PRESS: Winners, Losers, Dreamers
Powers, Thomas
The Battle. of the Somme took place a long time ago --nearly 61 years ago, now--but it was not the sort of thing anyone would be likely to forget. It was not like the Battle of Bunker Hill, or...
...Emerson tells us a lot about the ignorance of American civilians, the blundering of the American military, the confusion and venality of the Saigon soldiers, the tenacity and discipline and crazy single-mindedness of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese...
...Ellsworth Bunker singing the Whiffenproof song at a meeting of the Saigon Yale Club, founded by himself...
...The context which the film provides for the Brookside strike is a newsreel history of the U.M.W...
...Although Kopple's film does concentrate on the women of Harlan County, I doubt that it was her intention to do so when she first went there to cover an organizing strike at the Brookside Mine in 1973...
...A squad of Marines who refused to eat apricots because one of their buddies had stepped on a mine the same day a sergeant had eaten apricots...
...Emerson calls us to a high standard...
...as I write, 5 a.m...
...This is the kind of thing Emerson has put in her book: a former military chaplain who said, in 1967, "If Christ were alive today, he would be a Marine carrying a rifle...
...At least in the thirties you could feel you were part of a national effort going on in other vital industries----that the time was right...
...For the men, working and striking alike are filled with such danger and worry that both seem only a dispiriting drudgery...
...The argument is narrow now...
...Bow our heads...
...Now the time is long past...
...All this makes the role that the miners play in their own strike seem a rather debilitated one...
...And like that general history, the story of the Brookside strike is one of obduracy, implacability, hardship and violence--of gains so late, so small, so dearly won and so easily betrayed that they hardly make any difference...
...That time the owners broke the strike and beat back the unionization attempt, so here the miners are, forty years later, still trying to win just the right to organize under the U.M.W...
...The American people have felt all they are ever going to feel about this war...
...The sound of her voice can be harsh, grating, upsetting, irritating, unnerving, affecting, infuriating...
...Fenton saw Emerson's view of the war as a "rolling pin" with which she was beating the reader, and succeeded in keeping well out of the way himself...
...Emerson finally finished her book but then people reacted to it in ways which were almost crazed, her friends and detractors equally agitated and insistent...
...The owners only decide to settle when one of their gun thugs actually kills a striker...
...Inevitably, the men reflect this...
...We cannot help suspecting from Kopp!e's presentation that the men are just repeating once again an endless, futile cycle, and that they tbemselves suspect as much...
...Even now, when the survivors are in their late seventies or eighties, there must be men who dream of the first day...
...Wendell Phillips...
...After that there will be only the books...
...Far from affirming the old values of left-wing militancy and the united front, the film seems to lay them to rest almost...
...I remember a journalist who spent four years in Vietnam telling me late one night that he couldn't understand how he could have treated the war as a story for so long, how he could have been so careless . . . . ? Caring about the horror of war may seem an easy and natural thing, but it's not...
...It's 10 a.m...
...THOMAS POWERS WOMEN'S WORK 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN The fundamental likeness between Jeanne Moreau's Lumi~re and Barbara Kopple's Harlan County U.S.A...
...Instead it's a collection of small incidents, details, scraps of conversation, odd and disjointed remarks, interviews with civilians who do not have a single clear idea about the war, unless it's the impression that we fought the entire war with one hand tied behind our backs...
...Where the people in Lumi~re are rich, famous and chic, those in Harlan County are poor, isolated and oppressed...
...A blind veteran who said he used to look like Robert Wagner, the movie actor, and then removed his dark glasses and asked Emerson, "What do I look like now...
...This isn't surprising when you consider how people reacted to the war itself, and it's even less surprising once you read the book...
...We think of other things...
...The unpersuaded went at her book with equal vigor...
...And after all this, we hear an old veteran of the mines tell us as he goes back to work in the pre-dawn that he still can't retire because he would starve on his pension...
...For one thing, a coal-mine strike would seem to be an affair among men...
...She tried to explain things to people who missed the point...
...Yet even when conceded to be a documentary, Morean's film seems obviously different from Kopple's---dialectically different, to put it in appropriate Marxist terms...
...The reader, it must be said, sometimes wilts under the glare of this fierce intensity...
...The special horror of the 20th century has been our discovery of the ease of carelessness...
...I don't doubt Whitman liked the book but there is something loony about this extreme reaction...
...She's 45 now...
...After leaving Vietnam in early 1972, Emerson spent a year at Harvard where she talked to students who knew a lot of facts about the war but only listened impassively when she tried to explain what it was like...
...Her dispatches were not the usual reports of battles and Saigon politics, and her book is very far from being a reporter's book...
...She often thought of abandoning her book but always went back to it because she didn't want people to forget, "so when all of us are dead a long record will exist, at least in a few libraries...
...For many reporters Vietnam was a dead story, but Emerson did not seem to see it as a "story" at all...
...Lehmann-Haupt calls it "quintessentially boring...
...In fact, aside from the conceit that they are both documentaries, their differences are at first much more noticeable than their similarities...
...A soldier's remark that he used to rub Vick's Vapo-rub in his nostrils to kill the stench of bodies...
...By page 295, where Emerson quotes a CIA agent who said the problem was the terrain--the terrain...
...It's a world whose inhabitants are governed in the most fundamental way by the laws of matter...
...The automobile workers who shared those struggles of the thirties are now bored with the benefits they won, while the coal miners are still trying just to win them...
...We should bow our heads in gratitude...
...We may stop paying attention, but I doubt she's ever going to stop remembering...
...I mean that she has tried to find a way to make us see and care, and sometimes her way works, and sometimes it doesn't...
...One of the latter, an officer in ARVN, wanted to know why U.S...
...Sixty thousand, in one day...
...James Fenton in the Sunday and Christopher LehmannHaupt in the daily Times were very definite...
...Fenton calls it a "rolling pin...
...But the role that the women of Harlan County play is something else again...
...Other reviewers have called it "snobbery" or "self-righteousness...
...But what those who took part most remember was the first day...
...He talked to 500 participants from both sides, and more than one told him they still dreamed about the first day...
...she only wants to know if it touched us...
...To see the pain of war once, is to see everything in a new light...
...Not just the occasional twinge or gasp at a photo of a naked girl running down the road, but did we really care, a lot, for everybody, all the time...
...When Martin Middlebrook began to do research for his book, First Day on the Somme, in 1965, not quite 50 years after the battle, he found :that the memories of its survivors were still vivid...
...No one 4 March 1977:148 even hinted so much as a suspicion she was putting it on...
...Emerson doesn't really care what we think about the war...
...In another month the war will have been over for two years...
...Her tone instead is one of absolute conviction that no detail of this awful war can be fiat or irrelevant...
...The woman who said Emerson's assignment to Vietnam was a "once in a lifetime chance...
...She makes only the barest allusions to why she thinks things turned out as they did, and does not have one word to say about the war as a continuation of policy by other means" I have not gone back to check, but I doubt you could even find the word "'policy" in her book at all...
...But whatever else Emerson's critics have said, no one called her a fraud...
...Winners and Losers isn't about winning and losing...
...I am always glad to see him there...
...It's about the oldest and simplest of subjects: the pain of war...
...What was the lesson...
...Our hearts don't go out easily...
...and for another, while Kopple did work on Sandra Hochman's Year of the Women, her experience was acquired predominantly on Winter Soldier and Peter Davis's Hearts and Minds...
...She reminds me of Lincoln and Wendell Phillips and Sandburg . . . . Out of the ordure and offal of Vietnam we have been vouchsafed a book of genuine greatness and largeness of spirit...
...She worried about her Vietnamese interpreter, a man named Nguyen Ngoc Luong...
...veterans were throwing away their medals at the Capitol in Washington...
...A young officer in shock during a battle who was told by a doctor to breathe inside a paper bag because he was only hyperventilating...
...Perhaps someone is dreaming of that battle at this very moment...
...It lasted more than four months, from July 1 through the first week in November of 1916...
...Asking them how they felt about the war, I have heard stories about termites, the evil of welfare, diets that did not work, poor bus service, abortion, the horrible costs of feeding cattle and teenagers, busing, crime, useless back operations, the evil of welfare, whether hair dyes cause cancer, how hard it is to pick tobacco by hand, the danger of eating certain fish, crime, the trouble with a car called Capri, busing, why Coca Cola ,.~osts more than beer, ugly marriages . . . . " Those were bad years too...
...The first is that she says a lot more on that score than most readers seem to have noticed...
...Her way is very far from the reporter's...
...You've got a fight to ask why I'm bringing this up now, and I can't offer much by way of a reason...
...He disliked the hook so much, in other words, that he was almost ready to claim the war was . . . h e r / a u l t . . . . There is something fevered about such responses, to say the least...
...But it wasn't that at all: it was because they didn't want me to see what they was doing down there...
...in Germany, if I've got the time zones fight...
...2010 she'll still be dreaming about Luong and the things that happened in Vietnam...
...Those were dull years for a lot of reporters, after the Tet offensive of 1968, but before the big battles in the spring of 1972...
...Doing so now is doubly hard, too...
...I suspect they didn't dare...
...But I often think of those men dreaming about the worst day of their lives, most recently while reading Gloria Emerson's book about Vietnam, Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses and Ruins ]rom a Long War...
...Before the day was over 60,000 of those British soldiers had been killed or wounded...
...What went wrong, anyway...
...As she reaches this conclusion the words crowd Commonweal 149...
...Editors were moving the Vietnam story inside, a lot of papers were cutting their staffs or closing down their Saigon bureaus altogether, sending in a man from time to time from Hong Kong...
...they harden...
...She is not knowing or analytic or informative or anecdotal or debunking or any of the other things which reporters are...
...in Britain, 4 a.m...
...The book builds slowly, describing one wounding collision of America and Vietnam after another...
...A veteran who said half of the Americans killed in Vietnam probably would have died in car accidents at home...
...The leaders have to plead with the men to get them to picket...
...that they were "both made by women--is not immediately apparent...
...and the Times editor who cut the incident from a story because "it doesn't take us very far...
...and Lehmann-Haupt found her not only as willful and priggish as a child but actuallymthrough her "moral superiority, her inability to objectify, her confusion of categories, her romanticism, her sloppy language, her lack of historical imagination, her Manicheanism"--guilty of the very attitudes which got us into the war to begin with...
...They said it was because the house was in danger I had to leave," she sneers...
...In these traditional political terms, however, the Brookside strike was a pretty discouraging experience...
...Gloria Emerson was a reporter for the New York Times who spent two years in Vietnam at the beginning of the 1970s...
...I was discussing Moreau's film in my last column, and maintaining that it is, for all its fantasy, a record of Moreau's own life...
...The only common note in most reviews, whether for or against, was puzzled disappointment that Emerson had not explained what the problem was...
...A psychologist, all smile and water, says TM helps bad dreams, as if dreams were unnecessary, an impediment to life...
...It is ambiguously a dream had by someone asleep and a memory of actual events, and in so far as it is the latter, it is a documentary as much as a fiction film...
...we know why we lost...
...But those who think Emerson will forget and "get over" the war, as if it were a seasonal flu, are wrong...
...In A.D...
...Kopple's is a documentary film too, and solely a documentary, about a coal-mine strike in Kentucky...
...stretching from John L. Lewis's rhetoric through Tony Boyle's conviction for the Yablonski murders to current ran:and-file disaffection with the reform presidency of Arnold Miller...
...This is natural and right...
...It takes work to care about things...
...Nixon was bringing the troops home, the American public had grown indifferent, lonely anti-war activists were bitterly jokihg that after the Old Left and the New Left came the What's Left...
...One suspects that 1977 is going to look like a bad year too, in retrospect...
...Where Lumi~re is a documentary of the self, Harlan County is a documentary of otherness...
...Were they demanding more veterans' benefits...
...it is hard to imagine Emerson ever going out on a story again...
...At one point Kopple is interviewing an old woman who was once made to evacuate her house when a nearby mine exploded...
...In Moreau's world the people are beautiful to look at and almost all problems are mental...
...By that I mean it's not an account of what happened...
...In Harlan County they've been through all this before, back in the 1930s...
...Emerson has worked hard to learn to care what the war did to people but her command of the idiom is erratic...
...That was a bad year...
...feeling has to be learned like another language...
...In Vietnam, he told Emerson, the Americans wanted to win the war so much they became angry at the Vietnamese for not trying hard enough...
...There are two answers to that objection...
...It began with a terrific artillery bombardment of the German lines and then in the eerie silence after the barrage ended, along miles of muddy front, the British soldiers climbed up out of their trenches and began to walk toward the Germans...
...Commonweal: 147 Later she spent several years interviewing Americans about the war for her book, not just veterans but their families and neighbors...
...Gradually we get the point...
...fewer people are paying attention, and the number will grow smaller...
...Like the place in which they work, the whole realm of possibility in which these men live is dim, stifling and relentlessly grinding...
...And many, many Vietnamese, wounded, dead, scared and bewildered...
...Few books have been as widely reviewed this winter, and none has posed quite such a problem for reviewers, or brought forth expressions of such passionate admiration, or of pique, irritation and outright anger...
...The politics that drew her to Harlan County, in other words, must have been more Leftist than Feminist...
...Sometimes Luong comes into my dreams...
...But the reasons are almost beside the point...
...There cannot be many altogether clear consciences where Vietnam is concerned...
...Did we understand how much it hurt...
...A woman who asked what Emerson wore to officers' dances...
...Did we care...
...We turn away...
...If she quits smoking she may live another 35 or 40 years...
...In the world of Harlan County, from bad teeth to gunshot wounds, almost all the problems are rock-bottom physical...
...It was not like the Battle of Bunker Hill, or Austerlitz, or Bull Run, fought and won or lost in a day...
...Alden Whitman in the Clu'cago Tribune said Winners and Losers "elevates her to the apex of living American writers . . . . Such is the caliber of Emerson's writing, the exquisite tension she creates, that she can justly be said to be our very best...
Vol. 104 • March 1977 • No. 5
