Salvador
Didion, Joan
by Rupert Brooke "miraculously right"; a year later he is relieved to meet someone who has never heard of Rupert Brooke. It's the same thing with Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate. In January 1916...
...Castro's hands...
...thirsty thieves...
...And yet, even as one is tempted to see that morning as a psychological fault-line, one realizes that this would be too neat where Sassoon is concerned...
...enormous cold joints and geese and turkeys and a sucking pig and God knows what, and old men with their noses in their plates guzzling for all they're worth...
...El police state, plagued by an almost perpetual state of civil war...
...Because her stay in El Salvador was brief and exclusively professional, Didion has no personal stake in that embattled land...
...Fidel may never have played Grover Cleveland Alexander, but he was a mediocre minor-league pitcher before becoming the Robespierre of Cuba...
...But whichever it is, he can still find himself with an appetite for playing the "happy warrior" long after he has convinced himself of heroism's fakery...
...we are pleased to present the Official American Spectator Beer Mug...
...When we read these letters, it is perhaps best to keep in mind that at the end of the Boca Grande novel, Didion's narrator Grace concedes: "I am less and less certain that this story has been one of delusion...
...Sooner or later, every writer with a distinctive voice risks falling into selfparody...
...The cross on the altar is of bare incan descent bulbs, but the bulbs, that afternoon, were unlit: there was in fact no light at all on the main altar, no light on the cross, no light on the globe of the world that showed the northern American continent in gray and the southern in white...
...S assoon is not sure whether it is "cussedness" or "the old spirit of martyrdom" that keeps him going when he is back at the Front...
...Beer mugs are available only in sets of four...
...The wiring is exposed...
...It's been said that he is "untrammeled by reticence," but that puts it too daintily...
...You will note one date that can be inserted between all these contrasting attitudes: July 1, 1916...
...Sassoon's head was grazed by a bullet on July 13, 1918...
...Sassoon's diaries give an almost hour-by-hour account of his movements that morning ("I am looking at a sunlit picture of Hell...
...The war gave him much that he required, most of all an escape from the slack and prolonged childhood he led until he was nearly thirty, an "inane" life of fox-hunting and occasional poetastering...
...and via UPS when possible...
...Fluorescent tubes hang askew...
...It was this outcry that landed him for a time in Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, for what the authorities decided to call shell-shock...
...In A Book of Common Prayer, Didion's protagonist Charlotte Douglas is a norteamericana who lives in Boca Grande, lists her occupation as una turista, and tries unsuccessfully to sell her vision of reality to the New Yorker in a series of "Letters from Central America...
...The design is printed (no tacky decals) on clear glass, and the rim of this magnificent mug is trimmed with an attractive gold band...
...The careful reader may also dis THE BOY SCOUT HANDBOOK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS Paul Fussell / Oxford University Press / $15.95 Ronald B. Shwartz Three New Books Of Interest from the Social Philosophy and Policy Center OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES, by Fred D. Miller, Jr...
...I -----------38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 one more graphic instance of the center's not holding, of things' falling apart...
...Iv 47402 Please rush me a set of four official American Spectator beer mugs for S34.50 plus 51.50 for postage and insurance...
...After all, the United States joined forces with Stalin in World War II without insisting on his "certifying" human rights progress in the Gulag...
...His homosexuality-fully revealed for the first time in the series of diaries now being published -magnifies both his dutifulness and his losses...
...Still, Salvador contains some pas sages which could have been written only by one of our finest prose stylists...
...This is the young man in the poems "A Subaltern," "The Last Meeting," and "A Letter Home...
...State Zip Money-Back Guarantee Return in ten days if not satisfied...
...no light on the dove above the globe, Salvador del Mundo...
...He would continue to move, hesitatingly, between literature and sport, industry and indolence...
...it yet...
...Predict ably, President Reagan emerges as Didion's Kurtz...
...I am only here to look after some men...
...Now you can drink not only to the American Spectator, but from ii-the better to tolerate the besotted hokum passing for wisdom in the Republic these days...
...This wound brought him back once more to a hospital in England...
...when he meets him just before the Armistice he decides he's a wheezebag: "arrogant old Bridges with his reactionary war-talk...
...and the general uncertainty of the U.S...
...But the impact of reading this volume goes far beyond the pleasures of scholarly detection...
...In January 1916 he quotes him approvingly...
...One of his own men-mistaking him for a German-fired it...
...He would go on from there to live another half century, but nothing he would ever write would create the sensation of his protesting poems in The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918...
...Then, at the end of Didion's narrative, the Great Communicator is seen "certifying" El Salvador's progress toward political stability and human rights, even as the carnage and repression continue...
...What she does not say is that the reason no one could be surprised by this is that the Left produces its own Kurtzes...
...Unless the delusion was mine...
...In her recently published book, Salvador, Didion takes us back fo Boca Grande, even to the point of beginning her account with a description of the El Salvador International Airport...
...Salvador is essentially Joan Didion's "Letters from Central America," published originally not in the New Yorker, but in the New York Review of Books...
...The turmoil in El Salvador is simply At last ! Something for people who don't wear tee shirts...
...policy is not whether we can impose norteamerieana democracy on that troubled nation, but whether we can afford to allow a strategically located Central American country to fall into Dr...
...Part of Sas After months of testing...
...Although we ought not to be too eager to embrace jackbooted thugs of either the Left or the Right, no nation can survive in today's world by allying itself only with those leaders whom we would want to invite home to Sunday dinner...
...Boca Grande was a Central American Mark Royden Winchell teaches English at the University of Southern Mississippi...
...He will also come upon fourteen new poems, as well as many passages that would later be transferred into the Sherston memoirs...
...PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE: An Essay on the Rights of Future Generations by John Ahrens Are we tblrgared rn sacr,frce nor marginal welfare seder nr rnncar~e resources for lulure genera t><.ns' Rhrem aryues Thai we are not w oblrgared and chat through natural market forces and rerhnologrcal advances our progeny writ be given e drcrni chant.' to kve rvIi LAISSEZ PARLER: Freedom in the Electronic Media by David Kelley and Roger Donw+y A r.11~ny rrai,lue of the he a, k; hired of reguta nun e•.'rused „car rh.' .-t .. •s h, the IeLle.dI Wslvmalr rier..l.ilenrm r•f 14.E n,...l:a I I Quantity Price Sub•tornl I 1 I I I I ORDER FORM 4X IOOf IHE.Mil[IIllSnrf hAul.' t•hl IIARING FOR THE FUTURE I Aiti"ti t'Akt f ll k, 9S S400 $41)0 'TATE A check most be included with all orders...
...design...
...The sideboard in this Formby golf-club doesn't look like...
...The salient question which El Salvador raises for U.S...
...on nothing less than his stint as a combat platoon leader in WWII: "The careful reader," he writes, "will discern in all the essays in this book a speaker who is really a pissedoff infantryman, disguised as a literary and cultural commentator...
...Much of the rest of this book is posturing...
...soon needed the war, and kept on needing it, even after he had seen friends killed and himself wounded...
...Indeed, one suspects that this slim, overpriced book of reportage would not have had an appreciably different message had its author stayed home and relied for her information on the network news...
...One of the major disappointments of these diaries is that they contain no entries from those months, during which Sassoon had his conversations with another patient and poet, Wilfred Owen...
...It is, all by itself, another ticket to hell...
...In fact and by reputation, he is a bull in the china shop of American letters, and no wonder: he fashions himself as a kind of thinking man's John Wayne, wielding prose Ronald B. Shwartz is a Boston attorney and freelance writer...
...I entered the war when I was nineteen, and I have been in it ever since...
...If there is any political message here, it is that El Salvador is a Third World backwater which cannot be salvaged for U.S...
...Bloomington...
...On that morning the Battle of the Somme began...
...Didion writes her best journalism when she is able to establish a personal connection with a place (as in her elegiac essays about the Northern California of her childhood) or when she is discovering the inherent literary qualities of a public phenomenon (as in her rendering of the Lucille Miller story in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and her deflation of the buffoonish Bishop Pike in The White Album...
...U ,,I i'hil.-,phy and PoircV i . 39 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983...
...He remained a remarkably indefinite spirit in many ways, even in the decades after the war (he lived until 1967), and one must not expect to see the consistently heroic giving way to the consistently revulsed...
...0 Paul Fussell is a chaired professor of English who doesn't take literature -or much else-sitting down...
...This superstition informed the Carter Administration's disastrous stance on human rights and occasionally crops up in right-wing talk about linkage...
...On June 4, 1918, in a nervous and despairing moment, he writes: "After all, I am nothing bu what the Brigadier calls 'a pote 'tial killer of Germans (Huns).' O God, why must I do it...
...No wonder he preferred the carnage of the trenches to the carnage at the sideboard, even after he had made his public protest, in 1917, against "the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise...
...Order a set today-and never drink alone...
...a loathsome ending to the loathsome tragedy of the last four years...
...Sassoon is-invalided back to England three times in the course of the war, only to realize he would rather be back in the "sausage machine" than listen to the bloody-minded patriotism of the fat and safe and overage left home in dear old Blighty: "They say the U-boat blockade will get worse and there will be a bad foodshortage in England in 1917...
...We do, in earlier notations, get to see Sassoon meeting Robert Graves, "a young poet, captain in Third Battalion and very much disliked...
...These handsome schooners were made especially for the discriminating American Spectator bacchanal-holding a generous 15 ounces of your favorite beverage...
...My check for S36.00 is enclosed...
...One thing that certainly keeps him functioning is a sexually charged protectiveness toward the men serving in his company...
...That Joan Didion should succumb to this pitfall in a work of nonfiction suggests how predictable her view of the world has become...
...Box S77...
...The "certification" charade is required by an ancient liberal superstition, the Wilsonian notion that strategic self-interest is an insufficiently moral basis for a nation's foreign policy...
...with a certain fetching swagger and acid humor, and blaming it all...
...Didion rather cavalierly dismisses that consideration by observing: "no one could doubt that Cuba and Nicaragua had at various points supported the armed opposition to the Salvadoran government, but neither could anyone be surprised by this...
...From then on, as Sassoon's friend Edmund Blunden put it, the war had been "found out...
...Consider, for example, the following description of the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador: This is the cathedral that the late Arch bishop Oscar Ardulfo Romero refused to finish, on the premise that the work of the Church took precedence over its display, and the high walls of raw concrete bristle with structural rods, rusting now, staining the concrete, sticking out at wrenched and violent angles...
...A hard-hitting analysis of the controversy surrounding the World Health Organization's International Code of Breast milk Substitutes, a Code which called upon each nation of the world to ban the advertisement of infant formula and to control the dissemination of information about it to health care personnel Miller provides a devastating critique of the WHO Code based on his exhaustive study of both the scientific evidence and the moral assumptions of the Code's supporters...
...It gave his existence a certain purpose, however brutal, and "[a]fter all, becoming a military serf or trench galley-slave is a very easy way out of the difficulties of life...
...The first of these scenes is simply a variation on all the tired Bonzo jokes that have plagued Reagan for most of his political career...
...When a lieutenant is killed in 1916 he is left "longing for the bodily presence that was so fair" as he goes off by himself into the woods: In her 1976 essay "Why If Write," Joan Didion tells us that the initial inspiration for her novel A Book of Common Prayer was the image of the Panama airport at 6 a.m...
...The great high altar is backed by warped plyboard...
...I'm not...
...The pages he wrote in the course of it, and which we see in this volume, are of incalculable dramatic and historical value...
...Here neither is the case...
...He was in London for the Armistice celebrations on November 11, an "outburst of mob patriotism...
...The second, however, merits further comment...
...Featuring our infamous Turkey logo, this mug will be the envy of all your friends in the ''Masterpiece Theatre'' coterie...
...A reader of the diaries will find the triggering incidents for many more of the poems he already knows...
...and much perspiration...
...interests and that to take one side or the other there is to fall prey to the sort of selfdelusion which afflicted Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness...
...SALVADOR Joan Didion / Simon and Schuster / $12.95 Mark Royden Winchell THI: S:1 I l l2i:ll I=1 F:vlN6 CLUB P.O...
...Early in the book, we watch Reagan and Doris Day cavort on Salvadoran _television in The Winning Team, a 1952 Warner Brothers movie about the baseball pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander...
...The image proved so vivid that she later made up a country in which to locate the airport and a menacing political environment for that country...
...Please note that these tankards are shipped in quantities of four...
...I wrote his name in chalk on the beech-tree stem, and left a rough garland of ivy there, and a yellow primrose for his yellow hair and kind grey eyes, my dear, my dear...
...Postal Service...
...The diaries show plenty of continuing ambivalence...
...Twenty-thousand British soldiers were dead before the day was over...
...And the closest she comes to "found literature" is her short characterization of American ambassador Deane Hinton, who-as a cosmopolitan man with western American roots-seems to be Didion's kind of guy...
...An interesting creature, overstrung and selfconscious, a defter of convention...
...He would make an unhappy marriage, withdraw more and more into himself, and, finally, join the Roman Catholic Church., Something about him remained forever unformed and unreached, oddly beautiful and deeply pathetic...
...Your mugs arc fully insured against oafi%h handling...
Vol. 16 • July 1983 • No. 7
