Eric Hoffer, R.I.P
Bethell, Tom
Tom Bethell ERIC HOFFER, R.I.P. Stopping by the old man's aerie for one last visit. Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher whose first book The True Believer caused a stir among intellectuals...
...We shall eat, drink, and talk,'' Referring to a query I have now forgotten he added: "As to Russia: she will not change so long as the Occident remains dynamic...
...It is easy to die for what you believe...
...There are two sorts of people coming to America: both were nothing before they came, and both made good...
...He groaned when I said "simplistic," and lay on his bed, his eyes closed...
...Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher whose first book The True Believer caused a stir among intellectuals when it was published in 1951, died in San Francisco on May 21...
...It is good to be alive...
...It's a special thing to be a Jew, and this is what most Jews don't know...
...His health had deteriorated...
...It was because I have praised America extravagantly...
...He told me that he was working on a book he would call Conversations with Quotations...
...Let's see who blows up whom.'' (In the last year of his life, according to Lili, Eric Hoffer became increasingly preoccupied with the Middle East as several of his suppositions came true...
...Selden was perhaps ten years younger than Hoffer, slim and well preserved, with a trim beard...
...The question always comes now, can we reverse things...
...I disagree...
...Eric was more of an observer...
...He challenged Selden to name a better country...
...What do you do...
...Nothing is too good for us, remember that," said Hoffer...
...Neither could ever persuade the other of anything...
...You're an exclusivist...
...He couldn't be just a fraud...
...Then he wondered what they thought of Reagan in Washington...
...Thisis something else that I can't explain," he said, puzzled once again...
...Hoffer spoke in a strong Bavarian accent...
...We underestimate it, our friends underestimate it, our enemies thank God underestimate it...
...And the laughter...
...The view from his balcony brought back memories for Eric: he said he could smell his own sweat...
...His parents were recent immigrants from Alsace, living in the Bronx, when Eric was born at the turn of the century...
...God, he said, was simply an invention of the Jews, but at the table Eric always asked someone to say grace...
...It's the most imperialistic country of all...
...Only when the West declines and becomes negligible will Russia venture to experiment...
...He sees his own rise as evidence of others' inferiority...
...They are shaping public opinion, and so on...
...I thought he was asleep when the doorman rang the buzzer and announced that an old friend had come to see him: Selden Osborne...
...Really nobodies...
...If you couldn't make it here, you couldn't make it nowhere...
...He sent his only copy of the manuscript, in longhand, to Harper & Tom Bethell is The American Spectator 's Washington correspondent...
...I couldn't say...
...Take Truman," he said after a while...
...and A.R...
...Indeed he says that all his ideas about grammar emerged from •his familiarity with Hebrew grammar...
...This is what hothered me about homosexuality: they were not ashamed to admit it...
...Hoffer began to fill small notebooks, slowly piecing together The True Believer...
...So I've got a thousand or maybe two thousand quotations...
...It's an uphill battle...
...It's the greatest mystery in the world for me, and I have been preoccupied with the Jews since 1929...
...I left with Selden...
...I remember I once took Eric to hear Max Schachtman...
...The Jews have the atomic bomb," he said, "and they're going to use it if cornered...
...He spoke highly of Reagan, saying that he had always been underestimated, just like America...
...Bridges was afraid of educated longshoremen...
...It's very difficult to become a leader...
...I can describe how you land in Jaffa or Haifa and how you go to Jerusalem...
...His antagonism to this country is because it doesn't give him a role in leadership," Eric explained...
...It was spartan, but sufficient: bunk bed, table, a couple of chairs, and a small bookcase containing only a few favorites: Dostoyevsky, Montaigne, his own books (with some foreign translations of The True Believer...
...How come this hostility on the one hand, and this confidence on the other...
...They knew that it wasn't built right, they called our Constitution a horse and buggy thing, and so everything had to be reformed...
...And Reagan too is now tapping a religious strain...
...There's something else here, something else...
...But the Greeks were a different kind of homosexual...
...Better country...
...What is hard is to live for what you believe...
...That's where all the radicals who have lost faith in radicalism go," he said...
...Lili began...
...Hoffer was both subscriber and contributor to The American Spectator...
...The Bible he read for the first time when he was 27, and this had a greater influence...
...I might have said Australia or New Zealand...
...His great cause was one rarely articulated by intellectuals in America: America itself...
...He lay down on his bed...
...The time will come that American history will be divided into B.R...
...To read Hoffer you would think he was a mild theoretician in retreat from the world...
...Bridges didn't have no money...
...He was holding one of his index cards, and he was trying to fathom, as though for the hundredth time, the quotation written on it: "America is the most aggressive power in the world, the greatest threat to peace, to national self-determination, and to international cooperation...
...You resent any setup where an ignorant son of a bitch can run for office and get elected...
...As we entered the restaurant he put on a bon vivant display, which may have been a pose...
...How come...
...What concerned Hoffer was the increasing shameless-ness and militancy of homosexuals: "There cannot be civilized living without shame," he said, as slim waiters flitted by...
...Eric sat beside her and pointed out a Unitarian Church...
...He told me to read it aloud: "There has never been a time in history when the Jews have not been news...
...Born and raised in America...
...Selden's disagreement was crucial...
...And they want to convert people to their oun thinking...
...The table was laid for him...
...Shame means the acceptance of rules that cannot be enforced by coercion...
...Not many people are willing to die for what they believe...
...We forgot what evil is...
...periods during which the Jews have occupied and dominated Palestine have been the most exciting and significant in man's sojourn on this planet...
...Eric leaned forward on the bed, and through the window you could see the sailboats in San Francisco Bay leaning over in parallel...
...What is hard is to live for what you believe...
...He was wearing a light khaki safari outfit...
...xloffer lived alone in a tenth-floor efficiency apartment overlooking the waterfront and San Francisco Bay...
...t3 ix months later I again went to see Eric Hoffer in his apartment...
...Selden repeated it and said: "I think that the leadership of this country is hellbent to rule the world...
...I remember when I first started to think about writing a book...
...But he was greatly amused because the restaurant, a fashionable one, was externally "French" but actually owned and run by Chinese- a people he much admired and wished would come to America in far greater numbers...
...He thought for a minute and added: "I don't think Egypt .will attack Israel there...
...Do you remember that, Eric...
...He suggested that I pick another card from the file, directing me to Arthur Bryant, the English historian (they were only indexed up to C...
...Eric remembered his father referring to him as "the blind idiot...
...You know them better than I do...
...You said you never grew up with a sense of democracy because you never went to school...
...Selden is so anti-American that it frightens you," he said...
...I said that I worried that an alliance of intellectuals, wedded to government power, was slowly getting the grip that'had so long eluded them...
...Do you know," he told me as we sat down, "I was never accepted by the San Francisco literary establishment...
...He wants to infect us with his own sickness and then offer psychoanalysis as a cure...
...Repeat what you said," he demanded...
...for what you believe...
...We would be going to a restaurant opposite the apartment building where he lived, overlooking the San Francisco docks...
...Something different has happened in...
...It's not so conspicuous because the jetsam and the dirt are all on the surface...
...Lili turned out to be a motherly woman of Italian background, a schoolteacher, who had known Eric for about thirty years...
...I am trying to say something reasonable, and what I probably will say will be this: "Chomsky loves power...
...It grows thicker as I grow older," he said...
...For years I wondered how and when the silent majority is going to wake up...
...Lili, who was married to Selden, turned the wheel of the car and the topic of conversation by saying: "He has gone to jail for what he believes...
...If, let's say, Syria starts something, and the Israelis get in there and wipe the floor with Syria, then the Russians might send an army in and start to order the Israelis around...
...Maybe I should throw out Chomsky and not have any business with him...
...Eric gave a little sigh of pleasure...
...But that won't last...
...But he writes beautifully and he asks the right questions...
...If anyone is for America it should be him...
...You have Pope John Paul, you have the Ayatollah Khomeini, you have them popping all over...
...What America needs is not dissent but denazification...
...President Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom .earlier this year...
...If you have a shameless society you haven't got a society at all-for instance in Russia...
...But when the sources of power are so inconspicuous and so , hard to manipulate, then leaders do not appear...
...He kept up with the New York Times, the Jerusalem Post (weekly edition), Commentary, the Economist, several other publications, but recently had had an eye operation and found reading difficult...
...I favored democracy in the union...
...To me these things are all miracles...
...The man was a pervert I tell you...
...In person he was an energetic table-thumper,- a passionate advocate of causes, vehement, excitable, argumentative, a "fanatic," as he told me later...
...All of a sudden our values are breaking down," Hoffer said, "our norms are breaking down, and the rats are coming up from everywhere...
...He seemed not offended by this, but offered it as a specimen of opinion for my consid...
...As for Eric Hoffer, Selden said: "All his conclusions are wrong -every one of them...
...Eric always said that America is the country of the common man," said Selden...
...There is no shame, and no society...
...He's a very successful, prospering intellectual...
...He returned frequently to the anti-Americanism of the intelligentsia, attributing it to "leprous vanity . . . pretentious nonentities wanting to avenge themselves for being ignored...
...You try to understand why they say these things...
...They call him a metaphysical grammarian...
...And the answer is the same: they were so convinced that they were the fittest men to run the world that they wanted with all their hearts to wipe the floor and start from scratch...
...Tramps...
...He sees the world being run by inferior people, by people who make money, by people without principle or ideology...
...Bridges was a Communist and Eric anti-Communist...
...When he was five years old his mother fell down a flight of stairs while carrying Eric...
...The Jewish nation and its role in history preoccupied him for the rest of his life...
...We walked down the street to a coffee shop at the corner of Mason and Geary...
...There was a swish at Hoffer's elbow, and a man with a menu said: "As an entree tonight I have angler...
...Eric came to life immediately, sat up, and told me that here was an interesting fellow: a "true believer," he said-someone he had known for years and years...
...I wanted to meet him and so wrote, receiving a welcoming reply in his artless looping hand...
...With the outbreak of World War H Hoffer found steady employment with the longshoremen's union, then headed by Harry Bridges...
...But with Freud all we need is a little screwing...
...He said he wanted me to entertain him a little, to read him a few pages from The Idiot...
...Of course, I have seen photographs...
...It has discovered . the secret of survival...
...But he knew now that he had been mistaken in that belief...
...And the Israelis will say: What the hell...
...You accuse your father, your mother...
...He emitted a neighing peal of "There was a prototype for all this in Vienna," he went on, "toward the end of the Hapsburg Empire, before World War I. There was a group of very brilliant people, Jews and non-Jews, who were just glorying in the approaching doom...
...If you ever come to my room you'll see...
...Roosevelt is a watershed in American history...
...He added that fanatics were often important and that "if you have a real cause that needs fighting you had better get some fanatics...
...He was himself part true believer, part individualist...
...He would be going there in a week or two, and they would have some good discussions about disarmament...
...That evening I was in the car again with Eric and Lili, driving back to his apartment, where she would make up his lunch for the next day, and then leave him to contemplate his index cards in his customary solitude...
...No, he was afraid of longshoremen he couldn't use," said Eric who was very much himself again...
...What a disaster that these intellectual swine had such a free hand...
...I can describe the road exactly, as if I was there...
...It was soon time for Eric's longtime friend Lili Osborne to pick us up in her car...
...Consider the lengths people will go to come here...
...Heads at the lunch counter began to crane around in our direction...
...After Roosevelt, you blamed the system-everybody but yourself...
...Also the union under Bridges...
...If he had a chance to meet him he would say: "Go slowl The church has lasted so long...
...What happened...
...He told me that he had gone to Stanford University, and had joined the longshoremen's onion because he then believed that the revolution would originate with the working class...
...I hesitated...
...You won't win without them...
...He thought this was premature...
...Eric Hoffer was the old laboring man, sitting there in the corner, an "Andy Capp" hat on his head and clasping in his knobbly hands a walking stick between his knees...
...But he needs explaining...
...They had worked together as longshoremen on the waterfront down below...
...He was invited by Oxford to lecture...
...Here current events provided the stimulus for his thoughts about life...
...Two years later she died and he went blind...
...Then he sat up finally and said: "I don't want to be nitpicking...
...Tom," he"said, "what gives people like him the confidence that they really know everything, that they are superior to everybody else...
...There was silence and then Eric turned to me and asked: "Do you think he likes me-deep down...
...It was a tour deforce, favorably reviewed by Bertrand Russell...
...They are hurting each other...
...It is a really fabulous country...
...Eric mentioned the hopeless impasse of argument with Selden...
...I was struck by the contrast between his literary and his personal style...
...A doctrinaire socialist," said Eric, just before Selden came into the room...
...He was born in this country...
...In those days I was a dissident Trotskyite," said Selden...
...What I know about his past is that he grew up in a highly orthodox Jewish household...
...Eric said it wasn't so important...
...Hoffer said he had been invited to Israel many times but didn't want to go because he was afraid he would be "disappointed by reality...
...I appreciated it," said Eric...
...Nobodies...
...There is violence in the act there...
...I never found a common man who would agree with Henry Adams that America was created by a bunch of crooks...
...Right now religion is the ' only source of power that's there...
...Then, reflecting on the amazing ungratefulness of some who have done well in America, Hoffer said: "Gratefulness is not a natural thing...
...Hesiod has a beautiful saying: when the Goddess of Shame will depart, our society will fall apart...
...Just knowledge does not give confidence...
...And I couldn't figure out how intelligent people, who liked to eat the good food of Vienna and sleep with the beautiful women of Vienna, should derive such tremendous pleasure from contemplating the approaching doom...
...I think Russia will somehow stumble into it...
...eration...
...You have been rubbing your brain against them...
...What do you do...
...It is true that our intellectuals are becoming much more influential...
...It's a sort of treason to complain about America...
...I was going to go through my life and write down all the kindnesses done, right from the beginning...
...Then all of a sudden there wasn't a great man on this planet...
...The producer, George Crile, had interviewed Hoffer for the program but had not used the footage, to the relief of Lili, who was worried about the hostility his remarks might evoke...
...America is a fabulous country," he said loudly...
...Lili, I have told you a hundred times...
...And I didn't take the factor of religion into account...
...I don't know if we can reverse it...
...Hoffer went to sit on his bed...
...I asked Lili to put on my tombstone: 'The good that came to him was undeserved.' Many times I had ignorant people correct me...
...Here you have a Wasp, an Anglo-Saxon, with not a drop of Jewish blood in him, saying something that no Jewish chauvinist would dare say...
...Then for some reason he thought about the Pope...
...Count your blessings...
...There is some advantage to a parliamentary form of government...
...Then Eric lay back down on his bed, coughing...
...What do you think, Tom...
...There will be a reaction against it...
...A later work, Before the Sabbath, first attracted me to Hoffer...
...All my life I used to write down anything that I thought I wanted to remember...
...Hoffer put the card down and said: "Well, I don't know...
...Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves," Hoffer wrote-a One-sentence synopsis of The True Believer...
...The uniqueness of the Jews...
...What a good country it is...
...Eric was violently anti-Communist, but he gave credit to Harry Bridges," said Selden...
...I never spoke a word to Bridges," said Eric from his bed...
...The True Believer was the work of a "born generalizes" as Richard Rovere said...
...You're not a democrat, Selden...
...I was an active participant in the union," he explained to me...
...Not only does he side with our enemies, he sides with the enemies of Israel: Arabs, Palestinians, dissenters in Israel...
...He thinks that capitalism is for lowbrows, you see, and that'intelligent people should have a superior form of socialism, and so anybody who interferes with this program is a criminal...
...I learned from Selden all the time," said Eric...
...Row, receiving a telegram of acceptance several months later...
...Come any time," he said...
...I met him in the lobby of the Raphael Hotel, San Francisco, in October 1980, just three weeks before President Reagan's election...
...The only place I...
...But he knew it by heart anyway, he said...
...It was always axiomatic for the common man: America was the last stop...
...There was a place where some friends of his lived, about fifty miles down the coast, set among the redwoods: an old property with a goodly acreage...
...I can describe their uniqueness, but why they became what they are I don't know...
...A few minutes in a Mexican border town was his only trip abroad...
...But somehow there is a tremendous vigor in this country...
...One will say, I came as a barefoot boy, and look where I am now...
...This was during the heat of the Vietnam thing, I suppose...
...Noam Chomsky "Now," he said...
...He fell silent for a while, and seemed to be quite tired...
...In 1920 he went to California and stayed there for the rest of his life, rarely leaving the state...
...He said he knew the country "the way I know the palm of my hand...
...Of course, ready to sacrifice himself for the cause," said Eric gripping his stick once again between his knees...
...I am floating through the air with the greatest of ease...
...Unless you have a lot of money.'' "Noooooo-o-o-o...
...With Burke there is still a whiff of evil, in Reflections on the French Revolution...
...As we drove toward the waterfront he said: "We forgot all about the human condition...
...He is also convinced of his superiority over any politician or businessman alive in the United States...
...Everybody accuses his friend...
...Imagine what a disaster it was when we had the Depression and Roosevelt, that crippled aristocrat, got into power and he had a whole bunch of these chomskies and bomskies around him, telling him how to do things, and these people didn't have the least idea what this country was all about...
...It is easy to underestimate America," he said...
...Before Roosevelt, if something went wrong, you blamed yourself...
...One sensed that he was indifferent to material comforts...
...But I love him...
...I've been asking people about him, you know...
...That's a beautiful situation right now...
...Well," he replied, "we'll see what Reagan does...
...And every time, after that quotation, I am going to talk to that man...
...He attended no school, recovered his sight when he was IS, and began to read omnivorously...
...But in my case it was not Bridges but America that set the table for me...
...What a bunch of idiots they must be...
...It was as though the years and decades had fallen away, and they were back together, arguing on the waterfront...
...Of course, they always fall back on the Greeks...
...Hoffer would later become immensely antagonistic toward intellectuals, but he was one himself in many respects...
...Somebody told me that he is good looking...
...He was an ignoramus and yet he made a good President...
...The other will say, I came as a barefoot boy, and look where I am how...
...We ordered coffee and as we waited he demurred at something that I had said to the effect that America might now be in decline...
...But he was not in a reminiscing mood today...
...They think they are like others, but they are not...
...You see, there used to be a time when you had great leaders everywhere: here was de Gaulle, here was Churchill, here was Adenauer...
...All you've got is a conglomerate of people held together by coercion...
...The union paper never acknowledged his existence...
...While working part-time as an agricultural worker and gold prospector, Hoffer discovered Montaigne's Essays in a public library...
...If you went to school and you looked at your professors you would see that the brighter they were the less confident they were that they knew everything...
...I classified him as a fanatic...
...What is it that makes a man who is highly intelligent say such a thing...
...As we walked toward the center of the city he told me: "My whole concern today is disarmament...
...Puffing on a cigarette, he then said: "You see, you are going to have great leaders if it is possible to have power...
...He pronounced "own" to rhyme with "noun...
...And they would show us how the world should be run...
...Most of the educated longshoremen were followers of Bridges...
...And who built this country...
...I have just an enormous number of cards...
...They are a symptom of disintegration and decadence...
...They knew that the doom of the world was just around the corner...
...The conversation soon turned to a recent CBS documentary about the rising political power of homosexuals in San Francisco...
...He learned whole passages by heart and would recite them to his fellow hoboes in the San Joaquin Valley...
...There is a tremendous violence going hand in hand with the homosexuality in San Francisco...
...He admitted that he brainwashed little girls into saying that they wanted to play with him...
Vol. 16 • August 1983 • No. 8
