Secular faith of Barbara Pym
Wymard, Eleanor B.
Later, she humiliates herself further by sobbing uncontrollably in front of Meg, a younger friend who has been tormented in her love for a homosexual man. Until now, Leonora has offered her...
...The description of the pastel wallcovering and the mahogany chest of drawers in a room disposes the reader to believe that the account of what allegedly happened there is accurate...
...It has been more than eight years since the last U.S...
...In fact, a substantial number of Hmong fought with the revolutionary Pathet Lao, and others were able to avoid the war...
...Even within the church, Pym's characters are left to discover their own rites of affirmation...
...to whether and how the United States should use its power abroad...
...Acknowledging that "life bruises one," Wilmet Forsyth, for example, elevates her own life "in a glass of blessings," (1958) and looks forward to dinner with "Sybil and Arnold, a happy and suitable ending to a good day...
...The collision of East and West - - as Europeans colonized parts of Asia . . . also stirred Vietnam - - and sowed the seeds of a struggle that was to culminate - - in the inscription of nearly fifty-eight thousand American names on a granite memorial in Washington" [emphasis added...
...After her retirement, Letty Crowe tries "to discover what church-going held for people, apart from habit and convention, wondering if it would hold anything for her and if so what form this would take...
...That life which Catherine Oliphant describes as "comic and sad and indefinite--dull, sometimes, but seldom really tragic or deliriously happy, except when one's very young...
...Such ordinary characters are at home in the literary imagination of Barbara Pym...
...Today's battlefield is no longer the jungles and paddy fields of Vietnam...
...Robert Pisor covers the siege of Khe Sanh better in The End of the Line...
...VIETNAM A History...
...Da Nang was not captured," he writes, " i t disintegrated in its own terror...
...Her canon evolves toward the certainty that an individual can rescue herself from chaos, can affirm herself in a leap of faith which springs from a willingness to confront the terms of her own life...
...The gerontologist's mother-inlaw in A Few Green Leaves finds more comfort participating in parish coffees than by adhering to diet charts and exercise schedules...
...But his impassioned narrative does not focus narrowly on proving this point...
...Of the 50,000 South Vietnamese soldiers stationed in and around the city, hardly any raised a rifle in its defense...
...Even in a world of structured social effort, the individual is more isolated than ever...
...Maybe Pont/ff has the shade of the wallcovering in the pope's study right, but it does not understand more important matters such as what a pope is and has only a foggy idea of his situation...
...which should have been held in 1956...
...His book was written as a companion to the public television series, for which he was the chief correspondent...
...The U.S...
...If Pym's characters are in search of order and ceremony, it is ironic, indeed, that the Anglican Church, so pervasive in her novels, is never the source of inspiration for renewing one's faith...
...It ended only after Congress balked at paying the tab for the Saigon government -a regime which continued to insist it was the sole government of a separate southern state even after the 1973 Paris agreeII ment was signed...
...About the same time, farther south in Saigon, an American diplomat was urging members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam "to show confidence in the country's future by expanding their own enterprises and encouraging their friends and associates to invest there...
...He does range beyond Vietnam itself to deal with Cambodia and often-neglected Laos, and he demonstrates a real concern for the fate of ordinary people in the three countries of Indochina...
...That is a task no one else has tackled with particular success since the end of the war, from whatever political perspective...
...And despite his efforts to present a balanced account, his biases show in comments like this, from the end of the last chapter...
...Many of the authors of the new crop of Vietnam books, like at least some of the producers of the current public television series on the war, have a deep, passionate interest in the Vietnam war itself...
...He clearly demonstrates the corruption and military ineptness of the leaders in Saigon - - qualities which alienated them from the population of the South and left them unprepared to fight without a shield of American soldiers and bombers...
...Don Oberdorfer's Tet is better on the 1968 National Liberation Front offensive...
...At times, though, the limited range of his sources leads his compassion astray...
...Desmond O'Grady F ICTION is a fabrication which at its best can convey truth...
...Karnow's style is so tedious that it is tempting to recommend a short list of more easily digested books instead...
...Defense Attachd Office in Saigon between 1973 and 1975...
...In his book, Isaacs has concentrated on the period between the Paris Agreement and the end of the war some two years later...
...I IIIIHI Jill II Books: VIETNAM, THE BATTLE REJOINED I T HE BATTLES of Vietnam are being fought once again...
...Until now, Leonora has offered her little comfort...
...shallow refinements, at the beginning of the novel, now deepen into a kind of courage...
...In this, Saigon fundamentally contradicted the provisions of that peace agreement, which recognized the southern revolutionaries and confh'ro, ed that the division of Vietnam into North and South was only temporary...
...But celebration will, in fact, occur, if only with a cup of tea and a "comfortable chat about crematoria...
...But, even though Leonora grows in sympathy and sensitivity, Pym still does not claim too much for her...
...We must meet the countries of the third world on their own terms, not use them as pawns in global power games...
...During these two crises, Leonora creates new meaning for herself, however, by relinquishing her false pride and dignity...
...Karnow does draw on an interesting series of interviews with Vietnamese revolutionaries--interviews compiled during an extended trip to Vietnam in 1981 with a crew working on the television series...
...I n comparison to the present, the past is rich with natural rituals which provide assurance and connection...
...Still, Vietnam: A History has a particularly good account of the overthrow of Saigon's President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, one of the events Karnow covered in his long service as a war correspondent...
...Isaacs does not make as determined an effort to explore sources from the revolutionary side...
...The American war in that Southeast Asian land was declared ended, on paper, more than a decade ago...
...And Tiziano Terzano deals with the end of the war better in Giai Phong...
...He has the impression, for example, that "the Hmong of Laos had virtually been destroyed as a people" because of their involvement with the CIA's "Secret Army" in that country...
...Yet, for Pym, style is a way of coping with modem pressures, even if it cannot resolve them...
...It is the pages of books and the screens of our televisions...
...John Spragons0 Jr...
...So long as American casualties - - whether in Saigon or Beirut or San Salvador - - remain the highest consideration, we will have learned too little from Vietnam...
...But one must also admit that Pym's fiction shares in the existential temper of the modern novel...
...The great Vatican caper PONTIFF Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts Doubleday, $17.95, 459 pp...
...Arnold Isaacs lays his bias on the line in his preface...
...At its worst new journalism, which uses fictional techniques in reporting actual persons and events, tells lies in convincing detail...
...The co-authors do not understand the Commonweal: 22...
...Even though Catherine Oliphant in Less Than Angels (1955) and Rupert Stonebird in An Unsuitable Attachment (1963) want to return to church, it offers little for them except the comfort of nostalgia...
...Despite the length of that visit, however, he offers a jumbled sketch of present-day Vietnam...
...Some knowledge of the people and events involved is needed to break the spell of "Once upon a time in a room with pastel wallcoveri n g . . . " My knowledge of the Vatican broke Pontiffs spell...
...withdrawal from Vietnam, he writes, "represented a broken promise to millions of Vietnamese - - not just a few corrupt generals - - who depended on American protection against a ruthless and determined enemy...
...The fluffs in its treatment of the Vatican...
...Isaacs's anguished chapter on the collapse of the city of Da Nang, where the first American Marines had landed in 1965, is reason enough to read his fastpaced report...
...officials in Saigon beat an ignominious retreat from the embassy roof as revolutionary tanks roiled virtually unopposed toward the capital of the defunct southern regime...
...Some even have an interest in the way that war affected the lands and peoples of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia...
...Attending Stations of the Cross, she hears the litany, "'From pain to pain, from woe to woe' . . . but Letty's thoughts had been on herself and how she should arrange the rest of her life...
...The Hmong people and culture are alive in postwar Laos...
...For example, the social worker assigned to Marcia Ivory (Quartet in Autumn) has little insight into the old woman's profound loneliness, let alone her peculiar habit of collecting, washing, and stacking discarded milk bottles...
...But the new 13 January 1984:21 debate looks forward more than back - - to Lebanon and Grenada and El Salvador...
...Other characters, too, relieve their isolation by discovering their own private ceremonies, for contemporary life, according to Pym's later fiction, is very unfestive...
...And, like most Western reporters, his wartime coverage seems to have bhen entirely from one side of the lines...
...undermined its claim that the KGB used All Agca who attempted to assassinate John Paul II...
...If we cannot do that, then Vietnam will not be the last encounter to leave us with the painful scars of defeat in a war we should never have fought...
...In Pym's view of the modern world, only the resiliency of human nature generates the rebirth of a dead soul...
...Fields of Fire by James Webb gives a more engaging account of the GI experience...
...The entire war was an ill-conceived effort to preserve a pro-Western stronghold in southern Vietnam even after Communist-led independence forces defeated French colonial armies...
...Stanley Karnow Viking, $20, 750 pp...
...To minimize this tone of her high comedy would be to deny the core of Pym's vision...
...More than that, he at least attempts to sketch the connecting tissue of events between the high points in the fighting...
...Without Honor makes especially good use of studies prepared by the U.S...
...It began when the United States undermined the 1954 Geneva Accords which ended the French war, temporarily dividing the country pending national elections, I I Illl I WITHOUT HONOR DEFEAT IN VIETNAM AND CAMBOI]IA Arnold R. Isues Johns Hopkins, $19.95, $$9 pp...
...Stanley Karnow reaches for more, attempting to review Vietnamese history from the coming of the French until the present, with a brief sideways glance at Cambodia...
...The battle today is for the hearts and minds of the American public...
...The remaining trio in Quartet in Autumn finds redemption in the hope of Letty's picnic, not the celebration of liturgical ritual...
...If it makes myriad mistakes about the Vatican, does it have a grasp of the KGB...
...After all, the mode of The Sweet Dove Died is essentially ironic...
Vol. 111 • January 1984 • No. 1
