Saltbound
Ross, Mitchell S.
BOOKS IN REVIEWS - "Saltbound" the Americans during the war: spam, white bread, and a barrel of grease that was gulped down by the prisoners, who thought it was an American kind of butter. The central object of the tale is...
...I have reached the point where I will Mitchell S. Ross is the author of The Literary Politicians and.An Invitation to Our Times...
...Human vanity and cupidity are left here to speak for themselves...
...The central object of the tale is a shiny new bulldozer, meant for clearing the forest but first used to rebury a vast mound of corpses that had, in effect, become unburied (a common occurrence in the Far North because of the nearly impenetrable pei-mafros 0. The bull...
...Whether or not Block Island can be seen as a metaphor for New England and Sa/tbound as a bittersweet farewell to it~Williamson was raised partially in Vermont, and he is now at work on a book in and about Wyoming--we have in Sa/tboundan effort which is sound in every respect, a distinguished examination of regional culture, a searching and dignified exploration of American life...
...But if the Kolyma of these tales belongs to the past, to the Stalinist era, it is also true that the current Soviet regime is in many ways a creature of that era...
...Tr'dvLtips Dept...
...Eyes and ears open, he kept a journal and eventually produced this book...
...And it is still official policy to give prisoners a diet that doesnot meet their average daily requirements...
...Avegetarian, she disdains fisheating: "You put a piece offish and a piece of meat ,in the sun and see which crawls away first...
...In one sense, of course, Kolyma is past history...
...And yet Mrs...
...By contrast, Chilton Williamson, Jr., feels very much at home among mosquitoes, fishermen, and other inhabitants of the watery and wideopen spaces...
...Forced-labor camps, as Solzhenitsyn rightly says, are not a Russian invention...
...I suspect that Williamson refrained from indulging in it not because he is blind to imbecility but because he recognized here the value of a more serene treatment: In dealing with such a littleknown corner of America, the important thing was to portray it plainly and leave judgment to another day...
...F109, 163-09 Depot, Flushing, NY 11358 journal, yield moments of high humor...
...Recently he spent a winter among the people of Block Island, Rhode Island, which, we learn in Salthound's opening sentence, is "the terminal moraine of an ancient glacier" lying "at the juncture of Long Island Sound and Narrangansett Bay, longitude 71 ~ 30' west, latitude 41 ~ 8' north...
...As Conquest points out, more prisoners were executed in one particular camp in Kolyma alone in 1938 than were executed throughout the Russian Empire for the whole of the last century of Tsarist rule...
...But what should we make of our knowledge that Lattimore and others were absurdly wrong about Kolyma, especially when they spoke--as Lattimore did-of the old Tsarist regime's harsh treatment of prisoners...
...Alas, a man of virtue is seldom honored in his own town: his withdrawal was always attended by banks of strong men and sober women, standing helpless with weepy laughter on the sidewalks...
...SALTBOUND Chilton Williamson, Jr...
...Mrs...
...indeed, he dedicates the book to her...
...Conley is present.in the first section ("Fall") and the final section ("Spring...
...It is doubtful that the leaders of the current regime would summon this demon again, since they themselves might be destroyed by it...
...BEAT INFLATION...
...From time to time, moved by a desire to be amiable, I have held pole in hand and dropped bait into water, and I swear that I have never known any deeper tedium than this...
...As Conquest has said, these leaders "remain not only its heirs, but also its accomplices...
...they are a Soviet invention, an invention of the last 60 years...
...She rented her house to the author for the winter and departed for Florida, but she appears in the "Winter" section of the book through her letters and postcards...
...But both the structure of the current regime and the ideology on which it bases its legitimacy make it possible for Kolyma to happen again...
...This is especially remarkable because there seems just cause in many cases throughout the book for satire of the harshest sort...
...Roam the world 1st class by freighter or cruise ship at savings of at least 50...
...After finishing it, and wiping his mouth, he would walk slowly and with heroic self-control to his car, and drive at a snail's pace out of town, straddling the center line as though it were a tightrope...
...I sneeze easily and often, never more so than when Mother Nature attempts to seduce me...
...Williamson's shrewdness in handling his material can be seen most plainly in his depiction of one Beatrice A. Conley, his landlady...
...The effects of this conversion provide Williamson with his primary theme, but this is, no dry treatise on the political economy of summer resorts...
...Williamson's treatment of her is affectionate...
...By virtue of Shalamov's tales, the corpses of Kolyma will not disappear from our minds...
...After 1956 the daily life in these camps became less harsh and the death rate dropped significantly...
...Conley is ci3,ilized in her habits and kindly in her disposition...
...F o r most of Block Island's history (which dates back to Puritan times), the economy of the place was based on fishing and agriculture...
...He spends as much time among them as his duties as "Books Arts & Manners" editor of National Review permit...
...Worse, she subscribes.to the beliefs of a moronic cult called .the Great I Am Activity, which deals in Etheric Records~ Ascended Masters, life on Venus, and similar stuff...
...In recent decades and for various reasons Block Islanders have become heavily dependent on summer tourism to get along...
...This aversion grows stronger still whenever someone tries to tell me of the joy of fishing...
...Moreover, the Soviet constitution is such that the government can still declare virtually anyone it wants toa political prisoner...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1980 37...
...There are also several arresting asides, and even the historical sections, which on the whole are less captivating than the contemporary SAVE YOUR GAS...
...I feel more at home in a shopping mall than in an open field, where I feel less inclined to hymn the glory of God's green earth than to swear violently at the nasty bugs...
...For the deaths of thousands of party officials in Kolyma and in other forced-labor camps paved the way for the leaders of the current regime...
...Saltbound comes alive through its people, the natives and newcomers who give the place its ,peculiar coloration...
...Little matter: It is so elegantly done that even a nature-hater loved it...
...They are, as one would expect, an assorted lot, and it is among Williamson's triumphs that he is able to sketch them in a convincing way without gross invasions of privacy, without unseemly condescension, and at the same time without sentimentality...
...dozer is supposed to do a better job than the prisoners themselves, but it too fails...
...Conley is eccentric to the point of outright looniness...
...Methuen / $10.95 Mitchell S. Ross A city man born and bred, I am not the ideal customer for a book about rural life...
...The north resisted with all its strength this work of man," the narrator says, " n o t accepting the corpses into its bowels...
...Librarians will have a hard time knowing what to do with it, as it could be fairly classified as history, journalism, or Americana...
...So although Kolyma no longer exists, the demon of Kolyma hovers over the current regime...
...During his Block Island winter, Williamson collected a host of amusing stories, such as the saga of "OneBeer Allen," who would drive into town each night and drink beer at his favorite saloon...
...Something of an outsider despite her long residence on Block Island, Mrs...
...not fish unless a companion undertakes to fill the blank hours by reading aloud from a 19th-century novel while I wait for my worm to do its work...
Vol. 13 • September 1980 • No. 9
