ALGIS VALIUNAS:The Dreams of Your Youth Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties
Stone, Robert
BOOKS IN REVIEW mantling the theories of the French physiocrats, readers can know the ultimate relevance is tied to the Big Three. O’Rourke also does a decent job of intellectual...
...Though criticizing the American colonists as freeloaders, Smith nonetheless advised that “Great Britain should voluntarily give up all authority over her colonies, and leave them to elect their own magistrates, to enact their own laws, and to make peace and war as they might think proper...
...Stone’s is brief, sensible, and contrary to the spirit of the age he describes...
...If you want to know what the sixties really mean to one of the finest minds of his generation, read the novels instead...
...the moral world would be remade so that nothing is forbidden...
...But in many respects, Smith was as radical as they come...
...For a far clearer picture of the sixties’ cost in human wreckage, which demands not only regret but even remorse, one would do well to consult the title essay in Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), which ends with the description of a five-yearold girl tripping on acid in High Kindergarten...
...MAY 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 71...
...it’s a book about how to improve the station of humanity...
...To put it in more biblical terms, Smith’s books are the two tablets of the Law—one deals with more lofty concerns, the other says don’t boost your neighbor’s burro...
...Temptation manifested itself in the form of the International Gospel Theatre, which offered him the role of Chief of Temple Guards in an itinerant Passion Play...
...and youth officially extends well into senescence, which the golden children of ’69 are fast approaching...
...In 1968, the North Vietnamese Army, briefly in control of Hue, treated the city and its inhabitants the way the special Kommandos of Totenkopf SS treated the average Byelorussian shtetl...
...STONE’S MEMOIR of the sixties, Prime Green, actually opens in 1958, when he was a 19-year-old naval petty officer, journalist third class, on a transport ship plying Antarctic waters and rigged out for astrophysical observation...
...I am afraid, Converse reasoned, therefore I am...
...His two best novels are Dog Soldiers and Outerbridge Reach...
...Thus Stone became familiar with the feeling of manly blood approaching the boil, and he proclaims himself grateful for the experience...
...Like all books, this one is a mixed bag...
...NO MEMOIR OF THE SIXTIES is complete without a political summa...
...The brass produced great fat waves of frost, ice-lightning it appeared, with a razor-sharp serrated edge—the waves expanding and contracting marvelously along the bass line...
...as he informs the prostitute with whom he keeps company, the Brownes subscribe to The American Spectator—surely the most damning intellectual offense someone can commit in his world...
...SOME OF SMITH’S ARGUMENTS now seem so obvious that readers may wonder why our forebears didn’t see things that way (or why Congress still doesn’t in some cases...
...It occurred to me at one of those moments that I was happier than I had ever been before—with the penguins, the icebergs, the Beaufort scale, and the celestial nimbus clouds cruising above the wind...
...All the Trouble in the World and Eat the Rich are both minor triumphs in their scope and depth and snigger stimuli...
...So another memoir of the plague years, especially one by a writer who dropped sacramental acid with Baba Ram Dass and was on the bus with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, sounds about as appealing at this point as an intimate soiree with Maestro Charles Manson and his antinomian troupe of performance artists...
...You would think that, after encountering neardeath so sharp-edged and fearsome, Converse would want only to get back to peaceable normality as soon as possible...
...About his drug use, on the other hand, Stone leaves little unsaid: he sampled just about every drug there was...
...Yet his tour of duty was not entirely an idyll...
...What was that about Obama...
...But The Wealth of Nations is not a self-help book...
...A common but woefully misinformed criticism of Smith is that he was simply counseling selfishness...
...Ted Stevens, call your office...
...adultery would lose its seriousness in the coming sexual free-for-all...
...He attacked the guild system and government planning when these were considered part of the natural order—as British as bad teeth and kidney pie...
...The appalling cerebral insult this entailed is offset to some extent by his wondrous descriptions of hallucination: The [Great Lizard of the Dawn of Time] caused the music from the stage to become visible...
...He, his wife, and his Nietzsche-addled sidekick fall in among corrupt drug enforcement agents and their psychopathic minions, and Stone composes a fierce elegy for this collection of perfect fools and perfect brutes, who represent the counterculture in its foul connivance with the underworld...
...Hence it counsels that we commit to meddling in others’ affairs—indeed to imperialism for the Angelo M. Codevilla is a professor of international relations at Boston University and a fellow of the Claremont Institute...
...In 1960 Stone worked for the New York Daily News, which he loathed as a right-wing political instrument unconcerned with the truth and bent on rallying the conservative multitudes...
...It’s no light chore...
...This reticence leaves the reader curious: Did Stone not have at the low-hanging fruit everywhere available, or did he grab at it with both hands and just think the details not worth going into, or does he keep his mouth shut out of regard for his wife (to whom he remains married) and children...
...He is a master of this delivery, having pulled off this combo brilliantly in the past...
...the tension between virile heat and tender delicacy would become the stuff of his fiction, and in some respects of his life...
...Smith’s first book, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, deals with improvement from a moral perspective, while Wealth comes at the same subject from the material angle...
...There are points at which I wanted more lecture and less lark...
...Over and over, we located and realigned ourselves in the mathematics of the planet, forever adjusting and correcting the location of our tuck in space and time...
...From the tenor sax issued festive, gorgeous silk bands of the brightest richest red, whirling and dancing and filling the space with scarlet bows and curls...
...A general rage spread among all hands, a rage of battle I had never seen before...
...Egyptians died… begging us for protection, and we were moored close enough to them to take it personally...
...the boat simply is not good enough, and Browne failed to realize that in time because he is not good enough...
...Dead-end jobs—assembly line labor, peddling encyclopedias— and Janice’s pregnancy made cutting out on his marriage seem an attractive proposition...
...It’s either that or slogging on your own through Smith’s tangent about the “Variations in the Value of Silv...
...But they did not require Ken Kesey in the White House in order to prevail in many crucial respects, few of them salubrious...
...And it happens to be a sequel...
...Outerbridge Reach is a work of rare shapeliness and moral vision, a ripping good yarn, and a profound reflection on the persistence of the sixties in the lives of men and women who came of age then...
...In 1956, during the Suez Crisis, he took part in the evacuation of American civilians from the Canal Zone while French jets were bombing the area, “sending donkeys and baskets of figs and women wrapped in folds of cloth high in the air...
...Dangerous Nation aims to correct this “lack of selfDangerous Nation awareness,” by showing us By Robert Kagan how our “liberal ideology” (KNOPF, 527 PAGES, $30) makes us a “frightening power” bound to remake Reviewed by Angelo M. Codevilla the world in our image or die trying...
...The insights are excellent, but the style is at times awkward—perhaps an odd thing to say of such an accomplished stylist...
...The sweetness of forbidden delights would soon be outmoded...
...His peroration enumerates the accomplishments of his generation, and once he gets past “destroying the letter of the laws of racism and sexual discrimination,” the encomium is mainly purple gush about the virtues of Romantic excess...
...The Dreams of Your Youth THE RESIDUE OF THE SIXTIES that is not mere folderol, rodomontade, or Ben ’n’ Jerry’s tends to have the toxic throw-weight of mamba venom cut with methedrine...
...Like most people, I never trusted anyone who offered a formula that transcended the instincts of ordinary decency...
...And it was not so easy at that, not so ordinary...
...but then so does schizophrenia...
...The punctilio of naval discipline, an order devised for the conquest of nature at its wildest and most refractory, earns this tribute: The formalities of the bridge were vaguely liturgical: terse commands repeating ancient formulas in antique language, bells, blocks of Morse code reporting weather from the adjoining radio shack, the boatswain’s whistle at the regulation times of day...
...As O’Rourke quotes Smith, “A great bridge cannot be thrown over at a place where nobody passes, or merely to embellish the views from the windows of a neighboring palace...
...In 1960 Stone married Janice, a fellow writing student at New York University, which they both left to head off for New Orleans...
...Adam Smith,” writes O’Rourke, “helped produce a world of individuality, autonomy, and personal fulfillment, but that world did not produce him...
...I was never able to advance (if that’s the word) beyond the old boring liberalism of the twocheers-for-democracy sort...
...Sex and love figure prominently but not preponderantly in this book, just as they should in any recollection of youth...
...The French bombardment came close enough that the American ship was on the verge of returning fire...
...Sen...
...This is a long way from the Navy’s liturgical bells, and the synaesthetic glories have their price: Stone bolts from the jazz club with “a grinning rictus of terror” on his face...
...He begins filing false navigation logs that have him still leading the race, while in fact he dawdles and backtracks...
...The critics have it exactly backwards...
...and two years later Stone, by then a creative writing fellow at Stanford, was conducting a “deliciously illicit” affair with another young wife...
...Browne is leading the race when his sailboat develops trouble in stormy Antarctic seas...
...We were about to abolish the very notion...
...Smith attacks merchants and government officials (mercantilists) not out of a bizarre devotion to abstract principles but precisely because they are advancing their own good on the backs of others...
...One wishes someone with as fine a mind as Stone’s would have just taken some wasted loser’s word for it...
...But another look at his wife cinched the critical moral decision of his life: he would be bound by one love and forswear forever the adventures of vagabond bohemia and the creamy beauties who were lining the backroads and the boulevards just waiting for him to show his face...
...In the end Anne Browne MAY 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69 BOOKS IN REVIEW dumps Strickland and terminates his film, with extreme prejudice, and to restore the family honor she intends a circumnavigation voyage of her own...
...When evidence of this was unearthed, as they say, the business went a little underreported in Europe and the United States...
...but even so it rarely touches the brilliance of his best fiction...
...It could be a simple problem of misaligned expectations...
...With authors such as Steven Landsburg, Tim Harford, even Steven Levitt, I’ve grown accustomed to popularizers of economics who explain things effectively, lightly, even humorously, without trying to punctuate every other sentence with a rim shot...
...The value added for O’Rourke readers is that he shows the myriad ways in which Smith is still being vindicated, bringing the arguments and observations of Wealth to bear on such current headache inducements as the debates over globalization, privatization, even pork-barreling...
...There was a sense of everything seriously in place...
...or to read Dog Soldiers...
...There is fidelity and there is fidelity...
...Since most newspapers are into telling readers what they are used to hearing and think they already know, any suggestion of congruity in the cruelty of despera tion would have been the occasion of moral con fusion...
...Browne’s best friend, Buzz Ward, a survivor of five years in North Vietnamese captivity, tells Browne that the ordinary suburban life can be lived with full vitality, grace, and honor, and that no extreme salvage measures are needed in his case...
...From the bottom of his heart, he concurred in the moral necessity of his annihilation...
...It roughly coincided with the American massacre of villagers at My Lai...
...The ocean around us stood for blue infinity...
...Converse, a mediocre writer who has dropped in on the Vietnam War in search of a good tale, discovers his true nature during a fragmentation bombing by friendly fire...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW mantling the theories of the French physiocrats, readers can know the ultimate relevance is tied to the Big Three...
...The whole of the man’s corpus is important to keep in mind because the people who pretend that they’ve read Das Kapital like to think of Smith as a monomaniacal prophet of greed...
...68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2007 BOOKS IN REVIEW as the unalienable prerogatives of youth...
...Even capitalists think that’s bad...
...on peyote there are no metaphors...
...Contempt for duty, honor, and country, the crassest hostility to excellence in socalled education, monkey-house sexuality, and the drug-fueled party that never ends are now entrenched Algis Valiunasis a literary journalist living in Florida...
...This act of goodwill might dispose Americans “to favour us in war as well as in trade, and, instead of turbulent and factious subjects, to become our most faithful, affectionate, and generous allies...
...When it comes to moral clarity, however, Stone’s memoir disappoints in the end...
...yet with tremulous pride he takes part in a heroin smuggling operation, and thereby becomes complicit in the world’s willingness to destroy him without compunction, as though he has discovered the essence of life in mortal terror and intends to ride that feeling as far as it will take him...
...Ordinary decency, like the writing of good novels, requires that the whole truth be told...
...Being true demands Browne’s eventual suicide at sea, while his wife is having it off with Strickland...
...This is 70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2007 BOOKS IN REVIEW not a metaphor...
...However, when the writer happens to be Robert Stone, whose memoir is called Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, one does not expect the usual flummery...
...He was ashamed of the casual arrogance with which he had presumed to scurry about creation...
...There was, however, room for some daydreaming even at the helm, and time for reading Ulysses as carefully as it deserves, an activity interrupted on occasion by the sensation that the whole world was sliding out from under him, only to be made right again...
...In Outerbridge Reach (1992), Stone creates his most attractive hero, Owen Browne, an Annapolis graduate, Vietnam veteran, and yacht salesman who talks himself into taking part in a solo sailboat race around the world, as the sublime undertaking that will redeem the unendurable gray stretches of his discomfortingly comfortable middle-aged life...
...With Dog Soldiers (1974), the hell-bent narrative and the assured tone of acerbic gravity show Stone in command of his powers as storyteller and moralist...
...In those seconds, it seemed absurd that he had ever been allowed to go his foolish way, pursuing notions and small joys...
...Ward’s counsel turns out to be the finest wisdom Stone offers in this book, but Browne charges ahead regardless...
...But Stone went to Vietnam in 1971 as a reporter for a London weekly tabloid modeled on the Village Voice, and he also has his quarrel with the prevailing liberal press coverage of the war...
...Stone has written seven novels and a book of short stories, and his works examine lives Prime Green: fouled by failures of will and Remembering the Sixties nerve, energy and manhood By Robert Stone inadequate to the business of (ECCO, 229 PAGES, $25.95) living, the fateful erotic collisions between men and Reviewed by Algis Valiunas women worn and weary and desperate to salvage their lives through love or its simulacrum, and transcendent longings come to a bad end...
...Ordinary decency, I thought, was about the best of which I, and again most people, were capable...
...A cheesy liberal filmmaker who made his name with a Vietnam anti-war movie, Strickland, hopes to make a documentary that will reveal Browne and his wife for dutyand-honor numbskulls...
...O’Rourke is a wag, a wit, a wisenheimer...
...Illicitness was not going to be around much longer, with its pangs and guilty pleasures...
...On all of these points, Smith was eventually vindicated...
...Prime Green generally shows far more intelligence in its description of experience than in the conclusions Stone reaches about the significance of that experience...
...wandering the American byways in the company of the Christus’s knockout daughter, who he was sure had eyes for him, sounded a damn sight better than changing diapers...
...Measuring ourselves against the masters of the present, we regret nothing except our failure to prevail...
...About his own participation, if any, in the orgiastic life to come Stone maintains discreet silence...
...Approaching 70, Stone has to his credit a body of work that places him with Thomas Pynchon in the forefront of his American literary generation...
...As for Smith’s politics, O’Rourke writes that his views were “conventional” and “mildly reformist...
...In the logs he desperately quotes Melville, “Be true to the dreams of your youth...
...Still, if you want to get a sense of what Smith was trying to say and why it so radically changed the world, then O’Rourke provides an ideal point of departure...
...And happier, I suspected, than I would ever be again...
...Caricature of America ROBERT KAGAN WRITES that “despite four hundred years of steady expansion and ever deepening involvement in world affairs, and despite numerous wars, interventions, and prolonged occupations of foreign lands… Americans still believe their nation’s natural tendencies are toward passivity, indifference and insularity...
...He defended free trade at a time when His Majesty’s government managed international exchange for the benefit of empire generally and London specifically...
...O’Rourke also does a decent job of intellectual backfill...
...seriousness—after the deadpan ironic manner of Conrad—is his byword, and the life skewed tragically out of true—after the enervated and sometimes laughable fashion of Chekhov—is his natural element...
...His job is to be substantive while making readers snigger...
...This book is a recovery effort, to acquaint a new generation with Smith’s work and his world...
...In any case, his discretion seems manly, worthy of respect, however one might want to know more...
...Dropping peyote has its moments...
...But with this volume it sometimes seems as if the shtick is stuck...
Vol. 40 • May 2007 • No. 4
