Notebook: Our man in Westport

...My parents hadn't the slightest interest in, or even much knowledge of, Westport's literary heritage...

...Van Allen tells us that Williams died in Westport on October 12, 1950...

...In retrospect, signs of the impending calamity are easily recognized...

...I started walking up and down the irregular rows of graves...

...The simple inscription read, "Michael Williams" and, below that, "1894-1950...

...Westport has always had something of a literary and artistic reputation...

...But there it was, a rather elegant granite monument no more than four feet high, with a rough-hewn top and the only decoration a simple floral design engraved in two small triangles in the top corners of the front of the stone...

...But if the tragic lessons of Rwanda and Bosnia continue to be learned, and if Mandela's leadership and enormous prestige can be put to good use, history need not repeat itself in Burundi...

...This suggests that ways can be found to avert the worst of such killings...

...It was a gray, drizzly Sunday afternoon when I turned onto the ill-kept dirt road that is all that separates the Episcopal and Catholic burial grounds...

...The takeover will presumably indude biblical studies...

...Like a lot of adolescent boys, I did develop a devotion to Hemingway, and for several years I relied disastrously on A Moveable Feast and A Farewell to Arms as practical guides to writing and romance...

...Building a public consensus for such intervention even to stop genocide--is not easy, and neither elected officials nor humanitarian agencies have done nearly enough to convince the public of the moral imperative justifying such action...

...There was no mention of Williams's family or Commonweal...

...PAUL BAUMANN Commonweal 7 February 11, 2000...

...It's accompanied by a questionnaire bearing the same title as this piece...

...Lessons drawn from Rwanda tell us that the genocide was not the result of any spontaneous uprising or longstanding and intractable ethnic hatreds...

...I spent most of my time on the soccer field...

...A smooth-featured Virgin Mary, Joseph holding the baby Jesus, even the entire Holy Family were perched broodingly on various gravestones, creating a little crowd of witnesses...

...Since the battle for sanity and capitalism must be funded, recipients of the letter are asked to send the Institute a taxdeductible contribution of from $20 to $1,000, or "other ." Our friend is sending the " ." She, too, wishes to prevent charity frauds...

...I was not terribly keen to return to the general precincts of my youth, but few options presented themselves if I was to continue working in New York...

...Obviously these are hopeful signs...

...6Charity fraud a l e r t ' [] A friend reports receiving a promotional letter that has given her a whole new outlook on promotional letters...

...But, as it turns out, I do...

...I do not attach any occult meaning to such coincidences, but it did please me to learn of this aboriginal connection between what appears to be my life's work and the place where I grew up...

...Once imbued with Objectivism, the students will eventually "put that philosophy into action as they take control of our country's institutions of government and the private sector...

...the Sermon on the Mount may be replaced by Ayn Rand insights that will surprise you, such as: "The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing...

...Knowing something of Williams's tastes, I headed for those romantic evocations of the afterlife...

...As I grew up, my academic and literary interests Commonweal 6 February 11, 2000 were not much more pronounced than theirs...

...He plans to return to the peace table in Tanzania this month, bringing with him the weight of a galvanized and concerted international community, including possibly President Bill Clinton...

...And yet, "[I]f these guilt-mongers get their way, everything America stands for--independence, self-reliance, self-confidence--will go up in smoke...

...In reality, "you don't owe your life to anyone...

...The schools were good, my father's commute to New York tolerable, and the taxes low...

...There I discovered, much to my amazement, that Michael Williams, Commonweal's founding editor and the man largely responsible for getting the enterprise off the ground in 1924, had lived and died in Westport...

...The genocide was planned and carefully promoted by the Hutu government for months in advance...

...My return to the suburbs took place as Commonweal celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary, which for various reasons caused me to reread Rodger Van Allen's history of the magazine, Commonweal and American Catholicism...

...According to Van Allen, Williams combined a dedication and inspired devotion to the magazine with a taste for hobnobbing with wealthy Catholics...

...At the far southeastern corner of the cemetery, which abutted a thickly wooded hillside, there was an efflorescence of figurative statuary...

...For, "[o]nce they've established a 'moral obligation' to help others, they'll have made it 'moral' for government to take everything you own for 'the good of society.' That's a one-way ticket to tyranny...

...In the meantime, the potential for mass slaughter remains a daily worry...

...This is "a bold-faced lie...

...Westport...

...The Institute bases its philosophy, called Objectivism, on the principles laid down in the works of the late novelist Ayn Rand, author of Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged...

...What was missing at the time, of course, was the political will to act, and the United States was among the most derelict, as President Clinton himself has admitted...

...Williams's funeral Mass must have been celebrated in the church where I received my First Holy Communion and confirmation...

...Wednesday, November 12, 1924 G. IC CHF~qT~RTON Roll#on and Sex HOFFMAN NIGKERSON On Alliance with Rome BERTRAM C, A. Vr g~:i~ce ~ the 1.Jght THEODORE MAYNARD The Founder of Card~ni~ HENRY LONGAN STUART Lcmi* VeuBlot Twenty Ceam a Copr Ten Dol~n, Year VoIumc I, NO, 1 three kids, and I recently moved to a town adjacent to (but less expensive than...

...I could hardly believe it--after all, this whole adventure was something of a lark...

...The hoax is based on "the phony idea that you have a moral duty to serve others...

...I assumed he had been buried in town, and decided to make a little pilgrimage in search of his grave...

...There were a number of obelisks and large ornamental monuments as well as two mausoleums dating from the mid-1930s...

...I grew up in Westport, Connecticut, which is now notorious for being a pretentious suburb--the average house sells for something like $800,00(Obut was a middle-class community forty years ago...

...Paul Newman and his wife Joanne Woodward are long-time residents...

...It seemed a peculiarly Graham Greene-ish, if not Catholic, moment...

...Ralston wishes to warn Americans against a gigantic fraud, a "hoax perpetrated by the media, charities, politicians, and academics...

...The letter is from Richard E. Ralston, managing director of the Ayn Rand Institute...

...Most of the graves closest to the main road were from the late nineteenth century...

...Canvassing the names, I noticed that ethnic allegiances remained strong even in death, with the Irish and Italians (joined by a few stray Poles) buried in separate areas...

...His apparent strategy is to promote an African-mediated cease fire while looking to the international community for humanitarian aid and constructive diplomatic and economic pressure...

...Williams's direct association with Commonweal ended sadly in the late 1930s when his uncritical enthusiasm for Franco resulted in his resignation as editor...

...Patches of green moss covered the monument's plinth and the stone's base...

...I remembered going to her birthday party as well as her name, which was Olivia...

...In that context, I seem to remember Lillian Ross in her famous New Yorker profile quoting some derogatory remark Hemingway made about Westport...

...A former newspaper reporter, he was a heavy drinker, and battled illness for several years before he died...

...My family moved there in 1956 into a small three-bedroom split-level (my father paid $19,000 for it) in one of the town's new developments...

...I had no idea where to begin looking or even if Williams was buried there...

...You'll know you're a victim if anybody has ever tried to "get your money by making you feel guilty about the plight of others," or if you've been "forced to pay taxes to fund government welfare programs...

...It's time to "stand up and fight back for our liberty...

...Again, I thought how odd it was that Williams lay buried, here, just off a road I had traveled countless times as a child and teen-ager...

...You get the picture...

...I parked the car just off the rutted dirt road...

...I had no interest in returning to the suburbs and I certainly never expected to have any connection to Westport's literary, let alone Catholic, heritage...

...There, at the cemetery's edge, the names on the modest monuments were Venezia, Antedomenico, Adidomenica, Feledre, Delano, and Marushak, and the burial dates were from the beginning and middle of the last century...

...I couldn't agree more, and, when my parents moved out of town while I was in college, my ties to the place gradually attenuated...

...The cemeteries are situated on a hill to the north and west of town and in the midst of a dense residential area...

...Peter DeVries, the novelist and New Yorker writer, set a number of his stories in barely disguised versions of the town...

...The UN has frankly admitted its manifold failures in this regard...

...Real morality means pursuing your own happiness and interests...

...I drove out of the cemetery and back home to my new suburban life pondering the virtual anonymity of the man whose dream of creating a "Catholic literary journal" has generously given me work for the past ten years...

...A brief call to the church rectory got me directions to the "old" cemetery...

...As fate would have it, my wife, THE COMMONWEAL A Weald~Rca~ae4Litm~t~re, 77NASa and Public At~fob'l...

...To reach the "eager young minds" in the nation's colleges and high schools, the Institute runs yearly contests in which students write essays based on the novels, thereby grasping Rand's view of "man": "A heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute...

...First, observers on the ground should be able to keep track of the government's more malign initiatives and thus alert the world...

...F. Scott Fitzgerald briefly lived there, and the geography of The Great Gatsby, with its expansive views of Long Island Sound, is said to be modeled on Westport...

...My elementary school was a half-mile away, and in fourth grade I had had a crush on a girl who lived just down the street from the cemetery...

...OUR MAN IN WESTPORT Finding Michael Williams's grave othing in our lives is preordained, yet in looking back at the decisions one makes and the surprising places those decisions take you, the guiding hand of something more than rational choice and circumstance seems at work...

...How odd...

...Three rows in, I found what I was looking for...

...Strange, I thought, how clues to one's destiny, a destiny I for so long thought required traveling far from where I had grown up, had been lying unnoticed all around me in my childhood...

...Second, it is now widely believed that early, forceful action by the UN, or the international community acting through some other venue, could have forestalled the Rwanda genocide...