Test of Loyalty
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Test of Loyalty" FOR THE SERIOUS READER will prove incomprehensible; nonetheless I recommend it—I recommend it as an artifact of the age. The book is incomprehensible because Peter Schrag, though...
...I have only -a general idea as to why he finds all of the above characteristics so malodorous, but I do not think he leaves any doubt that he does and I think that while Mr...
...Such a book will keep its subject in focus, document facts and judgments, and not pretend to be quite so arty...
...Unfortunately Mr...
...1974 was no lean year for trashy books, but Mr...
...Of course Mr...
...And his critical style is wholly dependent on rhetorical smirks and frowns...
...The cause of this sally into belles lettres was our author's exposure to a random collection of innocent Californians being screened for jury duty...
...further, I cannot see what his statement has to do with the Ellsberg verdict...
...There is rising up in America a class of semi-educated individuals whose casual encounters with education have left them with cosmopolitan tastes, invidious conclusions, and intense theoretical commitments...
...It also gives us glimpses of our government frantically attempting to scotch publication of the Papers, and it gives us a glance at the serious legal debate that ensued...
...He is a religious follower of National Public Radio, and he believes educational television sharpens the mind...
...They have recently fanned out into all sectors of American life, and some have risen to prominence...
...And they do not blink when they encounter an author misusing words like "ideology" (p...
...They are easily conversant with the conspiracy theories which Mr...
...But first let me tell you what the book is about or what the book is supposed to be about, for one of the author's problems is that he tries to write several kinds of books on several different subjects simultaneously...
...Schrag extends to us no such courtesies because Mr...
...So it is that Mr...
...Schrag rarely pauses to explain what he means...
...Schrag's occasional spells of reportage are lucid though brief...
...The book is a stunning achievement...
...This makes it difficult for the intelligent reader to comprehend what it is that the author is getting at...
...His disposable income is almost totally exhausted on the intellectualized brummagem of the times...
...The intellectualoid speaks condescendingly to almost everyone he encounters, though his knowledge of the world is thickly interlarded with superstition and error...
...The result is—well, the result is I suppose the New Journalism or some such thing, for from every mixed-up page there arises a whiff of baloney...
...159) and "surrealism" (passim...
...He is absolutely incapable of clearly stating his appreciation of a subject and his reasons for that appreciation...
...Yesterday he was living on seeds, nuts, and wheat germ...
...The book is incomprehensible because Peter Schrag, though discussing matters of great moment, has the analytical prowess of a teenage poetess and the literary style of a rhinoceros...
...The book that misuses them frequently enough is guaranteed to enchant them...
...Sc:hrag in almost four hundred pages of delirium expatiates over the stultification of postwar liberalism, the perils of bureaucracy, the classification of documents, the First Amendment, the Nixon gang, political commitment, civil disobedience, virtue, California...
...Schrag's judgments are turgid, wrong, and offensive to anyone who finds America something other than a personal embarrassment...
...Indeed for them these misemployed words are catnip neologisms...
...on and on, until he arrives at this curious, though perfectly characteristic, judgment, which he smuggles into a chapter ostensibly dealing with the trial's verdict: "For a generation the country [America] had become increasingly European, particularly in its conduct of foreign policy...
...Schrag is being so provocative it might be helpful to us if he would explain himself...
...But such a pedestrian tale is not enough for the ambitious Mr...
...Think of it, while defenders of the law were attempting to preserve that law by breaking it, Dr...
...What bothers me with this judgment is, as with so many of Mr...
...Schrag maunders on, pausing now to report on Ellsberg's latest action and then lurching forward with his sensitive perceptions, historical judgments, moral instructions, and ominous prophecies...
...It gives us glimpses of Dr...
...Schrag is not writing for you and me...
...Schrag must instruct his readers on all the sundry conditions and issues tangential to Mr...
...He writes for America's New Age, and because he writes for the kind of people he writes for, he must attempt much more than merely chronicling an important historical episode...
...Schrag's audience...
...Test of Loyalty is supposed to be about the trial of Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo...
...Ellsberg was portraying himself as a proud exemplar of civil disobedience even as his corps of lawyers, public relations men, and Hollywood eminentoes were spending seventy thousand dollars a month professing his legal innocence—an enormous fraud by all hands...
...Ellsberg's well-publicized season in Gethsemane, and he allows his readers to see all of this as it filters through his own stupendously sensitive spirit...
...They are people who harbor vast pretensions to intellectual grandeur, though their intellectual accomplishments are so puny they are properly designated intellectualoids...
...For instance, despite his aforementioned disrelish for America's "becoming increasingly European," whenever he approaches things American he reflexively holds his nose...
...Intellectualoids will eagerly swallow the quack sociology, quack history, and quack psychology that oozes through Test of Loyalty...
...We all really ought to know more about Mr...
...Test of Loyalty is a fitting recipient of the Saturday Evening Club's Harold Robbins Award for the Year's Worst Book...
...It will be written more cautiously and more objectively, though possibly it will remark on the abundant ironies of this sad episode...
...Today he buys recycled clothing and edible calendars...
...Forgoing either the simple chronicling of an historical event (not one footnote appears) or the forthright polemicizing of a political or moral position, Mr...
...He prefers book reviews to books, newspapers to journals, and he chooses television documentaries and news stories over all of the above...
...Schrag is right or whether he is wrong...
...Of course, a useful history of the Ellsberg trial remains to be written...
...FOR THE SERIOUS READER Test of Loyalty will prove incomprehensible...
...Still, as I say, Test of Loyalty has my blue ribbon of commendation...
...Rather than stating his case, he lets fly with stuff like: "When they first entered the courtroom, they looked like a couple of busloads of tourists from Indianapolis who had lost their way to Disneyland: white, middle aged, old-aged, pinch-faced, obeisance-repressing-anger, the last revenge of the Puritan in America...
...Test of Loyalty is such a book, incondite and barely intelligible to the serious reader but prodigious fuel for the intellectualoids' fantasies...
...Schrag's judgments, that I have no idea what the author means...
...Schrag outdistanced them all...
...Now my fundamental problem with this asseveration is not whether Mr...
...He is writing for a rising class of people whose lives are filled with arcane fantasies, and that is why I commend the book to you...
...Such preposterous fads along with his political, cultural, and religious enthusiasms are almost all dictated to him by hucksters...
...Schrag has lifted from the Hate America crowd...
...Ellsberg absconding with the Pentagon Papers, frequenting Xerox machines, and attempting to distribute their infamous fruits to various statesmen and newspapers...
Vol. 8 • January 1975 • No. 4
