Another Kind of witness
Garvey, John
and Truly Invisible Airplane. Da capo. And that's why the Chiefs were so mad at Brown for letting the cat out of the invisible bag. The Invisible Airplane was no more aimed at the Russians than...
...It did have one very special quality but that depended upon absolute secrecy...
...The Invisible Airplane plays right into such a maniac's hands...
...Just as the only really unthinkable thought Herman Kahn ever had was the thought that funds for think tankers with their predestined thoughts about increased military budgets might somehow be cut off, so the only prospect that really terrorizes the Joint Chiefs has nothing to do with the Russians but with the terrifying possibility that somehow, some day...
...perhaps because we want to be- lieve that life is as hollow as Didion suggests it is...
...So she asked her in, accepted copies of Awake and The Watchtower, and thought that would be the end of it...
...Ioseph Payne Brennan Dust The dust in this deserted room, disturbed, swirls in a ray of random sun, hangs, settles, more silent than death...
...I am talking about the sort of thing People does for movie stars, and reviewers at another level do when they call every third novel the greatest book of the decade...
...So much writing validates our culture uncritically...
...There are a lot of journalists who write about people like Jane Fonda, but few who would say "I have never met anyone who exerted so little energy to be charnfing...
...I (economy class--millionaire Fonda dis- dains first-class frills) Jane told me more than I wanted to hear about the multina- tional corporations, and less than I al- ready knew...
...Although Re- gina tried, with each visit, to make our lack of interest as apparent as she could and still be polite, she finally had tomake it quite clear that we were Catholic and were not shopping around...
...Off Center is a selection which is as varied as could be...
...I am disinclined to find endearing a chronicler of the 1960s who is beset by rfiigraines that can be triggered by her decorator's having pleated instead of gathered her new dining room curtains...
...The quality lay in the showing...
...It is not so easy to see clearly what is false in a writer who has been as universally praised, by good reviewers, as Joan Didion has...
...Had it not been for old blabbermouth Brown, the Chiefs could have carried on in their joint for years with everyone sworn to silence as to where the money was going...
...Witnesses (Touchstone, $5.95...
...The Invisibility principle could have been applied prodigally in all directions: Invisible Tanks, Invisible Carders, Invisible Volunteer Armies, Invisible Audits, Invisible Conflicts of Interest...
...This looks like the opening slash in a fight which will leave a gory mess all over the floor, but it is much more than that: Harrison makes good points about the things that are wrong with Didion's prose, and is most concerned with the political conservatism and moral empti- ness of the attitudes which crop up again and again in Didion's work...
...l~hanks to what-a-pot- o'-me Brown, it's all out on the table...
...I don't know why this should be--a collection is something you can move around in, and you can read something whole at a sitting...
...I al- most threw a party when John Cheever's collected stories came out, two of Raymond Chandler's anthologies are among my favorite books, and Eudora Welty's The Eye of the Story delighted me...
...In this one moment of peace it bears the richness of diamonds, every mote precise as memory...
...It was bit- terly cold outside, and Regina thought the young woman could warm up a bit before continuing her door-to-door walk through an unsympathetic neighbor-hood...
...Later, partly because of this experi- ence, I picked up Barbara Grizzuti Hard- son's Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's...
...Gloria Emerson is quoted on the jacket of OffCenter: "She is never pompous, coy, or dull...
...Just as Jimmy Carter lied when he promised to cut de- fense spending, so the peace candidate would lie by promising ever increasing bucks for bangs...
...Through all of them there is a sense, or rather a compassion- ate commitment to the fact, that ideas matter too much to be dealt with in a sloppy or lazy fashion, because people are implicated in ideas, and are wounded by bad ones...
...All gone now...
...In the course of her story on the Moonies she makes a statement which could open into a book: "If we deny the validity of all absolutes, we leave the field open to mischievous charlatans and psychopaths--like Jim Jones, and, some would say, Sun Myung Moon...
...Rich's book," she says, "does not even tell me whether I may assume there are any qualitative differ- ences between my son--poised on the brink of adulthood, scared, brave, kind, uncertain--and ldi Amin...
...It is true that the closest that has come to being in recent years was Eugene McCarthy and that wasn't very close, but still it's a possibility and the Chiefs, after all, are paid to be prepared for the un- likeliest possibilities...
...We have to stop being embarrassed by religion before we can come to grips with the cults...
...Generations of Joint-Chiefs yet unborn could have grown up, soldiered their wayup the ladder and retired to sell invisibility back to their former comrades from snug harbors as chairmen and pres- idents of the proliferating branches of Invisible Enterprises, which for that mat- ter, could even have staged Invisible Duck Hunts for Invisible Joint Chiefs, frustrating at last the hated and anti- American press...
...I close the door quietly on the whole past of the universe waiting to be born again...
...You bring out the Handout Chairmen to the secret base on your fly- ing saloon from Andrews, pour them off the flight, trundle them up onto the view- ing platform and whisper, Now here comes the Invisible Airplane...
...The Invisible Airplane was no more aimed at the Russians than has been any other superweapon...
...I like Didion's writ- ing, especially her essays, and was not prepared for this opening: "When I am asked why I do not find Joan Didion appealing, I am tempted to answer--not entirely facetiously--that my charity does not naturally extend itself to some- one whose lavender love seats match exactly the potted orchids on her mantel, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables, someone who has chosen to bur- den her daughter with the name Quintana Roo...
...Hard- son isa feminist, but is irritated by Rich's anti-male oversimplifications: "My reading of Ms...
...Some of her best journalism and criti- cism has now be6n collected in Off Center (The Dial Press, $9.95...
...Anthologies are Considered risky...
...A pity...
...We ought instead to recognize that longing for the transcendental is a reality of the human condition, and not one to be scorned...
...But the woman returned several times, bringing her husband with her once...
...Right, there, Field Marshal, 'swonder- ful, and as long as you're up, how about a splash of that noise-killer, talk about technological breakthroughs...
...Since if there is one subject on which all presidential candidates lie it is peace, we may assume a genuine peace candi- date would do so, too...
...There are pieces on Moonies, Dick Cavett, hypochondria, Jane Fonda, famous writers, and Rose- land...
...Or, "On the flight to L.A...
...She is equally sharp in her reaction to the extremism and intolerance of Ad- rienne Rich's brand of feminism...
...According to Harrison, Frady re-veals, despite himself, Graham's "desire to ingratiate that is so profound as to amount to cunning, a pragmatism that stems from a lust to be Caesar's buddy, to share Caesar's power...
...Barbara Grizzuti Harrison left Jehovah's Witnesses, and during the writing of her book surprised herself by becoming a Catholic, something she de- scribes in the closing chapters...
...I found the book fascinating, and began to notice Commonweal: 584 Harrisorl's work in a number of places, including the New York Times, Harpers, The New Republic, and (yes) Com-mon weal...
...Even Gay Talese had a good one out, years ago, called Fame and Obscurity...
...what always shines through is wit, intelli-gence, and compassion...
...Apart from essays which reveal a keen critical eye and a way of seeing through received ideas, there is a tender apprecia- tion of her son, a recollection of her Jehovah's Witness girlhood, a funny, sad piece about her hypochondria, and many more good things...
...and her review of Marshall Frady's Billy Graham: A Parable of American Right- eousness challenges the notion that Graham is an innocent in a world too complex and ambiguous for his simplic- ity...
...no one else seems to have paid much attention to them...
...The woman never came back...
...As the noise of the jets rises to almost unbearable levels and the wind rises with it, the chief Chief points to the empty air and says with quiet pride: See, you can't see a thing- IfI hadn't told you the Invisible Airplanes were going by, you'd have thought you were looking at nothing at all, right...
...It is nice to see something sharper at work...
...Pub-lishers, I hear, tend not to...
...FRANK GETLEIN Of several minds: John Garvey ANOTHER KIND OF WITNESS A GOOD WORD FOR AN ANTHOLOGY O NE WINTER DAY several years ago my wife invited a young Jehovah's Witness into our house...
...This cryptic dust, I tell myself, came from the ends of the universe a billion years ago, through inconceivable black voids, through immensities of time we speak about but never comprehend...
...I have to •confess that I love collections...
...Down the long centuries of light it glided toward this room...
...Press, public, and who knows how many nosy Congressional committees will be asking questions, demanding progress reports, even insisting on Invisibility Ac- countability forms, listing every quart of the invisibility potion turned out, so that any amounts used for invisible duck blinds, shotguns, and sporty chiefs would be noticed at once...
...It is good to have this book, and good to know, from the jacket, that Harrison is at work on another...
...Now it lies quietly, gilded by" sun...
...some nut in favor of peace is going to make it to the White House and there goes the bali game...
...Each time she brought up her religion and the importance of joining...
...Poor Brown: a traitor to his class...
...Like all its predecessors, the Invisible Airplane had one target: the Treasury...
...These, and other assorted facts--such as the fact that Didion chose to buy the dress Linda Kasabian wore at the Manson trial at I. Magnin in Beverly Hills--put me more in mind of a neurasthenic Cher than of a writer who has been called Ameri- ca's finest prose stylist...
...There's worse...
...There is a review of Linda Bird Francke's The Am- bivalence of Abortion which will bother both pro-choice and pro-life people, an indication that she is on the right track...
...It was the story not only of Jehovah's Witnesses (which is, with Mormonism, one of America's most intriguing contributions to religion) but also a description of the effect of a cult on a particular person and her fam- ily...
...The chief Joint Chief surreptitiously steps on a floor button, much like that used to summon the butler, back at quarters, but this one activates the super sound deck and the hidden giant fans...
...But taking on the sham in Jane Fonda is relatively easy, though it is done here very well...
...There was something sad about this, because she had plainly wanted not only to convert us, but to be a friend...
...JOHN GARVEY 24 October 1980:585...
...Then, once in office, he could stage War Hawk Days ever month, for Congressmen and citizens to line Main Street and watch our Invisible Le- gions roll by, meanwhile invisibly syphoning the money into social amelio- ration, mass transit, rebuilding the cities, education, health care, all those ir-relevancies which get in the way of the true purposes of the modem superpower state, which is to impoverish its citizens so as to increase its ability to slaughter as many foreigners as possible as expen-sively as possible...
...The two things--our conversion to her religion and genuine friendship--were insepara- ble for her...
Vol. 107 • October 1980 • No. 19
