BOOKS

...Leah had the ability to make murder seem a form of affirmative action, a balancing of the scales, a viable option available to those who saw themselves as victims of a white totalitarian oppressor class determined to destroy them...

...Lowell had the ability to capture in just a sentence or two the essence of a person or insight into character...

...There is also the practical recognition that the armed forces currently present themselves as an opportunity to prepare for a career, or as a career in itself, which both women and minorities can ill afford to ignore...

...Determined to be a "leader of men," maybe a warrior or martyr, she imagines herself "in male battle attire, fighting for morally worthy ends...

...The idealizations of women as "beautiful souls" and men as "just warriors" do not stand up well to reality...

...Men can be gentle nurturers and brave conscientious objectors to war as well as cowards and evaders of conflict or responsibility...

...BOOKS BRIEFLY A Poet's Prose ROBERT LOWELL: COLLECTED PROSE edited and introduced by Robert Giroux Farrar, Straus & Giroux...

...Dunne poorly imitates such major writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and a whole stable of hard-boiled detective writers...

...Never pedantic, Lowell wrote freely and unaffectedly...

...Says Broderick in a typical passage...

...Dunne's main point is that Leah knows how to manipulate everyone...

...He described Ford Madox Ford as "large, unwieldy, wheezy, unwell," who "somehow looked like a British version of the Republican elephant...

...But the difference between Dunne and the writers he imitates is that he gives us only surface views of his characters and their situations...

...While I have reservations about some of Elshtain's ambiguous sentences and awkward circumlocutions, I do not argue with her eruditely earnest attempts to bridge the gaps that divide men and women, warriors and pacifists, realists and idealists, academics and lay readers...

...By the end of Women and War, it is still not clear if the implied negative has been proved, or, in fact, if a clear answer is possible without delving beyond history into "nature," biology, and anthropology...

...This and other "realistic compromises" emerge from Elshtain's acknowledgment of entrenched attitudes and of the appealing intensity and excitement of war experiences, compared to the dull and diffuse reality of peace as experienced by so many people, and the pallid image of "perpetual peace" projected by such dreamers as Im-manuel Kant...

...As "chastened patriots," not belligerent nationalists, and as "individual men and women" she urges that we "examine, and take up, the alternatives, woven throughout the story of women and war, to identities that lock us inside the traditional, and dangerous, narrative of war and peace...

...Elshtain has assembled an impressive assortment of information and observations about what the terse title promises: women and war...

...Thus the biological/historical source of the "passive" female stereotype which Elshtain recognizes as fairly universal, but rejects as being neither natural nor necessary, is left largely unaccounted for...

...377 pp...

...Leah is described by her enemies (and most of her friends) as a "kike" lawyer, lesbian revolutionary, unscrupulous opportunist...

...Despite numerous references (eighteen pages of endnotes, in addition to rather distracting footnotes on almost every page, and many quotations) which Elshtain employs both to illustrate Ann Morrissett Davidon is a free-lance writer, mother of two daughters, and peace activist...

...women, too, can be vicious or noble, war enthusiasts as well as opponents...

...And slogans and cant she did mouth...

...The adherents of this politics are those who share a moral humility that repudiates the fiction that any means are possible if one declares one's ends to be good or just...

...Editor Robert Giroux has brought together some splendid stuff from Lowell's pen, much of it short pieces about poets and writers...

...Then there is the head of the Farm Workers' Union, a crippled incomApetent, totally controlled by Leah, who is the real brains behind the attempt to organize migrant workers...

...The Book of Cheap Shots...

...But there is not one new or interesting narrative technique in the entire book, not even cinematic approaches which might be appropriate for his screenwriter protagonist...

...Included, too, are longer, previously unpublished autobiographical sketches which are luminous and highly affective...

...It sums up effectively the mentality of Ronald Reagan's America...

...Cheap Shots THE RED WHITE AND BLUE by John Gregory Dunne Simon & Schuster...

...His description of her minimal sexual apparatus turns one's stomach...

...The surface glitz cannot hide the absence of critical intelligence and the glorification of unadulterated greed...

...But his story is similarly glib, and his association with Bierce's cynicism can only prevent us from comprehending the truly catastrophic consequences of Reaganemia...

...Providing ample evidence that these roles are not innate or inevitable— although she does not explore their origins—Elshtain runs headlong into one of the problems facing feminists today: Do we push for equal representation in the armed forces, or do we renounce and denounce these ambiguously anti-life institutions...

...She was not given to introspection...

...It's not important that the growers are an equally stupid group of morons who make John Steinbeck's land barons sound like geniuses...

...What she knew how to do, she did...

...That is the underlying question Jean Bethke Elshtain addresses in this comprehensive survey of the mythical images and actual roles of women (and men) in relation to war throughout Western history...

...That should warn any reader to disregard the cover blurb announcing The Red White and Blue as "a stunning panorama of modern America from the early sixties to the present day...

...In the end, however, she does suggest that the conflicts and compromises of politics might substitute for the mass murder and mutual suicide that an all-out modern war would be...

...One is either neutral or violent...

...The Red White and Blue is held together by a series of ethnic jokes about blacks, Mexicans, Poles, Jews, and any other vulnerable targets...

...As an American—not specifically as a woman-seeking alternatives to "the cycle of vengeance and fear" that the "awesome potential force" of our country signifies, Elshtain invites us to "take unilateral initiatives in order to break symbolically" this cycle...

...Gene Bluestein (Gene Bluestein teaches at California State University, Fresno...

...While she says she does not favor the draft, and it is unlikely she means she would work for military conscription of women, the implication of this and other statements is an acceptance of the woman warrior as "not the worst alternative among those now available to us," perhaps a kind of fulfillment of her childhood fantasies...

...So we get a great deal of quotidian detail and glib conversation, but never anything that leads to the "truth of the human heart...

...harridan she could be...

...Like W.H...

...Similarly there is no motivation, analysis, or understanding of Broderick's family, which includes a radical priest whose seeming commitment to social justice is covered with the most banal dialogue since Pat O'Brien's padre roles in old prison films...

...He once told an interviewer he was eager in his criticism not to do the standard analytical essay and preferred to be "sloppier and intuitive...

...Through this personal anecdote—a refreshing contrast to subsequent peregrinations—and with many historical examples of women's eager participation in war and violent confrontation, Elshtain demonstrates that women not only may want to be, but have been, as heroic, or as ferocious, as men...

...475 pp...

...It's not that we couldn't use a thoughtful work of fiction to deal with the significant events of the last twenty years that have led to the present impasse in American life and art...

...In another sense it seems a fitting accompaniment to the last days of Ronald Reagan's Presidency...

...She was "a butch handmaiden of international terrorism...

...Elshtain echoes, but does not quite grapple with, William James's call for a psychological and moral "equivalent of war...

...She does not assert that women "naturally" either love or hate war, but suggests rather that they tend to have an ambivalent attitude toward it not unlike that actually felt by most men—despite the traditional stereotypes...

...These are the main characters, and they are surrounded by a crowd of mostly Hollywood and other California stereotypes, including such thinly disguised caricatures as Broderick's Chinese-American television anchor woman mistress, who makes love with the police radio on so she won't miss a good story...

...Auden and other accomplished poets, Robert Lowell wrote good prose...

...Nevertheless, Elshtain's assessments of women's and men's historical relations to war and militarism are credible and perceptive, from the "armed civic virtue" of Greek city-states through holy wars to the modern wars of nation-states...

...Unlike the Gipper, Dunne has not lost his memory or his voice...

...But it will take more than Dunne's limping attempts at social realism to accomplish that task...

...May they all peruse this volume and ponder our deadly divisive paths...

...At the age of eight, she is "swept away" by Ingrid Bergman's film portrayal of Joan of Arc, and marches off to get her hair cut—to the horror of her parents...

...Broderick corroborates most of this, and it is clear that Dunne intends us to understand her in just these terms...

...Elshtain waffles a bit on this point...

...18.95...

...No doubt we all know this, yet the image persists—in history and in current feminist and nonfeminist thinking—of women as victims and noncombatants, men as aggressors and warriors...

...Jack Broderick, the millionaire son of a billionaire father, describes himself as "by disposition one of life's neutrals, a human Switzerland"—the obvious connection is with the narrator of The Great Gatsby...

...not to mention the billionaire racist father, who ends up in bed with Leah after her divorce from Broderick...

...Other than the caricature of Leah's mother, an equally unscrupulous woman who specializes in "theme bar mitzvahs," Dunne gives us nothing to explain why Leah's being Jewish has anything to do with her values or behavior...

...At the end, when Broderick's brother and Leah are assassinated by a demented Vietnam veteran, Broderick loses his temper, attacks a cop, and is beaten viciously...

...Dunne repeats them well—that is the high point of his literary ability...

...Its ethos offers values for which one might die but not justifications of the need to kill, on the assumption one cannot arrogate this absolute unto oneself...

...A clumsily presented roman a clef, the work could more accurately be entitled...

...Throughout these conflicts the perceived role of women (with such exceptions as Aristophanes' fictional Lysistrata, the semi-mythical Joan of Arc, and a few others) has been as weeper rather than warrior, booster rather than participant...

...The epigraph to John Gregory Dunne's novel, The Red White and Blue, is from the misanthropic American writer Ambrose Bierce: "History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools...

...Intuitive he was, but sloppy never...

...What any of this means is beyond his analysis...

...Her sympathies clearly lie with the peacemakers, but she says of military conscription that she has "reluctantly come to the position that women should be granted no automatic exemption from this feature of civic life...

...American fiction never moves us when it tries to give a conventional novelistic treatment of historical events...

...This is more than just a bad book...

...But the personal history with which Elshtain begins—after an introduction summing up the dilemmas posed in the book—provides charming insight into the author's own movie-fed dreams of heroic military glory and gender-engendered frustrations...

...and to counteract these traditional stereotypes, there is little consideration of the biological circumstances that, until recently, confined so many women to incessant child-bearing and, for those who survived, a lifetime of child-rearing...

...This politics beyond war and peace refuses to see all right and good on one side only," she writes...

...a doomed sister who ends up as the mistress of the President of the United States, who is himself a foul-mouthed sex maniac...

...Here as elsewhere, Dunne reflects the surface of our society...

...The notion that "op-posites attract" is the best Dunne can do to explain Broderick's attachment to Leah Kaye, who becomes his wife...