God's Fifth Column

...it has no Daphne Merkin is an editor at McCall's and former book critic for the New Leader...

...A father (attentive and loving), a mother (harried and undemonstrative), a handicapped younger brother (time-consuming and resented), good marks at school, some difficulty making fridnds--the usual mixed fortune...

...George A. Kelly, James...

...Born in 1977 and published 10 times a year, we've already made a mark...

...In 1865, when the Civil War was over, we read of black men tramping the roads of the Confederacy in search of their wives and children: "After several months, the mass migrations subsided, but the search for lost family members continuedthrough newspaper advertisements that filled the newly established black newspapers into the 1880's...

...He flaunts the modish p/'ewar view (still current in some circles) that we and 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982 our civilization, in the words of the Beatrice Lillie song, are all of us just rotten to the core...

...God's Fifth Column is at its best on an anecdotal level, where the author can deploy his talent as a novelist...

...The only thing she will not do is accept responsibility...

...insight and tragic sense than sneering Schadenj~eude, and above all with some acceptance that human beings, more than God, are most often responsible for their own disasters...

...As Gerhardie goes on, generalization crowds out detail, the air of supercilious smugness becomes more suffocating, while the pronouncements wax more banal...

...aura to it...

...GOD'S FIFTH COLUMN William Gerhardie, edited by Michael Holroyd and Robert Skidelsky / Simon & Schuster/$15.95 Herb Greer T h i s book is one of those posthumous curiosities ~worked and reworked by the author and finally left unfinished...

...The tone and content of such pas. sages have a familiar echo...

...The Empress Eugenic . . . first glanced round to make sure...

...The liberal Protestants have their Christian Century, the Evangelicals have.their Christianity Today, the liberal Catholics have their Commonweal, and the Jews have their Commentary...

...All this is true...

...As in the astral light all ideas become personified-bearing out the reality of the Platonic Idea --so Hitler, having by mistake got through the swivel door into the concrete world, could not again remove his silly mug...

...In his foreword to Markets and Minorities, Milton Friedman speaks of Sowell's passion, adding that "the passion is disciplined by reason, by intellectual integrity, and by the careful and intelligent examination of a wide range of evidence...

...If you truly want to vein a game of t e n n i s , then yo u must be concerned to have someone keeping the score...

...Noting that Gerhardie was never satisfied with his text, the editors have cropped about a quarter of the original material, parts which seemed to them " l e s s ready than others...

...Alpert is prepared, of course, to let her unconscious (i.e., pain and rage and other damaging leftovers from an imperfect childhood) take the rap, but even there she is slippery...

...That: is why the NEW OXFORD REVIEW has made its appearance...

...National Review calls us "first-rate" and Newsweek has conceded that we are "thoughtful," even praising our "childlike exuberance...

...For it appears that he is just not interested in, for instance, the actual impact o f minimum-wage legislation upon the unskilled young in general and upon unskilled young blacks in particular...

...The real crux--and this point has the widest s i g n i f i c a n c e - - i s that everyone sincerely committed to any purposb is necessarily by that sincerity committed also to monitoring his success or failure in achieving that purpose...

...Such meanness and nastiness is unfortunately all too typical of the book...

...You see, we believe that orthodox Catholics need a high-grade magazine that really speaks to the mind as well as the heart, that speaks Truth with clarity, verve, and style...

...Gerhardie also shows an attractive sympathy for the culture and people of Russia, where, as the son of a British cotton-manufacturer, he was born and brought up in St...

...She manages to be both excruciatingly honest and resolutely self-protective--two qualities, I might add, which usually cancel each other out...

...Much the same applies in the latter case...

...The body of Chekhov (the name annoyingly mistransliterated as "Chehov") is gloatingly shown being taken away in a van marked " O y s t e r s , " followed for a while by the wrong funeral procession...

...One mark of a writer of real stature, as opposed to one who just manipulates language with euphuistic skill, is that he treats the events and consequences which give rise to such bromides with more wisdom than petty irritation, more charity and wit than shallow sarcasm, more...

...From the security of that made-up family," Alpert pontificates, "I felt capable of taking on the world...

...Petersburg...

...Those who so freely and so furiously denounce Thomas Sowell for allegedly betraying blacks, by taking various "rightwing I' and "anti-people" positions, are themselves very long indeed on passion...

...Jane Alpert's "autobiography," Growing Up Underground, is a perfect instance of the "new" 'memoir--a form freed of the burden of enlightenment...

...The consequent r e l i e f i s great, and general...

...Witness the fact that this "was the only country in which the slave population i'eproduced i t s e l f and grew by natural increase...

...The project was apparently planned as a quasi-Tolstoyan epic, a "biography of the age of 1890-1940," a vast mosaic of scenes from and essays on the worlds of politics, business, and the arts which was meant en toto as the embodiment of a Big Idea: that God is a malicious practical joker whose pranks no one escapes, from the anonymous "suffering unit" to the most exalted of Herb Greer is an American Writer and playwright living in Europe...

...The National Catholic Register has said that "for sheer feistiness and guts, it's hard to top the NEW OXFORD REVIEW...

...This is all tlSe easier because the shambling human race is blinded by persistent greed, stupidity, rancor, and/or good intentions...

...One begins to suspect him of not trying vdry hard, of picking up garbage and trying to disguise i t as haute cuisine...

...Possibly he was conscious of the failure, and continued for that reason to tinker with the text until he died...

...demanding only that, regardless of consequences, all legislation should be both conventionally left-wing and intentionally anticapitalist...

...On the outbreak of World War II we are given this reflection: Germans [like locusts] seem to be thermotropic, but their movements are due not so much to the heat of the sun as to that of Mars...

...In our day it is, or should be, well known that the average black in the money economy in South Africa is, apartheid notwithstanding, materially very much b e t t e r off than his opposite number in nearly if not quite all the black republics to the north...

...Much better writers (like his model Tolstoy) have fallen just as far short in the self-cast role of Guru...

...Probably the worst of these literary snickers describes Oscar Wilde's feeble deathbed assent to conversion by a Catholic priest, and then sends him offlike this: The supposed conversion--on a different plane of extremity--is reminiscent of a German bitch, blind, deaf, and halfparalyzed with old age...

...Orthodox Catholics have newspapers, quarterly journals, family magazines, and clergy magazines, but they have no "literary" magazine that can speak with the same authority and "weight" as a Commonweal or a Commentary...

...On Hitler: Here was the triumph of the lowbrow in politics--Lloyd George carried to a logical conclusion...

...Presumably this was because the slavers had a strong interest in keeping their black cargo alive...

...Please allow 2 t o 8 weeks f o r d e l i v e r y o f f i r s t issue) E nUl mm m n m n nm mn l U l l ~lm mm Im m~ I n n m m mm uw nm n nnli um u w nm n m ~ m nm = m m m m m m n m n m | m n m u | I SPECIAL DISCOUNT RATES FOR FIRST-TIME SUBSCRIBERS g | a C. ! g | ! I ! I il NAME (Please print or type) II | g II STREET ADDRESS I I I I I II CITY STATE ZIPCODE PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER g ,~n i i i I B i i IBB i i BB n i i i i n i i i B i i l i d BB mm i i i i i BB i i I=B B I I BB m BB I i BB BB U i BB i i BB i ~ One-year subscription . . $9 (regularly $14) One-year student or retired person's sub . . . . $7 (regularly $12) Three-year subscription . . . $19 (regulmly $36) I I l One-year C3nadi~.n or foreign s u b s c r i p t i o n . . . $11 1I (regularly $17) (Payment must be drawn in U.S...

...Once upon a time, autobiography was the province of men and women of achievement...

...political action is often horribly and lethally unpredictable...

...Help us explode old myths and prejudices...

...When at last the Good Brother loses patience and screams for an explanation, the answer rumbles softly through the synagogue:"You-u-u bug me...

...Again, in the worst year, the proportion of Irish would-be immigrants dying during the Atlantic crossing seems to have been over double the average in the slave ships...

...This moral sheds a harsh, unpleasing light upon the author of that Hymn of Hate in the Washington Post...

...But Alpert refuses to see any of this as unremarkable...

...Tolstoy is laid to rest with much derisive rumination on his preaching of love and his failure to love his own wife...

...His politicians are invariably clowns, his businessmen monsters of moronic cupidity, his artists pathetic victims...

...Just when you conclude that she has supplied all the psychological evidence contributing to her delinquency-the personal pathology of her i, elationship with Sam Melville easing the way to a more dramatically enacted maladjustment--she abandons that tack and breathlessly begins spouting bits of movement ideology- "We believed that the world could be cleansed of all domination and submission, that perception itself could be purified of the division into subject and object, that power playing between nations, sexes, races, ages, between animals and humans [[], individuals and groups, could be brought to an end...

...If, like Linda Lovelace, you are too busy---or too lazy--to jot down your impressions, professional collaborators will do the work for you...

...Our contributors include the best orthodox Catholicism has to offer: Francis Canavan S.J., Christopher Derrick, Joseph Fessio S.J., Paul H. Hallett, James Hitchcock, Msgr...

...I was dreading the return to Forest Hills as though it were a prison," From the horrors of living in a Queens apartment with middle-class, 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY" 1982...

...It is the standard cocktail-party chat of the between-wars literary chic, based on half-remembered scraps of books and newspapers...

...His concept of God reads a little like that in the old Jewish joke about the Good Brother who is reduced to rags and misery while his villainous sibling prospers and grows fat...

...On all these counts Gerhardie fails in this book, and fails badly...

...it follows that our leaders are often horribly foolish or weak or crooked...

...The third reason why Sowell is so exhilarating to read is, therefore, the luminous and constant sincerity of both his academic and political purpose...

...There are two observations I would like to make...

...After all, it's said, there aren't even enough intelligent orthodox Catholics to support a decent journal of opinion...

...His account of tile squaIid slaughter of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in a Siberian cellar is unique in the book--vivid, deeply felt, moving, untouched by the facile sarcasm and Schadenfreude which spoils so much of the rest, including the other death scenes...

...If you genuinely want to teach, rather than merely continue enjoying the pay and status of a teacher, then you will be bound to make .or to make use of some arrangements, and by p r e f e r e n c e some independently assessed arrangements, for discovering what, if anything, your pupils are in fact learning...

...Most of it has the feel of pickings from the writer's notebook, jottings over several years copied into the text without too much thought...

...His consistent thesis that the best-laid plans of mice and -men are invariabl...

...Private life left private no longer suffices...

...funds) il Sample c o p y . . . $3.50 Make check payable to "American Church Union" and mail to: New Oxford Review Room 286 6013 Lawton Ave...

...The essay material does spin out over a wide variety of subjects, ranging from philosophy (Plato is good, Aristotle is bad) through literature and music to politics, economics, journalism, morality, religion, and the future of mankind...

...the love of money and the love of power (not to mention the love of people en masse) is often horribly corrupting...

...straight off: The first is that Growing Up Underground is not set in a political context, except !n the most superficial and ready-made way...

...This is supposed to be one more example of God's sense of hum0r...

...Think again...

...we will nevertheless slip and fou~nder on the banana skins strewn in our path by a grinning Divinity who delights not in shaping our ends, but in frustrating them...

...and you will be ready to adjust your efforts and methods in response to this feedback...

...But their enormous multiplication in recent years seems to have been a byproduct of misdirected welfare programs: "More than four out of five Negro families in New York in 1905 were headed by the father...

...It is all very depressing...

...The game I was playing was essential to my stability, but it was also more dangerous than I dared admit...

...If it i s i n d e e d true knowledge he is a f t e r , r a t h e r than congenial conviction, then he cannot but be anxious to detect any seductive subs t i t u t e insinuating h e r s e l f into his arms...

...Passion neither is nor ever will be any sort of scarce good...

...GROWING UP UNDERGROUND Jane Alpert / William Morrow / $12.95 Daphne Merkin Ours is a culture enamored of public disclosures...

...it also follows that war is most often a horribly stupid and bloody exercise and therefore often horribly wrong...

...Fatherless black families too there always have been...

...Even the "magisterial" New York Times has had totake notice, disapprovingly calling us "ultraconservative...

...Mother Right," for example, the essay published while she was still underground, is a frenzied denunciation of leftist politics in the shape of Sam Melville after her conversion to feminist politics in the shape of Robin Morgan...

...Only when her mistress bent down close to her and shouted ioudly in her ear, 'Scho-ko-ladeI,' she would turn over and twitch feebly with her forelegs, in a faint shadow of reminiscent pleasure...

...Where he must admit that some scrap of decency, real talent, or genuine intelligence exists among our wretched species, Gerhardie provides a Catch-22 in the form of God's "comic s p i r i t " : We may plan, dream, desire, or discover what we please, severally or collectively (Gerhardie prefers the collective...

...It begins, as such psychodramas do, with a childhood that could fool you into thinking of it as more or l e s s normal...

...For in each case they can be used to show that a consistently and authentically critical approach is an essential requirement of good faith...

...As published the book is a chaotic, cranky, and generally callow tract which stoops to caricature more often than it achieves portrayal, and gives the unmistakable impression that the author was trying something beyond his intellectual and narrative powers...

...A former radical Who jumped bail after pleading guilty to involvement in several bombings in the late 1960s, Alpert went underground for four years and eventually resurfaced tO serve a twenty-month prison term...

...Hitler admired Lloyd George for lowering his arguments to the mindlessness of the vulgar mob...

...It is at present perhaps especially scarce in those areas of social science and social policy with which he himself has been--and remains--most concerned...

...The elegant vocabulary and classical reference serve only to heighten the vulgarity of such flea-market xenophobia, placing Gerhardie right on the level of the "mob" which he affects to despise...

...Of course Gerhardie is not joking, and his cast of characters is given little credit for being good...

...The riddle--Who am I?--has given way to more pressing questions: Who am I when no one else is looking...

...Does an August spent by a teen-age Jane in outdoor play and tentative sexual experimentation with the children of family friends strike the unwary reader as benign...

...ushedagley does nm srup him fcom offerir.g his own solmJo,: t,~ ti-e wor!d's ills: Wc war, r a ~v~r{d it, wt~ich every adt, lt .humar~ being receives as his birthright, in universal curre!,cy, say, one dollar a day, that do!k:r beine so regulated in relation ~,~ world-market prices as to form the gred u c i b l e s t a n d a r d of his daily s u b s i s - t e n c e . . . How this warmed-over version of Silvio Gesell and Major Douglas via Ezra Pound is to be organized is not spelled out...

...This strategy enables her to resort to a superbly useful confusion whenever her account of her activities threatens our "good opinion" of her...

...But that was in a period before minimum wage laws, when n e i t h e r the s t a t e nor the uniQns were p r e v e n t i n g the unskilled but ambitious young from pricing themselves into poor jobs, and so acquiring the work experience to become fit for better...

...Today, the memoir need not pose questions or offer clues, because it is meant to address itself to our prevailing anxiety--the fear of being lost in the shuffle...

...for his euphuistic flair cannot hide the fact that the ideas couched in his pretty prose are almost always secondhand, mediocre, silly--and utterly commonplace...

...If your commitment to a particular policy really is a commitment to a policy for producing such and such particular results, then you are bound to want to know whether they are being secured without incurring unforeseen and unacceptable costs...

...In his defense it might be said that if his hatred was clumsy and a little too infected with petulance and spite, he did try to hate the right things...

...If, on the other hand, you insist on dismissing or ignoring all evidence that your cherished policy is not in fact delivering the goods" promised, then the inescapable, existential moral is that your actual commitment either never was, or has since ceased to be, to the production of these particular goods...

...More than anything else, Growing Up Underground is the story of a girl who wanted to be noticed--at any cost...

...Moreover, there is a prejudice among modernist Catholics that those Catholics~who,really believe in the Bible, the creeds, tradition, and the Church are intellectually feeble...

...On one page he will despise the " v u l g a r mob," on the next shed tears for them as a collection o f " s u f f e r i n g u n i t s , " and on still another praise collectivism...

...Do I disappear...

...Everyone spills his story, from White House nannies to ex-heads of state...

...So he feels no need to expiate felt guilt for being a misbegotten WASP, or even to compensate for marginality as t h e descendant of West Indians or "free persons of c o l o r . " As a !00-proof, all-American black he has no call to prove that, if not blacker, he is at least more pro-black than thou...

...which may give that epitaph at least a touch of honor...

...the many real-life Moll Flanderses who populated eighteenth century London did not kiss and tell...

...Certainly Sowell cites evidence that Southern slaveowners did, for this very good reason, p r e f e r to employ expendable free labor for any really dangerous jobs: " I f the Paddies get knocked overboard, or get t h e i r backs broke, nobody loses anything...

...All we have is a demand for " s c i e n t i f i c control on the one hand, and personal liberty on the o t h e r . " G e r h a r d i e ' s manner with politicians is not less trite, more than a little confused, and staified with snobbery...

...Instead, the wars and revolutions become the great events of the era, remaining half-hidden behind the fog of anecdote and dissertation...

...If you are in business to make a profit, then you will surely take care to keep accounts showing which parts of your operation are and which are not more than recovering their costs...

...Next, I suppose we have to mention that Sowell is a mainstream black, who worked himself up out of Harlem the hard way...

...So ravenous and unselective a mass curiosity suggests, I think, something newly misshapen in the way we think about ourselves...

...As I suggested at the s t a r t , Sowelt moves through the clapped-out plant of the race-relations industry with that same devastating and unblinkered freshness of mind which his fellow economists "brought into the disaster area of the contemporary American criminal justice system...

...What is it, then, which makes not only Ethnic America but also everything else Sowell writes so exhilarating to read...

...and hence no very compelling reason why anyone but a lover should commend anyone simply for being passionate...

...Gerhardie offers his sweep of events from the end of the Victorian era to'the early years of World War II as an unrelieved chronicle Of internecine slaughter and moral defeat...

...Subscribe today...

...But orthodox Catholics have nothing comparable in the field...

...In part, certainly, the answer is that h e approaches every question as a thoroughly trained yet altogether unindoctrinated economist, wholly free from all the fashionable prejudices of the professional sociologist or the professional liberal...

...Varnado, and Paul C. Vitz...

...our public figureheads...

...There is no place in the text for scientific achievements (Einstein, for instance, does not appear among the cast of characters) or the growth of democracy in Britain, or other improvements in the lot of the common man (though all these things have a negative side that would have fitted the book's argument...

...He has a nice eye for the telling detail: [Victoria] was e v e r y inch a Queen as Arc Catholic/ -7 There is a tenacious myth in America that says Catholics are stupjd, ignorant, and superstitious...

...From Sowell we learn that "slaves in the United States had a longer life expectancy than peasants in Ireland, ate better, and lived in cabins built of sturdier materials, with more space, ventilation, and privacy than the huts of contemporary Irish p e a s a n t s . " Slaves in the United States also appear to have been treated somewhat less atrociously than slaves in Latin America and the West Indies...

...There is, after all, no global or even local shortage of passibn...

...It smears the portraits even of those whom Gerhardie professes to admire, using "God's Fifth Column" (i.e., the "comic spirit") as an excuse for venting spleen and contemptuous bad temper on his caricatures...

...The immediate relevance of these manifest, indeed tautological, truisms is in their perennially neglected application to both academic inquiry and the assessment of public policy...

...But Sowell's kind of sincerity is not common, and it ought always to be in strong demand...

...Oakland, CA 94618 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982 33 compared with her guest in the royal box at the Opera, the Empress Eugenic . . . . Reared for a throne, the Queen sat down without looking to see whether there was a chair or not to sit down on, convinced, as unshakably as she reigned by divine right, that a seat would be duly pushed up for her...

...I t is true that much of the material handled by novelists and historians is fundamentally banal: People and nations are often horribly cruel to each other...

...One thing which has remained the same is that some groups with a much lower legal status contrive to be materially b e t t e r off than many of their officially recognized superiors...

...True or not, it is a cheap shot, and the book overflows with these...

...The abovementioned magazines are distinguished and influential trend-setters, and the time has Come to give them some serious competition...

...She lay in a corner all day, oblivious to the world...

...the other is that Alpert appears to recognize this fact without actually admitting to it...

...Likoudis, Ralph Mclnerny, John T. Noonan Jr., Kevin Perrotta, James J. Thompson Jr., S.L...

...even in hindsight, she takes her growing pains seriously...

...Well, the NEW OXFORD REVIEW has arrived on the scene to dispel those falsehoods...

...One read about someone else's coming-of-age presumably in order to locate oneself in that process...

...Yet it fails to bring out that it is the very sincerity of the passion and of the commitment which demands such disciplines...

...The American Speatator in its November issue reprinted from the Washington Post one prize bout of such ritualistic liberal, journalistic apoplexy...

...The reader cannot hope to pin her down: Alpert is always decamping and, being an extremist by nature, she tends not just to abandon outposts but to raze them...

...Taking the former first, how can we possibly credit anyone with sincerity of academic purpose except insofar as he is willing to submit his conj e c t u r e s to the most rigorous testing...