A Personal History
Nolte, William H.
Other Stories, is, for my money, his best work since Herzog. A perceptive study of the assimilation of Old World immigrants into America, it covers more ground in forty pages than most novels....
...By then his gigantic ego was also in full operation...
...It is surely clear to anyone with good sense that that pact simply made the Axis aggressions possible...
...As Taylor recalls the scene and its impression (without mentioning the fact that the Loved One had the year before shuffled off this mortal coil): "Lenin looked very attractive with his reddish beard and a quizzical smile...
...I n The Trouble Makers (1957), his own favorite brainchild and the one he 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 would like to be remembered by, Taylor wrote that in his opinion "we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men's behaviour...
...Reading the wonderful collection of new stories in Him with His Foot in His Mouth, one is thankful that Bellow chose not to bury the odd assortment of intellectuals, Chicago mobsters, and night school existentialist tile contractors who appear in them in another long, amorphous novel...
...The fact is that Taylor almost invariably comes a cropper when he endeavors to give the reason for things happening as they did...
...In fact, one would never know there had been a second wife except for the prefatory remark...
...The skewed syntax perfectly complements the opinion expressed...
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...And yet Taylor himself admits in The Second World War that both Hitler and his generals knew by late November 1941 that the war in Russia was unwinnable...
...For beginners, let him read The Education of Henry Adams...
...To that rule he most certainly should have made an exception of himself...
...By that time he had also developed his passion for historical studies, for medieval architecture, and for politics...
...Ah, would that it were so...
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...His memoir is, in a word, a disaster...
...Also sprach Tartuffe...
...Beyond a description of events he is unable to go...
...Against whom, I wonder, does Taylor think we fought the War of 18127 Moreover, does he know nothing of the tense relations between America and Great Britain during the Civil War...
...Rather than relate to any one thing the " t h i s ' s " ebb and flow across the page like wreckage after a storm...
...I don't think his fiction would suffer much if he had excised every one...
...All these characteristics make the short story or novella, and not the novel, Bellow's natural form...
...By no means an uncommon view among historians as well as general readers...
...But, as I say, I have read other of his books, some of which are not at all badly written, and at least one--his biography o f Bismarck (1955)--I consider quite good though it may not be, as Taylor claims it is, "the best on [Bismarck] ever written...
...Taylor tells us in the preface to this work that he thinks every historian should write an autobiography...
...Back in 1949, Bellow wrote a story for the Partisan Review called "A Sermon by Doctor Pep," which could serve as a subtitle to much of his work...
...Indeed I had arrived as an historian though I was too busy to care about this at the time...
...it was certainly not--as the postwar decades have shown--in the American interest, or world interest, to help replace one menace by another...
...And why were we making war on Germany, which adamantly refused to return our fire...
...Faylor was 19 in 1925 when he, along adth his mother and Sara, first visited Russia and saw Lenin in Red Square, t sight that greatly stirred the youth...
...A somber note runs through this new collection of stories, however...
...After a long affair with one Robert Kee, Margaret fell under the spell of one of the great deadbeats of the age, Dylan Thomas...
...My favorite among the five, perhaps because it is the funniest, is the title story...
...hd, 400 p $16.95 LOSING GROUND American Social Policy 1950-1980 by Charles Murray This remarkable new book explores how the social programs of the last two decades have had the unintended and perverse effect of slowing and even reversing earlier progress in reducing poverty, crime, and discrimination...
...Near the end of the book Taylor lists the millions killed and wounded, the additional millions wandering hungry and homeless, the almost unbelievable destruction on both sides--and then concludes with a sentence that convicts him categorically of being a moral idiot: "Despite all the killing and destruction that accompanied it, the Seconci World War was a good war...
...11:00-6:00 Eastern Time...
...the diamonds on an heiress's bosom "lay like the Finger Lakes among their hills...
...Well, I suppose I would keep one of Herzog's phantom memos: "Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by -the expression 'the fall of the quotidian.' When did this fall occur...
...As a result he got a scholarship to the lesser renowned Oriel College...
...I demand that he say it in such a way that I can forgo interpretation or translation...
...When asked by a friend how he knew France would not fight after the Munich crisis in 1938, our modern Cassandra replied (or so Taylor says in his memoir), " 'Because of her failure to help Italy in 1848.' So for once I learnt something from history, which I have always said was impossible...
...in the book Taylor speaks of himself as being a bachelor in the 1960s even though his second marriage was not dissolved until 1974...
...It just seems somehow odd...
...In How Wars Begin (1979), an inconsiderable little volume composed of six lectures given on the BBC in July 1977, Taylor is musing over the reason for the British refusal to surrender during the early months of the 1939-1945 war...
...A fascinating view ot the development of a master storyteller...
...There, again, he denigrates the Yankee sharpers for their evil intentions--that is, for their acting out of self-interest...
...A PERSONAL HISTORY A.J.P...
...Not at allwnot, anyhow, for our omniscient historian, whose mindless argument I quote: 1 believed that if Great Britain were involved in war it would be on Hitler's side against Russia...
...It would be such an easy war that it was inconceivable to turn it down...
...In the same place he objects to American reluctance to aid Russia after the German invasion: "Aid to Great Britain was one thing, aid to Communist Russia quite another...
...which is supposed to be about Harold Rosenberg (or is it Clement Greenberg...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 41...
...Reading this wretched book, more a panegyric to his greatness than anything else, I found it hard to believe that so vain, petty, absurd, vulgar and often downright stupid a man could ever have written anything of merit...
...Nor is that confusion in any way clarified by what Taylor wrote about the matter of our part in the War in his The'Second World War (1975...
...He even praises the Soviets for putting down the Hungarian uprising in 1956...
...Speaking of Lenin, I must quote Taylor once more: "The world would now, I think, be a better place if Lenin's example had been generally followed...
...Ever since the Declaration of Independence in 1776," Taylor explains, "Great Britain had willingly or not supplied a strategical buffer between the United States and Europe...
...The reason he gives, for example, for the German invasion of Russia in June 1941 is simply a begging of the question: "There is no doubt why the Germans went to war with Russia...
...The truth is that I failed to find a single humorous, or even witty, remark inany of his books...
...The book got good reviews from distinguished historians...
...The two most ruthless and authoritarian dictatorships in the world were locked in a deathgrip...
...the narrative intelligence can jump wherever it pleases...
...He was already so advanced in his studies that his tutors at Oxford could teach him nothing, or at least so he says...
...In his every recollection there is a badly concealed dagger...
...Not until his third marriage, when he was 70, would he consent to sleeping double...
...A blockbuster investigation into the politics and science of cancer...
...Indeed, his worst enemy--and his enemies are legion if we can believe his own account--could hardly have portrayed him in a more damning fashion...
...Here, as with Herzog, we have a slightly cracked academic writing a letter which may or may not be put in the mail...
...Even when Fate seems to have dealt him a poor hand, it always turns out that he wins the final trick...
...The destruction of both systems and of both dictators, Hitler and Stalin, could only have benefited, not harmed...
...A gifted sponger, thief, and womanizer, Thomas showed up one day on the Taylor doorstep and proceeded to make himself at home...
...But what sort of pleasure might one get from such hop-legged stuff as this, with the prepositional phrases loping off in all directions: " I could not well explain that Chamberlain's phrase of a faraway country about which we knew nothing was an accurate statement in regard to all the countries of eastern Europe and so was drawn into pro-Czech propaganda in which I had little faith...
...The other stories, with the exception of "The Silver Dish," which is a moving contribution to that peculiar American literary sub-genre dealing with Lost Fathers, cover a number of areas which have engaged Bellow's imagination in the past...
...Though I no longer expect anyone trained in a British school to punctuate his prose in a consistent and helpful fashion, I still believe we should hold our island cousins responsible for knowing the rudiments of'English (or American) syntax...
...In the earlier book he states that the United States was making undeclared war on Germany in the summer of 1941 and that we had been aiding Great Britain through lend-lease since March 1941--facts that not even Taylor can deny or gloss over...
...584p S 1 9 . 9 5 TIlE APOCALYPTICS-Cancer and The Big Lie by Edith Efron With sizzling style Efron makes intelligible to the general reader the truth about cancer- and the distortions which have been fed to a hysterical public...
...Better a Communist regime supported by Soviet Russia, I thought, than an antiCommunist regime led by Cardinal Mindszenty...
...No people ever remember for more than a generation, and only haphazardly and vaguely then--but for a nation to act out of a remembrance of things four generations past...
...Nowhere does he so much as hint that Roosevelt's promise of aid and eventual, if necessary, intervention had something to do with Great Britain's remaining in the war after the fall of France...
...For the simple, and debased, reason that he favors the Soviet tyranny...
...Still, Taylor considers himself quite the stylist, constantly bragging about how well written his books are...
...Considering the fact that Lenin's two most illustrious disciples were Hitler and Stalin, I am forced to believe that Taylor is either utterly ignorant of "Lenin's example" or else an advocate of the most rigid kind of totalitarianism...
...But note how Taylor remembers the (probably imagined) slight: " . . . n o n e of the boys who got scholarships to Balliol when I got none has been heard of since...
...Needless to say, Taylor detests the Germans almost as much as he adores the Russians...
...He then gleefully recalls how his tutor, someone named Stanley Cohn, sought esWilliam H. Nolte is C. Wallace Martin Professor o f English at the University o f South Carolina...
...Of course it is...
...Though he loved his father, a gentle man who defended the boy from the wrath and strictures of his somewhat dotty mother, Taylor seems to have been shaped and molded not only in personality but in his ideological predilections by the mother, whom he actually disliked...
...Not one...
...For example, as a boy he earned and should have received a scholarship to Balliol College, but because his family had money the award was given to someone else...
...All very confusing, or so it seems to me...
...Whether this late pessimism is justified or not, it does not have the designer label affixed to the angst of most of our "serious" novelists...
...I confess that this puzzles me...
...Of his first marriage, to Margaret Adams, now deceased and hence unable to prevent her name being used, he tells us enough to pity both parties...
...What stirred the blood and lifted the hearts of Englishmen...
...Senator Truman, already influential and one day to be Roosevelt's successor as President, declared that the Western Powers should stand aside while the Russians and Germans cut each o t h e r ' s throats...
...What kept them going...
...The following passage might have come from a student in a remedial English course: " I had just read The Thirties by Malcolm Muggeridge and this affected my style...
...We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction...
...Bellow has been an eloquent dissenter from the Wasteland mentality which he once called " t h e Established Church in modern literature...
...In some ways, I suppose, Taylor deserves our pity as well as our contempt...
...By which he really means pro-Soviet...
...At this point, Taylor does an admittedly foolish thing: He tells Margaret that he will finance a house for Thomas on the condition that she give him nothing more...
...Not so...
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...one surmises from its truncated ending that it started as a sketch for a novel...
...He is not a dramatic writer, which he made abundantly clear in his full-length play The Last Analysis, and steers clear of the sort of immediate scene setting one finds, say, in James and Waugh...
...The Allies did their best to switch and were saved by their own incompetence...
...It was for this reason to a great extent that the United States had entered the first world war in 1917...
...When Bellow does get on with the story, he shows a canny sense of his strengths and weaknesses...
...I had a further motive which l think few others shared...
...By the way, Taylor insists several times that he is a very humorous writer...
...But in the next breath he shows that we were "unofficially at war in the Atlantic" in the summer of 1941...
...Even wheh Taylor's pro-Soviet sentiments--and his worship is a little more than simple-minded sentimentality--seem to place him in an untenable position, he succeeds, to his satisfaction if to no one else's, in showing he was fight after all...
...Only Taylor could have blown this soap-bubble: What saved the British was "an echo of the past, a memory of earlier times when they stood alone against Napoleon, dragging on for ten years...
...This filter of sensibility allows him to avoid the problem, as Mailer once put it, of getting his characters out of a room...
...Where were we standing when it happened...
...It is not an observation Augie March or Moses Herzog would have made...
...Why then does he insist that we not only should have gone to war but should have done so earlier...
...The professor paints each victim with a few deft comic strokes: A conniving lawyer has eyes "like the eyes you glimpse in the heated purple corners of the smallmammal house that reproduces the gloom of nocturnal tropics" (Bellow has as little use for lawyers as Dickens...
...When Taylor tells us that his mother "fell passionately, though of course platonically, in love" with Sara, I wonder about his word choice, but then I suppose one might fall passionately in love with a man's mind...
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...But since the British and French failed to join the Germans it would appear that he was wrong...
...Of yet another work he remarks, " I t is sound scholarly history and at the same time very funny, a specialty of mine...
...We might, by our policies, have encouraged this...
...Bloomington, Indiana tOO, I was not mistaken...
...In the end something would come r i g h t . " Romantic nonsense...
...At least by 1947, Taylor tells us, the "situation with Dylan" had become unendurable --not so much because of what he had done as because of what he had said...
...he was nfected for life...
...Taylor never seems to hesitate and think about what he is saying...
...For example, he admits to having been "greatly cheered by the news of the Nazi-Soviet pact," since at the time he believed that agreement ruled out the possibility of a German attack on Russia and therefore the likelihood of any war...
...Incidentally, the book that "got good reviews" was Taylor's, not Muggeridge's, as one dimly perceives from the context...
...Although Hitler couldn't invade Great Britain, neither could the British defeat Hitler...
...Then when the Russo-Finnish war broke out Taylor feared that Great Britain and France would go to the aid of Finland and thus, in effect, switch to the German side...
...He thus berates us for doing what he thinks we should have been doing...
...That latter interest he inherited from his mother, a domineering, moralistic woman, who clearly exerted a greater influence on Taylor than did his father, a successful cotton merchant in Manchester...
...And I , " Taylor smugly concludes, "so despised by clever Stanley, have been a principal contributor to the Sunday Express for the last twenty years...
...I hope I do not sound sacrilegious when I attribute the nature of Lenin's smile to post-mortem bewilderment, or in any case to the taxidermic art of those who stuffed him and put him under glass for the true believers and the merely curious to gape at...
...Along with her constant involvement in various radical causes of the period, she also had a way of becoming "romantically attached," as Taylor puts it, to first this man and then this other--first to a photographer, who died during the First World War, and then to a professional ladies' man and ardent Communist named Henry Sara...
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...in war anywhere...
...I decided then that he was a really good man, an opinion I have not changed...
...Because of the mistaken use of mood, I had to read the following two or three times: "Altogether 1938-39 was a dull and unprofitable year if it had not been for the long stretches I spent away from Oxford...
...I n my opinion," he proclaims, "the writings of an historian are no good unless readers get the same pleasure from them as they do from a novel...
...God knows that historians maul the language unmercifully, but Taylor, at least in recent years, must rank as one of the most fiendish assassins of English in this benighted age...
...Four children were born of the first marriage, and two of the second-though little is said about any of the progeny...
...No one except possibly Malcolm noticed this...
...Each is more entertaining and instructive for being on his own fictional patch...
...The humanistic music has ceased, and now there is a different barbarous music welling u p , " says one of the characters...
...Incidentally, he quotes a passage from Baldwin's book that strikes me as being entirely sound and worth reproducing: "The German invasion of Russia offered the United States alternatives short of allout war which it did not even consider...
...That was in 1935...
...I answered by propounding a Soviet Alliance as the test of anti-Nazi sincerity...
...Unlike most intelligent, rational beings, Taylor never lAISSEZ FAIRE B(Z KS BEST SELLERS Branden, LOVE & SEX IN THE PHILOSOPttY OF RAND (tape) $14.95 Branden, HONORING THE SELF S 15.95 Flew, THINKING STRAIGHT $7.95 Friedman, TYRANNY OF THE STATUS QUO S 10.95 Hayek, THE ROAD TO SERFDOM 06.95/S i 2.50 Hazlitt, FROM BRETTON WOODS TO WORLD INFLATION $10.95 Hazlitt, ECONOMICS IN ONE LESSON $ 5.95 lacobs, CITIES & THE WEALTH OF NATIONS $17.95 lohnson, MODERN TIMES $27.50 lohnston, WHO'S AFRAID OF THE IRS...
...But it does not infuriate me as does his insistence--in a review in the Observer (February 6, 1977) of Hanson Baldwin's The Crucial Years 1939-1941--"that lend-lease, far from being an act of unselfish generosity, was designed to squeeze Great Britain dry...
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...Fans of the New York Intellectual soaps, who can't get enough of what Rahv really said to Howe at the Trillings' New Year's Eve party, will get an extra fillip from "What Kind of Day Did You Have...
...he also dislikes the French, the Spanish, and the Americans in the wholesale fashion of a child or, worse, of a surly bigot...
...He left a month later...
...Until that happened, 'our enemy is here...
...Indeed, in all his books-or at least in the dozen or so that I have read--his predilection for Communist tyranny is clearly visible...
...Knowing eastern Europe, partly from experience and partly from my historical studies, 1 believed that Communist victories there would be an improvement on the existing regimes as in my opinion they have proved to be...
...When Taylor notes that to this day he is " s t i l l haunted by American academics, anxious to express their appreciation of my kindness to Dylan," the reader can almost hear the sound of teeth grinding...
...He notes that the United States in August 1941 had imposed " a total embargo on supplies to Japan, particularly supplies of oil and of credit," thus leaving Japan with a choice of surrendering or going to war...
...It is not enough for me to know what the writer is trying to say...
...Still, he insists that Roosevelt did not deliberately involve the U.S...
...It was under Sara's tutelage, incidentally, that Taylor first read such "Marxist classics" as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, The Civil War in France, Engels's Origins of the Family, and John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World...
...Taylor then tells us he "might not have minded so much if it had not been for Dylan's boasting...
...You'll never guess, dear reader, not even if your life depended on it...
...It covers many areas and contrasts Austrian with monetarist, neo-Keynesian, and socialist views...
...But all this intellection seldom fuses with the fiction proper...
...Bellow has a slangy way with high-brOw thought which is charming ( " . . . n i h i l i s m , too, has its nono's...
...Although he insists in his preface for the American edition of The Origins o f the Second World War (1962) that he had " a clean record" in the matter of appeasement to the Germans in the 1930s, pointing out that he addressed numerous meetings, always in opposition to appeasement, "when my critics were confining their activities to the seclusion of Oxford common rooms" (always the snide reference to his critics, who were always " s o f t " even when not clearly wrong), he nevertheless strongly opposed British rearmament...
...they went to war with the absolute blind confidence that they would win...
...Zetland: By a Character Witness" tells of a mute inglorious Augie...
...The second instance in which history taught him something is equally preposterous...
...Since he is often quite illogical it is difficult to determine just why Taylor believes what he professes to believe, but one cannot doubt that he has always been and continues to be, in his words, "unshakably proRussian...
...He explains to her that she is the only person he has ever insulted for no reason and relates in manic detail the notable instances when he has insulted people for a very good reason...
...With the exception of The Victim, which he later referred to as "small and correct," an exercise in restraint before he let it rip in The Adventures o f Augie March, Bellow's full-length novels could all be chopped up into smaller pieces without losing anything essential...
...Because by coming to the aid of Great Britain we could reassert our power in Europe...
...qpb, 242p $1 1.50 HAYEK ON LIBERTY by John Gray Gray shows the importance of Hayek's theory of knowledge and its connection to Mill, Nozick and Friedman...
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...Or this: "The second article, though not memorable, has the virtue of being funny, a constant failing of mine...
...Reports reached Taylor that Thomas "was boasting 'round the Oxford pubs that he had got the wife of a rich don hooked on h i m - - a boast followed no doubt by an evil giggle...
...Taylor/Atheneum/$14.95 William H. Nolte As if in extenuation of the crime he committed in writing A Personal History, A.J.P...
...And none of his irritable clowns, including Henderson, has been so successful...
...Like most such "lovers of the people," Taylor seems never to have gotten along very well with Tom, Dick, and Harry...
...Listen to this sleazy bit of sophistry: " I n this, There opportun _9 " i n e r i c 12] Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...his narrators are often alone in a room (or lying in a hammock in an overgrown garden) recalling the past...
...EJ Check or Money Order [ ] MasterCard | CARDNO EXP I I SIGNATUI~ NAME [ ] Visa STREET CITY/STATE ZIP THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 39 got over his Marxian measles...
...His colleagues, soon or late, turned against him, blocked him from awards that he thought he deserved-for example, the Regius Chair at Oxford--or failed to appreciate his efforts as historian, teacher, journalist, and finally TV panelist to enlighten the masses, the only ones, Taylor insists, who really matter...
...on the other hand, I found a great deal, more than enough to keep me going, that appealed to my sense of the absurd...
...His one separately published novella, Seize the Day, would be perfect i f it did not end with Tommy Wilhelm gushing at a stranger's funeral (a piece of sentimentalism which for some reason pleased the critics...
...But in at least two instances Taylor notes that he learned something from history...
...His method is the flashback, the monologue, the character sketch...
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...I agree...
...I should note that he is by no means defending Roosevelt against the charge of being a warmonger...
...It is addressed to a spinster librarian whom the writer, a retired music professor who is on the lam in Canada for legal-financial reasons, recalls having insulted years ago...
...Bellow once said that Gide's work is full of excellent monologuists who want to advance to dialogue, which is exactly his own case...
...So too was he infected ~y Marx's greatest disciple, Lenin...
...Taylor not very convincingly places the blame for the failure of those unions on the fact that he refused to sleep in a double bed, having as a child become accustomed to bedding down in a single...
...When he is not bragging about his superior intelligence, or all the great books he has written, or his unparalleled insight into modern history, he is asking us to believe that all who disagreed with him and stood between him and some prize that was rightfully his were not only wrong but somehow motivated by evil intentions...
...hd, 540p $19.95 TIlE CAPITALIST ALTERNATIVE by Alexander Shand For those eager to find out "what Austrian economics is all about," this book is a good place to start...
...Sometimes they appear in job lots on a single page...
...cape from Oxford by way of writing leaders for Lord Beaverbrook's Sunday Express," only to be sacked by Beaverbrook who considered Cohn a dull writer...
...Of another of his books he brags that "no one else has written a better book on the subject . . . . "There he at least leaves the possibility that someone may have written a book of comparable merit on the subject...
...How could we advocate armaments that were likely to be used against Soviet Russia...
...He gives an equally empty "reason" for America's intervention in the two World Wars--that is to say, we were motivated in both cases by selfinterest...
...There have been novelists obsessed with intellectual categories--Stendhal and Mann, for example--who nonetheless have managed to keep the namedropping to a minimum and get on with the story...
...rather, he slaps down the first, and usually wrong, word that comes to mind, then tacks on another, and then another until he has a handful, or enough to compose the kind of sentence that promptly sinks without trace once the ink is dry...
...Incidentally, he laments in his preface that his second wife did not wish to be either named or referred to in the book, a request that thus prevented him from atoning " f o r some of my graver acts of selfishness and lack of considera38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 tion...
...Cousins," which is a kind of companion piece to "The Old System," deals with municipal corruption in Chicago, about which Bellow did write an op-ed piece...
...Had 1 read nothing but Taylor's autobiography 1 would be justified in dismissing him out of hand as being hopelessly incompetent both as writer and as historian...
...After you examine the books, if for any reason you are not pleased, return them for a prompt refund...
...By far the most interesting and best written part of A Personal History concerns his early years, up to about the age of eighteen, at which point his general view of things was permanently frozen in place...
...He boasts that he never set foot in Spain so long as Franco was ruler, and in like manner brags that he has never been in the United States...
...Like the journalistic asides, most of these name-tag references are entertaining and provocative...
...In fact, it was from that work that he probably took his lecture in How Wars Begin...
...He showed up again in 1946 and evidently began the a f f a i r with Margaret not long after...
...Moreover, his first two marriages, each somehow lasting twenty years or more, were unhappy to an extreme...
...Of course, Margaret was soon giving the poet more money than eyer, and in 1950 bought him another home in London...
...To which quotation Taylor sneeringly responds: "Anyone who believes this can believe anything...
...It is also the only fiction Bellow has written since Seize the Day in which not a single world-class intellectual or school of philosophy is mentioned...
...This story is the sort of intellectual slapstick that Bellow does better than anyone...
...How Hayek influenced political practice is examined as is his system of ideas as a whole...
...Bellow has a weakness for the virtuosic manipulation of brand-name intellectuals...
...rather, he objects to FDR for not having been more forthright in declaring war, which, for reasons that he never explains so far as I know, he believes Roosevelt should have done as soon as war broke out in Europe...
...Although Margaret seems to have been rather more free with her sexual favors to outside persons than was conducive to harmony at home, Taylor actually seems to have condoned if not encouraged her affairs of the heart...
...Does there appear to be a contradiction here...
...Among the pleasures of reading Bellow is the impression that one is dealing with a mature and powerful mind which makes its own markets on the intellectual exchange...
...but after saying that he still refuses to believe that Roosevelt acted as he did "in the confidence that Japan would go to war...
...After all, nearly everyone he knew, if we are to believe him, did him an injury...
...You can't go for more than a dozen pages in his later work without running into Hegel or Freud or Sartre or Merleau-Ponty or Andr~ Breton...
...I n fact, A Personal History abounds in just such howlers--as do, for that matter, the other books written in the past twenty years or so...
...Lais~7 Faire Books, Inc 1984 THE EARLY AYN RAND: A Selection From Her Unpublished Fiction Edited and With an Introduction and Notes by Leonard Peikoff Includes early short stories, plays and never published excerpts from We The Living and The Fotmtahdwad...
...That is to say, I found nothing that was intentionally humorous...
Vol. 17 • November 1984 • No. 11
