad­vancement of whose fortunes was inconceivable to its na­tives. To do that, one indeed had to be a foreigner; and that's perhaps why the country took such pride in its cops, fellow travelers, and secret agents, commemorating them in all manner of ways, from stamps to plaques to monuments. Ah, all those Richard Sorges, Pablo Nerudas, and Hewlett Jon- sons, and so on, all that pulp of our youth! Ah, all those flicks shot in Latvia or in Estonia for the "Western" backdrop! A foreign surname and the neon lettering of hotel (always put vertically, never horizontally), sometimes the screeching brakes of a Czech-made motorcar. The goal was not so much verisimilitude or suspense as the legitimization ofthe system by the exploits on its behalf outside it. You could get a bar scene with a little combo toiling in the background, you could get a blonde with a tin-can taffeta skirt and a decent nose job looking positively non-Slavic. Two or three of our actors, too, looked sufficiently gaunt and lanky, the emphasis being always on a thoroughbred beak. A German-sounding name for a spy was better than a French one, a French one was better than a Spanish one, a Spanish one was better than an Italian one (come to think of it, I can't recall a single Italian Soviet secret agent). The English were tops, but hard to come by. In any case, neither English landscapes nor street scenes were ever attempted on our big screens, as we lacked vehicles with steering wheels on the right. Ah, those were the days—but I've digressed.

Who cares what country one grows up in, and whether it colors one's view of espionage? Too bad if it does, because then one is robbed of a source of entertainment—perhaps not of the most delectable kind, but entertainment none­theless. In view of what surrounds us, not to mention what lies ahead, this is barely forgivable. Dearth of action is the mother of the motion picture. And if one indeed loathes spies, there still remains spy-catching, which is as engrossing as it is righteous. What's wrong with a little paranoia, with a bit of manifest schizophrenia? Isn't there something rec­ognizable and therefore therapeutic to their paperback and Bakelite video versions? And what's any aversion, including this aversion toward spies, if not a hidden neurosis, an echo of some childhood trauma? First therapy, then ethics.

The face of Kim Philby on that stamp. The face of the late Mr. Philby, Esq., ofBrighton, Sussex, orofWelwyn Garden, Herts., or of Ambala, India—you name it. The face of an Englishman in the Soviet employ. The pulp writer's dream come true. Presumably, the rank of general, if the poor sod cared for such trifles; presumably, highly decorated, maybe a Hero of the Soviet Union. Though the snapshot used for the stamp shows none ofthat. Here he appears in his civvies, which is what he donned for most of his life: the dark coat and the tie. The medals and the epaulets were saved for the red velvet cushion of a soldier's funeral, ifhe had one. Which I think he did, his employers being suckers for top-secret solemnity. Many moons ago, reviewing a book about a chum of his for the TLS, I suggested that, considering his service to the Soviet state, this now aging Moscow denizen should be buried in the Kremlin wall. I mention this since I've been told that he was one of the few TLS subscribers in Moscow. He ended up, though, I believe, in the Protestant cemetery, his employers being sticklers for propriety, albeit posthu­mously. (Had Her Majesty's government been handling these matters, it could hardly have done better.) And now I feel little pangs of remorse. I imagine him interred, clad in the same coat and tie shown on the stamp, wearing this disguise—or was it a uniform?—in death as in life. Presum­ably he left some instructions concerning this eventuality, although he couldn't have been fully certain whether they would be followed. Were they? And what did he want on his tombstone? A line ofEnglish poetry, perhaps? Something like "And death shall have no dominion"? Or did he prefer a matter-of-fact "Soviet Secret Agent Kim Philby (1912­1988)"? And did he want it in Cyrillic?

VIII

Back to hidden neurosis and childhood trauma, to therapy and ethics. When I was twenty-four, I was after a girl, and in a big way. She was slightly older than I, and after a while I began to feel that something was amiss. I sensed that I was being deceived, perhaps even two-timed. It turned out, of course, that I wasn't wrong, but that was later. At the time I simply grew suspicious, and one evening I decided to track her down. I hid myself in an archway across the street from her building, waited there for about an hour, and when she emerged from her poorly lit entrance, I followed her for several blocks. I was tense with excitement, but of an un­familiar nature. At the same time, I felt vaguely bored, as I knew more or less what I might discover. The excitement grew with every step, with every evasive action I took; the boredom stayed at the same level. When she turned to the river, my excitement reached its crescendo, and at that point I stopped, turned around, and headed for a nearby cafe. Later I would blame my abandoning the chase on my laziness and reproach myself, especially in the light—or, rather, in the dark—of this affair's denouement, playing an Actaeon to the dogs of my own hindsight. The truth was less innocent and more absorbing. The truth was that I stopped because I had discovered the nature of my excitement. It was the joy of a hunter pursuing his prey. In other words, it was something atavistic, primordial. This realization had nothing to do with ethics, with scruples, taboos, or anything of the sort. I had no problem with conferring upon the girl the status ofprey. It's just that I hated being the hunter. A matter of tempemment, perhaps? Perhaps. Perhaps had the world been subdivided into the four humors, or at least boiled down to four humor-based political parties, it would be a better place. Yet I think that one's resistance to turning into a hunter, the ability to spot and to control the hunting impulse, has to do with something more basic than tem­perament, upbringing, social values, received wisdom, ec­clesiastical affiliation, or one's concept of honor. It has to do with the degree of one's evolution, with the species' evo­lution, with reaching the stage marked by one's inability to regress. One loathes spies not so much because of their low rung on the evolutionary ladder as because betrayal invites you to descend.

IX

Dear reader, if this sounds to you like an oblique way of bragging about one's own virtues, so be it. Virtue, after all, is far from being synonymous with survival; duplicity is. But you will accept, dear reader, won't you, that there is a hi­erarchy between love and betrayal. And you also know that it is the former that ushers in the latter, not vice versa. What's worse, you know that the latter outlasts the former. So there is not much to brag about, even when you are absolutely smitten or besotted, is there? If one is not a Dar­winist, if one still sticks to Cuvier, it is because lower or­ganisms seem to be more viable than complex ones. Look at moss, look at algae. I understand that I am out of my depth here. All I am trying to say is that to an advanced organism duplicity is, at worst, an option; for a lower one, however, it is the means of survival. In this sense, spies don't choose to be spies any more than a lizard chooses its pigmentation: they just can't do any better. Duplicity, after all, is a form of mimicry; it is this particular animal's maxi­mum. One could argue with this proposition if spies spied for money, but the best of them do it out of conviction. In their pursuit, they are driven by excitement, better yet by instinct unchecked by boredom. For boredom interferes with instinct. Boredom is the mark of a highly evolved spe­cies; a sign of civilization, if you will.

X

Whoever it was who ordered this stamp's issue was no doubt making a statement. Especially given the current political climate, the warming of East-West relations and all. The decision must have been made on high, in the Kremlin's own hallowed chambers, since the Foreign Ministry would have been up in arms against it, not to mention the Ministry of Finances, such as they are. You don't bite the hand that feeds you. Or do you? You do if your teeth are those of the CSS—the Committee for State Security (a.k.a. the KGB)— which is larger than both those ministries to begin with, not only in the number of employees, but in the place it occupies in the conscience and the subconscious of the powerful and the powerless alike. If you are that big, you may bite any hand you like and, for that matter, throats, too. You may do it for several reasons. Out of vanity: to remind the jubilant West of your existence. Or out of inertia: you're used to biting that hand anyway. Or out of nostalgia for the good old days, when your diet was rich in the enemy's protein because you had a constant supply of it in your compatriots. Still, for all the grossness of the CSS's appetite, one senses behind this stamp initiative a particular individual: the head of a directorate, or perhaps his deputy, or just a humble case officer who came up with the idea. He might simply have revered Philby, or wanted to get ahead in his department; or on the contrary, he may have been approaching retire­ment and, like many people of that generation, truly believed in the didactic value of a postage stamp. None of these things contradicts the others. They are fully compatible: vanity, inertia, nostalgia, reverence, careerism, naivete; and the brain of the CSS's average employee is as good a place for their confluence as any, including a computer. What's puz­zling about this stamp, however, is the promptness with which it has been issued: only two years after Mr. Philby's demise. His shoes, as well as the gloves that he always wore on account of a skin allergy, were, so to speak, still warm. Issuing a stamp in any country takes a hell of a lot of time, and normally it is preceded by national recognition of its subject. Even if one skips this requirement (the man was, after all, a secret agent), the speed with which the stamp was produced is amazing, given the thick of bureaucratic hurdles it ought to have gone through. It obviously didn't; it was evidently rushed into production. Which leaves you with this sense of personal involvement, of an individual will behind this four-centimeter-square piece of paper. And you ask yourself about the motive behind that will. And you understand that somebody wanted to make a statement. Urbi et orbi, as it were. And, as a part of the orbus, you wonder what sort of statement that was.

The answer is: menacing and spiteful; also profoundly pro­vincial. One judges an undertaking, I'm afraid, by its result. The stamp subjects the late Mr. Philby to the ultimate ig­nominy, to the final slight: it proclaims a Briton to be Russia's own, not so much in spirit—what's so special about that?— but precisely in body. No doubt Philby asked for that. He spied for the Soviet Union for a good quarter of a century. For another quarter of a century he simply lived in the Soviet Union, and wasn't entirely idle either. On top of that, he died there and was interred in Russian soil. The stamp is essentially his tombstone's replica. Also, we shouldn't dis­count the possibility that he might have been pleased by his masters' posthumous treatment: he was stupid enough, and secrecy is a hotbed of vanity. He could even have approved (if not initiated himself) the stamp project. Yet one can't help feeling some violation here, something deeper than the desecration of a grave: a violation that is elemental. He was, after all, a Briton, and the Brits are used to dying in odd places. What's revolting about this stamp is its proprietary sentiment; it's as though the earth that swallowed the poor sod licks its lips with profound satisfaction and says, He is mine. Or else it licks the stamp.

Such was the statement that a humble case officer, or a bunch of them at CSS, wished to make, and did, and that a liberal literary paper of humble strikebreaking origins has found so amusing. Well, let's say point taken. What should be done about it, if anything? Should we try to disinter the unholy remains and bring them back to Britain? Should we petition the Soviet government or offer it a large sum? Or should Her Majesty's Postmaster issue perhaps a counterstamp, with a legend something like English Traitor Kim Philby, 1912-1988, in English, of course, and see whether some Russian paper reprints it? Should we try to retrieve the idea of this man, despite himself, from the collective psyche of his masters? And anyway who are these "we" who provide your author, dear reader, with such rhetorical comfort? No, nothing of the sort could, or for that matter should, be done. Philby belongs there, body and soul. Let him rot in peace. But what one—and I emphasize this "one"—can do, and therefore should do, is rob the aforementioned collective psyche of its ownership of that unholy relic, rob it of the comfort it thinks it enjoys. And in fact it's easy to do this. For, in spite of himself, Kim Philby wasn't theirs. Consid­ering where we are today, and especially where Russia is, it is obvious that, for all its industry, cunning, human toil, and investment of time and currency, the Philby enterprise was a bust. Were he a British double agent, he couldn't inflict a greater damage on the system whose fortunes he was actually trying to advance. But double or triple, he was a British agent through and through, for the bottom line of his quite extraordinary effort is a sharp sense of futility. Futility is so hideously British. And now for the fun part.

XIII

In the few spy novels that I read as a child, the role of the postage stamp was as grand as the item itself was small, and would yield only to that ofa torn photograph, the appearance of the other half of which often would clinch the plot. On the stamp's sticky side, a spy in those novels would convey in his chicken scrawl, or on a microfilm, the secret message to his master, or vice versa. The Philby stamp is thus a fusion of the torn man with the medium-is-the-message principle; as such, it is a collector's item. To this we might add also that the priciest things in the stamp-collecting world are those issued by political or geographical ephemera—by short-lived or defunct states, negligible potentates or specks of land. (The most-sought-after item in my childhood, I re­call, was a stamp from Pitcairn Island—a British colony, as it happens, in the South Pacific.) So, to use this philatelist logic, the issue of the Philby stamp appears to be a cry from the Soviet Union's future. At any rate, there is something in its future that, in the guise of the CSS, asks for that. Actually, this is a fine time for philatelists, and in more ways than one. One can even speak of philatelist justice here— the way one speaks of poetic license. For half a century ago, when the CSS warriors were deporting people from the Bal­tic states that the U.S.S.R. invaded and rendered defunct, it was precisely philatelists who clinched the list of social categories subject to removal. (In fact, the list ended with the Esperantists, the philatelists being the penultimate cat­egory. There were, if memory serves me right, sixty-four such categories; the list began with the leaders and active members of political parties, followed by university profes­sors, journalists, teachers, businessmen, and so on. It came with a highly detailed set of instructions as to how to separate the provider from his family, children from their mothers, and so forth, down to the actual wording of sentences like "Your daddy went to get hot water from the station boiler." The whole thing was rather well thought through and signed by CSS General Serov. I saw the document with my own eyes; the country of application was Lithuania.) This, per­haps, is the source of a retiring case officer's belief in the didactic power of a stamp. Well, nothing pleases the tired eyes of an impartial observer so much as the sight of things coming full circle.

XIV

Let's not dismiss, though, the didactic powers of the stamp. This one at least could have been issued to encourage the CSS's present and future employees, and was no doubt dis­tributed among the former for free, a modest fringe benefit. As for the latter, one can imagine the stamp doing rather well witha young recruit. The establishment is big on visuals, on iconography, its monitoring abilities being justly famous for their -omniscience, not to mention omnivorousness. When it comes to didactic purposes, especially among its own brethren, the organization readily goes the extra mile. When Oleg Penkovsky, a GRU man who betrayed Soviet military secrets to the British in the ig6os, was finally caught, the establishment (or so I was told) filmed his execution. Strapped to a stretcher, Penkovsky is wheeled into the Mos­cow city crematorium's chamber. An attendant opens the furnace door and two other attendants start to push the stretcher and its contents into the roaring furnace; the flame is already licking the screaming man's soles. At this point a voice comes over the loudspeaker, interrupting the proce­dure, because another body is scheduled for this time slot. Screaming but unable to kick, Penkovsky is pulled back; another body arrives and, after a small ceremony, is pushed into the furnace. The voice comes over the loudspeaker again: now it's Penkovsky's tum, and in he goes. A small but effective skit. Beats Beckett hands down, boosts morale, and can't be forgotten: it brands your wits. A kind of stamp, if you will: for intramural correspondence.

XV

Before we set out for the fun part in earnest, dear reader, let me say this: There is a distinction between the benefit of hindsight and having lived long enough to see heads' tails. This is not a disclaimer; quite the contrary, most of your author's assertions are borne out by his life, and if they are wrong, then he blew it, at least partially. Still, even if they are accurate, a good question remains. Is he entitled to pass judgment upon those who are no longer around—who have lost? Outlasting your opponent gives you the sense of mem­bership in a victorious majority, of having played your cards right. Aren't you then applying the law retroactively? Aren't you punishing the poor buggers under a code of conscience foreign to them and to their times? Well, I am not troubled by this, and for three reasons. First, because Kim Philby kicked the bucket at the ripe age of seventy-six; as I write this, I am still twenh^r-six years behind him in the game, my catching-up prospects being ver dim. Second, because what he believed in for most of his life, allegedly to its very end, has been utter garbage to me at least since the age ofsixteen, though no benefit of foresight can be claimed here, let alone obtained. Third, because the baseness of the human heart and the vulgarity of the human mind never expire with the demise of their most gifted exponents. What I must disclaim, however, is any pretense to expertise in the field I am wading through. As I say, I am no spy buff. Of Philby's life, for instance, I know only the bare bones, if that. I've never read his biography, in English or in Russian, nor do I expect I ever \\ill. Of the options available to a human being, he chose the most redundant one: to betray one set of people to another. This sort of subject is not worthy of study; in­tuition \\ill suffice. I am also not terribly good \\ith dates, though I normally try to check them. So the reader should decide for himselfat this .stage whether he is going to proceed with this stuff any further. I certainly will. I suppose I should bill the following as a fantasy. Well, it isn't.

XVI

On Marchember umpteenth, nineteen filthy-fine, in Brook­lyn, New York, agents of the FBI arrested a Soviet spy. In a small apartment filled with photo equipment, on a floor strewn with microfilm. stood a little middle-aged man with beady eyes, an aquiline profile, and a balding forehead, his Adam's apple moving busily: he was swallowing a .scrap of paper containing some top-secret information. Othenvise the man ofrered no resistance. Instead. he proudly declared: "I am Colonel of the Red Army Rudolf Abel. and I demand to be treated as such in accordance with the Geneva Conven­tion." Needless to say. the tabloids went ape, in the States and all over the place. The colonel was tried. got donkey years, and was locked up, if I remember correctly. in Sing Sing. There he mostly played pool. In nineteen sissy-through or thereabouts, he was exchanged at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin for Gary Powers. the unlucky U-2 pilot who made headlines for the last time just a few years ago when he went down again, this time near L.A., in a helicopter, and for good. Rudolf Abel returned to Moscow, retired, and made no headlines. save that he became the most feared pool shark in Moscow and its vicinity. He died in nineteen-cementy and was buried, with scaled-down military honors, at No- vodevichye Cemetery in Moscow. No stamp was issued for him. Or was one? I may have missed it. Or the British literary paper of humble origin missed it. Perhaps he didn't earn a stamp: what's four years in Sing Sing to a lifelong record? And besides, he wasn't a foreigner, just another displaced native. In any case, no stamp for Rudolf Abel, just a tomb­stone.

XVII

But what do we read on this tombstone? We read: Willie Fischer, a.k.a. Rudolf Abel, 1903-1971, in Cyrillic, of course. Now, that's a bit too long for a stamp's legend, but not for us. (Ah, dear reader, look at what we've got here: spies, stamps, cemeteries, tombstones! But wait, there's more: poets, painters, assassinations, exiles, Arab sheikhs, murder weapons, stolen cars, and more stamps!) But let's try to make this long story short. Once upon a time—in 1936-39 in Spain, to be precise—there were two men: Willie Fischer and Rudolf Abel. They were colleagues and they were close friends. So close that other employees ofthe same enterprise called them "Fischerabel." But nothing unto­ward, dear reader, they were simply inseparable, partly be­cause of the work they did. Theywere a team. The enterprise for which they toiled was the Soviet intelligence outfit that handled the messy side of the Spanish Civil War's business. That's the side where you find bullet-riddled bodies miles away from the trenches. Anyway, the outfit's boss was a fellow by the name of Orlov, who prior to his Spanish as­signment headed the entire Soviet counterintelligence op­eration for Western Europe out of an office in the Soviet Embassy in the French capital. We'll play with him later— or, as the case may be, he will play with us. For the moment let's say that Orlov was very close with Fischerabel. Not as close as they were with each other, but very close. Nothing untoward there either, since Orlov was married. He wasjust the boss, and Fischerabel were his right and his left hand at once. Both hands were dirty.

XVHI

But life is cruel, it separates even the best of friends. In 1939 the Spanish Civil War is ending, and Fischerabel and Orlov part ways. They check out of the Hotel Nacional in Madrid, where the entire operation was run, and travel— some by air, some by boat, still others by the submarine that carried the Spanish Gold Reserve, which was handed over to the Soviets by Juan Negn'n, the Republican government's Finance Minister—in opposite directions. Orlov disappears into thin air. Fischerabel return to Moscow and continue to work for the old establishment, filing reports, training new recruits—the kind of thing that field men do when they are out of the -field. In 1940, when Rudolf Abel gets transferred to the Far East, where trouble is brewing on the Mongolian border, he makes a wrong move and gets killed. Then comes World War II. Throughout it Willie Fischer remains in Mos­cow, trains more recruits—this time perhaps with greater gusto, since German is his father tongue—but he generally feels fallen by the wayside, bypassed for promotion, aging. This fretful state of affairs ends only in nineteen faulty-ape, when he's suddenly taken out of mothballs and given a new assignment. "The kind of assignment," he remarks crypti­cally on the eve ofhis departure to one of his former sidekicks from the old Spanish days, "the kind of assignment that a field man's entire life is the preparation for." Then he takes off. The next time his pals hear of him is x years later when, nabbed by the feds in that Brooklyn apartment, good old Willie sings, "I am Colonel of the Red Army Rudolf Abel, and I demand . . . "

xix

Of the many virtues available to us, dear reader, patience is best known for being rewarded. In fact, patience is an integral part of every virtue. What's virtue \vithout patience? Just good temper. In a certain line of work, however, that won't pay. It may, in fact, be deadly. A certain line of work requires patience, and a hell of a lot of it. Perhaps because it is the only virtue detectable in a certain line ofwork, those engaged in it zero in on patience \vith a vengeance. So bear with us, dear reader. Consider yourself a mole.

XX

The hvang of a guitar, the sound of a shot fired in a poorly lit alley. It's Spain, shortly before the end of the Civil War (not ending through neglect on the part of Orlov's good offices, of course, but in Moscow they may see things dif­ferently). On this night Orlov has been summoned to see a certain official from Moscow aboard a ship lying at anchor in Barcelona. As the head of Soviet intelligence in Spain, he reports only to Stalin's own secretariat: directly. Orlov senses a trap and runs. He grabs his wife, takes the elevator down, tells a bellboy in the lobby to get him a taxi. Cut. Panorama of the ragged Pyrenees, roar of a hvo-engine airplane. Cut. Next morning in Paris, sound of an accordion, panorama of, say, the Place de la Concorde. Cut. An office in the Soviet Embassy on the rue de Varenne. Stalin's whiskers above the door of a Mosler safe flung wide open; a pin-striped wrist with cuffs stuffing a satchel with French banknotes and files. Cut. Blackout.

Sorry, no close-ups. Orlov's disappearing act offers none. Still, if one stares at the blackout intently enough, one can make out a letter. This letter is addressed to Comrade Stalin, and it says something to the efl'ect that he, Orlov, now severs his links with godless Communism and its hateful, criminal system; that he and his wife choose freedom, and should a single hair fall from the heads of their aging parents, who are still in the clutches of this system, then he, Orlov, will spill urbi et orbi all the dirty top-secret beans in his pos­session. The letter goes into an envelope, the address on that envelope is that of the offices of Le Monde, or maybe Figaro. At-any rate, it's in Paris. Then the pen dips into the ink pot again: another letter. This one is to Leon Trotsky, and it goes something like this: I, the undersigned, am a Russian merchant who just escaped with my life from the Soviet Union via Siberia to Japan. While in Moscow and staying in a hotel, I overheard, by pure chance, a conver­sation in the next room. The subject was an attempt on your life, and through the crack in the door I even managed to espy your would-be assassin. He is young, tall, and speaks perfect Spanish. I thought it my duty to warn you. The letter is signed with an alias, but Don Levin, the Trotsky scholar and biographer, has positively identified its author as Orlov, and if I am not mistaken, the scholar has received Orlov's personal confirmation. This letter is postmarked Nagasaki and the address on it is in Mexico City. It, too, however ends up in a local tabloid (La Prensa Latina? El Pais?), since Trotsky, still smarting from the second attempt on his life (in the course of which his American secretary was mur­dered by a would-be world-famous muralist—David Alfaro Siqueiros—with the assistance of a would-be world-famous, indeed a Nobel Prize-winning, poet, Pablo Neruda), habi- 170 I J 0 S E PH B R 0 D S K Y

tually forwards all threats and warnings he receives to the press. And Orlov must be aware of this, if only because for the last three years he has been in the habit of perusing quite a few periodicals in Spanish. While having his coffee, say. In the lobby of the Nacional, or in his suite there on the sixth floor.

XXII

Where he used to entertain all sorts of people. Including Ramon Mercader, Trotsky's third and successful assassin. Who was simply Orlov's employee, much the same as Fi- scherabel, working for the same outfit. So if Orlov really wanted to warn Trotsky, he could have told him a lot more about Ramon Mercader than that he was young, tall, hand­some, and spoke perfect Spanish. Yet the reason for the second letter was not Trotsky; the reason was the first letter, whose addressee wasn't Stalin. To put it more neatly, the Stalin letter, printed in Le Monde, addressed the West, while the Trotsky letter, though it went literally to the West­ern Hemisphere, addressed the East. The purpose of the first was to win Orlov good standing abroad, preferably in the intelligence community. The second was a letter home, informing his pals in Moscow headquarters that he was not spilling the beans, though he could: about Mercader, for instance. So they, the pals, could go ahead with the Trotsky job if they cared to. (They did, though no tear should be shed, since Trotsky, who drowned the only genuine Russian Revolution that ever took place—the Kronstadt Uprising— in blood, wasn't any better than the spawn of hell who or­dered his assassination. Stalin, after all, was an opportunist. Trotsky was an ideologue. The mere thought that they could have swapped places makes one wince.) Moreover, should the authorship of the second letter ever come to light, as it did in Don Levin's research, it could only enhance Orlov's credentials as a true anti-Stalinist. Which is precisely what he wasn't. He had no ideological or any other disagreement with Stalin. He was simply running for his dear life, so he threw the dogs a bone to munch on. They munched on it for a couple of decades.

XXIII

Blackout. Time for the credits. Ten years ago an emigre Russian publishing house in France published a book called A Hunter Upside Down. The title suggests one of those cartoon puzzles in which you have to look for the hidden figures: hunters, rabbits, farmers, birds, and so on. The au­thor's name was Victor Henkin. He was Willie Fischer's sidekick from the good old Spanish days, and the Fischerabel story is what the book is all about, although it aims to be an autobiography. Some ofthe Orlov tidbits also hail from there. The book should have been a hit, if only because people in the know on the longer side of the Atlantic still believed that they had Rudolf Abel. By the same token, they still believed that Orlov, who had joined them, truly worked for that side whose decorations one may see proudly displayed on his chest in one of Orlov's rare close-ups, in a book published with great fanfare in the States well after Orlov's death in 1972. But no fanfare for Henkin's book. When an American publisher tried to get a contract for it, he ran into a copyright wall. There were also some minor scandals over alleged pla­giarism in the German or French edition, it was in the courts, and for all I know Henkin lost. Now he works for a radio station in Munich that broadcasts into Russia—almost the flip side of the job he had for donkey's years at Radio Mos­cow broadcasting in French. Or else he is retired. A Russian emigre, with a highly checkered record . . . Not trustworthy,

172 I J О s E PH B R О D s K Y

presumably paranoid . . . Living in the past, ill-tempered . . . Still, he is free now, he's got the right papers. He can go to the Gare de Lyon, board a train, and just like fifty years ago, after a nightlongjourney, he can arrive in Madrid, the city of his youth and adventure. All he has to do is to cross the large station square and he'll be standing in front of the Nacional; he could do it with his eyes closed. Still with his eyes closed, he can enter a lobby that teemed fifty years ago with Orlovs, Fischers, Abels, Hemingways, Phil- bys, Orwells, Mercaders, Malrauxs, Negrins, Ehrenburgs, and lesser lights like himself: with all those who have taken part in our story thus far or to whom we, one way or another, owe credit. Should he open his eyes, however, he'll discover that the Nacional is closed. It's been closed, according to some—mostly the young—for the last ten years; according to others, for the last fifty. Neither the young nor the old seem to know who pays the property tax, but maybe in Spain they do things differently.

XXIV

And in case you think, dear reader, that we've forgotten him, let's extract Kim Philby from the crowd in the lobby, and let's ask him what he's doing there. 'Tm with the paper, actually," we'll hear. "Covering the war." Let's press him as to whose side he's on, and let's imagine that, just for an instant, he'll talk straight. "Switching at the moment. Or­ders." He may as well motion slightly upward with his chin, toward the sixth floor of the Nacional. For I am absolutely convinced that it was Orlov who told Kim Philby in 1937 in Madrid or thereabouts to change his tune in The Times from pro-Republican to pro-Franco, for reasons of deeper cover. If, as the story goes, Philby was meant to be a long shot aimed at the sancta sanctorum of British intelligence, he had better go pro-Fascist. It's not that Orlov foresaw which way the Spanish show might go, though he could have had an inkling; he simply thought, or knew, that Philby should be played for keeps. And he could think this way, or know this, only if he was privy to the file that the Russians by then had on Philby, who was recruited in 1933, or to the actual re­cruitment of Philby. The first is certain, the second is pos­sible. In any case, Orlov knew Philby personally, which is what he tried to tell the hapless FBI man who interviewed him in 1944, in Iowa, I think, where he then dwelled, having emigrated to the United States from Canada. At that point, it seems, Orlov was finally ready to spill the beans; but the FBI man paid no attention to the mention of some English­man with a stutter who worked for the Soviet Union, which, on top of everything, was at that time an American ally. So Orlov decided not to press this any further, and Kim Philby headed for the stamp.

XXV

With these beans still intact in his hippothalamus on the one hand, and on the other having penned a couple of novels filled with the standard field-man yarn, but of the Russian variety, Orlov was no doubt of some interest to the budding CIA in the late 1940s. I have no idea, dear reader, who approached whom: I haven't studied Orlov's life or its avail­able record. Not my line ofwork. I am not even an amateur; I am just piecing all these things together in my spare time, not out of curiosity even but to quell the sensation of utter disgust caused by the sight of that literary paper's cover. Self-therapy, then, and who cares about sources so long as it works. At any rate, regardless of who approached whom, Orlov seems to have been retained by the CIA from the 1950s onward. Whether he was on the payroll or just free­lancing is hard to say; but to judge by his decorations, as well as by the marginal evidence of his subsequent pen­manship, it's a fair assumption. Most likely, he was engaged by the agency in an advisory capacity; nowadays this sort of thing is called consultancy. A good question would be whether the fellows back in Moscow knew of his new affil­iation. Assuming, for Orlov's sake, that he didn't notify them himself, for that would still be suicidal, and assuming that the newly born agency couldn't be penetrated—if only for the sake of definitions—the fellows in Moscow were in the dark. Still, they had reason to believe that Orlov was around, if only as an aspiring thriller writer. As they had no news of him for a couple of decades, they may have wondered. And when you wonder, you imagine the worst. In a certain line ofwork, it's only prudent. They might even have wanted to check.

And they had the wherewithal. So they took it out of moth­balls and put it in place. Still, they were in no hurry. Not until nineteen filthy-fine, that is. Then they suddenly felt pressed. And on Marchember umpteenth, Willie Fischer gets himself arrested in Brooklyn, New York, by those FBI men and declares, urbi et orbi: I am Rudolf Abel. And the tabloids go ape, in the States and all over the place. And Orlov doesn't squeak. Evidently he doesn't want to see his old pal again.

What was so special about nineteen filthy-fine, you may ask, and why was it imperative now to check the state of the beans in Orlov's hippothalamus? Even if they were still all there, hadn't they gone stale and useless? And who says old pals must be seen? Well, dear reader, brace yourself for loony assertions. For now we are going to show you, in a big way, that we haven't forgotten our subject. Now we are cooking literally with oil.

XXVIII

Contrary to popular demonology, the foreign policy of the Soviet Union was, from the beginning ofits existence, always opportunistic. I am using this term in its literal, not its de­rogatory, sense. Opportunism is the core of any foreign pol­icy, regardless of the degree of confidence a state may have in itself. It means the use of opportunity: objectively present, imagined, or created. For most ofits sorry history, the Soviet Union remained a highly insecure customer, traumatized by the circumstances of its birth, its deportment vis-a-vis the rest of the world fluctuating between caution and hostility. (Nobody fitted the width ofthat margin better than Molotov, Stalin's Foreign Minister.) As a consequence, the Soviet Union could afford only objectively present opportunities. Which it seized, notably in 1939, grabbing the Baltic states and half of Poland, as offered to Stalin by Hitler, and in the final stages of the war, when the Soviet Union found itself in possession of Eastern Europe. As for the opportunities imagined—the 1928 march on Warsaw, the 1936-39 adven­ture in Spain, and the 1940 Finnish campaign—the Soviet Union paid dearly for these flights of fancy (though in the case of Spain it was reimbursed with the country's gold re­serve). The first to pay, of course, was the General Staff, almost entirely beheaded by 1941. Yet the worst conse­quence of all these fantasies, I suppose, was that the Red Army's performance against a handful of Finnish troops made Hitler's temptation to attack Russia absolutely irresistible.

The real price for the pleasure of playing with imagined opportunities was the total number of divisions assigned to Operation Barbarossa.

XXIX

Victory in the war didn't change Soviet foreign policy much, since the spoils of war hardly matched the gigantic human and industrial losses the war inflicted. The scale of the dev­astation was extraordinary; the main postwar cry was recon­struction. This was carried out mainly by means of stripping the conquered territories of their technology and trans­planting it into the U.S.S.R. Psychologically satisfactory, this, however, could not put the nation ahead industrially. The country remained a second- or third-rate power, its only claim to consequence being its sheer size and its military machine. Formidable and state-of-the-art as the latter tried to be, the comfort the nation could derive from it was largely of the narcissistic sort, given the cumulative strength of its supposed adversaries and the emergence of nuclear weap­ons. What really fell under the onslaught of that machine, however, was the Soviet Union's foreign policy—its options defined, as it were, by its legions. To this reversal of Clause- witz one must add the growing rigidity of a state apparatus petrified by the fear of personal responsibility and imbued with the notion that the first word and the last word on all matters, above all on matters of foreign policy, belonged to Stalin. Under the circumstances, diplomatic initiatives, let alone attempts at creating opportunities, were unthinkable. What's more, the distinction between a created opportunity and an imagined one can be galling. It takes a mind accus­tomed to the dynamics of a well-heeled economy (to the accumulation of wealth, surplus production, and so on) to tell one from another. If you are short on that sort of ex­pertise, you may confuse the one thing for the other. And well into the 1950s, the Soviet Union was short on it. It still is.

XXX

And yet in the late 1950s the Soviet Union undertakes something rather spectacular, something that leaves you with the sense that, with the death of Stalin in 1953, Soviet foreign policy comes to life. After the Suez debacle in the autumn of 1956, the U.S.S.R. undertakes an unusually well- coordinated and well-sustained push toward the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. This departure is as sudden as it is successful. Its goal, as hindsight avails us, is control of the Middle East, or, more pointedly, of its oil fields. The logic behind this move is simple and fairly Marxist: who­ever controls energy resources controls production. In other words, the idea is to bring the Western industrial democra­cies to their knees. Whether to do it directly, by sending troops into the region, or by proxy, by supporting the local Arab regimes and turning them pro-Soviet, is, for the mo­ment, a matter ofcircumstance and logistics; the proxy option is obviously preferable. And initially this works: a number of Arab states in the region go pro-Soviet, and so fast that one may think that these societies were ripe for Communist ide­ology, or at least accustomed to that sort of discourse. They were not. The few existing CP cells in King Farouk's Egypt, for instance, were wiped out under Nasser entirely, their members turned into cellmates ordangled from the rope. An even greater Marxist dearth marked—still does—the rest of the Islamic world, east and west of Cairo: the culture of the Book won't abide another one, especially one written by a Jew. Still, the first Soviet steps in the region met with suc­cess, the degree of which could be explained only by the newcomer's recourse to some sort of network within those societies, and with access to all its levels. Such a network couldn't be of German origin (not even in Egypt), since Reinhard Gehlen, the postwar head of West German intel­ligence, sold his entire file cabinet in the late 1940s to the United States. Nor could it be the French, who were a marginal presence in the region to begin with, and then fiercely loyal to France. That left the local pro-British ele­ment, presumably taking its cue—in the vacuum left by the master race's withdrawal—from some local resident (sta­tioned, say, in Beirut). Out of nostalgia, perhaps, out of the hope for the empire's return. At any rate, it certainly wasn't the novelty of the Russian version of the infidel that nearly delivered the region to the Soviets in the late 1950s; it was a created opportunity.

XXXI

Imagine this blueprint on a drawing board somewhere in Moscow thirty-five or forty years ago. It says: There is a vacuum left in the Middle East by the British. Fill it up. Support new Arab leaders: one by one, or bundle them together into some sort of confederation, say, into a United Arab Republic or League. Give them arms, give them any­thing. Drive them into debt. Tell them that they can pay you back if they hike their oil prices. Tell them that they can be unreasonable about that, that you'll back them up all the way; and you've got nukes. In no time, the West cries uncle, the Arabs get rich, and you control the Arabs. You become top dog, as befits the first socialist country in the world. As for how to get your foot in the door, it's all taken care of. You'll get along with these guys just fine, they don't like Jews either.

And imagine this blueprint being not of your own manufac­ture. For it simply could not have been. In order to conceive of it, you would have to be acquainted with the region, and intimately so. You ought to know who is who there, what this sheikh or that colonel is up to, his pedigree and hang­ups. In Moscow and its vicinity, there is nobody with that sort of data. Furthermore, you ought to know about oil rev­enues, the market, its fluctuations, stocks, this or that in­dustrial democracy's annual intake of crude, tankers' fleets, refineries, stuff like that. There is nobody acquainted with this sort of thing on your staff, or moonlighting elsewhere either. And even if to imagine that such a fellow existed, a doctrinaire Marxist and a bookworm, with the clearance to read Western periodicals—even if such a fellow existed, and came up with such a blueprint, he would have to have a godfather in the Politburo to place this blueprint on the drawing board; and placing it there would give that member ofthe Politburo an edge that his colleagues wouldn't tolerate for a split second. Ultimately this plan could not have been conceived by a Russian, if only because Russia herself has oil; actually plenty of it. You don't regard as a source of energy something you waste. Had it been homemade, this blueprint would never have seen the light of day. Besides, it's too damn close to an imagined opportunity. The very reason that it is on your drawing board, though, is that it has nothing to do with the native imagination. That alone should be enough to qualify it as a created opportunity. For it comes from without, and its main attraction is that it is foreign-made. To members of the Soviet Politburo in the i95os, this blueprint was what blue jeans are to their kids. They liked it very much. Still, they wanted to check the label. And they had the wherewithal.

xxxiii

And while they are checking the label, dear reader, let me give you something straight, without the author's interfer­ence. Harold Adrian Russell Philby, "Kim" to his chums in England and especially in Russia, where this nickname rang no Kipling bell, being instead a brand-new Soviet name, popular especially in the 1930s, since it was the acronym of Kommunisticheskii Internatsional Molodezhi (Communist International of Youth), was born in Ambala, India, in—as the stamp rightly says—1912. His daddy was Harry St. John Philby, a great English Arabist and explorer who subse­quently converted to Islam and became an adviser to King Ibn Saud of guess which country. The boy was educated at Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history and economics and was a member of the Apostles. After Cambridge he freelanced for various London publi­cations, and in this capacity he went in 1937 to Spain to cover the Civil War and later on was taken up by The Times, for which he covered the initial stages of World War II. That's essentially what was known about the twenty-eight-year-old man by 1940, when he was employed by MIG, the coun­terintelligence branch of the fabled British SIS, and given the job of handling anti-Communist counterespionage mat­ters. Presumably at his own request. During the war years he moves rapidly through the ranks, gets stationed in Istan­bul, and becomes, in 1946, the head of Soviet counterin- telligence. That's a big job, which he abandons only three years later, having been posted as first secretary ofthe British Embassy in Washington, that is, as chief liaison officer be­tween the SIS and the CIA, where, among other things, he becomes a close friend of James Angleton, the CIA's head of counterintelligence. On the whole, it is a marvelous ca­reer. The man is awarded the OBE for his wartime services, he is greatly respected by the Foreign Office and the gentle­men of the press, and is groomed to become the head of the SIS. That, essentially, is what was known to his peers and his superiors about this thirty-nine-year-old man in 1951, when something rather untoward occurs. Two of his old pals, way back from Cambridge days, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, turn out to be Soviet spies and fl.ee to the Soviet Union. What's worse, a suspicion lurks in the heads of people-in-the-know on both sides of the Atlantic that it was Philby who warned them off. He is investigated, nothing is proved, doubt persists, and he is asked to resign. Life is cruel, the best of pals can bring you down. Such was the verdict of many, including the Foreign Office. He resumes his journalistic career—after all, he is still in his forties— but the inquiries continue. Some people just don't give up. In 1955 Harold Macmillan, then the British Foreign Sec­retary, in a statement before the Commons, fully exonerates Philby of any wrongdoing. His slate wiped clean, Philby obtains, through the Foreign Office's misty-eyed assistance, the job of foreign correspondent for The Economist and The Observer in Beirut, whereto he sails in 1956, never to see the chalk cliffs of Sussex again.

XXXIV

It's three years later that the fellows in Moscow click their tongues, admiring the blueprint. Still, they want to check the label. For what is a clean slate to some is the writing on the wall to others. They figure that the Brits couldn't get any goods on a Brit because they were searching the Brits; they were doomed because they were engaged in a tautology. For the job of a mole is to outsmart the natives. As for the Russian end—should they ever gain access to it, which is highly unlikely—it would reveal nothing either. The identity of a mole, especially a mole so highly placed, wouldn't be known even to the case officer running him, it would be only a code name or a bunch of digits at best. That's as much as even the most knowledgeable defector can tell you, not to mention the fact that he would be defecting straight into the arms of the SIS counterintelligence section, and guess who is in charge of that. The only two people who might know his identity would be the present Soviet head ofcounterintel- ligence, and that far no Brit could ever go, or the counterin- telligence officer who recruited the man initially. A sergeant, by definition, is older than his recruit, and since we are talk­ing here about the 1950s, that sergeant should by now be either dead or indeed running the whole Soviet counterintel- ligence show. Most likely, though, he is dead, since the best way to protect the recruit's identity is to kill the sergeant. Still, in 1933, when a twenty-one-year-old Cambridge grad­uate was recruited, things were not as watertight as they are now in the 1950s, when we are checking the label, and the good old—no, dead—sergeant might have said something to his superior (who was presumably dead, too: those purges of the state security apparatus in the late 1930s were not for nothing) or had a witness to the recruitment, or the poor young witless recruit himself might have rubbed shoulders with somebody who later went bad. After all, his choice of pals is what brought him down, though for a while they delivered all the comings and goings of the Anglo-American Atomic Energy Commission. (Good flies on the wall they were, but now look at them coming here to roost!) Let by­gones be bygones, of course; but if we are to carry out this blueprint, we need something tighter than an exoneration by Harold Macmillan—bless his heart—in the Commons, we need complete immunity for our man against any whistle- blowers. No surprises, no voices from the past, no skeletons in the closet. So who are those guys he might have rubbed shoulders with before they went bad? Where are their death certificates?

And they can't find Orlov's. And Willie Fischer sings his world-famous Abel lyric. And Orlov doesn't want to see his old pal. And they conclude that he is either dead or not suicidal. And so they move into the Middle East, into Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Libya; they seize the created opportu­nity. They shower new Arab leaders with planeloads and shiploads of military surplus, advisers, and whatnot; they drive those nations into debt. And the advisers advise the leaders to hike oil prices to pay them back. And the leaders do just that: by high margins and with impunity, backed by this new set of infidels with nukes. And the West starts to kowtow and cry "UN"—but that's just the first syllable of "uncle." And now the faithful, the fidel and the infidel, hate the Jews together. It all works just like the man said it would.

But life is cruel, and one day the new oil-producing pals get greedy. They create a cartel, OPEC by name, and start filling up their own coffers. They put the squeeze on the West, but not for our sake! They also quarrel among themselves. Anyhow, they get richer than their old masters, not to men­tion us. That wasn't in the blueprint. The architect of our Middle East policy, the son of King Ibn Saud's adviser, an observer and economist to boot, our great and unexposed— well, technically speaking—secret agent should have been able to foresee this turn of events! Thus far everything went according to the plan: he delivered, and now this. Well, he better tell us what to do next. Basically, we need him here now, on a day-to-day basis. Anyway, it's safer for him here in Moscow; fewer temptations as well. He can concentrate better. It ain't Beirut.

It certainly was much colder. At least for the spy who came in from the warmth. At long last. Actually, exactly thirty years after he was recruited. Whatever that means, except that he is fifty-one years old now and has to start a new life. Which, after all, isn't that hard, since the local lads go out of their privileged ways to assist you; and besides, at fifty- one no life is that new, no country is that foreign. Especially if you have spied for that country all your adult life. And especially if you did it not for money but out of conviction. So the place should be familiar to you, at least mentally. For it's the conviction that is your home, your ultimate comfort: you blow all your life savings on furnishing it. If the world around you is poor and colorless, then you stuff this place with all manner of mental candelabra and Persian carpets. If that world used to be rich in texture, then you'll settle for mental monochrome, for a few abstract chairs.

And, as we are on our last leg, dear suffering reader, let's get a bit anachronistic. There is a certain type of Englishman who appreciates frugality and inefficiency: the one who nods contentedly at a stalled elevator or at one boy being caned for another boy's prank. He recognizes botch and bungle the way one recognizes one's relatives. He recognizes himself in a peeling, wobbly railing, damp hotel sheets, slovenly trees in a soot-laden window, bad tobacco, the smelly car­riage of a delayed train, bureaucratic obstacles, indecision and sloth, impotent shrugs; certainly in poorly cut serge clothes, in gray. So he loves Russia; mainly from a distance, as he cannot afford the trip except perhaps later in life, in his fifties or sixties, when he retires. And he'd do a lot for Russia, for his inefficient yet dramatic, soulful, Doctor Zhi- vago-like (the movie, not the book) Russia, where the twen­tieth century hasn't yet set its Goodyear tire, where his childhood still continues. He doesn't want his Russia to go American. He wants her to stay intense and awkward, in brown woolen stockings with broad pink garters: no nylons, and please no pantyhose. It is his equivalent of rough trade, of the working-class lads for whom his old Cambridge pals will be prowling London pubs for the rest of their lives. He is straight, though; and it's Russia for him, ifit's not Germany or Austria.

XXXIX

And if Russia is Communist, so much the better. Especially if it is 1933 and Germany is out of the question. And if somebody with a slight accent asks you to work for Russia, and you are just twenty-one, you say yes, because it's unlike anything else, and it sounds subversive. If school teaches you anything, it is to belong to a party, or at least to a club, and to form a cell. The CP is just another Apostles, a sort of frat, and it preaches brotherhood. At any rate, you go for what your pals do, and to them "the world proletariat" con­jures up rough trade on a grand scale. And in a while you hear that slight accent again and you are asked to do a job —nothing big, though faintly foul. And you do it, and now the slight accent has the goods on you. If he is smart, the next time he asks you to do something, he doesn't mention the world proletariat, he mentions Russia. Because you won't do it, say, for India, though India, technically speaking, is part of the world, not to mention the proletariat. Fifty years ago social fiction was still ethnocentric, and so were spies. More Chekhov for you, then; more of Constance Garnett's Tolstoy on the train ride to Spain, for it's the time. It is also the place. A bright young thing can sample that brotherhood here: its blood, lice, hope, despair, defeat, apathy. Instead, he hangs around in the lobby of the Nacional, sees some scum upstairs, and is told—to his secret relief, no doubt— to switch sides, for the sake of the greater good. That's how a bright young thing learns about the big picture, a.k.a. the future. The next time he hears the slight accent he knows it is a voice from the future. The accent will be different, since the first slightly accented throat has already been cut for the bright young thing's eventual safety; and if that throat had a beloved, she's already digging the permafrost of her twenty-five-year sentence in the Russian Far East, against the majestic snowy backdrop of a would-be Zhivago movie. Yet by the time the voice from the future enters your ear, there is World War II on your hands, Russia is an ally, and the SIS wants you to take part in the war effort. The big picture barges into view, and you ask for a Russian job. And since you are a gentleman, you are welcomed to it by senior gentlemen who can be identified as such, however, mainly by which door they push in a loo. Well, not even then.

XL

So you know the country where you end up thirty years later at the ripe age of fifty-one. Full of beans, no doubt, but past your prime. Ah, the chalk cliffs of Sussex! Ah, the accursed island! Ah, the whole Pax Britannica! They'll pay dearly for ruining such a brilliant career, for putting a clever man out to grass at the apogee of his ascent! A clever man knows how to get even with an empire: by using another empire. Never the twain shall meet. That's what makes a big picture grow bigger. Not a tooth for a tooth but a mouthful for a tooth! Perhaps the greatest satisfaction of every spy is the thought that he is playing Fate, that it's he who pulls strings. Or else cuts them. He fashions himself after Clotho, or perhaps after Arachne. A deus in rmachina that runs on petrol, he may not even catch the irony of being situated in Mazoutny Lane— well, not initially. At any rate, deus or deuce, controlling oil fields is a greater game than betraying the secrets of British intelligence to the Russians. There is not much left to betray in London anyway, whereas here the stakes are huge. The entire world order is at stake. Whoever wins here, it will be his victory. He, an observer and economist to boot, didn't readDas Kapital and The Seven Pillars of Wisdom for nothing. Not to mention that the victory will be Russia's, since what can you expect of democracies: no resolve. Imag­ine Russia, his slovenly brown-woolen-stockings-cum-pink- garters-clad Russia, as the world's master, and not because of the nukes or the ballistic missiles only: imagine her, soulful and slothful, with all the Arabian peninsula's oil revenues under her pillow—uncertain, Chekhovian, anti-rationalist! A far better master (nay, mistress) of the world than his own Cartesian West, so easy to fool, himself being a good ex­ample. And should worse come to worse, should it be not Russia but some local, some sheikh or dictator, it's fine by him, too. In fact, Daddy would be proud of him if it should all go to the Saudis.

XLI

And there it went, practically all of it. So much of it, in any case, that it should be the Saudis issuing this stamp, not the Russians. Well, perhaps one day they will. Or the Iraqis, or the Iranians. Whoever is to master the oil monopoly should issue the stamp. Ah, Muslims, Muslims! Where would they be now, were it not for the Soviet foreign policy of the 1g6os and 1970s; that is, were it not for the late Mr. Philby? Imag­ine them unable to purchase a Kalashnikov, let alone a rocket launcher. They'd be unfit for the front page, they wouldn't make even the backdrop for a pack of camels . . . Ah, but life is cruel, and beneficiaries don't remember their bene­factors; nor, for that matter, do victims remember the villain. And perhaps they shouldn't. Perhaps the origins of good and bad are better off remaining obscured—especially the latter. Does it really matter what clouds the godhead: the concept of dialectical materialism or the Prophet's turban? Can we tell one from the other? In the final analysis, there is no hierarchy between the cherry orchard and the triviality of the sand; it is only a matter of preference. For men, as well as for their money. Money, evidently, lacks a conscience of its own, and the jackpot goes to the desert simply out of its kinship for multitudes. On the whole, like a certain kind of Englishman, money has an eastward longing, ifonly because that realm is extremely populous. A secret agent, then, is but an early bird, a big bank's harbinger. And if he settles there, in the East, and goes native, helped along by local liquor or a willing maiden, well, so what? Have Noah's pi­geons returned? Ah, dear reader, imagine a letter sent today or in the near future from Moscow to Riyadh. What do you think it will contain? A birthday greeting, vacation plans, news of a loss in the family, complaints about the cold cli­mate? No, more likely a request for money. Say, for an investment in the well-being of Riyadh's fellow Muslims on Soviet territory. And it will be written in English, this letter, and it won't be worth perlustration. A postmaster, perhaps, having glanced at its return address, may lift the crescent of the eyebrow obscured by his traditional headgear, but after a momentary hesitation he'll shove this envelope into an appropriate slot: an envelope with a Philby stamp on it.

XLII

A glum thought, nods the exhausted reader. But wouldn't things have come to this juncture anyway, even without our English friend's assistance? Sure they would have, given the so-called dynamics of the modern world, which means the population explosion and the industrial gluttony of the West. These two would suffice; no need for a third party, let alone for an individual agency. At best, our English friend just articulated what was in the air or, as it were, afoot. Other than that, he was utterly insignificant. Sooner or later this was bound to happen, Kim or no Kim, Russia or no Russia. Well, without Russia perhaps it would have taken a touch longer, but so what. Individuals are incidental, it's all eco­nomics, isn't it? In this sense, even if an individual exists, he doesn't. Sounds a bit solipsistic, in a Marxist way; but our English friend would be the first to appreciate that. Mter all, historical necessity was his motto, his credo, his occa­sional rebuke to pangs of conscience. And after that, for all the professional hazards of one's trade, a belief in the im­minent triumph of one's cause is safe betting, isn't it? (What if your cause triumphs in your lifetime, eh?) At any rate, from the standpoint of historical necessity, our man was of no use, at best he was redundant. For the objective ofhistory was to make the Arabs rich, the West poor, and the Russians bob and bubble in limbo. This is what the bottom line says in that true bel canto of necessity, and who is the author to argue with it? A penny, then, for our friend's sense of mis­sion; but not much more for the author's flight offancy either. Anyway, what are his sources?

xliii

"Sources?" shrugs the author contemptuously. Who needs them? Who can trust sources? And since when? And does the reader realize what he is getting into by suspecting his author of being wrong, not to mention by proving it? Aren't you afraid, dear reader, that your successful refutation ofthe author's little theory might boil down to an inescapable con­clusion on your part that the dark brown substance in which you find yourself up to your nostrils in the world today is immanent, preordained on high, at the very least sponsored by Mother Nature? Do you really need that? Whereas the author aims to spare you this anguish by proving that the aforementioned substance is of human manufacture. In this respect, your author is a true humanist. No, dear reader, you don't need sources. Neither sources nor tributaries of defectors' evidence; not even electronic precipitation raining onto your lap from the satellite-studded heaven. With our sort of flow, all you need is an estuary, a mouth really; and beyond that, a sea with the bottom line for a horizon. Well, that much you've already seen.

XLIV

Nobody, though, knows the future. Least of all those who believe in historical determinism; and next to them, spies and journalists. Perhaps that's why the former often disguise themselves as the latter. Of course, when it comes to the future, any occupation is good cover. Still, information gath­ering beats them all, since any bit of information, including a secret one, is generated by the past: almost by definition, information deals with faits accomplis. Be it a new bomb, a planned invasion, or a shift in policy, you can learn only about what has already happened, what has already taken place. The paradox of espionage is that the more you know about your adversary, the more your own development is stunted, since this knowledge forces you into trying to catch up with him, to thwart his efforts. He keeps you occupied by altering your own priorities. The better your spies, there­fore, the more you fall into dependence on what you learn. You are not acting any longer: you are reacting. This maroons you in the past, with little access to the present and none to the future. Well, not to a future of your own design, let alone your own making. Imagine the Soviets not stealing American atomic secrets and thus spending the last four decades with no nukes to brandish. It could have been a different country; not much more prosperous, perhaps, given the doctrine, but at least the fiasco that we have re­cently witnessed might have occurred much earlier. If worse came to worse, they might have built a viable version oftheir socialism. But when you steal something, the catch possesses you, or at least your faculties. Considering the industry of our English friend and his pals, it went far beyond faculties; both hands of their Russian fence were, for quite some time, too busy to build socialism, they were hoarding goods. It could be argued that by betraying the empire in such vol­ume, the boys, in fact, served the empire in a far more substantial manner than its most ardent standard-bearers. For the wealth of secret intelligence passed to the Soviets by the Cambridge class of 1931 mesmerized its recipients to the point of making at least their foreign policy thoroughly contingent on the harvest yielded by their own plants. For the men in Moscow Center, it's been like reading the Sunday papers nonstop seven days a week instead of doing the dishes or taking the kids to the zoo.

xlv

So you can't say it was all in vain, dear reader, can you? Even though you may be as tired of the subject as the author himself. Let's claim fatigue, dear reader, and reach no con­clusion, and spare ourselves the distrust, not to say the ac­rimony. On the whole, there is nothing wrong with intricacy of thought except that it's always achieved at the expense of thought's depth. Let's get into your Japanese Toyota, which doesn't consume a lot of the Arab oil product, and go for a meal. Chinese? Vietnamese? Thai? Indian? Mexican? Hun­garian? Polish? The more we bungle abroad, the more varied our diet. Spanish? Greek? French? Italian? Perhaps the only good thing about the dead spies was that they had a choice. But as I write this, the news comes over the wireless that the Soviet Union is no more Armenian, then? Uzbek? Ka­zakh? Estonian? For some reason, we don't feel like eating at home tonight. We don't want to eat English.

XLVI

Why should one bother so much about dead spies? Why can't one contain the repulsion that rises at the sight of a literary magazine's cover? Isn't this an overreaction? What's so new about someone's belief that a just society exists else­where, so special about this old Rousseauish lunacy, enacted or not? Every epoch and every generation is entitled to its own utopia, and so was Philby's. Sure, the ability to cling to that sort of garbage beyond the age of down payment (not to mention the age of retirement) is puzzling, but one can easily put this down to temperament or to some organic disorder. A Catholic, a lapsed Catholic especially, can ap­preciate the predicament, and make a meal out of it if he is a writer; and so can a heathen. Or did I feel queasy simply because of the violation of scale, because of the printing enlargement of something small, a stamp really, as a result of which the perforation line takes on the dimension of a cloth fringe: a hanky's, a pillowcase's, a bedspread's, a pet­ticoat's? Maybe I have a problem with fringed linen—a child­hood trauma again? The day was hot and for a moment it felt like the enlargement of the stamp on the magazine's cover would go on and on, and envelop Belsize Park, Hamp- stead, and keep growing, larger and larger. A vision, you know. Too much reading of surrealist poets. Or else too many placards with the Politburo members' faces on the old ret­ina—and the man on the stamp looks like one of them, for all his resemblances to Alec Guinness and Trevor Howard. Plus, of course, the Cyrillic . . . enough to get dizzy. But it wasn't like 'that. There was no vision. There was just a face, of the kind you wouldn't pay attention to were it not for the caption, which, apart from anything else, was in Cyrillic. At that moment I regretted that I knew Russian. I stood there groping for an English word to shield my wits from the familiarity that the Cyrillic letters exuded. As is often the case with mongrels, I couldn't come up with the right word instantly, and so I turned and left the store. I only remem­bered the word well outside, but because of what it was, I couldn't get myself back to the store to buy the issue. The word was "treachery."

XLVII

A wonderful word, that. It creaks like a board laid over a chasm. Onomatopoeically, it beats ethics. It has all the eu­phony of a taboo. For the ultimate boundary of a tribe is its language. If a word doesn't stop you, then a tribe isn't yours. Its vowels and its sibilants don't trigger your instincts, don't send your nerve cells into revulsion, don't make you wince.

Which is to say, your command of this tribe's language is just a matter of mimicry. Which, in turn, points at your belonging to a different evolutionary order. Sublingual or supralingual, at least as regards the language that contains the word "treachery." Which is to prevent the sudden re­versal of a bone to jelly. Which is to say, evolution never ends: it still continues. The Origin of Species ain't the end of the road; at best a milestone. Which is to say, not all people are people. Might as well add this stamp to the Shells and Mollusks series. It's still a seabed.

XL VIII

You can only enlarge a stamp, you can't reduce it. That is, you can, but reduction will serve no purpose. That is the self-defense of small items, or, if you will, their raison d'etre. They can only be enlarged. That is, if you are in the graphics department of a literary paper of humble strikebreaking origins. "Blow it up," says the editor, and you cheerfully trot off to the lab. Can't reduce it, can you? Simply wouldn't cross your mind. Nowadays just push a button and it either grows or shrinks. To life-size, or to the size of a louse. Push it once more and the louse is gone. Extinct. Not what the editor asked for, though. He wants it life-size: large. The size of his fantasy, if not his dilemma. "Would you buy this man a drink or shake hands with him?" The old English pickle, except now it's grown chic, with perhaps a touch of retro to it. Ah, these days you push a button and the whole mental swamp gets heaving and gurgling, from the Pas de Calais to the Bering Strait, from the 1930s onward. For that's what history is for the generation currently active: for lapsed Catholics, editors in chief, and the like. For nowadays every­thing is chic and retro: this isn't the fin-de-siecle for nothing.

There is little to look forward to save your bank statement. Whom would you spy for nowadays if you had access to secret information, if you still ached to defy your class or your country? For the Arabs? For the Japanese? Whose plant, let alone mole, could you be? The village has gone truly global; there is a dearth of allegiance, a dearth of affinity. Ay, you can't betray Europe to Asia any longer, or, I'm afraid, the other way around. It's goodbye to conviction, goodbye to the good old godless Communism. From now on, it's all nostalgia for you, old boy, all retro. From your baggy pants to the matte black of your video, stereo, or dashboard echo­ing the burnished steel of a gun barrel. That's about how radical, how chic it's going to be: in Europe, but in Asia, too. So go ahead, blow up that louse from the 1950s, for reducing it might rob you of your emotional history. What would you be without that, without a big-time traitor never caught and never recanting in your past? Just a cipher in tax-bracket hell, not dissimilar to that of the old wretch when he still drew his salary in pounds. Go ahead and blow it up; pity it can't be made three-dimensional. Pity, too, that you have no idea, as you are pressing "enlarge," that in less than three weeks the whole thing on whose behalf your man toiled all his life will go bust.

XLIX

In a dream. A cross between a meadow and a communal garden somewhere in Kensington, with a fountain or a statue in the middle of it. A sculpture, anyway. Modern, but not very modern. Abstract, with a big hole in the center and a few strings across it: like a guitar but less feminine. Gray. Sort of like by Barbara Hepworth, but made of discarded thoughts and unfinished sentences. Lacelike. On the plinth there is an inscription: To Beloved Spider. Grateful Cob­webs.

L

Twangs of balalaika, the crackle of atmospherics. A hand fiddling with an eye-blinking wireless. It's Moscow, Russia, anytime between 1963 and 1988. More atmospherics and balalaika. Then the first bars of "Lilli" Burter and an upright female voice: "This is the BBC World Service. The news. Read to you by ..." In her thirties, perhaps. Well-scrubbed face, almost no makeup. A chiffon blouse. White. And a cardigan. Most likely beige, the tea-cum-milk color. A broad­cloth skirt, knee-high. Black or dark blue, like the evening sky outside. Or maybe it's gray; but knee-high. Knee-high knee-high knee-high. And then there is a slip. Oh my oh my oh my. Another Boeing is blown up in a desert. Pol Pot, Phnom Penh. Mister—a split-second pause—Mugabe. Knee-high. Main thing, the lace. Fragile and intricate like circumlocution. Minuscule dotty flowers. That never see the light of day. And that's why they are so white. Oh blast! Sihanouk, Pinochet, Rudi Deutchke. Chile, Chile, Chile, Chile. Dotty little pansies smothered to death by light-brown tights from a shop in Islington. That's what the world came down to. From the step-by-step approach, from the silks/ flesh/garter/bingo system to the either/or of pantyhose. De­tente, SYGINT, ICBMs. New tricks, but the dog's too old. For these, and for the old ones, too. Well, looks like. And going to end up here after all. Pity. Can't win them all, can you? Another whiskey, then. "The main points again . . ." In her thirties, if you ask me, and on the plump side. Din­nertime anyway. Methuselah fancies dotty littlepansies. Me­thuselah fancies ... All that matters in this life is that cobwebs outlive the spider. How does that thingummy— Tyutchev's! Tyutchev is the name—lyric go?

We are not given to appraise In whom or how our word may live on. And we are vouchsafed oblivion The way we once were given grace.

Dushenka! Dushenka! What's for dinner? "Ah, dahrleeng, I thought we would eat English tonight. Boiled beef."

1991

An Immodest Proposal

About an hour ago, the stage where I stand now as well as your seats were quite empty. An hour hence, they will be empty again. For most of the day, I imagine, this place stays empty; emptiness is its natural state. Had it been endowed with consciousness of its own, it would regard our presence as a nuisance. This is as good an illustration as any of one's significance, in any case; certainly of the significance of our gathering. No matter what brings us here, the ratios are not in our favor. Pleased as we may be with our number, in spatial terms it is of infinitesimal consequence.

This is true, I think, of any human assembly; but when it comes to poetry, it rings a special bell. For one thing, poetry, the writing or the reading of it, is an atomizing art; it is far less social than music or painting. Also, poetry has a certain appetite for emptiness, starting, say, with that of infinity. Mainly, though, because historically speaking the ratio of poetry's audience to the rest of society is not in the former's favor. So we should be pleased with one another, if only because our being here, for all its seeming insignif-

Delivered at the Library of Congress, October 1991.

icance, is a continuation of that history which, by some ac­counts floating around this town, has ended.

Throughout what we call recorded history, the audience for poetry does not appear to have exceeded 1 percent of the entire population. The basis for this estimate is not any particular research but the mental climate of the world that we live in. In fact, the weather has been such that, at times, the quoted figure seems a bit generous. Neither Greek nor Roman antiquity, nor the glorious Renaissance, nor the En­lightenment provides us with an impression of poetry com­manding huge audiences, let alone legions or battalions, or of its readership being vast.

It never was. Those we call the classics owe their reputations not to their contemporaries but to their posterity. This is not to say that posterity is the quantitative expression of their worth. It just supplies them, albeit retroactively and with some effort, with the size of readership to which they were entitled from the beginning. As it was, their actual circumstances were by and large fairly narrow; they courted patrons or flocked to the courts pretty much in the same way poets today go to the universities. Obviously that had to do with the hope of largesse, but it was also the quest for an audience. Literacy being the privilege of the few, where else could a poet find a sympathetic ear or an attentive eye for his lines? The seat of power was often the seat of culture; and its diet was better, the company was less monochrome and more tender than elsewhere, including the monastery.

Centuries passed. Seats of power and seats of culture parted ways, it seems for good. That, of course, is the price you pay for democracy, for the rule of the people, by the people, and for the people, of whom still only 1 percent reads poetry. If a modern poet has anything in common with his Renaissance colleague, it is in the first place the paltry distribution of his work. Depending on one's temperament, one may relish the archetypal aspects of this predicament— pride oneself in being the means ofcarrying on the hallowed tradition, or derive a similar degree of comfort from one's so-well-precedented resignation. There is nothing more psy­chologically rewarding than linking oneself to the glories of the past, if only because the past is more articulate than the present, not to mention the future.

A poet can always talk himself out of a jam; after all, that's his metier. But I am here to speak not about the predicament of the poet, who is never, in the final analysis, a victim. I am here to speak about the plight ofhis audience: about your plight, as it were. Since I am paid this year by the Library of Congress, I take this job in the spirit of a public servant, not in any other. So it is the audience for poetry in this country that is my concern; and it is the public servant in me who finds the existing ratio of 1 percent ap­palling and scandalous, not to say tragic. Neither my tem­perament nor the chagrin of an author over his own dismal sales has anything to do with this appraisal.

The standard number of copies of a first or second col­lection by any poet in this country is something between 2,ooo and 1o,ooo (and I speak of the commercial houses only). The latest census that I've seen gives the population of the United States as approximately 250 million. This means that a standard commercial publishing house, printing this or that author's first or second volume, aims at only .001 percent of the entire population. To me, this is absurd.

What stood for centuries in the way of the public's access to poetry was the absence of press and the limitation ofliteracy. Now both are practically universal, and the aforementioned ratio is no longer justifiable. Actually, even if we are to go by that 1 percent, it should result in publishers printing not 2,ooo to 1o,ooo copies of a poet's collection but 2.5 million. Do we have that many readers of poetry in this country? I believe that we do; in fact, I believe that we have a lot more than that. Just how many could be determined, of course, through market research, but that is precisely what should be avoided.

For market research is restrictive by definition. So is any sociological breakdown of census figures into groups, classes, and categories. They presuppose certain binding characteristics pertaining to each social group, ushering in their prescribed treatment. This leads, plain and simple, to a reduction of people's mental diet, to their intellectual seg­regation. The market for poetry is believed to be those with a college education, and that's whom a publisher targets. The blue-collar crowd is not supposed to read Horace, nor the farmer in his overalls Montale or Marvell. Nor, for that matter, is the politician expected to know by heart Gerard Manley Hopkins or Elizabeth Bishop.

This is dumb as well as dangerous. More about that later. For the moment I'd like to assert only that the distri­bution of poetry should not be based on market criteria, since any such estimate, by definition, shortchanges the ex­isting potential. When it comes to poetry, the net result of market research, for all its computers, is distinctly medieval. We are all literate, therefore everybody is a potential reader of poetry: it is on this assumption that the distribution of books should be based, not on some claustrophobic notion of demand. For in cultural matters, it is not demand that creates supply, it is the other way around. You read Dante because he wrote the Divine Comedy, not because you felt the need for him: you would not have been able to conjure either the man or the poem.

Poetry must be available to the public in far greater volume than it is. It should be as ubiquitous as the nature that surrounds us, and from which poetry derives many of its similes; or as ubiquitous as gas stations, if not as cars themselves. Bookstores should be located not only on cam­puses or main drags but at the assembly plant's gates also. Paperbacks of those we deem classics should be cheap and sold at supermarkets. This is, after all, a country of mass production, and I don't see why what's done for cars can't be done for books of poetry, which take you quite a bit further. Because you don't want to go a bit further? Perhaps; but if this is so, it's because you are deprived of the means of transportation, not because the distances and the desti­nations that I have in mind don't exist.

Even to sympathetic ears, I suppose, all this may sound a bit loony. Well, it isn't; it also makes perfect economic sense. A book of poetry printed in 2. 5 million copies and priced at, say, two dollars, will in the end bring in more than 1o,ooo copies of the same edition priced at twenty dollars. You may encounter, of course, a problem of storage, but then you'll be compelled to distribute as far and wide as the country goes. Moreover, if the government would recognize that the construction of your library is as essential to your inner vo­cation as business lunches are to the outer, tax breaks could be made available to those who read, write, or publish po­etry. The main loser, of course, would be the Brazilian rain forest. But I believe that a tree facing the choice between becoming a book of poems or a bunch of memos may well opt for the former.

A book goes a long way. Overkill in cultural matters is not an optional strategy, it is a necessity, since selective cultural targeting spells defeat no matter how well one's aim is taken. Fittingly, then, without having anyideawhom it is in particu­lar that I am addressing at the moment, I would like to sug­gest that with the low-cost technology currently available, there is now a discernible opportunity to turn this nation into an enlightened democracy. And I think this opportunity should be risen to before literacy is replaced with videocy.

I recommend that we begin with poetry, not only because this way we would echo the development of our civiliza- tion—the song was there before the story—but also because it is cheaper to produce. A dozen titles would be a decent beginning. The average poetry reader's bookshelf contains, I believe, somewhere between thirty and fifty collections by various authors. It's possible to put half of it on a single shelf, or a mantelpiece—or if worse comes to worse, on the windowsill—of every American household. The cost of a dozen poetfy paperbacks, even at their current price, would amount at most to one-fourth the price of a television set. That this is not done has to do not with the absence of a popular appetite for poetry but with the near-impossibility of whetting this appetite: with the unavailability of books.

In my view, books should be brought to the doorstep like electricity, or like milk in England: they should be consid­ered utilities, and their cost should be appropriately mini­mal. Barring that, poetry could be sold in drugstores (not least because it might reduce the bill from your shrink). At the very least, an anthology of American poetry should be found in the drawer in every room in every motel in the land, next to the Bible, which will surely not object to this proximity, since it does not object to the proximity of the phone book.

All this is doable, in this country especially. For apart from anything else, American poetry is this country's greatest pat­rimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger. The quantity of verse that has been penned on these shores in the last century and a half dwarfs the similar enterprise of any literature and, for that matter, both ourjazz and our cinema, rightly adored throughout the world. The same goes, I daresay, for its qual­ity, for this is a poetry informed by the spirit of personal responsibility. There is nothing more alien to American po­etry than those great Continental specialties: the sensibility of the victim with its wildly oscillating, blame-thirsty finger; the incoherence of elevation; the Promethean affectations and special pleading. To be sure, American verse has its vices—too many a parochial visionary, a verbose neurotic. But it is extremely tempering stuff, and sticking with the 1 percent distribution method robs this nation of a natural resource of endurance, not to mention a source of pride.

Poetry, by definition, is a highly individualistic art; in a sense, this country is its logical abode. At any rate, it is only logical that in this country this individualistic tendency has gone to its idiosyncratic extreme, in modernists and tra­ditionalists alike. (In fact, this is what gave birth to modern­ists.) To my eye as well as my ear, American poetry is a relentless nonstop sermon on human autonomy; the song of the atom, if you will, defying the chain reaction. Its general tone is that of resilience and fortitude, of exacting the full look at the worst and not blinking. It certainly keeps its eyes wide open, not so much in wonderment, or poised for a revelation, as on the lookout for danger. It is short on con­solation (the diversion of so much European poetry, espe­cially Russian); rich and extremely lucid in detail; free of nostalgia for some Golden Age; big on hardihood and escape. If one looked for its motto, I would suggest Frost's line from "A Servant to Servants": "The best way out is always through."

If I permit myself to speak about American poetry in such a wholesale manner, it is not because of its body's strength and vastness but because my subject is the public's access to it. In this context it must be pointed out that the old adage about a poet's role in, or his duty to, his society puts the entire issue upside down. If one can speak of the social function of somebody who is essentially self-employed, then the social function of a poet is writing, which he does not by society's appointment but by his own volition. His only duty is to his language, that is, to write well. By writing, especially by writing well, in the language of his society, a poet takes a large step toward it. It is society's job to meet him halfway, that is, to open his book and to read it.

If one can speak of any dereliction of duty here, it's not on the part of the poet, for he keeps writing. Now, poetry is the supreme form of human locution in any culture. By failing to read or listen to poets, a society dooms itself to inferior moSes of articulation—of the politician, or the sales­man, or the charlatan—in short, to its own. It forfeits, in other words, its own evolutionary potential, for what distin­guishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom is precisely the gift of speech. The charge frequently leveled against poetry—that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic, and whatnot —indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.

For poetic discourse is continuous; it also avoids cliche and repetition. The absence of those things is what speeds up and distinguishes art from life, whose chief stylistic device, if one may say so, is precisely cliche and repetition, since it always starts from scratch. It is no wonder that society today, chancing on this continuing poetic discourse, finds itself at a loss, as if boarding a runaway train. I have remarked else­where that poetry is not a form of entertainment, and in a certain sense not even a form of art, but our anthropological, genetic goal, our linguistic, evolutionary beacon. We seem to sense this as children, when we absorb and remember verses in order to master language. As adults, however, we abandon this pursuit, convinced that we have mastered it. Yet what we've mastered is but an idiom, good enough per­haps to outfox an enemy, to sell a product, to get laid, to earn a promotion, but certainly not good enough to cure anguish or cause joy. Until one learns to pack one's sentences with meanings like a van or to discern and love in the be­loved's features a "pilgrim soul"; until one becomes aware that "No memory of having starred I Atones for later dis­regard, I Or keeps the end from being hard"—until things like that are in one's bloodstream, one still belongs among the sublinguals. Who are the majority, if that's a comfort.

If nothing else, reading poetry is a process of terrific linguistic osmosis. It is also a highly economical form of mental acceleration. Within a very short space a good poem covers enormous mental ground, and often, toward its finale, provides one with an epiphany or a revelation. That happens because in the process of composition a poet employs—by and large unwittingly—the two main modes of cognition available to our species: Occidental and Oriental. (Of course both modes are available whenever you find frontal lobes, but different traditions have employed them with different degrees of prejudice.) The first puts a high premium on the rational, on analysis. In social terms, it is accompanied by man's self-assertion and generally is exemplified by Des- cartes's "Cogito ergo sum." The second relies mainly on intu­itive synthesis, calls for self-negation, and is best represented by the Buddha. In other words, a poem offers you a sample of complete, not slanted, human intelligence at work. This is what constitutes the chief appeal of poetry, quite apart from its exploiting rhythmic and euphonic properties of the language which are in themselves quite revelatory. A poem, as it were, tells its reader, "Be like me. " And at the moment of reading you become what you read, you become the state of the language which is a poem, and its epiphany or its revelation is yours. They are still yours once you shut the book, since you can't revert to not having had them. That's what evolution is all about.

Now, the purpose of evolution is the survival neither of the fittest nor of the defeatist. Were it the former, we would have to settle for Arnold Schwarzenegger; were it the latter, which ethically is a more sound proposition, we'd have to make do with Woody Allen. The purpose of evolution, believe it or not, is beauty, which survives it all and generates truth simply by being a fusion of the mental and the sensual. As it is always in the eye of the beholder, it can't be wholly embodied save in words: that's what ushers in a poem, which is as incurably semantic as it is incurably euphonic.

No other language accumulates so much of this as does En­glish. To be born into it or to arrive in it is the best boon that can befall a man. To prevent its keepers from full access to it is an anthropological crime, and that's what the present system of the distribution of poetry boils down to. I don't rightly know what's worse, burning books or not reading them; I think, though, that token publishing falls somewhere in between. I am sorry to put this so drastically, but when I think of the great works by the poets of this language bulldozed into neglect, on the one hand, and then consider the mind-boggling demographic vista, on the other, I feel that we are on the verge of a tremendous cultural backslide. And it is not the culture I am worried about, or the fate of the great or not-so-great poets' works. What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express himselfadequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is hound to act violently, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there should have been an adjective.

In short, the good old quaint ways should be abandoned. There should be a nationwide distribution of poetry, classic and contemporary. It should be handled privately, I sup­pose, but supported by the state. The age group it should be aiming at is fifteen and up. The emphasis should be on the American classics; and as to who or what should be printed, that should be decided by a body of two or three people in the know, that is, by the poets. The academics, with their ideological bickering, should be kept out of it, for nobody has the authority to prescribe in this field on any grounds other than taste. Beauty and its attendant truth are not to be subordinated to any philosophical, political, or even ethical doctrine, since aesthetics is the mother of ethics and not the other way around. Should you think otherwise, try to recall the circumstances in which you fall in love.

What should be kept in mind, however, is that there is a tendency in society to appoint one great poet per period, often per century. This is done in order to avoid the re­sponsibility of reading others, or for that matter the chosen one, should you find his or her temperament uncongenial. The fact is that at any given moment in any literature there are several poets of equal gravity and significance by whose lights you can go. In any case, whatever their number, in the end it corresponds to the known temperaments, for it can't be otherwise: hence their differences. By grace of lan­guage, they are there to provide society with a hierarchy or a spectrum of aesthetic standards to emulate, to ignore, to acknowledge. They are not so much role models as mental shepherds, whether they are cognizant of it or not—and it's better if they are not. Society needs all of them; and should the project I am speaking of ever be embarked on, no pref­erences should be shown to any one of them. Since on these heights there is no hierarchy, the fanfare should be equal.

I suspect that society settles just for one, because one is easier to dismiss than several. A society with several poets for its secular saints would be harder to rule, since a politician would have to offer a plane of regard, not to mention a level of diction, matching at least the one offered by poets: a plane of regard and a level of diction which no longer could be viewed as exceptional. But such a society would be per­haps a truer democracy than what we've known thus far. For the purpose of democracy is not democracy itself: that would be redundant. The purpose of democracy is its enlighten­ment. Democracy without enlightenment is at best a well- policed jungle with one designated great poet in it for its Tarzan.

It's the jungle that I am talking about here, not Tarzans. For a poet to sink into oblivion is not such an extraordinary drama; it comes with the territory: he can afford it. Unlike society, a good poet always has the future, and his poems, in a manner of speaking, are an invitation for us to sample it. And the least—perhaps the best—thing that can be said about us is that we are the future of Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop: to name just a few . . . Every generation living on the earth is the future —more exactly, a part of the future of those who are gone, but of poets in particular, because when we read their work we realize that they knew us, that the poetry that preceded us is essentially our gene pool. This calls not for reverence; this calls for reference.

I repeat: A poet is never a loser; he knows that others will come in his stead and pick up the trail where he left it. (In fact, it's the swelling number of others, energetic and vocal, clamoring for attention, that drive him into oblivion.)

He can take this, as well as being regarded as a sissy. It is society that cannot afford to be oblivious, and it is society that—compared with the mental toughness ofpractically any poet—comes out a sissy and a loser. For society, whose main strength is that of reproducing itself, to lose a poet is like having a brain cell busted. This impairs one's speech, makes one draw a blank where an ethical choice is to be made; or it barnacles speech with qualifiers, turns one into an eager receptacle for demagoguery or just pure noise. The organs of reproduction, however, are not affected.

There are few cures for hereditary disorders (undetect­able, perhaps, in an individual, but striking in a crowd), and what I'm suggesting here is not one of them. I just hope that this idea, if it catches on, may slow down somewhat the spread of our cultural malaise to the next generation. As I said, I took this job in the spirit ofpublic service, and maybe being paid by the Library of Congress in Washington has gone to my head. Perhaps I fancy myself as a sort of Surgeon General slapping a label onto the current packaging of po­etry. Something like This Way of Doing Business Is Dan­gerous to the National Health. The fact that we are alive does not mean that we are not sick.

It's often been said—first, I think, by Santayana—that those who don't remember history are bound to repeat it. Poetry doesn't make such claims. Still, it has some things in common with history: it employs memory, and it is of use for the future, not to mention the present. It certainly cannot reduce poverty, but it can do something for ignorance. Also, it is the only insurance available against the vulgarity of the human heart. Therefore, it should be available to everyone in this country and at a low cost.

Fifty million copies of an anthology of American poetry for two dollars a copy can be sold in a country of 250 million. Perhaps not at once, but gradually, over a decade or so, they will sell. Books find their readers. And if they will not sell, well, let them lie around, absorb dust, rot, and disintegrate. There is always going to be a child who will fish a book out of the garbage heap. I was such a child, for what it's worth; so, perhaps, were some of you.

A quarter of a century ago, in a previous incarnation in Russia, I knew a man who was translating Robert Frost into Russian. I got to know him because I saw his translations: they were stunning poems in Russian, and I wanted to be­come acquainted with the man as much as I wanted to see the originals. He showed me a hardcover edition (I think it was by Holt), which fell open onto the page with "Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length." Across the page went a huge, size-twelve imprint of a soldier's boot. The front page of the book bore the stamp stalag #3B," which was a World War II concentration camp for Allied POWs somewhere in France.

Now, there is a case of a book of poems finding its reader. All it had to do was to be around. Otherwise it couldn't be stepped on, let alone picked up.

Letter to a President

Dear Mr. President,

I've decided to write this letter to you because we have something in common: we both are writers. In this line of work, one weighs words more carefully, I believe, than else­where before committing them to paper or, for that matter, to the microphone. Even when one finds oneself engaged in a public affair, one tries to do one's best to avoid catch­words, Latinate expressions, all manner of jargon. In a dia­logue, of course, or with two or more interlocutors around, that's difficult, and may even strike them as pretentiousness. But in a soliloquy or in a monologue it is, I think, attainable, though, of course, one always tailors one's diction to one's audience.

We have something else in common, Mr. President, and that is our past in our respective police states. To put it less grandly: our prisons, that shortage of space amply made up for by an abundance of time, which, sooner or later, renders one, regardless of one's temperament, rather con­templative. You spent more time in yours, of course, than

Published in The New York Review of Books in response to a lecture by Mr. Havel that appeared in the May 27, 1993, issue of that publication.

I in mine, though I started in mine long before the Prague Spring. Yet in spite of my nearly patriotic belief that the hopelessness ofsome urine-reeking cement hole in the bow­els of Russia awakens one to the arbitrariness of existence faster than what I once pictured as a clean, stuccoed solitary in civilized Prague, as contemplative beings, I think, we might be quite even.

In short, we were pen pals long before I conceived of this letter. But I conceived ofit not because of the literalness of my mind, or because our present circumstances are quite different from those of the past (nothing can be more natural than that, and one is not obliged to remain a writer forever: not any more so than to stay a prisoner). I've decided to write this letter because a while ago I read the text of one of your most recent speeches, whose conclusions about the past, the present, and the future were so different from mine that I thought one of us must be wrong. And it is precisely because the present and the future—and not just your own or your country's but the global one—were involved that I decided to make this an open letter to you. Had the issue been only the past, I wouldn't have written you this letter at all, or if I had, I'd have marked it "'Personal."

The speech of yours that I read was printed in The New York Review of Books and its title was "The Post-Communist Nightmare." You begin by reminiscing about a time when you would be avoided in the street by your friends and acquaintances, since in those days you were on dangerous terms with the state and under police surveillance. You pro­ceed to explain the reasons for their avoiding you and sug­gest, in the usual, grudge-free manner for which you are justly famous, that to those friends and acquaintances you constituted an inconvenience; and "inconveniences"—you cite the conventional wisdom—"are best avoided." Then for most of your speech you describe the post-Communist reality (in Eastern Europe and by implication in the Balkans) and equate the deportment of the democratic world vis-a-vis that reality to avoiding an inconvenience.

It is a wonderful speech, with a great many wonderful insights and a convincing conclusion; but let me go to your starting point. It occurs to me, Mr. President, that your famous civility benefited your hindsight here rather poorly. Are you so sure you were avoided by those people then and there for reasons of embarrassment and fear of "potential persecution" only, and not because you were, given the seeming stability of the system, written off by them? Are you sure that at least some of them didn't simply regard you as a marked, doomed man on whom it would be foolish to waste much time? Don't you think that instead of, or as well as, being inconvenient (as you insist), you were also a con­venient example of the wrong deportment and thus a source of considerable moral comfort, the way the sick are for the healthy majority? Haven't you imagined them saying to their wives in the evening, "I saw Havel today in the street. He's had it." Or do I misjudge the Czech character?

That they were proven wrong and you right matters little. They wrote you off in the first place because even by the standards of our half of the century you were not a martyr. Besides, don't we all harbor a certain measure ofguilt, totally unrelated to the state, of course, but nonetheless palpable? So whenever the arm of the state reaches us, we regard it vaguely as our comeuppance, as a touch of the blunt but nevertheless expected tool of Providence. That's, frankly, the main raison d'etre behind the institution of police, plain- clothed or uniformed, or at least behind our general inability to resist an arrest. One may be perfectly convinced that the state is wrong, but one is seldom confident of one's o^ virtue. Not to mention that it is the same arm that locks one up and sets one free. That's why one is seldom surprised at being avoided when one gets released, and doesn't expect a universal embrace.

Such expectations, under such circumstances, would be disappointed, because nobody wants to be reminded of the murky complexity of the relations between guilt and getting one's comeuppance, and in a police state providing such a reminder is what heroic deportment is largely about. It ali­enates one from others, as any emphasis on virtue does; not to mention that a hero is always best observed from a dis­tance. In no small measure, Mr. President, you were avoided by the people you've mentioned precisely because for them you were a sort of test tube of virtue confronting evil, and they didn't interfere with the experiment, since they had their doubts about both. As such, you again were a conve­nience, because in the police state absolutes compromise each other since they engender each other. Haven't you imagined those prudent people saying to their wives in the evening: "I saw Havel today in the street. He's too good to be true." Or do I misjudge the Czech character again?

That they were proven wrong and you right, I repeat, matters little. They wrote you off at the time because they were guided by the same relativism and self-interest that I suppose helps them to make a go of it now, under the new dispensation. And as a healthy majority, they no doubt had a significant part in your velvet revolution, which, after all, asserts, the way democracy always does, precisely self- interest. If such is the case, and I'm afraid it is, they've paid you back for their excessive prudence, and you preside now over a society which is more theirs than yours.

There is nothing wrong with that. Besides, things might easily have gone the other way: for you, that is; not for them (the revolution was so velvet because the tyranny itself by that time was more woolen than ironclad—otherwise I wouldn't have this privilege of commenting upon your speech). So all I'm trying to suggest is that by introducing the notion of inconvenience you quite possibly misspoke, for self-interest is always exercised at the expense of others, whether it's done by individuals or by nations. A better notion would be the vulgarity of the human heart, Mr. Pres­ident; but then you wouldn't be able to bring your speech to a ringing conclusion. Certain things come with a pulpit, though one should resist them, writer or no writer. As I am not faced with your task, I'd like to take your argument now where, I think, it could perhaps have gone. I wonder ifyou'll disagree with the result.

"For long decades," your next paragraph begins, "the chief nightmare of the democratic world was Communism. Today —three years after it began to collapse like an avalanche—it would seem as though another nightmare has replaced it: post-Communism." Then you describe in considerable detail the existing modes of the democratic world's response to the ecological, economic, political, and social catastrophes un­raveling where previously one perceived a smooth cloth. You liken these responses to those toward your "inconvenience" and suggest that such a position leads "to a turning away from reality, and ultimately, to resigning oneself to it. It leads to appeasement, even to collaboration. The conse­quences of such a position may even be suicidal."

It is here, Mr. President, that I think your meta­phor fails you. For neither the Communist nor the post- Communist nightmare amounts to an inconvenience, since it helped, helps, and for quite some time will help the dem­ocratic world to externalize evil. And not the democratic world only. To quite a few of us who lived in that nightmare, and especially those who fought it, its presence was a source of considerable moral comfort. For one who fights or resists evil almost automatically perceives oneself as good and skips self-analysis. So perhaps it's time—for us and for the world at large, democratic or not—to scrub the term "Commu­nism" from the human reality of Eastern Europe so one can recognize that reality for what it was and is: a mirror.

For that is what human evil always is. Geographic names or political terminology provides not a telescope or a window but the reflection of ourselves: of human negative potential. The magnitude of what took place in our parts of the world, andover two-thirds of a century, cannot be reduced to "Com­munism." Catchwords, on the whole, lose more than they retain, and in the case of tens of millions killed and the lives of entire nations subverted, a catchword simply won't do. Although the ratio of executioners to victims favors the latter, the scale of what happened in our realm suggests, given its technological backwardness at the time, that the former, too, run in the millions, not to mention the complicity of millions more.

Homilies are not my forte, Mr. President; besides, you are a convert. It's not for me to tell you that what you call "Communism" was a breakdown of humanity and not a po­litical problem. It was a human problem, a problem of our species, and thus of a lingering nature. Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use ter­minology that obscures the reality of human evil—termi­nology, I should add, invented by evil to obscure its own reality. Nor should one refer to it as a nightmare, since that breakdown of humanity wasn't a nocturnal affair, not in our hemisphere, to say the least.

To this day, the word "Communism" remains a con­venience, for an -ism suggests a fait accompli. In Slavic languages especially, an -ism, as you know, suggests the foreignness of a phenomenon, and when a word containing an -ism denotes a political system, the system is perceived as an imposition. True, our particular -ism wasn't conceived on the banks of the Volga or the Vltava, and the fact that it blossomed there with a unique vigor doesn't bespeak our soil's exceptional fertility, for it blossomed in different lati­tudes and extremely diverse cultural zones with equal in­tensity. This suggests not so much an imposition as our -ism's rather organic, not to say universal, origins. One should think, therefore, that a bit of self-examination—on the part of the democratic world as well as our own—is in order, rather than ringing calls for mutual "understanding." (What does this word mean, anyway? What procedure do you propose for this understanding? Under the auspices of the UN, perhaps?)

And if self-examination is unlikely (why should what's been avoided under duress be done at leisure?), then at least the myth of imposition should be dispelled, since, for one thing, tank crews and fifth columns are biologically indis­tinguishable. Why don't we simply start by admitting that an extraordinary anthropological backslide has taken place in our world in this century, regardless of who or what trig­gered it? That it involved masses acting in their self-interest and, in the process of doing so, reducing their common de­nominator to the moral minimum? And that the masses' self-interest—stability of life and its standards, similarly reduced—has been attained at the expense of other masses, albeit numerically inferior? Hence the number of the dead.

It is convenient to treat these matters as an error, as a horrendous political aberration, perhaps imposed upon hu­man beings from an anonymous elsewhere. It is even more convenient if that elsewhere bears a proper geographical or foreign-sounding name, whose spelling obscures its utterly human nature. It was convenient to build navies and de­fenses against that aberration—as it is convenient to dis­mantle those defenses and those navies now. It is convenient,

I must add, to refer to these matters in a civil manner, Mr. President, from a pulpit today, although I don't question for a minute the authenticity of your civility, which, I believe, is your very nature. It was convenient to have around this living example of how not to run things in this world and supply this example with an -ism, as it is convenient to supply it nowadays with "know-how" and a "post-." ( And one easily envisions our -ism, embellished with its post-, conveniently sailing on the lips of dimwits into the future.)

For it would be truly inconvenient—for the cowboys of the Western industrial democracies specifically—to recognize the catastrophe that occurred in Indian territory as the first cry of mass_society: a cry, as it were, from the world's future, and to recognize it not as an -ism but as a chasm suddenly gaping in the human heart, to swallow up honesty, compas­sion, civility, justice, and, thus satiated, presenting to the still democratic outside a reasonably perfect, monotonous surface.

Cowboys, however, loathe mirrors—if only because there they may recognize the backward Indians more readily than they would in the open. So they prefer to mount their high horses, scan the Indian-free horizons, deride the In­dians' backwardness, and derive enormous moral comfort from being regarded as cowboys—first of all, by the Indians.

As one who has been likened often to a philosopher- king, you can, Mr. President, appreciate better than many how much all that happened to our "Indian nation" harks back to the Enlightenment, with its idea (from the Age of Discovery, actually) of a noble savage, of man being inher­ently good but habitually ruined by bad institutions; with its beliefthat improvement ofthose institutions will restore man to his initial goodness. So to the admission previously made or hoped for, one should add, I suppose, that it's precisely the accomplishment of the "Indian" in perfecting those in­stitutions that brought them to that project's logical end: the police state. Perhaps the manifest bestiality of this achieve­ment should suggest to the "Indians" that they must retreat some way into the interior, that they should render their institutions a bit less perfect. Otherwise they may not get the "cowboys' " subsidies for their reservations. And perhaps there is indeed a ratio between man's goodness and the badness of institutions. If there isn't, maybe somebody should admit that man isn't that good.

Isn't this the juncture at which we find ourselves, Mr. President—or at least you do? Should "Indians" embark on imitating "cowboys," or should they consult the spirits about other options? May it be that the magnitude of the tragedy that befell them is in itself a guarantee that it won't happen again? May their grief and their memory of what happened in their parts create a greater egalitarian bond than free enterprise and a bicameral legislature? And if they should draft a constitution anyway, maybe they should start by rec­ognizing themselves and their history for the better part of this century as a reminder of Original Sin.

It's not such a heady concept, as you know. Translated into common parlance, it means that man is dangerous. Apart from being a footnote to our beloved Jean-Jacques, this prin­ciple may allow us to build—if not elsewhere, then at least in our realm, so steeped in Fourier, Proudhon, and Blanc at the expense of Burke and Tocqueville—a social order resting on a less self-flattering basis than was our habit, and perhaps with less disastrous consequences. This also may qualify as man's "new understanding of himself, of his lim­itations and his place in the world" you call for in your speech.

"We must discover a new relationship to our neighbors, and to the universe," you say toward the end of your speech, "and its metaphysical order, which is the source of the moral order." The metaphysical order, Mr. President, should it really exist, is pretty dark, and its structural idiom is its parts' mutual indifference. The notion that man is dangerous runs, therefore, closest to that order's implications for human mo­rality. Every writer is a reader, and ifyou scan your library's shelves, you must realize that most of the books you've got there are about either betrayal or murder. At any rate, it seems more prudent to build society on the premise that man is evil rather than the premise of his goodness. This way at least there is the possibility of making it safe psycho­logically, if not physically (but perhaps that as well), for most of its members, not to mention that its surprises, which are inevitable, might be of a more pleasant nature.

Maybe the real civility, Mr. President, is not to create illu­sions. "New understanding," "global responsibilities," "plur­alistic metaculture" are not much better at the core than the retrospective utopias of the latter-day nationalists or the entrepreneurial fantasies of the nouveaux riches. This sort of stuff is still predicated on the premise, however qualified, of man's goodness, of his notion of himself as either a fallen or a possible angel. This sort of diction befits, perhaps, the innocents, or demagogues, running the affairs of industrial democracies, but not you, who ought to know the truth about the condition of the human heart.

And you are, one would imagine, in a good position not only to convey your knowledge to people but also to cure that heart condition somewhat: to help them to become like yourself. Since what made you the way you are was not your penal experience but the books you've read. I'd suggest, for starters, serialization of some of those books in the country's major dailies. Given the population figure of Czechia, this can be done, even by decree, although I don't think your parliament would object. By giving your people Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, Platonov, Camus, or Joyce, you may tum at least one nation in the heart of Europe into a civilized people.

That may do more good for the future of the world than emulating cowboys. Also, it would be a real post-Commu­nism, not the doctrine's meltdown, with the attendant "hatred of the world, self-affirmation at all costs, and the unparalleled flourishing of selfishness" that dog you now. For there is no other antidote to the vulgarity of the human heart than doubt and good taste, which one finds fused in works of great literature, as well as your own. If man's neg­ative potential is best manifested by murder, his positive potential is best manifested by art.