Without Honor
Spragens, John Jr.
debate looks forward more than back - to Lebanon and Grenada and El Salvador; to whether and how the United States should use its power abroad. Arnold Isaacs lays his bias on the line in...
...If it makes myriad mistakes about the Vatican, does it have a grasp of the KGB...
...The U.S...
...Only Department D can move so swiftly, be so well organized, calling upon its vagt experience in the area of grand deceptions designed to mislead, confuse, or influence world opinion against the Church...
...There Dillard writes disapprovingly, "People still magically regard novelists as helpless, fascinating neurotics who compose in deliriums or trances _9 . . young writers may be misled into thinking that novelists are rich or even that they are active...
...Gardner was also well-off and died actively in a motorcycle accident...
...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...
...They describe the theology of certain cardinals as "impeccable" as if it were an accent...
...Although it is one of the key issues of the book, only the censorious Vatican version (Jesuits are running wild) is given...
...The Hmong people and culture are alive in postwar Laos...
...But surprisingly, most of the trouble, according to most of the essays that I have seen, is not the fickle public, the publishers, or the late twentieth century, but other writers...
...Nor the importance of his office, the secretary of state...
...Benedict will get a chuckle: Thomas and Morgan-Witts refer to the Jesuits as monks...
...if you are denied readers, or access to them, the claustrophobia becomes lethal...
...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...
...There are certainly more "creative" writers of ability today than there were fifty years ago, just as there are more talented golfers, tennis players, basketball players, too...
...Among other howlers: "Gianpaolo is suggesting his will be a pontificate in the Constantine tradition, with less politicking and more praying...
...In a slide typical of the book, this hypothesis is soon asserted as a fact which underpins the authors' main thrust: that the KGB was behind the assassination attempt on John Paul I1...
...Fields of Fire by James Webb gives a more engaging account of the GI experience...
...So, like white mice in an overpopulated cage, writers have begun to cannibalize each other...
...It is instructive, though, to contrast his ideas with those found in Annie Dillard's Living by Fiction, published last year, which has been recently reissued iri paperback [Harper & Row, $4.95, 192 pp...
...We must meet the countries of the third world on their own terms, not use them as pawns in global power games...
...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...
...This may explain his undeservedly minor role in the book and provide a clue to the prominence given to sources such as the Irish Dominican Father Lambert Greenan and to the archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Franz Koenig...
...And despite his efforts to present a balanced account, his biases show in comments like this, from the end of the last chapter...
...The fluffs in its treatment of the Vatican...
...Could this be Department D at work after all...
...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...
...In fact, a substantial number of Hmong fought with the revolutionary Pathet Lao, and others were able to avoid the war...
...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...
...Despite their vaunted twentytwo months of research, two hundred thousand miles of travel, six million words transcribed in interviews, a further eight million words of documentation and "much else," the authors apparently did not walk the three hundred yards from St: Peter's to the Jesuit headquarters for the necessary information...
...In fact, before John Paul I there had been non-Italian nuncios for years -- such as the Australian James Knox in India...
...Anyone will make mistakes in a book on three popes but some of those in Pont/ff indicate the authors started knowing nothing and hard work could not quite overcome this...
...Desmond O'Grady F ICTION is a fabrication which at its best can convey truth...
...Aspirants & philistines Ill ON BECOMING A NOVELIST John Gardner Harper & Row, $13.95, 150 pp...
...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...
...There has been no shortage lately of articles by novelists and poets with a variety of grievances...
...And, like most Western reporters, his wartime coverage seems to have bhen entirely from one side of the lines...
...It is widely known that Kiing has always refused to come to Rome for a trial and was condemned without appearing...
...John Gardner's book is aimed at aspir2 ants, those foolish enough to want to join the fray...
...Koenig fares even worse...
...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...
...But it is usually considered that the Emperor Constantine's conversion meant quite the opposite: more politicking and less praying...
...Of the 50,000 South Vietnamese soldiers stationed in and around the city, hardly any raised a rifle in its defense...
...Greenan is described as "witty," and "one of the sharpest and finest minds working in the service of the Holy See...
...John Gardner, the author of fourteen books, many of them novels, who died recently, takes a different tack in the posthumous On Becoming a Novelist, but he, too, heaves a handful of stones, though his principal aim is that of a buoyant real estate agent, showing off a few glass houses to eager buyers...
...Pontiff begins in 1978 with Ali Agca planning to kill Paul VI, then switches back and forth between the Vatican and the Turk headed for St...
...Pontiffs conclave and Ali Agca stories are plausible but then so are other sections which I know are mistaken_9 Thomas and Morgan-Witts also assert John Paul II wrote to Leonid Brezhnev warning he would return home to fight if Poland were invaded_9 They interpret Vatican denial of this story as further proof of its veracity...
...Defense Attachd Office in Saigon between 1973 and 1975...
...Felici, wary of power groups within the church, opposed Opus Dei...
...Two long pieces of this sort by "someone named" Bryan F. Griffin (that is how Mr...
...Several reviewers have noted the clanger in which they describe Hans Kiing being called to the third floor of the Congregation for Doctrine and condemned...
...Cardinal Pericle Felici is described as an advocate for more power for the conservative Opus Dei movement...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...We are provided a sample of Greenan's "wit" which makes him sound like the essence of Irish clerical insensitivity: Seated at a dinner party beside the small, swarthy Sicilian nuncio to Ireland, Archbishop Gaetano Alibrandi, Greenan smiled at him and said "I had no idea we had Arabs in the Church's diplomatic service...
...And Tiziano Terzano deals with the end of the war better in Giai Phong...
...debate looks forward more than back - - to Lebanon and Grenada and El Salvador...
...I'm surprised Cardinal Koenig did not spot that one...
...Perhaps the excuse for this prose is that the authors describe themselves as "social historians...
...Koenig might have been consulted but the Vatican has a professional diplomatic corps and diplomatic relations were part of the Paul VI-Casaroli Ostpolitik which had already produced an agreement with Hungary...
...In his book, Isaacs has concentrated on the period between the Paris Agreement and the end of the war some two years later...
...More than that, he at least attempts to sketch the connecting tissue of events between the high points in the fighting...
...The ungainly prose does not prevent the book having its moments, e.g., the description of the conclaves which elected the two John Pauls and the whole detailed Ali Agca sequence including a spell in a Libyan terrorist training camp...
...and sentences such as this (after the Vatican announced that the sick Paul VI's Sunday blessing has been canceled) "This brief statement heightened the perception of observers both in and outside the Vatican...
...It treats Cardinal Agostino Casaroli as a moderator-compromiser in every situation...
...But his impassioned narrative does not focus narrowly on proving this point...
...it is a disheartening display of literary anthropophagism...
...confusion between "obtuse" and "obscure," and "ingenious" and "ingenuous...
...Karnow's style is so tedious that it is tempting to recommend a short list of more easily digested books instead...
...Vagueness about context means that they often miss out on the definition, or the nuances, of issues, preferring buzz words such as "open" or "meaningful...
...That is a task no one else has tackled with particular success since the end of the war, from whatever political perspective...
...Ali Brandi...
...The great Vatican caper PONTIFF Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts Doubleday, $17.95, 459 pp...
...But this is silly_9 Silly or not, that is, more or less, how Gardner describes novelists...
...The two men didn't exchange another word during dinner and Greenan "tabbed Alibrandi as 'a fella who couldn't see a joke...
...It was his nod," they write, "which encouraged the Vatican to establish diplomatic relations wlth Jugoslavia...
...Your name...
...It is, he tells the novice, beneficial to have something wrong with you: "A psychological wound is helpful . . . some fatal childhood accident for which one feels responsible . . . embarrassment about one's own physical appearance: all these are promising signs_9 He is also very much of the "trance" school of fiction composition, even to go as far as suggesting methods of self-hypnosis...
...They claim John Paul I had exciting innovations in mind: " . . . eventually there might even be non-Italian nuncios...
...Without Honor makes especially good use of studies prepared by the U.S...
...If the remainder of the presentation of Koenig is accurate, the less attention Vatican diplomats pay to him the better...
...He has a reputation for intelligence but the authors make one suspect he is a pompous selfpromoter who also sees Bolshies behind every bush...
...Robert Pisor covers the siege of Khe Sanh better in The End of the Line...
...Given the present social and political climate there is a lot to complain about -- I have a few complaints myself...
...The authors often refer to him as "the secretary" as if he could be confused with the pope's personal secretaries...
...It is also mistaken...
...The authors attribute to him what I believe to be an unwarranted importance in Vatican diplomacy...
...And, these days, the shattering of glass can be heard everywhere...
...From Pontiff you would never guess that Casaroli had any principles, vision, or sense of humor...
...He throws quite a few stones, though what usually upsets him is that the writers most vulgarly known are the most vulgar, a tautology he seems not to notice...
...But the indisputable tenants of the world's glassiest houses, those who live the most revealed lives, are writers...
...Arnold Isaacs lays his bias on the line in his preface...
...The book confirms stereotypes, and stereotype-confirming is what Pontiff is largely about...
...Annie Dillard, at least in her published Commonweal: 24...
...The Jesuit viewpoint (the Order is basically sound despite some publicity-grabbing mavericks) is not given, nor is an overview which would show why the Vatican counts particularly on the church's largest and most prestigious order and why the Jesuits are particularly tested by the abrupt shift from a Counter-Reformation mentality...
...Of course they refer to the Council, but more as a series of separate issues than as the context for the pontificates of Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II, which are their subject...
...II William O'Rourke II~[~ EOPLE who live in glass houses IF shouldn't throw stones...
...more engineers, lawyers, etc...
...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...
...It is a how-to book, though Gardner, along the way, gives his views on how to separate the gems from the paste, the true artist from the phonies_9 The material in the first half of the book is the sort of thing you would hear if you attended a solid creative writing class, say, one taught by the likes of a John Gardner...
...Isaacs does not make as determined an effort to explore sources from the revolutionary side...
...Da Nang was not captured," he writes, " i t disintegrated in its own terror...
...His book was written as a companion to the public television series, for which he was the chief correspondent...
...On the death of John Paul I, the then Secretary of State Cardinal Jean ViUot decided there should be a cover-up of the fact that the pope was found in bed by the nun who took him his morning coffee...
...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...
...Well, yes and no...
...But though the practitioners of literature are increasing, the audience for their work seems to be an endangered species...
...One complaint heard often today (and made a number of times by Griffin) is that there are already too many writers...
...PANIC AMOR Tile PHILISTINES Bryan F. Griffin Regner7 Gateway, $12.9S, 2S9 pp...
...Pontiff does not even handle the prolonged Jesuit-Vatican controversy adequately...
...The authors are almost as vague about the Vatican diplomatic service as they are about theology and its role...
...Peter's square while popes succeed one another...
...The co-authors do not understand the Commonweal: 22 significance of the Second Vatican Council, when the church modified its self-awareness...
...That's Arabic fol~ sure in my book...
...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...
...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...
...Well, listen to the everso-canny Casaroli in Pontiff: "There was a very real possibility that the KGB was content to let the world know it was implicated -- that it deliberately wanted the attack on the pope to be seen as a stark message that the Soviet Union has the capability to eliminate opposition anywhere...
...At times, though, the limited range of his sources leads his compassion astray...
...Vatican officials frequently try to settle grudges by leaks to the press but here, according to the authors, Koenig saw the long hand of the KGB: "Koenig is even sure he knows which section.of the KGB spawned it: it bears the malevolent mark of Department D--for dezinformatsiya - of the First Chief Directorate...
...Don Oberdorfer's Tet is better on the 1968 National Liberation Front offensive...
...But, of course, there wouldn't seem to be too many writers if there were more readers to go round...
...At its worst new journalism, which uses fictional techniques in reporting actual persons and events, tells lies in convincing detail...
...These pages reveal an obviously warm and generous spirit...
...What has 13 January 1984:23 occurred reeks of the opportunism which has in the past seen other Department D provocations grow to monstrous proportions...
...Despite the length of that visit, however, he offers a jumbled sketch of present-day Vietnam...
...If you have readers you feel you have enough space around you...
...But who lives in a glass house...
...The device is effective and the narrati~;e technique is well handled despite the subjournalistic prose capable of "wide breadth...
...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...
...Politicians, celebrities...
...Pontiff is an inextricable farrago of fact and fancy, a masterpiece of disinformation...
...undermined its claim that the KGB used All Agca who attempted to assassinate John Paul II...
...Griffin introduces people of insufficient renown) ran in Harper's some time ago, and have now been expanded and issued as a book...
...The official version was that his Irish secretary, Father John Magee, found him but someone rang the true version to a right-wing Roman publication and all hell broke loose...
...A footnote suggests Casaroli would not collaborate with the authors...
...This is plausible since Felici was a conservative...
Vol. 111 • January 1984 • No. 1
