Overdrive (10 page)

It was endless. The soldiers rotated their sleeping arrangements. Lower berths were for two men who slept head to toe. The upper berth, one man. There was no air conditioning. The chow lines were boisterous. The clusters of poker players intense, indefatigable—some played around the clock. The beer and the booze seemed almost self-generating, as if a distiller were on board. One grizzled old soldier (probably he was twenty-five) had got uncontrollably rowdy near El Paso, and we had had to lock him into a bathroom where, sitting on the toilet, his hostility, along with the alcohol, gradually metabolized.

So to speak, the Upstairs and Downstairs of train travel, over against the Orient Express. One hedonistic, the other spartan. It is terribly vexing that it isn't obvious that the one was ultimately more pleasurable in memory than the other.

 From the ballet we went to the home of Mica and Ahmet Ertegun. She is, simply stated, one of the most beautiful and interesting women in the world. Ahmet is many things, most conspicuously a rock music entrepreneur-tycoon. He either owns the Rolling Stones or else they own him, something of the sort; but the relationship is symbiotically profitable, and Ahmet is always going around the world in his Gulfstream jet to attend this or that rock recording enterprise, while Mica either accompanies him, or attends to her interior decorating business in New York. Ahmet has also been a trustee of St. John's College in Annapolis, with which Stringfellow Barr was associated for so many years, and which stresses the importance of the Great Books. Albert Jay Nock, the eccentric and dazzlingly erudite essayist, belletrist, and neoanarchist, incidentally a personal friend of my father's, spoke so highly of St. John's that my brothers and I all very nearly ended up being sent there. In any event, Ahmet talks to me about St. John's. He is still using a cane, having had a hip operation, concerning the post-surgical care of which he has received extensive lessons from Pat, who went through it two years earlier.

To everyone's dismay (people don't quite like it if operations end by being hedonistic experiences), Ahmet enjoyed every moment of it, declaiming about the fine care the doctors and nurses took of him, the pleasure he took in receiving visits and best wishes from his friends. It was all really quite irregular, so that it came as enormous relief to his wife and friends when, having been brought home for the post-hospital part of his recuperation,
Ahmet turned absolutely impossible
, expressing his displeasure with everybody and everything, though not I think the Rolling Stones. From this other extreme, he has emerged in recent weeks as a man of dignity and fortitude, but then what else would one expect of a former trustee of St. John's, Annapolis?

Back home, Pat and I chatted. Then I read, but my eyes soon wandered. For a moment I thought I might, as an exercise, apply Henry George economics to the problem of ballet deficits; but I decided to put it off and, come to think of it, I haven't yet undertaken that exercise.

Wednesday is one of the three days a week in which I write a newspaper column, and of course the day generally begins with that special kind of newspaper reading during which your subconscious, and indeed your conscious, minds are scanning the news in search of a nubile subject to write about—because it is either this or a column about something that has been nagging you. Or, finally, there is the drawerful of articles, clippings, book excerpts that cry out for comment. Gene Shalit, a marvelously amiable and perceptive—personality, I suppose one calls him— with lethal verbal powers, did an interview with me two or three years ago on radio, the subject being my then-current novel, and as he wandered about hill and dale with amiable discursiveness, I gradually lost my guard, so that when he asked me, "How do you decide what you're going to write a column about?" I answered that after you have written a column for many years, you could, if your back were up against the wall, close your eyes, and let your index finger descend on
any
story on the front page of the New York
Times
—and proceed to write a column on that subject. "Oh yes," Gene said. "I remember reading that one."

Fair enough, and a nice way to transform into braggadocio what wasn't meant as such. But one should not expect someone of Shalit's prehensile wit to let such an opening go.

George Will once told me how deeply he loves to write. "I wake in the morning," he explained to me, "and I ask myself: 'Is this one of the days I have to write a column?' And if the answer is 'Yes,' I rise a happy man." I, on the other hand, wake neither particularly happy nor unhappy, but to the extent that my mood is affected by the question whether I need to write a column that morning, the impact of Monday-Wednesday-Friday is definitely negative. Because I do not like to write, for the simple reason that writing is extremely hard work, and I do not "like" extremely hard work.

I work for other reasons, about which mostly dull people write, dully. (I have discerned that those who are given to the formulation, "I am one of those people who . . would generally be safest concluding the sentence, ". . . bore other people.") Is it some aspect of a sense of duty that I feel? Moral evangelism? A fear of uselessness? A fear that it is wrong to suppress useful, here defined extramorally as merchandisable, talent? I do resist introspection, though I cannot claim to have "guarded" against it, because even to say that would suppose that the temptation to do so was there, which it isn't. Indeed, these very words are prompted by an imperative handed to me by my friend and editor Sam Vaughan, the least imperious of men: but curiosity is, in such circumstances, his professional business. Why do I do so much? I expect that the promptings issue from a subtle dialectical counterpoint. Of what? Well, the call of
recta ratio
, and the fear of boredom. What is
recta ratio?
The appeal of generic Latin terms (
habeas corpus, nihil obstat, malum prohibitum
) derives in part because the language is indeed dead and therefore unmoved by idiomatic fashion. In part, however, it is owing to the complementary character of its tantalizing inscrutability. It is just faintly defenseless; so that one can, for instance, interpret a Latin term—use it metaphorically, even—without any decisive fear of plebiscitarian denial. We know that the term translates to "right (rightly) reason(ed)," and that the Scholastics used it to suggest the intellectual instrument by which men might reason progressively at least to the existence of God, at most to how, under His aegis, they should govern themselves in all major matters, avoiding the major vices, exercising discipline, seeking virtue. The search for virtue is probably best drowned out by
commotion
, and this my life is full of. It is easier to stay up late working for hours than to take one tenth the time to inquire into the question whether the work is worth performing.

And then, as I say, that other, the fear of boredom. Thoreau is known for his compulsion, day by day, to discover more and more things he could be without. But I have enough of everything material, at least measured by ordinary standards. But not the reliance to do without distraction; so that I would not cross the street without a magazine or paperback, lest the traffic should immobilize me for more than ten seconds. The unexamined life may not be worth living, in which case I will concede that mine is not worth living. But excepting my own life, I do seek to examine, and certainly I dilate upon, public questions I deem insufficiently examined.

I was saying that I do not enjoy writing. I envy those who do. John Chamberlain once told me that if he has not written during the day he will not sleep, and it is only when he wonders why he cannot fall asleep that he remembers that he has not written during that day; and so he rises, and writes. John Chamberlain is as incapable of affectation as Muhammad Ali of self-effacement. It is simply the case that some people like to sit down hour after hour and write, and with some of them the disease is so aggravated that it doesn't particularly matter whether what they write will be published.

I elected to devote today's column to the fascination politicians are showing over the lapse of David Stockman in confiding to his friend Mr. Greider of the Washington
Post-Atlantic Monthly
his misgivings about Mr. Reagan's economic program. I set out to make the point that those who ask Stockman to resign because his offense is hypocrisy have not considered the genocide that would result from an impartial application of this rule. (How many congressmen who express opposition to inflationary spending vote against inflationary spending?) A second observation is that Stockman, during 1981, found political obstacles to the execution of practically everything he sought, and that, after all, he never did attempt to call for a decisive reduction in the marginal rate of taxation—say, to twenty-five percent. Reduced to that level, in the estimate of Milton Friedman (as stated in a most measured article in
Newsweek)
, you would organically affect the deployment of dollars away from tax shelters, thereby adding to the taxable base more than enough revenue to make up the relatively light (thirteen percent) loss in general revenues. (Friedman argues that reducing the top marginal rate of taxation to twenty-five percent would
increase
tax revenues.)

 I have read the newspapers and breakfasted in the beautiful, cloistered, red-red library Pat has so ingeniously decorated and then, in my dressing gown, I climb up the stairs to my little study, which incidentally looks out, between 8 and 8:30, on the handsomest, gayest, most cheerful parade of children aged six to twelve, the youngest of them accompanied by nurses or governesses, all of them carrying sackfuls of books, bouncing off to the multifarious schools concentrated in the area. I dial my private office number (the switchboard is not yet open) and Frances Bronson, who is as usual there early (she attends early to most of her problems, and all of mine) gives me late messages from yesterday and asks where I wish to meet my sister Priscilla (the managing editor of
National Review
) and Joe Sobran (one of the senior editors) for lunch before the scheduled performance of
Nicholas Nickleby
. I suggest Paone's (my favorite restaurant, which is also near the office), whence we'll drive to the theater, meeting Pat there (she has another lunch date). Doria Reagan is arriving independently, and Ron not until dinner, as he could not escape a rehearsal suddenly scheduled for that afternoon by his ballet troupe, Joffrey II. I inform Frances that as soon as I write my column I'll telephone it in to Susan at the office (who will record and transcribe it, after which Frances will copy-edit it). In due course this is done. And I turn, again, to my correspondence.

Harold O. J. Brown, a youngish scholar who did his divinity work at Harvard and in the past has written religious essays for
National Review
, sends me a copy of a reproachful letter he has sent to Bart Giamatti, president of Yale, on reading Giamatti's dressy excoriation of the Moral Majority. Giamatti's remarks were made in September, to the freshmen, and my own comment on it at the time had been that to be lectured on the perils of the Moral Majority upon entering Yale was on the order of being lectured on the dangers of bedbugs on entering a brothel.

Again I reflect on the ire provoked by the MM, and the fashion parade of those who have attacked it. Giamatti is a man of near-infinite sophistication and wit, who would normally spend no more time warning us about the Moral Majority than he would warning of the Flat Earth Society. He'd be much more at home warning of the dangers of gnosticism, or sciolism, or pridefulness. But the A4oral Majority is the season's bug, and it sweeps the country. The president of Georgetown University has pitched in, with results similarly vulnerable. The first reaction to this kind of thing is the pleased roar of the programmed reactors—who was that singer who got so much attention, by merely stepping up to the podium during an entertainment at LBJ's White House, and declaiming on the Vietnam war? That kind of thing. But in the long run it's dangerous because the attack is clearly unbalanced and can damage your reputation for precise criticism, if you have a reputation for precise criticism.

The February 1982
Commentary
would feature an article, alas at Giamatti's heavy expense, called "God & Man at Yale—Again," by Robert William Kagan, a recent graduate of Yale doing graduate work at Harvard. "The faction which Giamatti's speech served was that of the liberal intellectuals among whom he was raised and educated, and whose ideological dominance on the Yale campus has not abated for a moment since Buckley complained about it thirty years ago in
God and Man at Yale
. The fact is that the greatest threats to pluralism, to academic freedom, and to the values of a liberal education at Yale have always come from the Left, not from the Right or the New Right. The status quo which Giamatti has been trying to preserve against the destabilizing efforts of groups like the Moral Majority is quite secure within Yale's gates. Preserving it, however, may not necessarily be in the best interests of the University."

I write to Joe Brown thanking him for a copy of his letter, and expressing doubts that Mr. Giamatti will answer it. There, though, I must sympathize, because it isn't possible to respond when the answer would require extensive analysis to mail that arrives in such volume as no doubt it does to the president of a major university. Sometimes I wonder whether no answer at all is preferable to a very brief, formulaic answer.

Brooklyn College wants a telegram sent to be read out when Stanley Goldstein is given the Alumnus of the Year award, which will happen tonight. Stan Goldstein is a high concentrate of ability and enthusiasm who launched an accountant's firm only seventeen years ago, and now it is huge. He is deeply conservative, and so to speak ex officio he became the accountant for
National Review
, the Conservative Book Club, and suchlike organizations, even as Monsignor Eugene Clark, and
only
Monsignor Clark, gives the benedictions at our functions. I write out the telegram and feel glad for Stanley, though I fear that he will attribute his winning the Alumnus of the Year award to his jogging every day. How hard he has tried to get me to take up that dismaying practice. But he always knows when it
simply won't work
. I told him I would endeavor to use an indoor bicycle every other day, and he is pacified; while I am troubled by my inconstancy. At my funeral, I know he will be saying, "I warned him, I warned him."