Traveler's Notebook
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union TRaVELER'S NOTEBOOK BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Rome-we are sitting on some very old steps, gazing up at the Coliseum, that gorgeous monument to bread and circuses. Built by Jews,...
...Between the Egyptian pyramids and the Roman Coliseum stretched two millennia, about the same amount of time that intervened between the Coliseum and the Holocaust...
...He has given up meat, tobacco and alcohol...
...Then he repeats some doggerel he learned in the Kansas City ghetto: "Your eyes may shine and your teeth may grit, but none of this ice cream will you git...
...then he would stroll over to the palace and meet his new, young wife in front of an agreed upon painting, where he would lecture at length on how the picture made him feel...
...according to Herbert Lottman's preface to The Bern Book, Carter has written several brilliant novels, all of them yet unpublished...
...assisi-in Report to Greco Nikos Kazantzakis calls this the most beautiful place in the world, save his native Crete...
...It is not one of my jazziest lectures...
...We go to the dog races and pick up several thousand lire (about $7...
...His intuition of late has led him to draw thousands of pictures, many of them, he has been assured by artists, worthy of display...
...they collected saints for their walls...
...it may also be an oppressive sense of history engendered by the sight of this too, too solid stone, each boulder a reminder of man's inhumanity to man...
...I just follow my intuition...
...He wrote it 16 years ago...
...according to Van Wyck Brooks, Dostoev-sky wrote most of The Idiot in rooms across the street...
...One of our longshots, a dappled greyhound named Venetia, wins going away...
...My house has too many windows...
...It is easy to admire the town, clinging to a high cliff overlooking Umbrian olive groves...
...after the stones of Rome and the poplars of Dachau it is good to be with Vincent and Liselotte in Bern...
...It is at least a mile from bus to concentration camp...
...Did she see the smoke and smell the stench-and go right on tending her roses...
...To equate the Concentration Camp Dachau with the City of Dachau would be unjust...
...The upshot is essentially religious: "I was finally revealed to myself to be . . . merely a state of mind, a mere thought of myself...
...I don't think any more," he tells us...
...Florence-we are in the Pitti Palace, a vast and gaudy museum where princes once dwelled...
...the other trees-poplars -that concealed the barbed wire and allowed the local citizenry to see absolutely nothing...
...They are our ice cream...
...I'm not worrying about them," he says...
...Unfortunately some visitors transfer without further thought their justified aversion to the City of Dachau...
...Carter calls the book "a record of a voyage of the mind"-an odys-sey in which he painfully works his way out of an assortment of spiritual chains: first the manacles of race (he is black), then the manacles of ego...
...he needs no car ("Wherever I go, I walk...
...it takes two hands to lift even a pawn...
...The emphasis is on worshiping the saint rather than on emulating the man...
...We get a clue at the camp gate, where a tasteless four-color poster urges us to visit the "beautiful Dachau Castle...
...This is our fourth day in Rome and we are weary...
...That man is Walt Disney...
...Was she here back "then...
...We are silent as we walk back to the bus stop, past a factory, past a truck advertising Dachau bread, past all the neat little houses with their spotless square windows...
...Carter is a superb storyteller...
...Still, there is Giotto's painting of St...
...the trees from which "difficult" prisoners were hanged by their wrists...
...The chessmen are nearly life-size...
...It may be the heat...
...Built by Jews, it devoured Christians...
...Since that time only one other man has possessed the profound spiritual ability to communicate with animals...
...The reactions of his wife are not recordsd...
...Francis was very spiritual," he says...
...This afternoon, before ambling over here, we visited the Church of St...
...Dachau shares an equal measure of responsibility with every other German city...
...it was published, after many rejections, last May...
...which condition I shared with all entities in the universe...
...all week we have been wandering down the opulent corridors of popes and princes...
...Sometimes I draw pictures through the night, one after another...
...They were very rich...
...It is swarming with scenes in bas-relief of the triumphal procession following Titus' capture of Jerusalem...
...Francis talking to the birds...
...My wife Diane sighs and wonders whether the thousands of cars roaring by-the sleek Ferraris and the mercurial Fiats-do not also represent a form of enslavement: modern man chained to his chariot...
...at 50, with a touch of gray in his beard, Carter stays loose and wiry...
...To reach Dachau, a suburb of Munich, one takes a commuter train, a bus, then a longish walk...
...I am astonished by my anger...
...I ask Carter about his other books...
...he is also a weary emancipator looking into the valley where, presumably, his feckless constituents are making merry 'round a golden calf...
...the ovens...
...We see him, full of a fierce melancholy, wandering the streets of Bern, picking up barmaids, hassling with Swiss landladies frightened by his blackness, examining spider webs on the railing of the Kirchenjeldbrucke ("What could he have been thinking, way out there in the middle of nothing, building a web...
...Francis was born here in 1182, and we are now in the basilica where the good man is buried...
...When I read The Bern Book I had a Holden Caulfield reaction: I wanted to meet the author...
...Most of the paintings have him in unnatural postures: conversing with angels or rising toward heaven...
...Parting is such sweet sorrow...
...Dachau-this is a pilgrimage we pledged to each other...
...He is a bearded giant holding the tablets...
...I'm taking each day as it comes...
...Not less, but also not more...
...Harry and Philip, teenagers amid stone ruins, inquire politely where they might buy some playing cards...
...I think of a remark a Manhattan burgher made in 1776: "I don't want a revolution...
...spoils from the Temple of Solomon, including a Torah, are still discernible...
...Bern-a pleasant errand in a pleasant city...
...she looks sweet and kind...
...Why doesn't the town of Dachau provide more convenient transportation for the thousands of pilgrims who come here each week...
...Behind the esthetics lurks a history of social ugliness...
...The walls are covered with Giotto's 28 frescoes depicting his life...
...the parade grounds where prisoners were made to stand at attention for days on end, often in the dead of winter...
...We have been overwhelmed by art-the pristine Raphaels, the darkly glowing Titians-even as we have been saddened by the tyrannies that accumulated them...
...Peter in Chains, where sits (on a rock) Michelangelo's magnificent Moses...
...We have come to meet Vincent O. Carter, a remarkable expatriate from Kansas City who has written a remarkable work, The Bern Book (John Day...
...Later, in a brochure, we read a peculiar apologia: "Indignation and dismay fill every visitor of the Concentration Camp Memorial...
...an English-speaking monk, leading a group of american tourists, is explaining that picture...
...Carter sings as he walks-sometimes a blues melody, sometimes a cornier tune like "I'm in Love with a Wonderful Guy...
...We see and assimilate what we can: the barracks with their narrow, three-decker pine bunks...
...an old lady is weeding her flowerbed...
...Verona-we are standing beneath Juliet's balcony in an amiable little courtyard once inhabited by the Capulets...
...a few hundred feet to our right stands the arch of Titus, a shameless tribute to the man who did the enslaving...
...Now, accompanied by his beautiful friend Liselotte, he is smiling at us and guiding us through this friendly city...
...We are a little lost and bewildered in this sunny suburb of white stucco houses and pink gardens...
...We must chew pistachios and cultivate our gardens, counseled Pangloss...
...He worked in the mornings...
...If you persist in this foolishness," he seems to be saying, "you will again be enslaved...
...he is, if not liberated, at least free of the more common enslavements...
...Glory be to God for dappled things-and for bread and circuses...
...He recognized that animals had souls and could communicate...
...Verona tonight, Munich tomorrow...
...We are sitting in a public rose garden watching two elderly men play chess, not on an ordinary chessboard but on an expanse of checkered pavement...
...The Jews were slaves, unhappy pioneers of the Diaspora...
...For awhile I was working so fast and steadily I injured the nerves in my hand...
...The book is not as abstract as its conclusion...
...Now, sitting on the steps, I discourse to my family on the subject of slavery and emancipation...
...Many are walking with us, americans mostly, and perhaps a dozen Greeks, each wearing a yellow badge bearing the name of his hometown...
Vol. 56 • September 1973 • No. 17
