Within the Whirlwind
Ginzburg, Eugenia
did not captivate those who viewed politics as a practical art of horsetrading or, worse, of jobbery, bribery, and pillage. Nor were TR's early views at all remarkable. The...
...There, where prisoners were routinely robbing and betraying each other for crumbs, these two found the ultimate in mutual devotion...
...On the whole he handles it well, although there are too many uninteresting stories about overrated modern poets for my taste...
...The same political insights keep turning up...
...Never mind that the name of the camp, Elgen, is the word for corpse in the Yakut language...
...they are tasty all the same...
...He also opposed a nickel-an-hour minimum wage, although he was soon to respond generously to the tutelage of Samuel Gompers...
...said Warren Harding...
...A. v. Hayek I (Nobel laureate) I "In his favor Professor Simon I has only a simple t)air of I I virtues: his facts are right and I II his ideas make sense...
...Again and again, some generous person or unpredictable turn of events would save her from going over the precipice...
...It was no help when, as a sincere believer in the Soviet system, she demanded justice according to Soviet law...
...The sole, overwhelming lesson was the awful brevity of life . . . . An asthmatic childhood had shown that life could be stifled, cut off, unless one fought back and all Papa's admonitions to get action, to seize the moment, had the implicit message that there was not much time after all...
...He was arrested shortly after she was...
...Partly, the appeal persists because of eternal qualities in the drama Soviet dissidents describe...
...The last day found her like a person who has patiently endured a year in plaster but who cannot stand five minutes more...
...Many Presidents of the United States have been profoundly mediocre men, and have known it...
...Still, the moral dimensions of her sensibility left room for guilt...
...John Steinbeck worried about the effect of t h e Prize on its recipients...
...Our funniest Presidents have been two vastly different men, Abraham Lincoln and Calvin Coolidge...
...She and Anton, separated by miles of Arctic emptiness, were able to see each other fairly regularly because of his privileged position as a doctor and hers as a kindergarten attendant...
...Nothing lasts...
...Why shouldn't we begin mending and weaving and doing whatever is n e c e s s a r y , " he wrote to his editor, " t o bring the Nobel in poetry to America...
...It also says something about Eugenia Ginzburg's literary flair...
...L_ THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 39 is improving rather than deteri- I orating...
...Theodore Dreiser offered H.L...
...WITHIN THE WHIRLWIND Eugenia Ginzburg / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / $17.50 Anne Crutcher L i k e Tolstoy's happy families, Soviet dissident memoirs are, in an important sense, all alike...
...When freedom appeared, all ignoble sentiments were hushed...
...There was no question of envying the man who at the moment personified freedom...
...She speaks of herself as lucky, and she was...
...I am heartily tired of this life of bondage, responsibility and toil," he said...
...There are hundreds of wonderful stories in them...
...There is a general catharsis to be had in the recollections of a Solzhenitsyn, an Amalrik, or a Bukovsky...
...government and I U.N...
...When the blizzard descended, she was terrified of death in the snow...
...Her early prison experiences included a cross-section of the possible horrors...
...Ironically, it was no better guarantor of safety than her unwillingness...
...Even so, many writers have f e l t moved to act like politicians on occasion, particularly when contemplating that Scandinavian chimera, the Nobel Prize...
...The poet Theodore Roethke was another who felt himself deserving of the arctic laurel...
...Tm a Ford, not a Lincoln," declared Gerald Ford...
...But fact can accommodate as much poetry as fiction...
...A nearly dead Eugenia has been restored to health by a Woman doctor with a bad conscience...
...Speaking of the selfless joy prisoners showed at the release of their fellows, she says "To see someone emerging on the far side of the barbed wire was to make contact with freedom...
...I and richer in natural resources and standard of living for future I generations...
...Her story follows the familiar outline...
...whereas the politician, however exalted, is installed in office by the electorate for a limited period of time, and is all the while at the mercy of various unlovely special interest groups...
...So call the books puddings without themes if you like...
...President, I'm from Boston...
...She had an artist's sensitivity to the details that crystal...
...I Population growth has its I costs...
...I Ben Wa ttenberg (Syndica ted columnist) I I _9 Rave reviews in Fortune, I II Business Week, The-New York I Times, Washington Post, I London Observer, London I Evening Standard, and many I ! other top periodicals...
...There is also the specific moral exhilaration of contact with an order of human being you don't run into every day...
...I think Wystan Auden should be next, then Pablo Neruda, then me and that's a cold, considered, objective judgment...
...Her husband's willingness to go along with anything the party did put a permanent emotional distance between him and her...
...Just as naturally, he knew little of the circumstances in which more ordinary people lived...
...The revelations of depravity and spiritual triumph repeat themselves...
...is on the decline...
...Four issues $12.50...
...Centre for Conflict Studies, University of New Brunswick Fredericton, N.B., E3B 5A3 Canada Telephone: (506) 453-4978 Massachusetts was once greeted at the White House by an excited guest: "Mr...
...In Eugenia Ginzburg's c.ase, though, the context establishes its validity...
...More than once, she owed her life to somebody else's need for atonement...
...I I _9 Already highly praised by I II Nobel prize-winners and pres- I idents of the American I Economic Association: I "A first-class book of great I II importance...
...I I I I Cut out this ad and send with I $14.50 plus name and address to I PRINCETON UNIVERSITY I PRESS, 41William Street...
...Who can read that and doubt that despair is a sin...
...We are not "running out" of natural resources...
...So it was by fate no less than fortune that TR was set apart from ordinary experience...
...Is 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 teaching children to say "We love Comrade Stalin better than Mommy or Daddy" buying safety at too high a price ? She was never sure...
...I THE ULTIMATE RESOURCE I by well-known economist Julian L Simon backs up these asser- I tions with U.S...
...In the book of literary anecdotes, Donald Hall is faced with the problem of sifting and selecting his material...
...Dreiser and Roethke, by the way, never won it...
...Another sister suffered from a spinal deformity...
...These anecdotes handsomely illustrate the vanities and cupidities of great men...
...She and her younger son, reunited after a dozen years apart, re-established emotional connection by reciting alternate passages from poems he had learned from her as a four-year-old...
...lize the essence of experience...
...They yield no grand generalizations about the nature of writers or Presidents, save the obvious one that eminentoes are people, too...
...The rest of her ten-year sentence included returns to tree-felling as well as other hospital jobs, one of which led to her supreme good fortune...
...When she saw a man approaching her from the other direction, she was further terrified of being robbed and killed...
...contrast, the egotism of Presidents has often been tempered by an understanding of political reality...
...She saw it without sentimentality, as she saw everything else, including the limits of human ability to transcend inhuman treatment...
...When the doctor telephoned to say they must postpone their reunion because of a threatened blizzard, she reacted with frenzied determination to meet him anyway...
...Coolidge: "You'll never get over it...
...The kind of people who write Soviet dissident memoirs compound the fascination...
...But she knew she was not the only one to feel moral qualms in the midst of surviv~il anxieties...
...Anton Walter, a German physician, a fellow prisoner, and a worthy partner for even such as Eugenia...
...In Presidential Aneadotes, Paul Boiler simply and sensibly calls the roll of the forty Presidents, introducing each with a brief, fluent narrative" to which some briefer anecdotes are then tagged on...
...He had to be conducted reverentially to maybe Shaw . . . . Maybe I'm being over-optimistic but I wouldn't have accepted it if I hadn't thought I could beat the r a p . " Well, he was being over-optimistic: In the six years of life that remained to him after winning the Prize, Steinbeck published nothing...
...statistics, together with I I solid empirical analysis...
...I am a man of limited talents from a small town...
...S t a r t the ball," he wrote, "and if I snake the forty thousand--isn't that what the lucky mutt is supposed to draw?you get five thousand...
...Her defense against hopelessness and degradation was to recite poetry...
...The harrowing details are the same no matter which area of the Gulag sets the stage...
...L t o the Whirlwind, the first volume of her autobiography, published in 1967, tells how she was expelled from the party and arrested...
...There, amid so many deprivations, she encountered true love...
...The supply of cropland I is increasing around the world I And pollution in the U.S...
...The sleepy, laconic Coolidge was an American original...
...She was not only a natural creator of literature but one whom literature nourished...
...After a few further brushes with disaster, she has been assigned to a job as a nurse in a home for children born in labor camps...
...I Instead--though it is hard to I believe--natural resources and I energy have been getting tess scarce for decades, as seen I in their falling prices over the I long run...
...Mencken a piece of the action if Dreiser could sail triumphantly to Stockholm...
...David McCullough is too seasoned and sensitive an observer of human character to slip into the artless habits of post-Freudian biography, too wise and observant of complications to reduce life's mysteries to sovereign explanations...
...Winter waits NOVELS by J. Inchardi $11 each Lines On The Death Of A Fisherman Three Jews In A Tub Dreamship Yurros A Paper Toy Intercurse Jehovah Mafioso Saturn Maru Order by mail from Sirius Books, P.O...
...After t h a t , it numbs and destroys the strongest...
...But he was far more...
...Several years later, after Sinclair Lewis had become the first American author to win the Prize, Dreiser climaxed a period of unpleasantness between the two men by slapping Lewis's face in public...
...A good Communist, married to a party dignitary and herself doing well in the hierarchy-she was a history professor at the University of Kazan--she got into trouble because she was not quick enough to denounce a colleague who had been nailed as a Trotskyist in the Stalin purges of 1937...
...This is no doubt because Hall is himselfa writer of verse who shares with his colleagues a tendency to inflate the importance of the lyrical expositions of neuroses that for the most p a r t compose twentieth-century poetry...
...In such a context, the word "luck" might be expected to ring false...
...The Albany days revealed little of the future progressive...
...Like a mythic incarnation of dauntless love, she set out on foot...
...I've always been afraid of it because of what it does to people...
...In any event it is funny, and sad, to see so many tal ented men coveting the benediction of a handful of Swedish professors...
...Oxford University Press / $14.95 THE OXFORD BOOK OF AMERICAN LITERARY ANECDOTES Edited by Donald Hall / Oxford University Press / $15.95 Mitchell S. Ross own talent...
...PRESIDENTIAL ANECDOTES Paul F. Boller, Jr...
...The individual soul defending itself against Them-society, the state, whoever wields the collective power--has been a riveting theme since Antigone...
...The patrician reformism of his father's circle came naturally--it was said by one wit that he "seems to have a pulpit concealed on his person...
...Economic growth due to more babies and I immigrants is likely to make the I U.S and the world less-polluted...
...her as a "counter-re,)olutionary terrorist" and launched her on 18 years of prison and Siberian exile...
...The former Governor of He or She Who reads The American Spectator Ought also to read a new international journal dealing with low-intensity conflict--the wars that are occurring everywheremand ways in which governments, the media, and the public respond...
...It's a line of work that attracts superior minds and noble spirits...
...The man was Dr...
...Lincoln viewed life with a lofty cynicism and lightened his sadness with laughter: Recall his reading from Artemus Ward before announcing the Emancipation Proclamation to the seated secretaries of his cabinet...
...McCullough writes: There were no answers save "God's will" or " f a t e , s t r a n g e and t e r r i b l e f a t e , " Theodore said...
...Twentiethcentury history has not diminished its relevance...
...As Within the Whirlwind, the second volume of her memoirs, begins, the luck has done its work once more...
...Yet each new testimony is as fascinating as the last...
...His father died in his 40s...
...He called for the restoration of the whipping post for certain crimes...
...The poignance of their intimacy reaches an epic vividness in Eugenia's account of the last dayof her ten-year sentence, after which she could look forward to the comparative bliss of Siberian exile without civil rights...
...considering the local alternatives, it's a good job...
...Between the covers of these two books you will find a festival of Americana that will fill you with patriotic pride and encourage you to let loose with a few Bronx cheers...
...Certainly all this holds for Eugenia Ginzburg, a magnificent woman rendered the more magnificent by her season in hell...
...Break open the Wild Turkey and strike up the band...
...Rutherford B. Hayes, known as His Fraudulency after his dubious victory over Samuel Tilden in the 1876 election, felt no urge to prove his bona tides by running for a second term...
...She managed to survive solitary confinement in a freezing cell, transportation to Siberia in a crowded boxcar, extra punishment for resisting a guard's sexual overtures, a stint of tree-felling at 49 degrees below zero and, of course, the potentially mortal illnesses that go with such treatment...
...It was he...
...That defined Anne Crutcber is a journalist based in Washington, D.C...
...His wife (of Bright's disease) and his mother (of typhoid) died within hours of each other while he was still a young man...
...t h a t is obvious...
...They even had what might be called fun together...
...Theodore Roosevelt's life blended, in almost freakish opposition, the gifts that birth, money, and secure position could bestow with sudd,~n, cruel deprivations...
...Reading through them I found the writers more arrogant than the P r e s i d e n t s . This seems to me fitting and proper as the writer, after all, maintains sovereignty over his Mitchell S. Ross is author of The Literary Politicians and An Invitation to Our Times...
...the gates to ensure that he d i d n ' t ]D spill the precious gift he had . [ ~ y recovered...
...Adversity purifies, she observed, but only up to a point...
...His amiable brother Elliot, the father of Eleanor Roosevelt, was an alcoholic and a fugitive from family responsibilities, not to survive the century...
...When Millard Fillmore was offered an honorary degree from Oxford University he turned it down, explaining, "No man should, in my judgment,~ accept a degree he cannot read...
...For one thing I don' t remember anyone doing any work a f t e r getting it except These collections of anecdotes are consistently amusing...
...Box 177 Freeport, Maine 04032 I That is the essential theme of what this subtle, elegant, and humane biography has to tell us about the shaping of TR...
...But in the long run the I benefits of additional people I outweigh the costs...
...The book's richness in vignettes as moving as this says something about the way Gulag conditions reduce life to primordial patterns...
...The Theodore Roosevelt of Mornings on Horseback is indeed the sum of his experiences and nurture...
...The author has undoubtedly examined the claims of the "psychobiographical" techniques now fashionable, and occasionally makes unobtrusive use of their insights--but invariably without calling into play their penchant for arrogant pronouncements, a ponderous apparatus, and depreciative jargon...
...In the end, though, humility and skepticism fuse with the grander aspects of her nature to give the book its profoundly affirmative impact...
Vol. 15 • March 1982 • No. 3
