THE BEARD.ING OF GABRIEL KOLKO
Kammen, Michael
or that ,his surviving son ~vent mad and killed himself, that a daughter went mad, and that another daughter (outrageously) "blamed" him for those catastrophes; or that he could be, and at...
...Commonweal: 219 diverse actions and become all things to all men...
...The Cain and Abel story in the Bible is so brief, so cryptic, that we know almost nothing at all about its meaning...
...Out of that sense of things the great poems came, and they yield cold comfort...
...For what he has really done is take the midrashim, the thousands of disparate, disorganized, disjointed commentaries on the biblical stories that are scattered all through rabbinic literature and weave thorn into hauntingly beautiful and coherent psycho-biographies and ADULT VOCATIONS special program for men over twenty-one...
...Why did Cain kill...
...Read aright," as Frost would say, they are not the folksy, homely verses of his popular reputation--they're neither one nor the other: Read aright, he is at best a dark and (as Lionel Trilling said to Frost's consternation) "terrifying" poet, a tragic poet...
...Like Beard, too, Kolko is appalled by the manipulative political power which accrues to persons and groups having great wealth...
...He simply remained aloof, indifferent, unconcerned...
...Hence its complexity and simplicity at one and the same time...
...Kolko is a policy-oriented historian particularly concerned about matters of economic motivation and political responsibility for those historical actions which have shaped the world we live in...
...They run in only one direction along a single circuit...
...What did it mean...
...At one level all he has done is collect and retell old legends...
...Messengers of God: Biblical P o r t r a i t s and Legends ELIE WIESEL Random House, $8.95 JACK RIEMER Elie Wiesers new work is a strange creative achievement...
...Incrementally, that process has provided modern American history with one o/ its main currents and defining experiences...
...But at another level the words "all he has done is retell" and "simply transmitted" in the preceding paragraph are colossal understatements...
...Like Beard, who became an isolationist (or "continentalist") between 1934 and his death in 1948, Kolko regrets the extent of U.S...
...Why did God favor one's gift over the other...
...That audience is aware of man's fallen nature, and it surely knows that nice people do not often write great poems...
...where tributes are possible, tributes are rendered...
...To watch over a person who grieves is a more urgent duty than to think of holy things...
...How grateful we must be to them for doing that, for two reas o n s - f o r showing us how to begin again, and so that we can now be the descendants of Seth instead of the children of Cain the Killer or of Abel the Victim...
...This universality made such abstractions useful not merely for American liberals but those of Europe as well...
...they illuminate with a harsh, uncomfortable glare...
...For that reason one might say that his "main currents" are not AC but DC...
...but so were their individual aspirations for upward mobility, not to mention their belief that higher status could be achieved within a generation or less...
...That is all we know, and we a r e left with more questions in our souls than there are words in the story: Where were the parents...
...foreign policy...
...but what was to be made of the life as distinct from the art...
...Finally, only one thing matters...
...The weaknesses and tensions of the system, therefore, we must move to the fore, with the growing inability of the directors of the society to control or rationalize it being the central institutional phenomenon over the past century...
...but a great many regarded the United States as an enduring Eden of opportunity and freedom (and not just the Jews and the Irish, as Kolko seems to suggest...
...Kolko, a 44-year-old American who has taught at York University in Canada since 1970, indicts the United States for failing to meet and master the fundamental challenges of the twentieth century...
...1~ower overseas during the twentieth century, and would like to see our interventionism vastly scaled down...
...Thompson, of course, knew this, and Winnick knows it...
...Beyond a doubt he wrote more than a few such "little" poems and they're impossible t o g e t - r i d of...
...Between the lines, between the letters, there is God who does bear part of the responsibility, who accuses and is accused...
...it certainly wasn't Thompson's original impulse when as a young man he was delegated by Frost to devote a considerable part of the rest of his life to the poet's life and Life...
...PHILLIP CORWIN is a poett, novelist and critic who works for the United Nations...
...no philosopher knows why...
...An example may make the point...
...Kolko is most impressive in his chapters on political economy and foreign policy, but somewhat less so as a social historian...
...His powers as a poet were declining-had declined (indeed his avarice seems to have swelled as his powers sank...
...Any school child knows what happened...
...Like Beard, Kolko is equally interested in both domestic party politics as well as U.S...
...It does not matter, by this view, that he was a a God-damned son-of-a-bitch...
...to the victor...
...His book looks like an anthology of previously published material...
...MICHAEL TRUE is an associate professor of English at Assumption College and lecturer at Clark University, Worcester, Mass...
...Why did he deserve to die, what did he do...
...And perhaps this is the sin of which he, as we, was guilty...
...It seems quite ~clear =that the main drift in modern American history illustrates the limits of capitalism and its social order in dealing with its emerging difficulties...
...Suddenly we realize that we are not just playing detective games with a cryptic tale or doing intellectual exercises with a rel April 1977:220...
...His stark truths went into his poems, even if sometimes he builded better than he knew...
...they may shock some readers and make others yearn for the days of candlepower, when more options seemed still to be open, and the promises of American life were infinite...
...Because it Was God's fault, if God had not given him free will and envy :and temper, and had not made weapons, it would not have happened, says another...
...And finally, like Beard, Kolko has enjoyed considerable academic influence through six widely read books, particularly The Triumph o~ Conservatism: A Reinterpretation o/ American History, 1900-1916 and The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1954...
...foreign policy, and upon the changing character of our working class...
...There is much more within the story...
...Because he didn't realize what killing was, says one midrash...
...That's all I ask...
...or that he could be, and at times was, devious, dishonest, a liar and blackguard and fraud...
...He regards this failure as a major trend in modern American history, "for problems and crises have multiplied faster than solutions, and this gap has grown with time...
...And to all these whys the midrash responds...
...So, seen aslant in the shadows we cast, are we all...
...His conclusions are radical, which is forewarned in the dedication "to the Vietnamese Revolution and the heroic people who made it...
...That suggests that Abel saw his brother, the only brother he had in the whole world, sad and depressed and he did not say anything...
...If there is a covert villain in the plot, it is not so much malevolent conservatism, or even unrestrained capitalism, but rather those impulses of American liberalism to talk about "progress" but not implement it, and to accept change grudgingly in order to protect special interests_9 'q'he essence of American liberal ideology," Kolko contends, "was a broadness which allowed it to subsume the most 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 REVIEWERS MICHAEL KAMMEN iS Oil t h e staff o f t h e Center for Advanced Study in the Behavorial Sciences in Stanford, California...
...It responds with answers which themselves become questions, with becauses which lead to new whys...
...Perhaps it was because of what he didn't do...
...Why did God let it happen...
...save for a rare miracle, the spasm of a dying poet, nothing that he wrote in those years will endure, and much of it is no more than the dimmest echo, or merely bad: a kind of talkativeness where a great talker, faintly recalling the old manner, runs on not hearing the absence of the slow, somber, deep, powerful music .,and not noticing the awkward embarrassment of his audience...
...There are all the future unborn generations that could have come from Abel who die with him when he dies, and who make his death such a sin, such a waste...
...What did the first death feel like...
...It means that they are only our uncles now and that we are not doomed to repeat their ways forever...
...Like Parrington, Gabriel Kolko is Harvard-educated, a disaffected Populist, and argumentatively selective in his choice of materials, themes, and critical analysis...
...Without straining, the portrait might have been much harsher than it is-the authors, for example, aren't nearly critical enough of Frost's political pronouncements and other futilities majestically uttered in supreme confidence that the ancient seer speaketh eternal truths when really the tiresome old chap was babbling...
...He goes too far, I believe, in repeatedly overemphasizing "America's violence and social and inThe Presidents and their circles responded to the bankers and businessmen who sought their ears and actions, and any historian who works in the docttments o[ the period [1896-1920] finds innumerable recurrent contacts between important economic leaders and the main political figures both be[ore and during the enactmem o/ legislation they desire or oppose...
...Apart from some poor phrasing and occasional problems of punctuation, moreover, Main Currents presupposes considerable prior knowledge and understanding of recent American history and economics (especially international economics...
...The universe for Frost (he once said ,he was "prepared for any sadness in the structure of the universe',) was a dark, desolate, shelterless place marked by dialectic tension, composed of opposing forces, contraries--good and evil, lightand darkness, fire and ice...
...He said of his life once, at his best, in a solemn meditative moment: "All I've wanted is to write a few little poems it'd be hard to get rid of...
...Abel did nothing, and this was his sin, as it is ours...
...Unfortunately the book is not likely to reach as wide an audience as it deserves, however, because unlike Charles Beard, Kolko is not a gifted prose stylist...
...His emphasis, not surprisingly, is upon the connections between corporate wealth and political power, upon the various crises of U.S...
...He says: "Midrash is to Bible as imagination is to knowledge...
...Even if his pain comes from God, his pain gives him priority...
...He has simply transmitted some of the many tales that the Jewish tradition has woven around the biblical figures...
...BOOKS THE BEARD-ING o r GABRIEL KOLKO MICHAEL KAMMEN Main E r a ' r e n t s in Modern Ameqfleaa History GABRIEL KOLKOHarper & Row, $15 More than just the title of this book evokes memories of Main Currents in American Thought, an influential classic which Vernon Louis Parrington began in 1913 and published to wide acclaim in 1927...
...Kolko also, in my opinion, stresses too highly the immigrants' lack of commitment to remaining permanently in the United States (especially during the period 1875-1925...
...Even more to .the point, however, Kolko is in many respects the modern incarnation of Parrington's better -known contemporary, Charles A. Beard...
...Why did they quarrel...
...He means by that that the biblical stories are the base, the bare bones, around which midrash creates new realities...
...Why was one depressed...
...And now see how gradually, imperceptibly, but surely the whole focus of our reading has changed...
...Or perhaps because he wanted to shame God or shake God or pay back God f o r what He did to Adam is another possibility, or perhaps it was out of economic, or sexual, or religious rivalry, the very sa~e reasons that people have killed forever since, or perhaps . . . perhaps after all these possible reasons, and in spite of all these reasons, and because of all these reasons we simply do not know why he did what he d i d - - o r why we do it too...
...flourishes are added to brushstrokes ~r plausible, and sometimes even when they are not...
...The text says that Cain's face was sad after God rejected his gift, and then it goes on with the story...
...Like Beard (~r in 1946 published "Grounds for a Reconsideration of Historiography"), Kolko is a revisionist whose thrust for fifteen years now has been to reconsider the conventional wisdom of modern American historiography...
...JOHN DEEDY is Managing Editor of Commonweal...
...There are the old parents, Adam and Eve, the world's first parents, who come back on stage at the very end of the story, and bury their child, the first parents to ever have to do that, and who then go on to make love and give birth to a new child, whom they name Seth...
...the canonical poems are as memorable as any written in this century...
...That capitalism and liberalism have f~liled us in many ways, Kolko demonstrates persuasively...
...The basis of United States foreign policy in Asia outside of the Philippines," he writes, "has become a favorite topic of research and debate among historians, who will never understand wholly the meaning of the issues which arise there save in a global context, including especially Latin America...
...The amhor also strains too hard in order to explain the lack of "any united subjective consciousness" among the industrial, working class_9 Ethnic differences may have been an important factor, as Kolko asserts...
...Somewhere in this book Wiesel has a metaphor about what midrash does to Bible that also expresses what Wiesel has done to ,midrash...
...RABBI JACK RIEMER is the editor of the recently published Jewish Reflections on Death (Schocken...
...The book is hard to follow at points because its unrelieved flow of generalizations often seems elusive or abstract...
...When someone close to you is suffering, he comes first...
...These and many more whys come at us from every word of the story...
...9 . . In effect, within the parameters o/ a class society, political li[e was administered according to its class character and political parties, and that /act, perhaps more than anything else, meant that business forces in need would have a reasonable chance to attain their goals, in part or wholly, by resort to political ~mechanisms...
...What can be said for Frost the man is said...
...Main Currents in Modern American History dividual disintegration," paying no attention whatever to some of the countervailing sources of stability and cohesion...
...Historical specialists may disagree with some of Kolko's particular lines of interpretive analysis, but overall his indictment is powerful, searing, and persuasive...
...He does so, however, by neglecting their very real achievements...
...Some hoped to return to their pMces of origin, it is true, both richer and wiser...
...Iconoclasm isn't the point of the biography though it is in part the effect...
...All we have is a couple of lines: that they were brothers, that they both brought gifts to GOd, that GOd favored one's gift and not the other's, that one became depressed, that they quarreled, that one k i l l e d the other, that God asked him why, and that he became an exile forevermore...
...And Abel...
...Why did God ask why...
...No doubt he was doing other things, perhaps holy things, at the time, as Wiesel puts it, but when your brother is suffering no one has the right to think of better things, even of holy things...
...They take hold of us and ,won't let go...
...His aim, Kolko says, "is to describe historically the nature and purpose of power and its institutions in the United States, and its evolution over the century since the 1870's the period of modern capitalism...
...to the victim...
...Ultimately, however, this is an important and brilliantly original b o o k - - filled with stimulating suggestions for future lines of inquiry--by a scholar who has done his homework thoroughly, and who outstrips most other historians of modern America by constantly seeking to interrelate diverse casual contexts which have ordinarily been regarded as discrete...
...Write: ADULT VOCATIONS Box 41N, Commonweal into models and mirrors of ourselves...
...This new volume is Kolko's most 1 April 1977:218 general and comprehensive: in part a less-detailed revision and synthesis of his earlier work, as well as an attempt to fill in some of the interstices and connections between those more specialized books (especially for the period 1920-1940...
...All the same it must be borne in mind that the period recorded here was a melancholy time in Frost's career in art, a sad fallingoff...
Vol. 104 • April 1977 • No. 7
