John Leonard | The Nation

Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, blasphemes not only Islam and Hinduism, but Thatcherism and the advertising industry. He's unkind, too, to V.S. Naipaul. For this they want to kill him?

John Leonard, former literary editor of The Nation, died November 6 at 69. From the archives, his iconic piece on Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize win, in his honor.

John Leonard, noted critic and former literary editor of The Nation, died Wednesay at 69. This review of Don DeLillo's Falling Man was one of his last pieces published in the magazine.

Kurt Vonnegut, who passed away Wednesday, will be remembered for his brilliant, cynical and often depressing humor.

Celebrating the eloquence of the feminist, activist and writer in whose work memory, history, poetry and prophecy converge.

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day is actually four stories, each replete with brilliant patter, fancy footwork, wishful thinking and a
plaintive ukulele.

John Leonard edited and wrote the introduction to These United
States: Portraits of America (Nation Books).

Isaac Babel, the Jewish Cossack, told Konstantin Paustovsky, the playwright and publicist: "If you use enough elbow grease even the coarsest wood gets to look like ivory. That's what we have to do with words and with our Russian language. Warm it and polish it with your hand till it glows like a jewel." For instance:

The first version of a story is terrible. All in bits and pieces tied together with boring "like passages" as dry as old rope. You have the first version of "Lyubka" there, you can see for yourself. It yaps at you. It's clumsy, helpless, toothless. That's where the real work begins. I go over each sentence time and time again. I start by cutting out all the words I can do without. Words are very sly. The rubbishy ones go into hiding.

This is the Babel who so famously informed us in "Guy de Maupassant": "When a phrase is born, it is both good and bad at the same time. The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernible. One's fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice." Later in the same story, on the same page, comes a sentence quoted so often that it must be true: "No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place."

To be sure, as a kid in Odessa he loved Flaubert, and even wrote his first couple of stories in French. Adulthood was more difficult. One might say that the key's last twist, the ultimate shortening, the final polish, the iron spike, was a blank page. Accused in 1934 of the sin of "unproductivity," he told the first Soviet Writers' Congress that he had become a "master of the genre of silence." On the same occasion, just to prove how contrary he could be, Babel also defended the right of the writer to write badly: "Comrades, this is a very important right and to take it away from us is no small thing.... Let us give up this right, and may God help us. And if there is no God, let us help ourselves."

But back to his chat with Paustovsky: "I've got no imagination," he said. "All I've got is the longing for it." Which means: "I can't invent. I have to know everything, down to the last vein." This would explain why he thought "the most interesting things I have ever read are other people's letters." And how come, first in Odessa and then in Paris, he paid people to tell him the story of their first love. Ilya Ehrenburg likewise testifies:

Babel wanted to know everything: what his brother-soldier, a Kuban Cossack, felt when, after a two days' drinking bout, in a fit of melancholy, he had set fire to his own house; why had Mashenka of Land and Factory, after cuckolding her husband, taken up biokinetics; what sort of poetry did the White Guard Gorgulov, the French President's assassin, write; how did the old accountant seen once in the window of the Pravda office die; what was the Paris lady at the next table in the café carrying in her handbag; did Mussolini keep up his bluster when he found himself alone with Ciano...

It also explains why, as a 23-year-old apprentice journalist in 1918, he reported without fear or favor in the pages of Maxim Gorky's magazine Novaya Zhizn on every open wound in revolutionary Petersburg, from the anger of the unemployed, the panic of the disabled veterans and the mortality rate of newborn children to the murdered bodies that overwhelmed the morgue and the animals starving in the zoo. How's this for a flashy lead: "I'm not about to draw any conclusions. I'm not in the mood"? Or this, for editorializing:

Our government, as everyone knows, wallows in administrative bliss in only two cases: when we need to run for our lives or when we need to be mourned. During periods of evacuation and ruinous mass resettlement, the government's activity takes on a vigor, a creative verve, an ingenious voluptuousness.

And it may even explain how Babel, "with glasses on his nose and autumn in his heart," happened to be on a horse in the first place, on the Russian-Polish front during the civil war between Reds and Whites in 1920, pretending not to be Jewish even though everybody knew he was. His agit-prop dispatches to ROSTA, the state news agency, and The Red Cavalryman, the army's daily newspaper, can't be said to have glowed like jewels--"Slaughter them, Red Army fighters! Stamp harder on the rising lids of their rancid coffins!"--but he was just as hungry for extremes as he was for information. To his diary he confided darker ideograms that would translate, rubbed up and whittled on like ivory tusks, into Red Cavalry.

"Trickster, rapscallion, ironist, wayward lover, imprudent imposter," Cynthia Ozick calls him in her intro to this grand occasion of literature, the Complete Works--"and out of these hundred fiery selves insidious truths creep out, one by one, in a face, in the color of the sky, in a patch of mud, in a word. Violence, pity, comedy, illumination. It is as if he is an irritable membrane, subject to every creaturely vibration." And maybe he knew too much. He would return to Ukraine in 1929-30, for a firsthand look at the famine caused by collectivization. Two chapters are all we have of the unpublishable novel, Kolya Topuz, he was secretly writing about it when they came for him in 1939.

There are no longer any bees in Volhynia. We desecrated the hives. We fumigated them with sulfur and detonated them with gunpowder. Smoldering rags have spread a foul stench over the holy republics of the bees. Dying, they flew slowly, their buzzing barely audible. Deprived of bread, we procured honey with our sabers. There are no longer any bees in Volhynia.

         
(Babel, "The Road to Brody")

Like a plug of cork in a tub of blood, Ilya Ehrenburg could always be counted on to float. So while there is no reason not to believe him when he tells us in his Memoirs that Babel was "my most intimate and true friend, the author to whom I looked up as an apprentice to a master," we also know that he wouldn't say so in public until it was safe, decades later. That when Babel, after eight months of torture and a twenty-minute trial, was executed by a firing squad early in the morning of January 27, 1940, for Trotskyite terrorism and spying for France, Ehrenburg happened as usual to be abroad. That a prudent Ilya waited to declare himself till Stalin, too, was dead. Not to mention Mandelstam, Meyerhold, Pilnyak and Gorky (murdered). Or Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Tsvetayeva and Fadeyev (suicides). Or Akhmatova, Bulgakov, Olesha and Zoshchenko (zipped up in fearful silence; writing, if at all, for the crypt). Plus all the émigrés, castaways, jailbirds and boat people, from Bunin and Zamyatin to Aksyonov, Brodsky, Sinyavsky, Solzhenitsyn, Voinovich, Zinovyev and--in his portable Winter Palace, his Zemblatic mobile home--the gaudy Nabokov.

"True literature," said Zamyatin in 1921, "can only exist where it is created, not by painstaking and reliable clerks, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics." Mandelstam added later, "Only in Russia is poetry respected--it gets people killed." After a visit to Osip in exile, Akhmatova wrote: "In the banished poet's room/terror and the muse watch by turn,/And a night is coming/that has no dawn." In The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn advised us: "A great writer--forgive me, perhaps I shouldn't say this, I'll lower my voice--a great writer is so to speak a second government, that's why no regime anywhere has ever loved its great writers only its minor ones." To Ehrenburg, in Moscow in 1938, Babel observed, "Today a man talks frankly only with his wife--at night, with the blanket pulled over his head."

Not Ilya, who loved to party. But neither Ehrenburg's sociability nor his evasive memoir explains why, in Paris in 1946, he went out of his way to lie to Babel's widow, Evgenia, telling her that Isaac was still alive, merely under house arrest. Or why, when he finally got around to something more approximate to the truth ten years later, he hit her between the eyes with the news that not only was her husband dead but that he had another wife and another child, on whose behalf Ehrenburg wanted Evgenia to sign a fradulent admission of divorce. She spat in his face.

More such lying faces should have been spat in: Andrei Zhdanov's, for instance, who called Akhmatova "half nun, half whore." Mikhail Sholokhov's, who wanted Sinyavsky shot and believed any author publishing in the West without permission deserved to be exterminated like the Colorado beetle. And the faces of the 70,000 censors, with their 300-page index of banned subjects--earthquakes, plane crashes, food shortages, crime stats, Trotsky. And all those Socialist Realists who rewrote their production novels about making sausage, tempering steel and pouring cement according to the ever-changing line. And every single one of the 130 writers, including Gorky and Zoshchenko, who went out to admire a new canal linking the White Sea with the Baltic, praised the project as a triumph of progressive penology, and forgot to mention that the canal had been built by the forced labor of 300,000 convicts, a third of whom had perished in the triumphant progressive process.

They would like to blame Stalin for everything. But Boris Pasternak reminded us in Dr. Zhivago of self-helping prisoners in a woodsy gulag in the 1930s:

They told us: "Here is your camp. Settle down as best you can."... We cut down saplings with our bare hands in the forest to build huts. And would you believe it, we gradually built our own camp. We cut down the wood to build our own dungeons, we surrounded ourselves with a stockade, we equipped ourselves with prison-cells and watch-towers--we did it all by ourselves.

Must we dig up all over again the bad faith and yellow bones? Yes, because generations of Americans grew up reading Russian literature, Soviet-styled, as if it were samizdat from the historical unconscious, the whirlwind's deep word; as if it either apostrophized a radiant future better than Oz, or cried instead from Dante's hell for help. ("We are the vanguard, but of what?" Babel wondered in his diary.) The cold war only intensified the hysterical quality of this reading, its gnomic-cryptic scuttle, its masquerade of spycraft. Never mind Babel versus Kafka. Who knew for sure if Gorky's Mother, radicalized by the factory workers, was a better person than our own, or Portnoy's? If Bely had done for Petersburg what Joyce would do for Dublin? If Blok was a sort of Rimbaud? If Symbolism, Futurism and Acmeism were better off with a NEP or a Five-Year Plan? If Pilnyak with his "men in yellow jackets" belonged on the shelf with Malraux? If it was absolutely necessary to read Olesha's Envy? If Dudintsev's gumption made up for the dreariness of Not by Bread Alone? Or, for that matter, whether Solzhenitsyn was really a nineteenth-century Russian novelist or just another messianic Old Believer, covered like an icon with soot and candlewax, part of the nostalgia craze?

No other writer of the Soviet era ever aroused as much American emotion as Babel. If his Red Cavalry and Odessa Tales impressed Gorky, Bely, Mayakovsky and Ehrenburg, as well as Malraux, Mann, Canetti and Brecht, they also wowed Hemingway, Bellow, Trilling, Paley, Howe, Malamud, Roth, Berryman and Carver. Even though "The Story of My Dovecote" is probably the best account of a pogrom and one of the finest stories ever written, Cynthia Ozick seemed to suggest in an essay on the 1920 Diary that when Babel traveled undercover with the Cossacks, he became what he impersonated. As if the rape and murder of Jews in the Pale of Settlement hadn't been a Polish specialty before Babel was born, she also used him as a stick to beat "the cruelly ignorant children of the Left who still believe that the Marxist Utopia requires for its realization only a more favorable venue, and another go." In her introduction here, she pulls that punch. But her doubts may have encouraged John Updike to assert, in his New Yorker review of the Complete Works on November 5, that Babel "to the end, sought to accommodate" an "increasingly totalitarian revolution." This is flabbergasting. He didn't run out of gas or--from the overconsumption of junk food, cheap sensations and disposable ideas--simply explode. He wasn't a fucking Rabbit.

It made sense that most Russian writers would at first welcome the revolution as a deliverance from a medieval mind haunted by fires, bears, church bells melted down into cannon balls and golden hordes of Scythians in cloaks of sewn-together scalps. Out of such a mind rode Ivan the Terrible's Oprichniki, secret police on black horses with severed heads tethered to their saddlebows, the dwarfs of Empress Anna, Pugachev in an iron cage and goat-smelling Rasputin. "Our brethren the Slavs," said Vissarion Belinsky, the critic who got Dostoyevsky into so much trouble, "cannot be awakened to consciousness quickly. It is a well-known fact that when the lightning does not strike, the peasant does not cross himself, he has no lord...whereas the holy mother La Guillotine is a good thing." Or so maybe it seemed to an alienated intelligentsia up to its eyeballs in vodka, dominoes, smoked fish, sable skins, onion domes, six-winged seraphs, a snuff box and the knout.

Although he confused Revolution with Resurrection, even Blok was enthusiastic at the start. Mayakovsky imagined himself in a "Cloud in Trousers" as both John the Baptist and "a sewage disposal operative...mobilized and drafted" by Lenin. If Mandelstam was predictably ambivalent as early as 1918--"We shall meet again in Petersburg,/as though we had buried the sun there"--not so Pasternak, an expert on "the maximalist temperament" of Russian intellectuals and their "nostalgia for the future," whose alter ego Zhivago rhapsodized:

The Revolution broke out...like a breath that's been held too long. Everybody was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions--his own personal revolution as well as the general
one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private individual revolutions are flowing into it--the sea of life, of life in its own right. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a work of art, transformed by genius, creatively enriched.

Before long, of course, Pasternak, Akhmatova and little-did-he-know Bukharin would be petitioning Stalin for Mandelstam's life. Osip never mastered the genre of silence. By 1928, in "The Egyptian Stamp," he had decided, "Petersburg has declared itself Nero, and was as loathsome as eating a soup of crushed flies." In 1930 he would add: "Petersburg! I don't want to die yet! You know my telephone numbers. Petersburg! I've still got the addresses: I can look up dead voices." And then, in 1933, he attacked Stalin himself: "His fingers are fat as grubs,/And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips.... His cockroach whiskers leer/And his boot tops gleam.... He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries./He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home." It's amazing Mandelstam wasn't immediately whacked. But he was merely sent away for awhile, his murder postponed till 1938.

And here's the eerie part, which almost seems to mimic our own kinkiness with the Soviet texts. Stalin telephoned Pasternak in July 1934 to tell him he was letting Osip off the hook. Pasternak told Stalin during the same call that he'd like to meet and talk. "About what?" Stalin wanted to know. "About life and death," said Pasternak. So Stalin hung up on him. Such, in the Soviet Union, was the awful intimacy between the realm of the imagination and the ministries of fear. If Pasternak, who wrote a note to Stalin after his wife's suicide, had a sort of fool's license that kept him from dreadful harm, that license didn't extend to his mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, sentenced to five years in a labor camp. If Babel had been safe while Gorky was alive, Ehrenburg was no use once he disappeared. Bulgakov's life may have been spared because Stalin enjoyed a play of his, Days of the Turbins, so much that he sat through it fifteen times. A toadying poem by Akhmatova in 1949 got her son out of a labor camp, but didn't get her back into the Writers' Union so she could publish a book. And when that same son was arrested for the third time, in 1949, she burned all her papers.

It may seem perverse to spend so much emotion on such a minority--600 Soviet writers disappeared, most of them forever, into penal colonies, labor camps, torture chambers and psychiatric wards, whereas millions died in collectivization, and we haven't even gotten to the schoolteachers, garage mechanics, Catholic nuns and Jewish "refuseniks" found guilty of writing a letter, reading an article, seeking a visa or belonging to a human rights watch group--but these writers were remarkable. Twentieth-century literature isn't really worth imagining without Bely's St. Petersburg, Babel's Red Cavalry and Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. They were also fascinating. Tsvetayeva and Rilke wrote poems to each other. Yesenin was married to Isadora Duncan. Modigliani did sixteen potraits of Akhmatova in Paris in 1911--and when she had to be evacuated from Leningrad during the siege, she took off by propeller to Tashkent clutching the score of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony.

What had such a prodigality of personality and talent to do with party cells, cadre perks, city soviets, farm collectives, lapdog writers' unions, bought psychiatrists, secret policemen, technocrats on the pig-iron front, informers, apparatchiks or the three elements of Socialist Realism--narodnost (national character), ideinost (ideological expression) and partiinost (party spirit)--not to wonder why a Stalin would even be interested, much less suspicious (and of what?), with his love for Charlie Chaplin, his hatred of everyone else, his bad teeth and not very interesting Georgian inferiority complex, such a mensch for all the bloody seasons, but especially a Great Terror? Why trouble himself with a Babel and his minimalist fictions, his Cycladic sculptures and Yiddish spitballs? And then why, if everything was Stalin's fault, try a Sinyavsky for slander and a Brodsky for parasitism after Stalin was dead? Where is it written in any socialism that we gouge out the eyes of our brilliant children with Five-Year Plans? That we put a bullet through our own heart like Mayakovsky?

In his 1966 novel The Holy Well, Valentin Katayev, otherwise a time-serving rewrite man on the Socialist Realist pig-iron front, imagined a cat trained to speak by its Georgian master, who died trying to mouth the latest polysyllabic catchword. He also imagined a shadow that "never left me but followed a step behind," a "most rare cross between a man and a woodpecker...an informer, a bootlicker, an extortioner, and a bribetaker."

"Bring good men and we shall give them all our gramophones. We are not simpletons. The International, we know what the International is. And I want the International of good people, I want every soul to be accounted for and given first-class rations. Here, soul, eat, go ahead, go and find happiness in your life. The International, Pan Comrade, you have no idea how to swallow it!"

      "With gunpowder," I tell the old man, "and seasoned with the best blood."
            (Babel, "Gedali")

There will doubtless be gripes about this or that in Peter Constantine's translation, but not from me. I'm familiar with Babel only from previous translations, by Mirra Ginsburg, Max Hayward and David McDuff. Judging from these English variants, Constantine sometimes improves on his predecessors and sometimes fudges up or jaunties. But this is the Babel we already know--except much, much more of him, including dramas, screenplays, notebooks and journalism.

Besides, I was traumatized at an early age by two different translations of the very same passage in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. In the Ralph Matlaw version, on page 91 of the Norton Critical Edition, we read: "And now I hope, Arina Vlasyevna, that having satisfied your maternal heart, you will turn your thoughts to satisfying the appetites of our dear guests, because, as you're aware, even nightingales can't be fed on fairy tales." But Neal Burroughs translates the same sentence, on page 122 of the Washington Square Press edition, this way: "And now, Arina Vlasyevna, I hope your maternal heart has had its fill, and you will see about filling our dear guests, for, as you know, fair words butter no parsnips."

Did you know that the Russian word for "parsnip" is "Pasternak"? And so must most of us make do with the edible roots of a writer while not quite hearing his whole song. Never mind. Some sort of magic-making happens anyway, or Toni Morrison and Kobo Abe wouldn't have been knocked out by English and Japanese translations of Gabriel García Márquez, who was himself overwhelmed by Jorge Luis Borges's translation into Spanish of Franz Kafka, who has also been translated into Italian by Primo Levi, who didn't care for Babel, and into Polish by Bruno Schulz, who was murdered about the same time as Babel. For that matter, Günter Grass read Tanizaki in Old Teutonic.

"If you think about it," Babel wrote in an early, breezy "Odessa" story, "doesn't it strike you that in Russian literature there haven't been so far any real, clear, cheerful descriptions of the sun?" He certainly obliged, although perhaps not cheerfully, with suns that hang down like the pink tongues of thirty dogs, suns that pour into clouds like the blood of a gouged bear, suns that soar and spin like red bowls on the tips of spears, suns that roll across the sky like severed heads. But he was equally interested in animate objects--grandmothers, schoolchildren, Hebrew teachers, landladies, pawnbrokers, prostitutes, police chiefs, playwrights, sailors, cash-register girls, medical orderlies, wrestling champions, dying bulls and peeping Toms. Plus, of course, the Cossacks and the Jews.

But most of all Babel was possessed by extremes of subjectivity looking for prose analogues, by "the fat and funny bourgeois [who] lie in the evenings in their white socks on couches in front of their funny, philistine dachas, digesting their meals beneath a dark and velvety sky, while their powdered wives...are passionately squeezed behind bushes by fervent students of medicine or law"; by the wings of angels, mounted on hinges, which have to be removed at night and wrapped in clean sheets; by the purchase of a prostitute with a loaf of bread; by gangsters on their way from a wedding to a brothel dressed up like hummingbirds; by a crucifix as tiny as a courtesan's talisman; by "the sweetness of dreamy malice, the bitter contempt for the swine and dogs among men, the flame of silent and intoxicating revenge"; by ancient synagogues, yellow walls and prophet-bearded Jews selling chalk, bluing and candlewicks; by the "captivating Stavitsky," smelling of perfume "and the nauseating coolness of soap," whose "long legs looked like two girls wedged to their shoulders in riding boots"; by honeybees and Spinoza and looking at the world as if it were "a meadow in May over which women and horses wander"; by a churchful of saints who "marched to their deaths with the flair of Italian opera singers"; by the chimneys of Zamosc, "the thievish lights in the ravines of its ghetto, the watchtower with its shattered lantern," the green rockets over the Polish camp and a"damp sunrise poured down on us like waves of chloroform"; by faith, love, death and cruelty.

Babel--who told "fairy tales about Bolshevism" all over the Polish front; who would live to regret "the foppish bloodthirstiness and loudmouthed simplicity with which in those days we solved all the problems of the world"; who asked of his executioners only that they "let me finish my work"--went into battle without bullets in his gun. "You believe in God, you traitor!" he was told. And: "I can see right through you! Right through you! What you want is to live without enemies, you'll do anything not to have enemies." And when the rabbi's son who looked like a young Spinoza ended up among the revolutionary dead, here's how Babel mourned him:

I threw everything together in a jumble, the mandates of the political agitator and the mementos of a Jewish poet. Portraits of Lenin and Maimonides lay side by side--the gnarled steel of Lenin's skull and the listless silk of the Maimonides portrait. A lock of woman's hair lay in a book of the resolutions of the Sixth Party Congress, and crooked lines of Ancient Hebrew verse huddled in the margins of Communist pamphlets. Pages of The Song of Songs and revolver cartridges drizzled on me in a sad, sparse rain.

This, of course, was his own jumble and his private rain. Nevertheless:

He died before we reached Rovno. He died, the last prince, amid poems, phylacteries, and foot bindings. We buried him at a desolate train station. And I, who can barely harness the storms of fantasy raging through my ancient body, I received my brother's last breath.

Once upon a time in an Isaac Babel story, there was in the Odessa seaport a boy named Karl-Yankel, as if to yoke Marx and shtetl. The Jewish Cossack had high hopes for him: "I grew up in those streets, now it is the turn of Karl-Yankel, but they did not fight for me as they are fighting for him, few people had any thought for me. 'It's not possible,' I whispered to myself, 'that you won't be happy, Karl-Yankel. It's not possible that you won't be happier than I.'"

We are the vanguard, but of what?

Every good hunter is uneasy in the depths of his conscience when faced with the death he is about to inflict on the enchanted animal. He does not have the final and firm conviction that his conduct is correct. But neither, it should be understood, is he certain of the opposite.

         (Meditations on Hunting
         José Ortega y Gasset)

My bloodthirsty stage, the warrior phase of a developing manhood, lasted from age 6 until age 12. At 6, I was the first little boy on my block, in Washington, DC, to have a Lone Ranger atomic bomb ring. You peeked in at a color photograph of the mushroom cloud. In fact, owing to a mixup of breakfast cereal boxtops in Battle Creek, Michigan, I had four Lone Ranger atomic bomb rings, one for every other finger on both hands. I only wish I could have quoted Sanskrit.

At age 12, in 1952, I found myself wearing a WIN WITH KEFAUVER T-shirt in Joe McCarthy territory, at a hunting and fishing lodge in northern Wisconsin, when one of the black Labrador retrievers came back with a nose full of porcupine quills. Grim men in checkerboard motley took up arms in the forest primeval. I found the fierce porcupine, hiding up a tree. I shot it twice with a .22 rifle. It fell at my feet, not exactly a sweet kill. I can't remember if we ate it. But no bird sang, and neither did a Hemingway.

Robin Williams has since explained: "Kill a small animal, drink a lite beer." My son, who was born so fortuitously in 1962, describes himself today as the first Berkeley antiwar protest, or a draft dodge. I tell you this so that you will know just who's thinking out loud about Weatherman, the Days of Rage and the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion. In my opinion, they were all a bunch of Lone Ranger atomic bomb rings.

Bill Ayers takes a different view. He was himself a street-fighting Weatherperson, a rock-and-roll Tupamaro, a social bandit out of Hobsbawm, like Rob Roy, Pancho Villa, Jesse James and the Opportune Rain Sung Chiang. He was in love with another Weatherperson, Diana Oughton, a former Peace Corps Quaker, who died making bombs on West 11th Street. He then married a third Weatherperson, Bernardine Dohrn, a University of Chicago law school graduate feared by J. Edgar Hoover ("the most dangerous woman in America") and American Rhapsodized by Joe Eszterhas ("our real babe in bandoliers"). And he's foster father to the child of a fourth, Kathy Boudin, who remains in prison for the 1981 stickup of a Brink's truck that killed four people. How he got to American Berserk, carrying a poem by Ho Chi Minh in his pocket, tattooed on his neck with the rainbow-and-lightning logo and playing with the sticks of dynamite they nicknamed "pickles," is the subject of this unrepentant retrospection.

Up to a point, Fugitive Days is the frazzled story of almost any white middle-class 1960s activist in the civil rights and antiwar movements, written with a speed-freak rush between embarrassing apostrophes to Mnemosyne--memory "is a delicate dance of desire and faith, a shadow of a shadow, an echo of a sigh" when it isn't a twig "tossed like a toy from crest to trough" on a murky "wine-dark, opaque, unfathomable" sea, or the "ghosts and fears that haunt us, floating desires and falsifying dreams more powerful and more compelling than hard reality will ever be," or "a mortuary," or a "mystification," or maybe even "a motherfucker"--but at least true to the kids we were. At that OK Corral point, however, when a movement devolved into a vanguard,when participatory democracy turned into a tantrum of the Leninist cadres, when Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry started looking like Don DeLillo's alphabet killer cult, Bill Ayers blinks.

Such swaddled beginnings: The middle child of well-heeled Midwesterners--his "rising executive" father became CEO of Commonwealth Edison of Chicago--young Bill grew up in comfortably suburban Glen Ellyn, Illinois, playing football almost as soon as he could walk, catching crayfish and sticking frogs in the Du Page River, summering at YMCA camp or on Cape Cod, reading books like The Runaway Bunny and Catcher in the Rye, going to movies like Flying Leathernecks, prepping at Lake Forest Academy and, upon discovering in Ann Arbor that he was too small to cut the mustard on Michigan's Big 10 football team, dropping out to play instead for social justice.

Well, not immediately. He auditioned in Detroit for the Rev. Gabriel Star, who sent him to New Orleans, where Father Peter Paul Streeter couldn't figure out what to do with him, so he signed up as a merchant seaman on a freighter to Piraeus full of "Food for Peace." Rome was where he first read about Vietnam, in the International Herald-Tribune. Back then to Ann Arbor and Students for a Democratic Society, being radicalized by his first bonfire, teach-in, sit-in and jail time: "anarchists and street people, radicals and rockers." Not to mention Diggers, Wobblies, dope, hair and his first tattoo, a red star on the left shoulder. Like his heroes Bob Moses and Martin Luther King Jr., he would be "a nonviolent direct action warrior, in the spirit of the civil rights struggle. I was about to personally disrupt this war, and I tingled all over."

What this meant, at age 20 in 1965, was teaching young children in a freedom school and learning from a local leader of Women's Strike for Peace "the fine points of female orgasm." By age 21, he was director of the Ann Arbor school and setting up a similar one in Cleveland--food and lodging paid for by church groups and labor unions, $2 a week in spending money and an expanding agenda that included a rent strike committee and a healthcare project--when he met his first urban riot: "The strange thing was to live in an atmosphere simultaneously terrifying and deeply energizing." Alas, when Stokely Carmichael and Black Power came along, "I [had to] get out of the way"--which meant leaving both Cleveland and Jackie, the young black woman with whom he slept. (Among other things, Fugitive Days is an anthology of ass. This aspect of Ayers got a turgid airing in a Weather Underground communiqué from Jane Alpert in 1974; you can look it up online in the Duke University archives.) But he had seen enough:

Night after night, day after day, each majestic scene I witnessed was so terrible and so unexpected that no city would ever again stand innocently fixed in my mind. Big buildings and wide streets, cement and steel were no longer permanent. They, too, were fragile and destructible. A torch, a bomb, a strong enough wind, and they, too, would come undone or get knocked down.

So it was back to Ann Arbor, where he met Diana, just returned, herself, from Guatemala. Not only could she worm dogs, can fruit and drive a motorcycle, but she was as blond as Bill. About Bill, Diana wrote to her sister: "I'm afraid he's going to be a boy forever--he's got a Peter Pan complex, and no Wendy Girl in sight."Together, they "wanted to teach the children, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, fight the power, and end the war." And yet, as the war worsened, so did their behavior. If Diana began to identify with Simone Weil, longing to parachute behind enemy lines, even cutting her long hair, Bill seemed to channel the BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY Malcolm X poster on the wall in their kitchen. In Washington for the 1967 demonstration, he told TV reporter Peter Jennings, who had paid for the steak he ate: "I'm not so much against the war as I am for a Vietnamese victory. I'm not so much for peace as for a US defeat." Even before the assassinations of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, the Mexico City Olympics or the Chicago Democratic Convention, "everything seemed urgent now, everything was accelerating.... It fell to us--and we were just kids--to save the world."

You already know more than you want to about Chicago 1968. But Ayers makes clear the determination of student radicals, wearing red headbands, toting backpacks with Vaseline and goggles to protect themselves against tear gas, hammers to smash windows, slingshots, blackjacks, cherry bombs and marbles (for scattering any cavalry charge), to bring down capitalism, racism and imperialism by kicking butt. After which "smoke and rage," there was "fear, then naked panic," and, finally, "sheer joy and wild relief to be there cherishing every lovely blow." For those in need of an epiphany:

The serpent of rage was loosed in the wide world, and it sank its passionate fangs deep into our inflamed hearts, power and corruption lying in the tall grass side by side along the pathway of wrath.
      Uncontrollable rage--fierce frenzy of fire and lava, blowing off the mountaintop, coursing headlong, in an onslaught of unstoppable chaos--choking rivers, overwhelming the living things in its disastrous path, consuming to exhaustion.
      Purifying fury, white-hot and cutting laserlike through illusion, burning a fine, straight tunnel to the very soul of things. Illuminating anger, passionate and perceptive, eliminating all distraction and doubt, our bright shining pinpoint of lucid, absolute certainty at last.

This doesn't sound to me much like Bob Moses, Grace Paley, Allen Ginsberg or Joan Baez. It sounds more like Big 10 football.

The sky was blue and the whips were black. (Isaac Babel)

Nor, trust me, do you really want to hear about the takeover of SDS by its Maoist faction, Progressive Labor, which scowled upon the "revisionism" of the North Vietnamese. It wasn't necessary to be a member of any wing of the Revolutionary Youth Movement, all of them waving their Little Red Books, to want to secede in 1969 from a lunatic state of mind. But Ayers and his buddies took up citizenship in a system almost equally delusional--with its rhetoric of "wargasms" and "an American Red Army," its ideology of pothead group sex and rubbishy machismo, and its dorky four-fingered fork salute. They brought the war home by invading high schools, trashing supermarkets, going to kung fu movies, hassling autoworkers on a beach, passing out leaflets at a Hell's Angels rally, burning an effigy of Henry Ford III at a Davis Cup tennis match, springing Timothy Leary from prison, accusing one another of reading poems or eating ice cream, blowing up statues and each other.

Diana had to be identified from the print on a severed fingertip.

This isn't hindsight. Even at the time, and much quoted since, the Wisconsin SDS observed, "You don't need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes are." Ayers quotes a friend fed up "with what he saw as our increasingly self-righteous pose within the movement, and especially with our newfound appetite for sharpening the political line. Fuck your political line, he'd say, laughing. A fishing line might feed someone, a line of poetry might fire an imagination here and there, but a political line?" Don't tell me, as Ayers does, that you had to be there to feel Weather's rage. We were there, and most of us thought they were bonkers. Renegade splinters of the fractured New Left, imagining themselves to be samurai or Sioux, Boxers or Bolsheviks, turned violent at the end of the 1960s,and the media adored them for it. It meant that everybody underneath, in the rice paddies or on the streets, was the same sort of Crazy Horse, sun-dancing himself to death after a dusting of wild aster seeds and a chaw of dried eagle brain. Ever since, the 1960s have been written off as nutcase excess.

Ayers might have told us why, looking back, he now thinks so many smart kids shape-shifted their shamanic selves from Dr. King to Dr. Strangelove or Baader-Meinhofs and the Red Brigades. There is even reason to suspect that he knows things about himself he would prefer to blame on Harry Truman and Hiroshima than to analyze out loud. For instance, even before he read Dickens, Twain and Hemingway, Ellison and Kerouac, Rousseau, Thoreau and Marx, even before his favorite films turned out to be The Battle of Algiers and Bonnie and Clyde, he seems to have had a crush on boom-boom. The Fourth of July was his favorite holiday because of cherry bombs--"and the rocket's red glare." At age 14, hanging with the neighborhood pool sharps and bumper tags, he proved himself an honorary "Italian" by keeping silent after he was accidentally set on fire by an exploding zipgun/pipe bomb, whose ingenious construction from match heads, firecracker fuses, threaded bolts, cotton wadding and ball bearings he lovingly describes. To pass the time at Lake Forest Academy, overprivileged preppies "trapped small animals in the woods and blew them up with candle bombs late at night." As early as page 21 of Fugitive Days, young Bill has already asked a poignant question:

Could there ever be a really good bomb? It could not be built to hurt or kill. Maybe it could extract minerals from the ground. Maybe it could knock over an abandoned building, or maybe the Pentagon after everyone goes home. Simple earth-works, performance art, everyone standing back. Bombs away.

But Looking for Mr. Goodbomb will not entirely explain his memoir's prurient interest in pressure-trigger, alarm clock, magnifying glass and nipple time bombs, in Bangalore torpedoes and homemade grenades, in nitroglycerin, ammonium nitrate, mercury fulminate, chloride of azode and dynamite, not to mention hat pins, brass knuckles, garrotes and saps, or, even after the death of Diana, his training in the desert with high-powered rifles and 9-millimeter pistols. The once-upon-a-time "nonviolent direct action warrior" has become his very own free-fire zone.

Now listen to his Days of Rage paean to army surplus helmets, gas masks, heavy boots, steel pipes, war whoops, piercing whistles and "rolls of pennies to add weight to a punch"; the hot blood, the ice-cold forehead and the sparks leaping from his skin: "I'm not kidding--I looked at the backs of my hands then and little blue and white electric currents danced wildly across them." Breaking the windows of hotels and cars, "we shrieked and screamed as we ran, ululating in imitation of the fighters of the Battle of Algiers. I saw us become what I thought was a real battalion in a guerrilla army, and it felt for that moment like more than theater, more than metaphor. I felt the warrior rising up inside me--audacity and courage, righteousness, of course, and more audacity." And: "My feet were a spinning blur, and I hardly touched the ground. I saw fire in the firmament, and vengeance in the faces of my pursuers." And: "I was scared but still exhilarated, swept along in the darkness, hunched over, gliding with a cosmic energy coursing through me, something large and mysterious powering my fateful rush." Until, finally, a Chicago graveyard, "a fugitive city" of wrecked and abandoned cars and buses:

This bizarre and violent time, this ritual of combat, this surreal setting combined with ferocious demons vomited into the dark-eyed night, pursuing me now with anonymous, deadly hatred. I was sure of only one thing: whatever happened next, I was choosing with eyes wide open, and while I might be wrong or foolish, limited and inadequate, mine would not be the suffering of the hapless victim. I might get crushed, but I would never complain and I would never bring suit. Life's tough. Get a helmet.

This is the cuckoo sprung from the clock of a Sumerian warrior-king, a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid psychology of masculine triumphalism. So it's no surprise, just lousy timing, that on the very morning of the terror bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bill Ayers should be quoted, in a smirking interview in the New York Times, as saying of his Weatherman days: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Maybe he's joshing again, as he assures the Times he must have been if he actually said in 1970, "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home,kill your parents, that's where it's really at" (intended, he now says, as "a joke about the distribution of wealth"). His wife, Bernardine Dohrn, must likewise have been joking when she said in 1969, after the Manson gang murders: "Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach. Wild!" (Dohrn hastens to tell the Times that "we were mocking violence in America. Even in my most inflamed moment I never supported a racist mass murderer.") And Jerry Rubin told me in 1977 that he'd only been joking in 1968, after Robert Kennedy's assassination, when he declared that "Sirhan Sirhan is a Yippie!"

We Fascisti are violent when it is necessary to be so, but this necessary violence of ours must have a character and style of its own; it must be aristocratic; it must be surgical.

         (Benito Mussolini, April 3, 1921)

After the Village townhouse explosion, when all the Weather balloons went underground, they resolved to be more careful: "No one at that safe house in those white hot days wanted to surrender, and no one argued for surfacing or disbanding. No one even thought that we should turn away from violence on principle. There was, however, a consensus growing that our actions would be strongest as symbols...a kind of overheated storytelling." So, while the last half of Fugitive Days is devoted mostly to the tradecraft of hiding out from the FBI--the "doubleness" of collecting dead-baby birth certificates and switching identities, the code names from rock songs and rules against food stamps, the odd jobs building swimming pools and slaughtering chickens, writing Prairie Fire, reading Amilcar Cabral, being filmed by Emile de Antonio, the Che posters, the chopsticks and Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap--mention is also made in passing of the occasional bombings of ROTC buildings, Selective Service offices and the "corporate giants most clearly identified with U.S. aggression and expansion," like Standard Oil, United Fruit, Chase Manhattan and IBM.

Each, Ayers tells us, was "hugely magnified because of the symbolic nature of the target, the deliberate and judicious nature of the blow, and the synchronized public announcements suggesting the dreadful or exhilarating news that a homegrown guerrilla movement was afoot in America." He insists that "I thought about the justification for each action.... [We] did our best to take care, to focus, to do no harm to persons and no more damage than we'd planned." I'm sure that all the other kamikazes of Kingdom Come say pretty much the same thing just before they bomb another abortion clinic. Later, speaking of the Pentagon, Ayers tells us: "Because nothing justified their actions in our calculus, nothing could contradict the merit of ours." We've heard this before, too, from everybody in Belfast, Sarajevo and Beirut who ever killed a child because his Higher Power told him to.

Somehow, it all just happens: Bill dreams of falling overboard while crossing the Atlantic, the ship steaming off without him and his feelings "of total abandonment, of utter loneliness," as the waters close overhead. He is overcome by a sensation that "the train was racing headlong downhill without regard to flashing lights or warning bells as the locomotive of my heart switched tracks. I didn't know where I would stop, or where I might be stopped, but there was already blood on the tracks and you could see it." He feels himself "drawn to the escalating fight, to the need to hurl myself into war in solidarity and in sacrifice" but also "evicted...we could never go home." Finally: "Circuit complete, compass in motion, disruption under way. Upside down. And so it ends, and so it begins, and we were, all of us, short-circuited, going under." Notice how passive this is, so innocent of will or choice, all momentum or inertia, all drag, all fall, never my fault.

In his terribly moving last pages, Ayers imagines that Diana in the townhouse had a change of heart and was moving to disconnect the bomb when it exploded. Of course, he thinks this wishfully, but one likes him for it, as one likes him for returning, after the underground years, to the teaching of children, with which he began. I was going to argue that it's too late, after so many pages of slimy apologetics. And then I would razzle-dazzle the somnolent with the quaint warrior ways of the Dani, the Yanomamo and the Jivaro headhunters of Ecuador; the blood sacrifice of the Scythians, the ritual pederasty of Sparta and Crete, and the agaric mushrooms and fermented honey of the carnivorous Celts; Boudicca, Scathach and Chang San-feng, who left no snowy footprints; bombs in Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover; and, of course, Gilgamesh waiting around till the worm fell out of the nose of his dead buddy Enkidu. But then bombs really did come down, and I no longer have the heart.

Let's leave it simple. Let's valorize, instead of Weatherman, those who strung along with Gandhi on his Salt March to decolonize the Indian mind in 1930. And the Dutch doctors who refused, during the Nazi occupation, to screen for genetic "defects." And the Danes who declined to build German ships, feed the German Army or honor the Nazi racial laws, while whisking away their Jewish fellow citizens to Sweden. And the Fisk students who desegregated Nashville's downtown lunch counters in 1960 and thereby launched a second American revolution. And the Polish workers in Solidarity who occupied a shipyard in 1980and, by insisting on their right to strike, began, without firing a single shot, the dismantling of the nonprofit police states of Eastern Europe. And those disenfranchised citizens of martial-law South Africa whose economic boycott spread from the black townships to the conscience-stricken West, paralyzed the apartheid state and led eventually to free elections. And those Chileans who ended Pinochet's dictatorship with street festivals, protest songs, union activity, vigils by the mothers of the disappeared and a surprise plebiscite. Not to forget the women of Manila who shamed the tanks of Marcos with a fusillade of yellow flowers, the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square or what Daw Aung San Suu Kyiis apparently accomplishing under Rangoon house arrest.

Everywhere it is written--in bullet holes and amputations, in shell shock and mushroom clouds, in brainwash and shrink-wrap--that political science is a clenched fist, that power flows from the mouths of guns, that bloodlust and servitude are coded in our genome and that obedience or death is the inevitable trajectory of narrative. But there is another way to read this atrocious past century: the view from Gandhi's spinning wheel, in which, against tyranny, exploitation, occupation and oppression, popular movements of tens of thousands withhold their consent. They refuse, secede, mobilize, challenge, humiliate, disrupt and disobey. And their principled civil disobedience--tactical, strategic, improvisatory, sometimes even whimsical--creates the very wherewithal of a civil society. When Vaclav Havel and his friends wrote a new social contract in 1989 in the Magic Lantern Theater in Prague, on a stage set for Dürrenmatt's Minotaurus, they weren't reading Prairie Fire. Nor were the students from Charles University, dressed comically as Young Pioneers in red kerchiefs, white blouses and pigtails, calling themselves the Committee for a More Joyful Present, who joined these jailbird intellectuals when they were weary and depressed: "We have come," the students said, "to cheer you up--and make sure you don't turn into another politburo." And the students gave to all the members of Havel's plenum little circular mirrors to examine themselves as they wrote the future of the Czech Republic to the music of the Beatles--in order to be on the lookout for you know whom.

When they came for Newton Arvin, as he had always known they someday would--the sex cops, the truth squad, the Cossacks, fathers and philistines--he spilled his beings. In the cross-shaped top-floor apartment of his Northampton tower, "unbreachable save for two narrow sets of steeply twisting stairs," the 60-year-old professor of English at Smith College was listening to Mozart, reading Proust and drinking Scotch. He didn't own a TV set. (Nor had he ever learned to drive.) But there were drawers full of linen shirts and cashmere sweaters, shelves stocked with leather-bound Loeb Library Greek and Latin classics, a Leonard Baskin woodcut (of Tormented Man) and the journal to which he had recently confided: "Emerson is right about old age: one of its blessings is the knowledge that there cannot be so very much more of all this."

There were also, alas, muscle magazines like Adonis and Physique Pictorial, photographs of Athenian boys at homoerotic play and, on his bedroom bureau, a bodybuilder snapshot of a nude Truman Capote. Yes, Truman Capote, the one great love of Newton Arvin's life and the only hero in this dreary tale, which is otherwise a parable of the Closet and the Snitch.

Although his criticism was admired by both H.L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson, Arvin had all but vanished from our sonar till three years ago, when The New Yorker published Barry Werth's "encapsulation" of this book. He might turn up occasionally in memoirs of the 1930s and 1940s, back when he was still a radical, before giving it up for Harry Truman, as he gave up writing for The Nation in favor of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, but those suggestive biographies in which he looked at the secret lives of Hawthorne, Whitman and Melville through binoculars of Marx and Freud were out of print, waiting for queer theory to catch up. He was a regular, and even a trustee, at Yaddo, the Saratoga Springs Bomarzo of writers' colonies, before they dumped him at crunch time, just like Smith. And he is also mentioned in the journals of his former student Sylvia Plath, who, maybe because he had so disliked Ted Hughes, describes him as "fingering his keyring compulsively in class, bright hard eyes, red-rimmed, turned cruel, lecherous, hypnotic, and holding me caught like the gnome Loerke held." But until Werth got interested, the rest was fuzzy. Didn't he die suddenly at age 63, coincident with the publication of his book on Longfellow, during a New York newspaper strike, after some hushed-up smut-ring scandal?

Whereas we tend to recall the worst of Truman Capote: the performing seal and celebrity pudge of the talk shows, gossip columns and police blotters, devolved back into a caterpillar from the monarch butterfly on the jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms; the neogothic parajournalist who propagandized for capital punishment before and after his masked ball at the Plaza Hotel; the corrupted choirboy who traded in his bamboo flute and his marzipan sweet tooth for a cold-blooded, bestselling Grant Wood grotesque (and still his boozy mother couldn't stand her sissy son); the society poodle who stopped licking and started biting the hands of those who used to pet him, only to end up with a bottle for a mother, never delivering that so-much-blabbed-about great novel, guzzling vodka in a dirty bathrobe and hallucinating assassins from whom he could only be saved by Liz Smith. Of this Truman Capote, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote that he "never showed an interest in political or moral debate and perhaps this was prudent since ideas, to some degree, may define one's social life and could just be excess baggage he didn't need to bring aboard; and, worse, boring, like the ruins and works of art he declined to get off the yacht to see."

Yet only one of these two men was brave, loyal, free or even liked himself. After Newton Arvin named every name he could think of to the Massachusetts State Police in September 1960, he would explain himself to one of those he fingered: "I couldn't go through this alone." We are reminded not only of Whittaker Chambers, Elia Kazan, Linda Tripp and David Brock, but of what Marianne Moore once said about Jean Cocteau:

One has...the sense of something submerged and estranged, of a somnambulist with feet tied, of a musical instrument in a museum, that should be sounding; of valor in a fairy tale changed by the hostile environment into a frog or carp that cannot leave its pool or well. In myth there is a principle of penalty. Snow White must not open the door of the dwarf's house when the peddler knocks. Pandora must not open the box. Perseus must not look at the Gorgon except in his shield.

Newton Arvin's stereotypical story is almost as depressing to read about as it must have been to live through. From his unhappy, bookish childhood in Valparaiso, Indiana, he recalls an ominous incident with a secondhand bike when he was 12. Noticing that the seat was too low for him, his father raised it. After a long July afternoon of riding, the boy developed a painful limp. During the next few days of "nervous anxiety, irritability, and dejection," he suffered what he would come to believe was his first nervous collapse. His subsequent propensity for "crackups and breakdowns," his physical weaknesses and cowardice, his hypochondria and hysterical self-absorption, even the symbolism of the sexually injured, father-hating hero in the Ahab section of his Melville book, could all be traced back to this Philoctetes trauma, as if a bicycle seat were a pineal gland. Still, "I had succeeded in getting attention of a concerned and kindly sort from my father, and that, no doubt, was enough."

He was, he thought, "uniquely misbegotten": "I was certainly a girlish small boy, not a virile one, even in promise. I was timid, shrinking, weak, and unventuresome. I had no skill in boyish games and sports, and no interest in them, and I was quickly penalized as a result." But at Harvard, although they drummed him out of the Student Army Training Corps for failing a physical, Arvin by age 19 had already read everybody from Freud to Lenin, from Emily Dickinson to William James, plus, decisively, Van Wyck Brooks, whose Letters and Leadership persuaded him that "literary criticism was social criticism, a nobler calling" than the business culture he despised. He had also discovered a crush on his roommate.

Van Wyck Brooks was more obliging than the roommate. So impressed was the literary editor of The Freeman by Arvin's Phi Beta Kappa book reviews that he offered Arvin a job. When that fell through, Arvin taught briefly at the Detroit Country Day School, where "the strain of working with boys just a few years younger than he while concealing his ambiguous sexual longings unnerved him." He didn't finish the year. Fortunately, an all-girl student body at Smith College needed an instructor in English composition, and he fell spellbound into his lifelong locus, like a frog in a pool or a carp in a well. While he would leave Northampton--to Europe on one fraught occasion, to Yaddo whenever they said yes and to mental hospitals almost as often as Yaddo, as if they were weight-watcher spas with electroshock--Northampton was the only home that Arvin knew for the next thirty-seven years. He was afraid of Harvard, afraid of New York and afraid of himself. It is hard to imagine his ever voting for William Z. Foster in 1932.

But in the Smith library, Arvin found the clue to Hawthorne, a "queer changeling" like himself: "It was an ill thing to have a poetic imagination." Worse, "to be a writer of storybooks was little better, little less degenerate, than to be a fiddler." The indifference of the world was a punishment for "the very act of withdrawing into himself." The essential sin, Hawthorne seemed to say, "lies in whatever shuts up the spirit in a dungeon where he is alone, beyond the reach of common sympathies and the general sunlight. All that isolates damns: all that associates, saves." The "A" embroidered on Hester's breast obsessed Arvin as much as Hawthorne: "For how deep a wrong might it not be the expiation, and how terrible loneliness the cause!" Werth sums up both of them: "The root sickness of America...wasn't exploitation or deviancy. It was repression and self-hatred--shame."

And at Smith, in 1931, he met the woman who would be his wife. Poor Mary Garrison, a college swimmer with "a full face, bobbed hair, long limbs, and sumptuous breasts." If it worked for Hawthorne... Before their marriage, he asked her to read Walt Whitman's Calamus poems, hoping she'd guess his secret. Mary didn't. She was no more use to him than electroshock, morphine or tranquilizers. "Real intimacy with anyone," says Werth, "was more than Arvin could achieve." If he emerged from his "guilt-filled isolation," it was to consort with male friends, whether heterosexuals like Granville Hicks and Daniel Aaron or homosexuals like Oskar Seidlin, Howard Doughty and, later on, untenured faculty like Ned Spofford and Joel Dorius, whose names he blurted to the cops in 1960. Not even his oldest boyhood pal, David Lilienthal, busting trusts all the way up to the Atomic Energy Commission, ever guessed that Newton was a Calamus until he read it in the papers. There was room in this closet for only one hanger.

Yaddo was another story. In that magic castle, not only did he write the Whitman book that faced up to the poet's "manly attachment" and self-celebration, if not his own, but he also met Katherine Anne Porter, Louis Kronenberger, Eudora Welty, Marguerite Young, John Malcolm Brinnin, Carson McCullers and Truman Capote, age 21 in 1946, after which many meals, movies, moonlit walks and, Werth tells us, a two-year love affair that was "the happiest, most productive period of Arvin's life," including most of the hard work on Melville. About this furtive scholar, Capote said: "He was like a lozenge that you could keep turning to the light, one way or another, and the most beautiful colors would come out." And later added: "Newton was my Harvard." To "Little T," Newton wrote:

Only I am not a bad boy, and neither are you; we are very good indeed and we shall be better and better as time wears on--for we are at the source of good, and we are drinking the water of truth, and what we are making between us is purely beautiful. Is it possible to be better than that?

More amusing, so much so that it breaks the heart, is a note from Newton in Northampton to Truman in New York: "LOST probably in Manhattan, one peppermint stick, beautifully pink and white, wonderfully straight, deliciously sweet. About a hand's length. Of great intrinsic and also sentimental value to the owner."

But they couldn't live together: Not in New York, where Arvin was as terrified as he was fascinated by drag queens in Harlem. Not even in Nantucket, which was all right in the mornings when Arvin worked on Meville and Capote wrote Other Voices, and also in the afternoons, when Arvin read Pascal and Capote sunbathed. But over dinner, F.O. Matthiessen and the Trillings were not impressed by Truman. (Said Edmund Wilson: "A not unpleasant little monster, like a fetus with a big head." Said Capote: "I must have looked like a male Lolita to those people.") And surely not in Northampton, where Arvin "lived under more or less strict protective cover as a faculty bachelor." It was, Werth tells us, "unthinkable that a staid New England townsman, even a reluctant one like Arvin, would cohabit with someone as flagrantly undisguised as Capote," who showed up on alternate weekends, "raced through town on his visits trailing a signature long scarf" and even sat in the back of Arvin's classes on Proust, James and Shakespeare.

Moreover, Arvin didn't want to live with anybody. Not for the first time or the last, he undertook to sabotage himself. Putting off Capote, who couldn't write at home with his alcoholic mother and wanted to spend time up north, Arvin cautioned him: "It is as if something physical like blood were ebbing out of me--not always, but much of the time--when I am not alone; and the point comes when my identity begins to slip away from me, and I cease to be a whole person even for someone I love." And no sooner had Capote sailed for Europe in May 1948 than Arvin entered into an affair with one of the young novelist's best friends in New York. Capote, as it happens, didn't find out about it from the friend himself, although he would have. He found out about it by reading Arvin's journal.

Which would have been the end of it, except that twelve years later when Arvin was sick, broke and besieged, abandoned by Smith and Yaddo, arrested and facing a trial for trafficking in pornography in a state in which sodomy was still against the law, it was Capote who phoned and wrote from New York and Europe, Capote who made repeated offers of money to help out, Capote who stuck to a friend who hadn't even liked his books, Capote who left funds in his will to endow an award for Lifetime Achievement in Literary Criticism in Arvin's name, Capote who may have been out, flagrant and undisguised, but understood his loyalties enough to stand tall and fast. One of many slogans in Alcoholics Anonymous--we call them bumper stickers--is that you're only as sick as your secrets. Like many AA bumper stickers, this one is smarter than it looks.

I see that I want to fast-forward through the rest, speed-read the writing on the wall, past behaviors simultaneously more reckless and clandestine--the blue movies, the readings from Propertius and the seducing of junior faculty; the trips by bus to Springfield to cruise the Arch and to New York for the Everard Baths; the Etruscan dancers and the public restrooms--unto hospitals (McLean's was his favorite) and suicide attempts (two, both featuring sixteen Nembutals). Of course, Arvin suffered from depression. Of course, he medicated that depression with alcohol, which is a depressant. Of course, if you are serious about suicide, try jumping like F.O. Matthiessen from eleven stories up. And, of course, he died of pancreatic cancer complicated by diabetes, both of which are associated with alcohol abuse. But, at a certain point of muddled vehemence, all these ailments conspire with one another, transcending any one origin myth. Even after Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe raved about his Melville book, he still left the light on all night long. Equally, of course, as Werth observes, "his whole life had been against the law." Death by misadventure in the closet.

How can he be read with respect, or perhaps at all, in a time when we all seem agreed that anguish, inquietude, the experience of guilt, and the knowledge of the Abyss are the essential substance of which admissible literature is made?
      (Newton Arvin on RalphWaldo Emerson)

Oh, come off it, Newton.

Still, when the cops came to ransack his tower and then asked him who his friends were, who else had looked at the dirty pictures so ferociously objected to by the Postmaster General of the United States, whatever possessed him to rattle off their names and ruin their careers? Werth doesn't have a theory, any more than he has time for more than a cursory look at the scholarly books, any more than he has bothered to talk to any of the women who worshiped Arvin at Smith in the 1950s and who speak of him, even today, as "a tragic figure," any more than he has done any comparison shopping among brave and craven behaviors by literary intellectuals at moments of stress or witch hunt, even before they started mortgaging their skepticism, their intellectual property rights and their firstborn children for a think-tank sinecure, a corporate canary cage, an Op-Ed parking space, a cable-television camera and an invitation to a way-cool party. He is just relieved to be able to tell us that 1960 was the last time such a thing could happen here.

Are we so sure? I'm as pleased as anyone else that Northampton elected a lesbian mayor in 1999 and that the Empire State Building turns lavender on Friday nights before Gay Pride parades. But the blood-dimmed tide has reversed itself before, even in the ancient world, where you'd think Alexander the Great taught us something about gays in the military. And in the Renaissance, where Michelangelo proved to be a credit to his race. And in prewar Vienna, postwar Weimar and merry old England, which chose to crush its very own Enigmatic thinking machine, Alan Turing. From Harvey Milk to Matthew Shepard, the signals are scary. And the same sexual hysterics are also busy going after stem cells and French contraceptives. Meanwhile, people lose their jobs for logging on to the wrong website.

I sometimes wonder if the Closet doesn't create the Snitch; if, according to another principle of penalty, outlaw desires encoded like A.E. Housman's in Latin poetry, or Alan Turing's in cryptanalysis, or Newton Arvin's in symbolic literature, or even in the superstructure of Marxism and the manifest content of psychoanalysis and the deconstructive text, don't elaborate a psychology of secrets--a kind of underground, spycraft and espionage of false-bottomed narratives, counterfeit identities, microdots, camouflage and disinformation; the closet as deep cover and the snitch as counterintelligence. Are we all hiding? Will we all betray ourselves...and others? If any of this is true, then "outing" may contain an element of self-hatred. On the other hand, without snitches, there couldn't be a War on Drugs, nor would we need the Witness Protection Program. On the third hand, Truman Capote was transparency itself.