THE VIRTOUS MAN AND THE HOLLOW MAN
Rabben, Linda A.
In 1937 George Orwell went to Spain; in 1980 Christopher Dickey went to Central America. Both set out to write about wars—Orwell to do articles on the Spanish Civil War for left-wing...
...Dickey makes himself seem like one of Eliot's hollow men...
...I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful...
...Orwell's book became a classic...
...This slavish "objectivity" undercuts the author's power to move and convince us...
...Contras) Ironically, in his zeal to be "objective," Dickey ends up glorifying the contras, apparently against his intention...
...This pose accords with the ideal of journalistic objectivity, but it weakens what he surely means to be an indictment of U.S...
...I studied James's face, his eyes darting about us, then looked at the mulch and insects at the base of the tree an inch or so from my eyes, thinking what an asshole I was to be here...
...In his introduction to Homage to Catalonia, Lionel Trilling called Orwell a virtuous and an honest man...
...policy and actions...
...He is not afraid to state his convictions directly as a committed socialist...
...Perhaps for the same reason Orwell acknowledges his limitations: to allow the reader to identify, and thus sympathize, with him...
...Perhaps it is no longer possible to believe in the decency of human beings as Orwell did...
...But there are some important things that Orwell and Dickey do not have in common...
...Both set out to write about wars—Orwell to do articles on the Spanish Civil War for left-wing British periodicals, Dickey to do articles on the revolutionary wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala for the Washington Post...
...He looks on with curiously flat affect, as if the capacity for horror has been drained from him...
...Both experienced war directly—Orwell as a partisan, Dickey as an observer...
...Both risked their lives...
...Dickey alternates such passages with political analysis of Washington's role in the "covert" war, but the energy of the book is concentrated in his eyewitness, anecdotal accounts of the contras in action—rough, tough, crazy guys, war is hell, and gimme another drag on that cigarette, compaiiero...
...In contrast, Orwell invests his prose with moral concerns: The last thing I wished for was to be mixed up in some meaningless street-fight...
...It is clear that Orwell's beliefs determine the way he writes, while Dickey tries so hard to conceal his opinions and his values that the reader may be left with the impression that he has none...
...In framing his analyses in war-novel rhetoric, Dickey has failed to question—indeed, reinforced —the basic assumptions that lead us into military adventures and wars (what Orwell calls "that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all...
...James," I said in a voice so low it seemed barely to pass my lips, "what the fuck are we going to do if we get hit...
...I began to feel more normal and to be sorry for the four poor devils who were sweating and slithering with the stretcher on their shoulders...
...I thought what a good thing it was to be alive in a world where silver poplars grow...
...To be marching up the street behind red flags inscribed with elevating slogans, and then to be bumped off from an upper window by some total stranger with a sub-machine gun—that is not my idea of a useful way to die...
...Dickey does not seem to have either—or if he does, he hides them with a care that seems almost perverse...
...It was a mile and a half to the ambulance, and vile going, over lumpy, slippery tracks...
...q 106...
...Contras) Note the short, punchy words and sentences, the sentence fragment, the redundant "and"s...
...Why does he call himself an asshole, I wondered as I read this passage...
...I had thought about this a long time...
...The passage conveys Orwell's love of life, his skepticism, his rationality, his powerful sense of irony, his idealism...
...Down," he said...
...It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan...
...Whether Dickey is virtuous or honest I do not know, since he tries so hard to conceal himself from his readers...
...James nodded...
...I think that it embodies a distinctively male retreat from feeling and involvement, and a fascination with violence and cruelty...
...Dickey, With the Contras (Simon and Schuster, 1986...
...And then Cancer...
...I think we've got to do whatever Krill says to do...
...Dickey's has received extremely favorable reviews and may become a classic, too...
...Homage) "Behind here," Krill said, pulling us to the massive stump of an ancient tree...
...And now it was weeks, months later, and Visage had to try to put it all back together again...
...Contras) Orwell admits his frailties with a wonderful lack of self-congratulation, while Dickey often seems to posture for effect...
...I may believe Dickey's facts—indeed, they seem authoritative and unquestionable— but I do not believe in the authenticity of his persona...
...Thus Dickey reduces this war to the level of a docudrama...
...And the camp had broken to bits...
...Homage) And he makes a statement that in Dickey's world would probably be impossible: "Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings...
...Dickey fights for nothing during his journey with the contras through the jungles of Honduras and Nicaragua: he tags along...
...The styles of these two writers differ significantly, and it is through their styles, rather than their reportage, that they reveal their basic dissimilarities as people, as writers, and as exemplars of their eras...
...Get down," he said, shaking his head...
...Their stories were lost to confused rumor and unmarked graves...
...If so, why does he want us to judge him so severely...
...Orwell takes sides but also tries to tell the truth as best he can: And I hope the account I have given is not too misleading...
...We have seen this pose often enough, in film noir, in recent novels by male authors (Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise and many others), and in the deadpan self-display of punk rockers...
...And he does this through a choppy, Hemingwayesque style that seems all too deliberate and all too dated...
...105 Ten, twenty, thirty—there may have been as many as forty commandos killed by Krill...
...Many people mistake this self-indulgence for power, and our national leaders play upon this confusion in their rationales for policy...
...I trust him not only as a reporter but as a human being...
...I don't think we've got much choice if something happens...
...Look at the difference between these two passages: I did not make any of the correct political reflections...
...after all, we have fifty more years of counter-evidence on a gargantuan scale...
...I never do when things are happening...
...No one knew for certain...
...Orwell is another kind of man...
...Every review of the book that I have read has assumed that the book is an indictment, not mere reportage...
...Orwell, by contrast, seems unimpeachable in every sense, a noble embodiment of his beliefs...
...Homage) He does this with a careful choice of words: "meaningless," "elevating slogans," "bumped off," "useful...
...Why does one writer impress me so positively and the other leave me so cold...
...Leaves began to fall, severed by bullets clipping a few feet above us...
...his strength comes from a unique combination of conviction, anger, wry humor, and acute lyrical sensibility...
...Homage) Nor does he follow the contemporary journalistic prescription, which declares that objectivity is value-free...
...Both wrote books about their experiences: Orwell, Homage to Catalonia...
...I knew what a sweat it was, having helped to carry a wounded man down a day or two earlier...
...The leaves of the silver poplars which, in places, fringed our trenches brushed against my face...
...It seemed, now, incredible that our lives should come down to such utter dependence on this one man, but he had changed so much over the three days of marching that to stay with him, do exactly what he said, seemed not only the only alternative, but also the best...
...Although it is a privilege to identify with Orwell, a man who risked everything to fight for a cause he believed in, it is much more difficult to glorify Dickey's quest for a story...
...But all the while the pain in my arm was diabolical, making me swear and then try not to swear, because every time I breathed too hard the blood bubbled out of my mouth...
...Is the word meant merely to shock, or is he trying too hard to impress his readers with his contemptible qualities...
...Orwell had strong moral convictions and political views that he set forth in his book...
...And then there had been Jaguar...
...But must we meekly surrender, in the name of "realism" and "objectivity," in two-syllable words and one-sentence paragraphs, to what we used to claim to abhor...
...We had touched on it before...
...It takes courage to maintain such faith in the face of the infamy, betrayal, and brutality that Orwell witnessed in Spain...
...It seems to be always the case when I get mixed up in war or politics—I am conscious of nothing save physical discomfort and a deep desire for this damned nonsense to be over...
...The tone is macho, laconic, cynical...
Vol. 34 • January 1987 • No. 1
