The Perils of Lennonism
DRAPER, ROGER S.
The Perils of Lennonism THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT: NOTES OF A COLLEGE REVOLUTIONARY By James Simon Kunen Random House. 150 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by ROGER S. DRAPER At the time of last spring's...
...It's possible," he says, "that I am here to be cool, or to meet people, or to meet girls...
...Not merely admiration, in fact, for the author declares that "against my better judgment, I love [Mr.] Clean...
...speculation about "whether Lenin was as concerned with the breast size of his revolutionary cohorts as I am...
...How, Kunen wondered, could he, a Columbia student, march down 125th Street shouting "Columbia get out of Harlem...
...This, I think, means two things...
...He is not, and does not pretend to be, an ideologist...
...Most important, Kunen is not sure why he entered the building...
...Almost every page has at least one striking phrase, and there are a couple of sentences which I genuinely envy...
...Nixon, perhaps...
...There were even more disturbing realities after the bust...
...Certainly Harvard and other recent strikelets...
...I am willing, even anxious, not to think about it any more...
...Yet to keep his radical conscience clear, he insists he is not at all certain that liberal reformism can improve matters...
...The tragically archaic quality of that wish, and the entire book, is reminiscent of Norman Thomas, Adlai Stevenson, pre-Vietnam peace marches, and "We Shall Overcome...
...The administration does not now challenge the right of students to make demands upon it...
...The thought of Kunen is more John Lennonist, than V. I. Leninist...
...These are trivial details, however, when set beside Kunen's greatest problem: his inability to decide whether he is a revolutionist or a reformer...
...The Morningside Bol-shies were only too happy to believe them...
...Most of the criticisms of Columbia voiced during the strike were highly arguable...
...The infuriating aspect of the expansion issue, for example, was not the expansion per se—that was inevitable—but Kirk's obvious indifference to the suffering produced by the university's plans...
...I liked Dean Deane...
...While the possibility that what we do at Columbia may have little relevance anywhere—except maybe Harvard—has clearly occurred to him, Kunen cannot figure out what to do with this particular bit of intelligence...
...Thus, on April 27, Kunen noted that "it is disappointing to find out that the outside world is going on as usual...
...Of course, the possibility exists that I am here to precipitate some change at the university...
...He chats with Dean Deane and comes away muttering, "God...
...he fears the end of the Vietnam war because after it is gone there will be nothing left to execrate...
...He cannot rid himself of the notion that if there is unrest at Columbia and other universities, the same discontent must exist in the rest of society as well...
...As for The Revolution, it seems no closer...
...The list of people Kunen can't bring himself to hate is revealing...
...What has come out of the Columbia strike...
...Grayson Kirk (and who should have known if not Grayson Kirk) assured the rebels that they were dedicated to wrecking the university and the rest of society...
...He dines with the Harvard law professor investigating the Columbia turmoil, Archibald Cox, and likes him—though against his will...
...Unfortunately, too, although James Kunen can clearly perceive the ambiguity of the contemporary radical movement, he seems unaware that the enemy is not wholly evil either...
...what am I going to do...
...But toward the end, the substance of The Strawberry Statement becomes extremely thin, and Kunen's narrative begins to resemble a poor stream of consciousness novel...
...Kunen calls himself an "issue man...
...This carries the awful and—dare I say it—liberal implication that a succession of minor reforms might cumulatively improve American life...
...endless political meetings...
...That confession is a clue to the Establishment's greatest mistake...
...He also likes girls, drugs, people, hurricanes, pneumatic jackhammers, and revolution (to offer a partial list...
...This is not to say that the author is a total flop as a hater...
...If we get guns we're just like them and everybody would be better off without us...
...Columbia itself has in some ways reformed...
...Finally he sent in the cops, not once but on three occasions...
...So Kunen has to fall back on the longhairs, his fellow college students...
...They musn't be fooled by improvement . . . ." At the same time Kunen tells us that McCarthy "tries to coopt people with little things," and concludes that "if they're a little happier for it, I'm for it...
...On the other hand, the proposals for "restructuring" face a dubious future...
...But Kunen has difficulty hating in a radical movement where it is increasingly true that "if you want to make it with the activists, hatred has to be all right with you...
...Kunen likes strawberries...
...First, that he is not impressed by the hoary ideological clap-trap peddled endlessly during the strike...
...Kunen is virtually as alienated from the hard-core revolutionists as from the powers that be, for he does not "feel as sure of [himself] as they seem to feel about themselves...
...The first half of the book, a diary-like narrative of the strike, was originally published in New York magazine...
...feelings of uselessness ("I'll do anything to feel like I'm doing something...
...Yet, he admits, "beyond defining what it wasn't, it is very difficult to say with certainty what anything meant...
...Whether the thwarting of so many would-be authors is their own fault, or indicates the exhaustion of the revolutionary muse, I do not know—¦ though in my own case it is the latter...
...To do him justice, Kunen recognizes that he is no revolutionist...
...The New York Times, which hips its readers to "all the news that's fit to print," saw fit to print Kirk's comments, and added many of its own in a similar vein...
...Kunen calls the fellow "much whiter than I am" because he seems hostile to black power...
...But the revolutionary fantasies were soon nourished...
...By 1968, this attitude was no longer tolerable, just as the administration's blindness to the moral implications of government research was now unacceptable...
...A participant in the uprising from the initial occupation of Hamilton Hall on April 23, 1968, his account of the communes is rather different from the idiotically overromanticized description in Up Against the Ivy Wall...
...Second, he really believes the world would be a better place without the much-disputed Morn-ingside Heights gym, and without the Institute for Defense Analysis...
...Moreover, he has a number of sensible comments on the subject, such as: "There must be better ways to fight guns than with guns, and if there aren't we ought to think up some...
...So fragile is Kunen's resolve that he cannot even suppress a lingering admiration for Eugene McCarthy, the arch-coopter...
...On the whole the writing is good, if excessively cute...
...Similarly, he found the Workers unsympathetic, and sometimes even hostile...
...One wonders whether this was the spirit that brought down the Winter Palace...
...He has the radical's frantic contempt for the "bourgeois revisionist drivel" of liberals (including, apparently, Dwight Macdonald and Harold Taylor, chairman of the board of wbai...
...Reviewed by ROGER S. DRAPER At the time of last spring's rebellion at Columbia, I, and virtually every radical I knew, was "writing" a book...
...The "strawberry statement" of the title refers to a remark by Columbia Dean Herbert Deane on April 25, 1967 (almost exactly a year before the beginning of the occupation): "Whether students say 'yes' or 'no' on an issue is like telling me they like strawberries...
...At the close of the book, Kunen insists "that the Columbia action cannot be dismissed as an overgrown panty raid...
...There is an interesting tip-off to the author's creeping liberalism in his account of a conversation with a black man from Falmouth, Massachusetts...
...Kunen found the substance of the liberated life rather boring: intensified identity crises...
...The works of the mimeograph machine Marxists "just don't speak" to him...
...And this is a relief to him because "if blacks can be whiter than whites, then the color thing becomes quite confusing and maybe everyone will just forget about it...
...The television people further inflated the radicals' sense of self-importance, as did most of the newspaper columnists, experts on everything...
...Like Kunen, most of the demonstrators had very little notion of what they were doing...
...or to get out of crew, or to be arrested...
...He does not like school, but he has been there so long that it has become the center of his existence...
...Few students?surely not James Kunen—seem interested in purely university issues, for these lack the powerful emotional appeal of The Revolution...
...Their principal difficulty was that although the enemy took them seriously, their hoped-for allies among the oppressed and the downtrodden did not...
...His frank confusion, his openly expressed insecurities, are the most attractive aspects of The Strawberry Statement...
...His "better judgment" is that "people should be kept unhappy so that they will know they're unhappy...
...parts of the second half, dealing with Kunen's subsequent confusion, have appeared in the Atlantic...
...All this projected literary activity has thus far resulted in only two works, Up Against the Ivy Wall, by reporters of the Columbia Spectator, and this one by James Simon Kunen, a 20-year-old Columbia College junior...
...Quite a lot of people shared his tastes...
Vol. 52 • May 1969 • No. 9
