Picked-Up Pieces (14 page)

September 1974

A
YEAR AND A MONTH
after the visit to Anguilla that prompted my letter, banner headlines announced to me in London that Great Britain had invaded little Anguilla: early in the morning of March 19, 1969, two frigates landed three hundred fifteen Red Devil paratroopers, forty Marines, and forty-nine London policemen, in response to a supposed insult delivered to William Whitlock, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, by an unruly Anguillan mob six days before. This Lilliputian exercise of gunboat diplomacy (the Anguillans, foreseeing the invasion, had buried all their guns, and not one person was injured) attracted derisive world attention and terminated
Anguilla’s claim to being “one of the most obscure islands in the Caribbean.” Also terminated were whatever proprietary feelings I had had for her. The full Anguilla story is told, thoroughly but all too facetiously, by Donald E. Westlake, in his
Under an English Heaven
(Doubleday, 1972). The uneasy interim condition prevailing in early 1968 persisted through the year, while various raffish Americans infiltrated advice into Ronald Webster’s ear and the young Anguillans of the “Defence Force” that had replaced the St. Kittian policemen grew to resemble licensed hoodlums. Our friend Tony Lee, Mr. Westlake feels, proved too airy-fairy for his responsibilities as Our Man on Anguilla, and failed as the Commissioner installed by the invasion forces. Certainly he looked very tired the last time we saw him, on page 13 of the March 23, 1969, London Sunday
Times
, beside the wrap-up headline, “
BRUTE FARCE AND IGNORANCE
.” The British press, generally anti-Vietnam, was stridently unsympathetic with their own government’s interventionism. “This ‘wag the flag and flog the wog’ farce,” the
Evening News
termed it, and the
Times
drew the conclusion that “a British Government is still capable of replaying Suez not as tragedy but as farce.”

Farce or no, reinstatement to the status of an English colony was just what the Anguillans wanted, and under subsequent Commissioners the Royal Engineers busied themselves, according to Westlake, “building schools, paving roads, starting an electrification program, studying the water table, and generally tidying up the effects of the previous three hundred years of neglect.” The last of them left, to kudos from the
Beacon
, on September 14, 1971, leaving a better island than they found, a
de facto
colony still technically part of the paper federation of St. Kitts–Nevis–Anguilla. Anguilla has dropped from the news these last years, nor have we returned to compare her with the lost world of 1960 remembered in this poem:

FOUR INTRODUCTIONS

I
N 1963
, when the newly founded
New York Review of Books
began to publish the drawings of David Levine, the art of caricature in America was quiescent; the theatrical cartoons of Al Frueh in
The New Yorker
had ceased, Al Hirschfeld had become primarily a decorator of advertisements, and William Auerbach-Levy, the most artful of them all, had rounded off his career with an elegant album entitled—a question he had too often heard—
Is That Me?
These men had followed the linear tradition of Ralph Barton and Max Beerbohm; economy was the soul of their wit, and their mood, as they reduced the features of this or that celebrity to a cunning black-and-white design, partook of the genial mood of showbiz.

Levine, instead, flung himself in a fury of crosshatching upon his subjects. His style looked past Beerbohm to the three-dimensional grotesques of Daumier and Tenniel. No weary pucker or complacent bulge of physiognomy could slip through the supple net of his penstrokes, and every corner of the face—that vulnerable patch between the eyebrows, the unseemly area behind the chin, the mute folds of the ears—was brought into a focus whose keenness transcended the mild demands of “humor.” On the gray expanses of the
NYRB
pages his etched homunculi seemed astoundingly
there;
one wanted to pick them up and put them on the shelf. Now, in the form of this book, one can.

Our selection concentrates upon literary figures. Drawn in fortnightly installments to illustrate topical book reviews, the gallery of modern authors
approaches completeness. Mann and Borges are missing, and one wonders what Levine would do with Salinger’s sad handsomeness or Kierkegaard’s bent beauty. But how good it is to know that Gide has no top to his head, and that Truman Capote has no chin, resting, like Baudelaire, within his bow tie like an egg in an egg cup. Levine is not so much an observer as a visionary. Working principally from photographs, he evolves a concept, a monstrous breathing idea. His grasp of this idea deepens with time; of the two versions of Malraux in this volume, the one is a caricature and the other is a caricature of a caricature. Of the three Becketts, the smallest and earliest has the innocence of wit; it puns the man and buzzard. This simile is absorbed and heightened in the alarming metaphor of the profile, with its drastically eroded cheek, its delirious pinpoint eye, its incredible chopping-knife of an ear. And the lava contours and volcanic turtle-neck of the third drawing seem gouged from chaos and quite intimidate any thought of satire. Levine’s evolving style reinvents the gargoyle, that antidote to the angel and necessary adjunct to a complete humanism. All we humans, beneath the faces that would proclaim for each a separate individuality, share the worse-than-simian weirdness of thinking reeds. Mankind is a riddle it takes the Gothic style to pose.

Since Levine, as clairvoyant, has liberated himself from the physical presence of the subject, the living and the dead are the same to him, and with uncanny authority he conveys, out of fudged old portraits and stylized prints, the essence of the immortals. Take Browning’s wonderfully astute, plump, and conceited left hand; or Ben Franklin’s cherry-nosed, finger-snapping display of pragmatic pep; or Casanova’s evidently numbing virility. The artist discovers a surprising dandyish sneer on the time-softened face of John Milton, and elicits from the noseless bust of Catullus, at the farthest rim of Caricature’s reach, the agonized satyr’s howl that resounds through imperial Rome. One looks forward to, yet rather dreads, Levine’s inevitable cartoon of Jesus.

Our artist was born in 1926 in Brooklyn, where he still lives. He has been quoted as describing himself as “a painter supported by a hobby—satirical drawings.” As a painter he is representational and has been described, by John Canaday, as “a legitimate anachronism.” In his comic art also he displays somewhat anachronistic qualities. Besides offering us the delight of recognition, his drawings comfort us, in an exacerbated and potentially desperate age, with the sense of a watching presence, an
eye informed by an intelligence that has not panicked, a pen ready to encapsulate the latest apparitions of publicity (Twiggy inspires a drawing too lovely to omit) as well as those historical devils who haunt our unease.

A
S
I
REMEMBER
, I wrote
Of the Farm
(the title originally was simply
The Farm
, but this had a monumentality that seemed bogus to me, which the preposition “Of” suitably reduced; I intended to mean that the book was
about
the farm, and that the people in it belonged
to
the farm, were of the earth, earthy, mortal, fallen, and imperfect) in the late summer and early autumn of 1964, in pencilled longhand. Then I embarked on a trip through the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that lasted six weeks; the last night of this tour, and perhaps the most pleasant and unconstrained, was spent in Prague, in the apartment of Mr. Igor Hájek, the brilliant and engaging young man then involved in translating my previous novel
The Centaur
. Upon returning to the United States, I rewrote and typed
Of the Farm
, and in due course it was published, enjoying the mild sale and mixed reviews that usually greet my productions. Now, when Eastern Europe presents an aspect more troubled yet more hopeful than four years ago, Mr. Hájek and I both find ourselves in London, and he is translating my novella. And it has amused him to point out to me that I, like Joey Robinson, now possess, if not a new wife, a Citroën station wagon. Of such circling strands are past and present, fact and fiction, woven.

Of the Farm
was my first attempt at book-length fiction after the writing of
The Centaur;
it was undertaken after a long hesitant interval fruitful of short stories. Like a short story, it has a continuous action, a narrow setting, a small cast. I thought of it as chamber music, containing only four voices—the various ghosts in it do not speak, and the minister’s sermon, you will notice, is delivered in close paraphrase, without the benefit of quotation marks. The voices, like musical instruments, echo each other’s phrases and themes, take turns dominating, embark on brief narrative solos, and recombine in argument or harmony. The underlying
thematic transaction, as I conceived it, was the mutual forgiveness of mother and son, the acceptance each of the other’s guilt in taking what they had wanted, to the discomfort, respectively, of the dead father and the divorced wife.

Threads connect it to
The Centaur:
the farm is the same, and the father, even to his name, George, seems much the same in both books. Mr. Hájek has directed my attention to a strange phrase, “his humorous prancing whine,” in which the prancing is purely a remnant, like a badly erased pencil line, of the half-horse half-man. In a sense this novella is
The Centaur
after the centaur has died; the mythical has fled the ethical, and a quartet of scattered survivors grope with their voices toward cohesion. And seek to give each other the stern blessing of freedom mentioned in the epigraph from Sartre.
^*
Let us hope that all nations will in their varying languages seek to bestow this stern blessing upon one another. I am honored at this moment [that is, when the cultural liberalization under Dubcek had just been crushed by Russian tanks] to be translated into Czech.

T
HERE IT STANDS
, in the shadow of Adams House, where Mt. Auburn Street unaccountably branches into Bow, an unaccountable little flatiron building with Amsterdam gables and a face—two round windows that look crosseyed, a red lantern for a nose, and, above the bright bowtie of its door, an exclamatory mouth of which the upper lip is so complex it
might be a mustache. A copper hardhat tassled with a cage completes the apparition. This is the Lampoon Building. One’s first impression is of an extravagance, and even in the 1950’s, before the national-parody money shored up the subsiding foundations and restored lustre to the furnishings, this impression was confirmed by entering the tiled, worn, odorous, festooned interior. The gorgeous playful thing was put up, as a civilized prank, by American wealth when it was untaxed and unconscience-stricken; it is a folly and a toy and a bastion, an outcropping, like the brick mass of Harvard itself, of that awful seismic force which has displaced nine-tenths of the world: Wasp Power. The Lampoon is a club and, as do all clubs, feeds on the delicious immensity of the excluded. Robert Lampoon, born Robert Stewart, lucidly advances the doctrine usually left unspoken: college men are the “highest type in the world,” Harvard men are “the best of all,” and Poonsters are “the cream of Harvard men.” And with him we travel to an enchanted realm where young Lord Byrons, garbed as monks and nuns, are served roast pigs on platters and sit each “with a bottle of imported sherry between his knees.” In 1973, sipping our bitter domestic sherry, we feel, even without John Reed and Granville Hicks to remind us, that there is a shadow side to this “Harvard of the chosen few,” the underworld of callow snobbishness and automatic jokes about “Kikeland House,” of arrest-exempt lawlessness and an inherited consensus of the “dull and sated and blind.” To be fair, the same page which reprints this last phrase from John Reed’s reminiscences also shows a Lampoon window dedicated to Reed’s memory; The Lampoon, though a flower of the Establishment, is a twisted flower, stemmed from the Establishment’s wise instinct to grant itself license—license to be idle and (hence) open, license to mock and hence (symbolically) to destroy. Of my uneasy year as President, I remember fondly certain moments of ecstatic, probably revolutionary confusion. Trying to deliver stern speeches about impending deadlines, I was pelted with buttered rolls. A born follower, I found myself leading a bellowed medley of preposterously obscene songs, waving my potent baton, the Presidential jester’s stick donated, as I remember, by the beneficent Sadri Khan. Where is it now? Not stolen, I hope, as was my engraved mug, and my youth.