Reviews

...Their fears, their hopes, their adolescent loves and casual flirtations, their music—not the official music of brass bands, but intensely private music, jazz and blues— are all essentially personal...

...At the ten hour-long regional TV programs, where carefully chosen panels (never more nor less than one black face) of "ordinary" citizens asked questions in the presence of a hand-picked Republican audience, Nixon's apparently spontaneous answers had all been rehearsed and worked over again and again during dry runs...

...Quite the contrary...

...Deprived of a yardstick, the present becomes vulgarized, expendable: anything is possible...

...Even the most venal old-fashioned ward heeler was usually a devoted party man, his loyalty rooted in communal or family tradition...

...The dust jacket describes the book as a romantic novella about a jaded man and a demurring woman...

...In view of the special circumstances of 1968, any account of an election that brought Nixon to power would have to end on a somber note, and McGinniss does this very well...

...I don't care whether they're white or whoever the hell they are...

...THIS FUNDAMENTAL AFFIRMATION runs through all of gkvorecky's works, from the detective stories, The Mourning of Lt...

...All of us—no matter how intelligent and sophisticated—have a remarkable talent for either ignoring whatever messages do not fit our preconceptions, or interpreting them in accordance with our prejudices at whatever cost to logic and consistency...

...The reaction of the regime to The Cowards was swift and overwhelming...

...I really don't see any choice," he said...

...In official statements, ideology was becoming the measure of reality, and there were things not to be said, thoughts not to be thought...

...Is The Selling of the President a comedy or tragedy...

...They figure other kids got footballs for Christmas, Nixon got a briefcase andhe loved it...

...WITH THE PUBLICATION of The Cowards, one of the major literary figures of our times is making a belated appearance in English...

...It is shared by other Czech writers like Vaculik, Hrabal, Havel, Kundera, and others...

...You name it...

...But already in The End of the Nylon Age, the early companion piece to The Cowards, a second theme appears...

...Total surrender to constantly changing, contorted ideology became the price of survival...

...They have discovered human reality, and 8kvorecky's presentation is more than anything else a reaffirmation of the tangible reality of human life in an age of posturing and ideology...

...They always have been and they always will be...

...In the coup in 1948, ideology had triumphed...

...Forming a kind of triumvirate with him were Len Garment, a Nixon law-partner, and Frank Shakespeare, a relic of the Aubrey era at CBS...

...it describes...

...The Czechoslovak spring was not the anti-Communist revolution of which Middle America approves...

...New York: Trident Press...

...It was apparent, though, that the elaborately planned strategy had been less than a total success...

...The manager of the publishing house, an editor-inchief, and some five editors were fired...

...The lion cub who "survives it all and grows into beauty" is the Marianne of the only revolution which still makes sense in a posttechnological, postideological world...

...Yet the books that speak for us most clearly are different...

...I mean I don't want my kids growing up in an atmosphere like this...

...The book was written in a time of gathering clouds...

...They are capable of ideals, of love, even heroism, but their lives are made of different stuff...

...Overtly, it is a story about a man at a vacation resort who tries to seduce a woman who, by all expectations, should be willing enough—and becomes more and more fascinated as she refuses him...

...You can't coexist with men who are trying to enslave you...

...That everyone does know this may very well be the most important part of the impact...

...His books have been alternately banned and published, withdrawn and reprinted not only in 453 Czechoslovakia, but in Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and even Germany...

...A week later, the regime brought out its heaviest ideological and administrative artillery...

...kvorecky was transferred and his salary drastically cut...

...Their bankruptcy testifies not only to the bankruptcy of Hitler's nationalism or Stalin's communism, but to the bankruptcy of all ideologies which sacrifice men to utopian blueprints and destroy in the name of love...

...Elaborate and expensive attempts to define the exact nature of the influence have produced a great many interesting fragments of information, but no theory that is both definitive and all-embracing...

...It was something far more profound, far more fundamental: a rediscovery of the reality of human life, of the tangible goodness of being human, ordinarily human...

...Erazim V. Kohak Revolution of Sanity THE COWARDS, by Josef Skvorecky...

...But in the process it reduces the ideal from a reference point for the present to a distant promise for the future...

...Thinkhe's a bore, a pain in the ass...

...It was rather like the quiz-show scandals once again— though this time with somewhat higher stakes...

...We have to stand up to them at every turn...

...Johnson's ineptitude in front of cameras did not prevent him from scoring a smashing victory over a relatively telegenic Barry Goldwater...

...Like most blurbs, it is true but misses the point...

...Hubert Humphrey had been seizing every opportunity for exposure on all the media and the polls showed that he was gaining...

...This short narrative makes Theodore White's ponderous quadrennial volumes (whose titles McGinniss's parodies) seem as outmoded as a Victorian three-decker biography...

...I am sure that many Americans were not even con scious of his paralysis—a situation that, for better or for worse, would be difficult to ar range today...

...gkvorecky tells it from the perspective of young men who are only marginally touched by the political manias of their elders...

...Its publication in November 1958 may well have been a slip of the censors who let the book get by with only minor changes while banning some of gkvorecky's rather innocuous stories...

...If the criterion of revolutionary literature is that it in fact starts revolutions, The Cowards definitely qualifies...

...Josef Skvorecky has given East European readers a perspective of sanity in an insane world and a human perspective in an inhuman one...

...There is no posturing, there are no gimmicks, whether literary or political...

...From a commanding lead in mid-September, Nixon's support had gradually dwindled until, as Murray Kempton later put it, he had become the presidential choice of only half the country: "There seems no place larger than Peoria from which he has not been beaten back...

...And by being placed in a finite future, the ideal becomes vulgarized as well...

...The producers lived in terror of an off-beat question...

...Yet beneath the politicized facade human life went on, real, and good, more precious for the seven war years...

...It is an ordinary book about ordinary people...

...They are less interested in what their man really stands for than in creating an image for him based on some lumpen-Platonic idea of the kind of person the voters would like him to be...

...The Cowards does neither...

...His appearance in English is a literary event, especially if American publishers follow up The Cowards with The Emoke Legend, The Lion Cub, and any of his other works currently oscillating from unprintable manuscripts and out-of-print editions to the index librorum prohibitorum...

...The election-eve telephone shows were harder to rig, and Humphrey did not hesitate to have unrehearsed conversations with actual citizens: Nixon's callers' questions were funneled through rewrite men who emended them to match answers previously prepared on cue cards...

...It was, after all, Cook County and not public revulsion at his jowliness that really defeated Nixon in 1960...

...Skvorecky's protagonists have no taste for official heroism...

...Even Novotny, then President of Czechoslovakia, attacked the book at a mass meeting in Prague's Julius Fucik Park...

...Her faith, to be sure, is a strange mixture of theosophy and outright superstition with some Freudian admixture which gkvorecky obviously does not commend to his readers...

...She has rather more in common with Jane Eyre than with Raskolnikov, but precisely that makes her revolutionary...

...She appears frigid with suggestions of just the opposite, rather neurotic and unfit for the world...

...Yet his main theme is the failure of the image manipulators to deliver the votes as they claimed to be able to do...

...here is Harold Wilson, a superb TV performer and the darling of the polls, being humbled by a man whose allegedly poor image was the despair of his campaign managers...

...She refuses to strike heroic poses, but she also refuses to rationalize...

...By the time the fury had subsided in the early sixties, the effect was clear...

...Blueberry, serialized on Prague TV, to the recent The Tank Battalion...

...There is Harry Treleaven, a onetime executive at J. Walter Thompson, who believes that "most national issues are so complicated, so difficult to understand and have opinions on that they either intimidate or, more often, bore the average voter...

...420 pp...

...and a poor television image defeated Lyndon Johnson in 1968, making such archaic rituals as primaries, convention and campaign unnecessary...

...By contrast, media experts such as Gene Wyckoff, author of The Image Candidates (Macmillan, 1968) have no strong political opinions themselves and regard the beliefs of the aspirants they serve as problems to be overcome, rather than the basis of policies to be communicated...

...With the "wrong" kind of personality for TV, little money, and the albatross of the war and Chicago around his neck, Humphrey came close to winning, while every resource known to Madison Ave nue barely helped Nixon scrape into power...

...After turning out 18 sixty-second visions of postelectoral peace, order, and tranquility, Gene Jones had firm plans to move himself and his family out of the U.S.A...

...On another level, the political affiliations of law firms generally bear some relation to the ideological convictions of the partners...

...It describes, with the perceptions of a major writer, and the men and events it describes are basically ordinary, at least by Czech standards in the closing days of the war...

...It's as simple as that...

...It is an utterly fascinating description...

...He did his best to see that Nixon's campaign was neither intimidating nor boring...

...When I first read the book, I thought he might have carried satiric exaggeration too far...

...It does not condemn or extol...

...Every big advertising agency has one or two political campaign specialists, and the literature on the subject (both scientific and pseudoscientific) is proliferating alarmingly...

...This, finally, is the dilemma of democratic socialism as well...

...He is the President of every place in this country that does not have a bookstore...

...Yet The Cowards is anything but revolutionary in any usual sense...

...For some unaccountable reason Nixon's staff allowed McGinniss, a notoriously irreverent wit, to observe their campaign in close detail...

...Either the candidate or the strong man behind him often exercised an almost feudal power over his retainers...

...Virtue has become official...

...Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, storm ing round about this issue...

...History ingresses into their lives, but does not displace them...

...They live through the exhilaration of the end of the war, only to see liberation reduced to the careers of petty-bourgeois and party bureaucrats...

...Written orginally in 194849, the manuscript remained in the author's drawer through the Stalin years when Czech literature was restricted to Marxist tracts and tractor romances...

...In a world that understands itself almost entirely in ideological abstractions, democratic socialism is an affirmation of concrete humanity in an ideological age...

...According to received opinion, victory in the television debates elected John F. Kennedy in 1960...

...But it is also the universal world of advanced indus trial countries in the postideological age, the world of official illusions and ordinary lives, of bending spines and heroic poses...

...They represent a new type of revolutionary literature, a literature that is nonideological, even nonpolitical, but is, in an age of ideological abstraction, revolutionary in that it rediscovers the value and reality of concrete human life...

...The reaction of the readers was no less swift...

...Richard Nixon lost in 1960 because he allowed anxiety to show on his sweaty, stubbly face during the debates...

...EVERYONE KNOWS that the rise of TV has had a profound impact upon politics...

...It is a very funny book, at least until one remembers that its subject is a campaign for the presidency of the United States—not much of a laughing matter these days...

...New York: Grove Press, 1970...

...Clearly, presidential candidates cannot be packaged and marketed just like soap or cereal, no matter what the wise guys say...

...Or, better, it tells the story of people caught in the drift, the human rub of history...

...In the wasteland that is left, affirmation of humanity becomes trivial without the affirmation of an ideal...

...Past revolutions have destroyed men in the name of ideology—killed their bodies for the sake of their souls, and destroyed their souls for the sake of Utopia...

...Perhaps the most frustrating thing about being a Czech in America today is that one meets with so much sympathy and so little understanding in a society conditioned to ideological abstractions...

...But the point is the figure of the woman, Emoke...

...It became a rallying point of life...

...Leona, the lion cub of the title, is not a theosophist or a neurotic...

...one might even suspect that a lit tle television exposure would have helped •to wreck their prospects...

...They see the cruelty and pomp...

...They measure abstractions in human terms...

...But it is measured in the concrete terms of human life...

...This is why Czechoslovak "socialism with a human face," its socialist democracy, remains significant even two years after Russian tanks replaced Russian ideology...

...Not that the Czechoslovak upheaval has failed to produce political literature: there are such works as Mnacko's Belated Reports, or the memoirs of Josefa Slanska who is the widow of one of the prominent victims of the age of ideology...

...He was booked onto both Meet the Press and Face the Nation, where the usual deferential questioning caused him little trouble...

...Skvorecky's The Cowards tells the story of the end of a war and an era in a provincial city on the eastern border of Bohemia...

...When they hit the teachers over the head, goddammit, they have no right to run the school...

...Shakespeare's chief political emotions appear to be a hatred of the press and a conviction that the Russians are brutal murderers who are "out to get us...

...They look onhim as the kind of kid who always carried abookbag...

...The newspapers were beginning to jeer at the excessive caution of the Nixon campaign, and he himself was getting restive...

...Revolutionary literature as we have come to think of it thrives on illusions or disillusionment, extolling a vision of Utopia or condemning reality with utter revulsion...

...This is the theme 8kvorecky tackles in The Emoke Legend...

...Their most despised rivals tend to be not members of opposing parties but issuecentered print journalists and their own candidate's political advisers...

...De Gaulle, Harold Wilson, and Trudeau are often similarly identified as politicians whose success can be attributed in whole or part to video charisma...

...He'd always have his homeworkdone and he'd never let you copy...

...gkvorecky's young men, workers and students closed out of schools, appear as cowards to an ideological age, and they make no attempt to refuse the label...

...For understandable reasons, the candidate was seldom allowed to utter words that were really his own...

...This makes life difficult for people who, like me, want to see a radical reordering of the way we live now, but at least it seems to mean that if Richard M. Nixon is now President of the United States, it is not because people like Harry Treleaven, Frank Shakespeare, and Gene Jones decided to help him get there...

...But she has something the postideological age lacks, an ideal that is not just a temporal, temporalizable plan for a future, but a normative ideal...

...Fortunately for democracy, the influence of mediated communications upon public opinion has been greatly exaggerated...

...It is comforting to know that a man of this intellectual caliber is now Director of the USIA...

...It is true that, by controlling camera angles and editing tapes, a skillful producer can do a great deal to rearrange reality in his candidate's favor, but not much more than others were able to do by other means before the days of television...

...Leona affirms her very ordinary humanity by retaining a sense of justice and a moral norm that does not bend to practical or ideological convenience...

...Nor was it a Central European analogue of the revolt against reality which amuses American intellectuals...

...He's a funny looking guy...

...The affirmation of human reality now appears empty without an affirmation of a human ideal...

...It seemed incredible that the man who uttered these graceless and confused oversimplifications could be the candidate of a major party for the highest political office in the world...

...Harding and Coolidge were at least as improbable occupants of the White House as Nixon is...

...The world in which this book was written was different from that of The Cowards...

...The history is there: the last spasms of German rule, the skirmishes between armies, the ambiguous liberation, and the full canvas of the end of the war...

...etc.] Obviously, McGinniss had captured the idiom perfectly, and this confirmation of his accuracy makes us inclined to credit what he has to report on other subjects...

...He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning withhis suit all bunched up and starts runningaround saying, "I want to be President...

...to Montsarrat in the West Indies...

...I write this shortly after the news of Labour's defeat in Great Britain has just come through...

...She describes herself as "just an ordinary girl," and she is that—yet in a postideological age that precisely is what makes her extraordinary...

...In the end, the professionals had to allow the candidate a little more liberty to be himself...

...Nobody has embraced this new faith with more alacrity than the professional campaign managers...

...It speaks of a reality, but the listeners hear only the usual abstractions...

...Each succeeding election sees larger teams of communications experts joining the campaign staffs and greater proportions of electoral funds made available to them...

...THIS IS win' Skvorecky should be read, together with all the authors whose books breathe the faith of the Czechoslovak spring...

...7.95...

...Get rid of the war there will be another one...

...What would we all be saying now if Daley had failed to produce the vote for Kennedy...

...Who was forty-two years old the dayhe was born...

...The book sold out overnight, was lent and borrowed, copied and talked about...

...The only revolution which makes sense today is the affirmation of man in all his concreteness, in all his ordinariness, in all his humanity...

...Television certainly favors certain physiques and personalities more than it does others, but history does not support the view that this need be crucial...

...She is an ordinary girl who survived a Nazi concentration camp and the age of fanaticism which followed it...

...On the other hand, as a polio victim myself, I have always been im pressed by the way in which Franklin D. Roosevelt's disability was (I suppose deliber ately) suppressed or disguised whenever he was in front of press or movie cameras...

...In The Lion Cub, which is to appear in English in the near future, Skvorecky fuses the themes of affirmation of humanity and affirmation of the ideal...

...Precisely because her ideal is not a program, a unity of theory and praxis, but a genuinely normative ideal, it gives her a perspective and raises her to a different level...

...In a mad world, they speak with a sane voice...

...The heroes are official, virtues are official, ideals are official...

...The publication of The Cowards is a happy omen...

...And in the subsequent years, the Czechs lived through a spasm of fanaticism...

...This does not seem to prevent any of us— experts and amateurs alike—from acting on implicit faith...

...gkvorecky describes its effect on the men who inhabit it with clinical accuracy...

...The novel was attacked viciously day after day in press and radio broadcast...

...However, during the very week that I read these words, I saw him at the Pentagon, unaware that television cameras and microphones were recording what he had to say: You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses...

...The world in which Leona moves is one gkvorecky knows well, the world of Czech in tellectuals in the final years of Novotny...

...One somewhat positive review appeared, again through a slip, but the second review described the author as a rotting kitten that should be shipped off to the vet...

...The center of McGinniss's stage is occupied not by the candidate but by half a dozen practioners of the new political arts...

...Five years later, when the Party rescinded its original decision, it went through three large editions in Czechoslovakia as well as numerous editions and bans in other "socialist" countries...

...Skvorecky's fundamentally human perspective is by no means unique to him...

...Here, for instance, he quotes Nixon on the crisis of race and discipline in the New York schools: Yep, this hits it right on the nose, the thing about this whole teacher—it's all about law and order and the damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there...

...In a skirmish between the two armies they destroy a tank—with a machine gun carefully, unspectacularly preserved in hiding throughout the war—and they refuse to claim credit...

...The Czechs, having lived through both a technological and an ideological revolution, have outgrown the residual illusions...

...If he had refrained from escalating the Vietnam war and put his formidable energies into domestic reform, does anyone doubt he might still be President...

...The man who produced most of the spot commercials used during the campaign expressed his doubts about Nixon in a manner that went beyond words...

...Ideology gains its force by placing the ideal in history...

...But even that faith gives her something others lack, a sense of her own identity, a confidence that there still is truth, that there is a right and a wrong...

...They're ruthless bastards and they're trying to conquer the world...

...These new men differ from professional politicians...

...and he won both the nomination and the election in 1968 by deftly projecting the image of a new, warm, statesmanlike Dick Nixon...

...This is the theme 8kvorecky works out in a book that cries out for translation, The Emoke Legend...

...Now you put him on television, you've gota problem right away...

...The classic account of a campaign waged on these principles is now The Selling of the President 1968, by Joe McGinniss...

...In a mad world, sanity is revolution...

...Roger Ailes, the boy wonder who used to produce the Mike Douglas show, had no illusions about the candidate whose television appearances he supervised: A lot of people think Nixon is dull...