Double Crossing

...about good-will ambassadors who think dissidents and refugees are spoilsports...

...Again, considering the literary art of the modern menu, Baker observes that a hamburger is not a hamburger, but " a magnificently seared thickness of sizzling goodness...

...Baker uses this style best in his autobiography, Growing Up, which last year won him his second Pulitzer Prize (the first having been for commentary...

...The satirist tells us a lot about his times, about fads, popular delusions, and the madness of crowds...

...about humanitarians who think of human slavery as a bargain price to pay for cradle-to-grave medical care...

...Use the coupon and order today...

...There is a lot of clubbable fat on the clauses...

...These exceptions aside, the language is nicely crafted, and the title is an apt play on words...

...Packaged solidly in a business-like briefcase, the Berlitz Comprehensive Cassette Course contains: 1. Ten inlroductory lessons in a 90-minute long fh, st cassette to familiarize you with the spoken language...

...In the second, fewer can so faithfully record the antic ravings of maniacs...

...And, in fact, that is what Snow intended: a huge, majestic narrative that would teach people about how the world actually lives its life, instead of flash before them what passes for reality as it streams through a few individual consciousnesses...

...In 1962 the Sun tried to lure him back by offering him a column...

...Rounding out the Baker canon are his burlesques...

...Brenner, in a moment of panic and in the presence of the Soviet officer, kills an enraged GI who discovered the betrayal...

...And the hell with politics...

...Kiril's brother Aleksei, clearly the black sheep of the family (or one of a small herd of black sheep, as we learn later), is just a b o u t everything that Kiril isn't, including a Soviet secret police baron...

...You'll have to read Double Crossing to find outmhut don't count on it being that simple, and make sure you've got a half dozen free hours in front of you before you open it...

...Despite the claims of certain of his fans, Baker is not the funniest man in America...

...The material is carefully researched, the plotting intricate and taut, the dialogue neat and pointed, and most of the narrative smooth enough to be unobtrusive, although it gets a tad bumpy in spots...

...In one of his collections, you can turn to another column...

...All thanks to this 50-lesson do-it-yourself Berlitz e language course...

...Seven of the ten refugee children leap to their deaths in the Havel River to escape repatriation in the Soviet Union...

...When you first set foot in the country you're going to, don't regret that you might have learned scores of words and phrases before you left...

...The Times counteroffered, and Baker has been writing the "Observer" column ever since...

...Philip Snow's own style is amusingly like his brother's...

...It is, however, sad that the most memorable attack o n Snow's work was F.R...

...Such work is bittersweet, and filled with desperation...

...3. Six illust~__ed workbooks to use wlth the tapes, each contalning SO pages of easy-to-understand, concise information to help you speak with the least dJ~iculty...

...But even Kiril is stunned to learn that those who try to pass the boundary--and who failmare buried in unmarked graves...

...As a reward for good work, the Sun sent him to its prestigious London post...

...For once, Anthony Lewis is right...

...You're not making anything...

...Uniformed maids began passing trays of drinks...

...Double Crossing is a thriller and a moral fablemserved up with an engaging restraint and dedicated to "men and women behind the Iron Curtain who share, with the hero of this book, a common desire: to be free...

...They used to be made of wood...

...Fifteen thousand hand-picked guards work the entire border area in twoman sentry units...

...What would be more natural than for him to train me as his chief assisting surgeon...

...The ensuing court drama, evidently a wonderment to Erika Holzer, owes its absurdity to the role played by the American Civil Liberties Union...

...Enjoy the social advantages only a second language can bring...

...Instead, you find essentially three columns: one of withering satire, reflecting outrage at the modern world while upholding the traditional values...

...Leavis's sadistic one ("Snow's relation to the a g e . . , is characterized not by insight and spiritual energy, but by blindness, unconsciousness and automatism"), since Leavis was himself a horribly graceless writer of prose...

...Of course you didn't...

...The audience was a galaxy of literary and miscellaneous notoriety" is the sort of sentence he's capable of writing...

...A word may be in order here to show why leaving the Washington bureau would have such a dramatic effect on a journalist's life...

...about journalists and culturati who think the topic of people living under Communism is a bore...

...In fact, he liked people who had started out and ended up more or less as he had: "To have been poor and to have succeeded in an intellectual rather than a commercial sense went a long way towards earning his approval...

...I might have been luckier and got into a relation less extreme...

...Lucy Baker told her son when he was eight, " I f you think I'm going to raise a good-for-nothing, you've got another think coming...

...42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984...

...Aleksei has some information about Dr...

...A girl's laugh...

...making a total of 6V2 hours of recorded ins~uction in all...

...They carry lightweight submachine guns, tracer ammunition and tear gas bombs, and they have standing orders: Shoot to k i l l . . . "Finally, there is a barbed-wire mesh fence that is ten feet high and three feet underground--to prevent tunneling . . . . The fence is studded with watchtowers--over six hundred of them...

...2. Forty additional lessons on five convenient 60-n~ute ," __,-~t_ es...

...but I didn't care as much about his Ping-Pong matches with Philip as, not unexpectedly, Philip does...

...No, Russell Baker is funny in the same way Mark Twain, George Ade, and, in our own day, Jean Shepherd are funny: darkly...

...We know about a man's love for his car...

...300 pages, in all, to get you on the way to fluency in a second language...

...Baker writes, "She was like a warrior mother fighting~o protect her children in a world run by sons-of-bitches," optimistic and even sunny in the face of rejection, defeat, and failure...

...Well, that's a common enough Russian name, but Dr...

...Double Crossing, then, is also a novel about weird pustules of Western corruption and hypocrisy...

...The list of match-ups between Strangers and Brothers characters and their real-life models has considerable interest...

...You might as well say that" there are no good television repeats, no sand in the sheets, no seconddegree sunburn...

...The Soviet military officer, Nikolai Malik, had helped Brenner cover up the killing, had blackmailed Brenner for several years afterwards, and then had disappeared...

...Lewis Eliot's anguish over his mad wife in Homecomings...

...Ink on a white shirt...

...Brenner and I would have a weekend to get acquainted...

...A flat tire...

...to warrant a grudging halftrust as a temporary operative for the KGB...

...He took some good material into wellintentioned but clumsy hands, and he was a sturdy soldier in the battle for sense on the modern novel's much abused pages...

...Kiril Andreyevich Andreyev, a Moscow physician and our hero, wants more than anything to get out o f the Soviet Union, permanently...

...It may be funny, but it is also truthful, even factual...

...her husband, Henry Mark Holzer, a professor o f law at Brooklyn College, is one of the lawyers who argued for Waiter Polovchak's right to stay in America after Waiter's father decided to leave Chicago and take his family back to the Ukraine...

...He was sitting outside a closed Senate committee hearing when he was so inspired...

...Brenner is all too eager to get back home--eager enough to strike a deal with a Soviet officer in Berlin: the betrayal of a group of GIsponsored Ukrainian refugee children in exchange for a complicated arrangement that will net Brenner a quicker passage home...

...A lightning bug against the sycamore, ants in the kitchen, a mole in the lawn, a snake in the meadow and a shark in the surf . . . . When the radiator is boiling and the picnic is floating away in the thunderstorm and the roof of the seaside cottage is leaking, then do men sing, "Sumer is icumen in, coo-coo...

...E r i k a Holzer's background should be of interest to those who came in late for the real-life spectacle that gave Holzer the inspiration for her novel...

...But as time goes on he will be remembered for being a novelist and very little else...

...This course avoids the dry and the dull--mixes voices, sound effects and useful text in the delightful manner only Berlitz, the world's best known language inmuctor, can offer...

...In 1954 he joined the New York Times Washington bureau...

...While in his political columns he often affects what may be termed a Sixties New Dealer pose, Baker more often than not looks at politicians of whatever stripe the only way a journalist should, in the words of the old editorial writer's saw: down his nose...

...And if you could add commercial success to that, well, so much the better...

...A political Russell Baker column...

...They work right in the halls of power, have the best seats--they Know...

...Thus does Russell Baker win his laughs...

...The realist-humorist, which is not the most elegant but the most apt term, describes the rituals, characters, and episodes that are more or less permanent features of the landscape, the anchors in the midst of life's more fabulous moments of melodrama...

...One of the transcendent moments in h i s career seems to have been a telephone call, in 1959, telling him that The Affair had been made a Book of the Month Club choice in the United States...

...Unfortunately, this shelf of books tends to sag with its own stylistic weight...

...Baker the satirist deadpans...

...In the newspaper, you can turn to some really important reading on the social pages or the obits...

...The uncertain form of the book...

...For each major character, the narrator is occupied with the questions: How much of his fate is due to the accident of his class and time...

...So Dr...

...Double Crossing is about human treachery, dual identity, and the crossing of a bridge called Glienicker, which joins West Berlin to Potsdam, East Germany, over the Havel River...

...There are portions of Strangers and Brothers that are entirely involving: the manipulations of The Masters...

...Conscious of himself as a realist set upon reversing the experimental tides of modernism (a crusade he also conducted in his criticism), Snow wanted to prove the vitality of the chronicle novel in an age whose most famous work of fiction took place in a single day...

...Even the greatest enterprise of his life, the eleven novels in the Strangers and Brothers series, seems to have impressed him less as an imaginative challenge than a career opportunity...

...Kiril knows that those who get past the boundary have been reduced to a trickle of a hundred or so per year...

...9 began to wonder why, at the age of 37, I was wearing out my hams waiting for somebody to come out and lie to me," Baker reminisced for Time in 1979...

...He closely followed the books' sales, because, as he put it in 1947, "no front rank novelists (except Proust & Henry James) failed to get a reasonable sale in their own life-time...

...He was born in 1925 in Virginia...

...Baker covers a lot of familiar ground in a book Anthony Lewis calls an American Classic...

...Growing Up is about Baker's early childhood in Virginia, his father's death when he was a boy, and his mother's heroic efforts to get her son " t o make something of himself...

...And ~avel is so much more fun when you can meet people and talk their language...

...It was a grandly reactionary task, and it is too bad he wasn't more deft at it...

...They exist in a rarefied atmosphere...

...But he did not really begin writing until 1974, when he left the Washington bureau for New York...

...4. A specially prepared, easy-to-use Rotarg Verb Pmde~" will help you with bTegular verb fonns~once you're ready for grammar...

...I am always nervous in the presence of systems," he writes...

...Certainly he saw more worlds than most men do...

...Yet the disappointment lingers, for a bad Russell Baker column is as rare as a bad chocolate-chip cookie...

...been fixed as a writer whose gifts lay entirely in the description of committee deliberations instead of romantic passions...

...Such is his style of burlesque...

...She has something important to say, and she says it in the mode of the serious thriller...

...one cannot have seen much unless one believed in chance...

...at his worst, he is indistinguishable from the other heavy lumber on the Times op-ed page...

...Baker warns Coop to "stay out of i t . " Of course Coop cannot, not in this age of the antihero and the vice squad...

...Summer is also a lightning bug glimmering against the sycamore, and don't you ever forget it, Virginia...

...Such stuff is closer to the grain of American life than bloodless comment on Watergate, the sins of Richard Nixon and his friends, Vietnam, or Pax Atomica...

...Know them before you arrive--and be able to improve your fluency while you're there--with this Berlilz course in a brief case you can take with you...

...At the Sun, Baker was a rewrite man and reporter, covering general assignment and police stories...

...This, of course, sounds more on the order of the nineteenth-century novel than the twentieth...

...Baker stopped being a reporter in 1962, when he began making staccatotoned, witty columns...

...He felt reporting was drudgery, "an unworthy way for a grown man to spend his life...

...Easily...

...Few, perhaps, are aware that the patrols are continuous...

...In a lengthy flashback, Brenner recalls his brief service time in Germany at the end of World War II...

...and one in the madcap burlesque mode...

...He told Philip in 1935: " I think I've a really workable idea that's going to occupy me for the next ten or twenty years...

...E r i k a Holzer's first novel is very good--superior by first-novel standards...

...he sometimes sounds a little like a toastmaster or the composer of, well, honorary-degree citations: "A close friend and as a confidant for nearly fifty years, he was unmistakably influential in keeping Charles informed, encouraged and entertained with a vivacity which the passing years have only faintly sapped...

...Here Baker goes to the movies, and "Gary Cooper is in the next seat as usual, wearing his badge and Stetson...

...He presents the facts, and you draw your own conclusions...

...You didn't have the nerve to walk up to the salesman and say, "I want to buy a shirting...

...The point of the book is to make Snow out to be something of a polymath...

...but on the whole, I had to say of myself what I should have said of others--in your deepest relations, there is only one test of what you profoundly want: it consists of what happens to you...

...Baker is much better than this, and he knows it, which is why you won't find many of the fish-wrapper columns in his collections...

...Perhaps Brenner's crossing to the East will give Kiril his opportunity to cross over to the West...

...The first deflates pomposity, the second shows us what George Ade called People You Know, and the third makes us laugh...

...The same ACLU that argues for the privacy rights of minors when parents intrude on the sexual behavior of their children is the ACLU that argued for the integrity of the family when Walter's father tried to yank his unwilling 12-year-old son back to the world of big parades and Gulag...

...Politics, and writing about politics, covering politics and commenting on politics thus seduced Baker, although not entirely...

...People speculate that should the wire strands be laid end to end, they would encircle the globe...

...This is not to say that Baker is a confectioner of lightweight goods...

...Here, Daddy tells his daughter Virginia about the good old summertime while putting down a good number of gin and tonics: No good old summertime...

...Snow was a notoriously flat writer...

...His father died when he was five years old, and his mother raised him just about singlehandedly...

...For another thing, it sounded like something so elegant that you were afraid the salesman would say that people as minimal as you weren't worthy to wear shirtings...

...And that's not all summer is...

...HONKY BA~ GUARANTEE THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 41 There are miles and miles of barbed wire in the fence...

...In the first place, few have the imagination...

...part biography, part reminiscence, results in a kind of confused charm...

...There are, in fact, in his books some remarkable statements (nineteenth-century novels were permitted to have statements) about love: There was a lot of chance, I knew, in human relations...

...At age 19 back in 1945, when the war was safely winding down, "Honor Student" Brenner had enlisted in the Medical Corps so that his experience would give him "an edge over his John R. Dunlap teaches English at the University of Santa Clara...

...Now you can...

...now they consist of concrete cylinders set one on top of another, crowned by a platform with searchlights and ports for machine guns...

...For his part, Kiril talks with just the right blend of cynicism and opportunism ("Defectors run in the opposite direction, d o n ' t they...

...Brenner that he thinks will be very persuasive, and the defection of a Western luminary would be a hefty addendum to Aleksei's shady resume...

...He can describe someone as the "most dolichocephalic of men," a phrase his brother might have chosen, and the chapter titles-exactly like his mentor's--have a cheapo grandeur that makes one grind one's teeth: "Two Men Rebuild Their Hopes," "Stateliness of a Man Presiding," etc...

...The burden of Erika Holzer's novel is that it probably won't be...

...I'm rather excited by it and, given some sanity in the world to enable me to carry it through, I believe it'll make me...

...classmates '~ when he returned to an early registration in medical school...

...Painlessly...

...It is familiar: The reader experiences the shock of recognition upon reading about romances, characters, neighborhoods, events, and even meals he knows...

...He will need help to escape, and he is testing Adrienne, Kurt Brenner's wife, a Western journalist who, unlike many others of her trade, appears troubled by the plight of the East: "Most people know about the border patrols between the DDR and the Federal Republic of Germany in the West...

...For $125.00, choose the course you need to start talking Eke a native...

...At one point in Double Crossing, up in a Soviet army helicopter returning to East Berlin from a Baltic resort, Kiril Andreyev, playing cicerone to his American guests, matter-of-factly describes the boundary of his world...

...He attended Johns Hopkins, served in the Navy during World War II, and then joined the Baltimore Sun...

...Few writers can carry o f f such things as well...

...Butlers hovered about with bottles poised...

...Joe Mysak is a reporter f o r the Daily Bond Buyer...

...Sure you have...

...but Kiril looks forward to a chance at making a break for it when he gets to East Berlin...

...In fact, less than one-third of his columns are written with humorous intent...

...At his best in these columns, Baker is somewhat Menckenesque...

...one of a realisthumorist style...

...But years later now, the invitation to East Berlin has come to Brenner over the signature of, among others, a Russian official named N. Malik...

...Alas, he now interests us chiefly for what he attempte d than for how he actually managed it...

...Available in French, German, Italian or Spanish-it's yours for only $125.00...

...You have a shaving system...

...Kurt Brenner, a world-renowned American surgeon on his way to a medical conference in East Berlin...

...Such, as Dickens wrote, is life...

...She and her husband are both lawyers...

...You have good seats, sure, but you're always on the sidelines...

...Kurt Brenner--now famous, fiftyish, and on his way from New York to a prestigious confab in East Berlin--has a lot on his mind...

...And for good reason, too...

...Snow has wrongly...

...We know what Baker is talking about when he describes the social striations among Nantucket's summer people...

...Describing his goals for the series in 1945, he wrote: characters, major and minor, second, to depict a number of social backgrounds in England in the period 1920-1950 from the dispossessed to Cabinet Ministers...

...For a look at how we live now, however, Baker has no superiors, and few peers...

...Psychoanalysis, radical feminists, and book-banning all pass under the cynic's gaze, and do not come off the better for it...

...Such is Observer Russell Baker...

...Nowadays you don't have a razor anymore...

...Brenner--full of himself and his ambition to be the "apolitical ambassador of good will" at an important Eastern-bloc medical conference--has something to think about on the plane to Berlin...

...Or take this example from The Rescue of Miss Yaskell and Other Pipe Dreams, his latest collection: Men, have you ever felt the lust for shirtings...

...The treachery is pervasive in this novel, but one seedy incident in particular dwells in the memory of Dr...

...But in Germany, shortly after V-E day and after many experiences too gamy for his taste, Pfc...

...Baker did not spring full-blown from the brow of Ochs...

...and how much to the essence of his nature which is unaffected by class and time...

...For opinions on such things we turn to more informed, wiser, or at least more politically compatible heads...

...He knew how to give his sentences sense, but he almost never made them sing...

...I like learning that Lord Snow liked Benny Hill and the Muppets, and I enjoyed the description of the piggishness with which he read the papers at breakfast...

...For one thing, you weren't sure what a shirting was...

...Things that can spoil your day: Leaving your wallet home...

...This is very funny, and possibly very sad...

...I t should be remembered, though, in spite of Snow's rather industrial approach to his own fiction, that the Strangers and Brothers series was sustained by some noble intentions and very good moments...

...But you didn't go over there, did you...

...The Washington press corps covers Important front page stuff...

...Summer is a wilted collar on the neck, steam on the eyeglasses, poison ivy between the toes and a mosquito bite behind the ear...

...Doctor Kiril and Colonel Aleksei have different opportunities in mind when, together, they work up a scheme to persuade the prominent Dr...

...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 Meanwhile, Dr...

...the religious despair of Roy Calvert in The Light and the Dark...

...There is something more elephantine than integral about it, and judged wholly and finally the undertaking is probably a failure...

...We know the perils of bachelor cookery...

...While this may result in very good daily reporting on politics, it rarely makes for particularly enduring commentary on the American scene...

...Brenner to defect to the East...

...It should be read by the men and women this side of the Iron Curtain who care not a whit about that desire...

...I mean, have you ever ducked into one of those high-toned haberdasheries to get out of the rain and noticed a discreet sign over in the corner--probably in Old English lettering--that said "Men's Shirtings," and felt your mouth water...