Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!enterpoop.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.natrev From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS Date: Wed, 25 Nov 92 12:17:28 EST Message-ID: Lines: 980 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS Bad Rap for Malcolm X CAROL IANONE Miss Ianone teaches writing and litrature at NYU's Gallatin Division, and is a consulting editor of Academic Questions. CONVENTIONAL WISDOM, often heard in the months leading up to the release of Spike Lee's movie, has paired Martin Luther King Jr. and Mal- colm X in a kind of good cop/bad cop formulation. King, it's said, preached love, integration, and nonviolence; Malcolm X preached hate, separatism, and violence. If the country doesn't wise up and achieve equality as King proposed, the wisdom goes, then blacks will follow Malcolm X's directive and do it ''by any means necessary.'' Sometimes, especially more recently, the convention is altered to hold that the country has already failed to take King's way and that Malcolm X's is in the ascendancy, witnessed in such phenomena as the angry, swaggering style of ghetto youth; the pop- ularity of rap music, replete with threatening, often murderous lyrics; the intimidating mode of black politics practiced in many large cities; and, of course, South-Central Los Angeles. In either version the formulation is inaccurate on some important points. True, Malcolm X can in some ways be seen as the progenitor of the whole model of black activist behavior that we see today, marked by prov- ocation, confrontation, Afrocentrism, and the excoriation of the white race. Furthermore, Malcolm X often characterized as ''Uncle Toms'' those blacks who sought a road of moderation and accommodation, setting the stage for the situation today in which any black who doesn't agree with the mili- tant line can be denounced as a traitor to the race. But what we now have is the worst of Malcolm X, while the best of him has been conveniently discarded or overlooked. He always insisted, for ex- ample, that black people had to realize that along with equal rights there had to be ''the bearing of equal responsibilities.'' According to Remember- ing Malcolm (Carroll & Graf, 208 pp., $21), a moving memoir by Benjamin Karim, who was one of Malcolm X's assistant ministers at New York's Black Muslim Mosque Number Seven, Malcolm X felt that blacks ''had to bear some of the blame for their own unenlightenment. You can blame a person for knocking you down, Malcolm often said, but you can't blame that person if you refuse to get back up. . . . However much slave history taught us about the injustice and misery we as a people had suffered, it did not excuse us from assuming responsibility for ourselves and each other by altering its course.'' Malcolm X's own struggle out of the humiliations, deprivations, and various hellish detours of the underclass -- welfare, reform school, hus- tling, pimping, alcohol, drugs, crime, and finally prison -- taught him the paramount necessity of self-respect and mutual respect among blacks. Moreover, Malcolm X understood how blacks preyed on each other like ''animals and vultures'' in the ugly black underworld. His autobiography tells of his poignant amazement at witnessing the respect with which black people had learned to treat each other in the Muslim movement. Karim's summary of Malcolm X's message to his followers is this: ''Be hon- est. Harm no one, and take nothing that is not yours. Treat others as you would be treated by them. Practice charity. Exercise self-control. Avoid ex- tremes, keep a middle path. Pay your taxes. Obey the law.'' With such teachings, Karim says, Malcolm X ''rescued us from the myth of our moral inferiority.'' And whatever his contribution in creating it, ours is not a world Mal- colm X would have been at home in. Twelve years celibate before his mar- riage, he would have been dismayed at the distribution of condoms to chil- dren. The faithful husband and devoted father would be horrified at black men making babies and leaving them to the care of the white man's state. The slovenly and disordered appearance of youth today, black and white, would have appalled him, as would their language, and the language of rap; he abhorred profanity and even the use of slang words like ''kid.'' Mal- colm X, who always dressed impeccably in the grownup masculine style of the 1950s and early 1960s, and couldn't stand to see a Muslim brother with his collar and tie loosened, would have disdained running shoes, baseball caps, and oversized T-shirts with Xs on them. And Malcolm X loved learning. Affirmative action and curricula based on ''self-esteem'' might well have broken his heart. In prison, he copied out the entire dictionary, word for word, including punctuation, and read so much in bad light that he had to begin wearing glasses. (''Any college li- brary would have been lucky to get that collection,'' he later said of his prison's library.) His excitement at reading, at learning, at taking posses- sion of ideas, is something you can almost taste in his autobiography. Karim reports that Malcolm X once mused ruefully, ''How many dictionar- ies and reference books do you suppose we would collect if we went through a black housing project in New York? Enough to fill a car trunk or van? Or maybe a suitcase?'' Karim continues in Malcolm X's voice, ''We can't blame the white man for the dictionaries black children don't have. Poverty, said Malcolm, provides no excuse for ignorance any more than history does. Ignorance breeds poverty, he said, it's not the other way around.'' For their classes at the mosque, Malcolm X's Muslim students were expected to have a notebook, a dictionary, a thesaurus, a book of syn- onyms and antonyms, an etymology text, and a library card. They were given extensive study assignments. In addition, Malcolm X encouraged the Muslims to use their spare time creatively, to go to museums, for ex- ample, instead of sporting events. In fact, as some have noted, his whole post-prison disposition was rather puritanical, deliberately repudiating the looseness and ease that had come to be associated with some segments of black life in America. MALCOLM X was also ruthlessly honest, and he would never have been able to endure the sea of lies about race that we swim in today. ''He didn't blame white people for their resistance to integration with the Negro as he lives today,'' according to Charles W. Wiley -- a political activist and journalist who had made his acquaintance -- writing in NATIONAL RE- VIEW almost thirty years ago. ''He said that a white person who pretends that property values don't go down when Negroes move into a neighbor- hood is a fool, but that when a white man tells the truth about such issues he is called a bigot.'' Malcolm X often embarrassed liberals by proclaim- ing, for example, that the Sixties were ''an era of hypocrisy. You pretend that you're my brother and I pretend that I really believe you believe you're my brother.'' Malcolm X knew that ''pie-in-the-sky promises of equality through pass- ing laws'' would not work, that laws could not change attitudes. He pre- dicted that riots would follow the passage of civil-rights legislation, when the entire civil-rights leadership thought that such legislation would solve the whole racial problem. And he was right. ''A hungry man will dislike you if you refuse to give him help,'' he told Wiley, ''but will hate you if you promise help and give him a check that bounces.'' He was not talking so much about actual food as about spiritual food, black people's need to feel and be accepted in the fullness of their humanity, something he believed they could not get from sitting at lunch counters and singing ''We Shall Overcome.'' Malcolm X knew that the ghettoes contained the explosive and lethal rage that he remembered from his own past, although he would not have confused it with political protest. His much-vaunted belief in vi- olence was really only an assertion of the need for self-defense when the government fails to protect certain citizens. During the period of poverty and dysfunction that followed his father's death, Malcolm X resented the official intervention of state welfare agen- cies into his family's life, but the reader of his autobiography cannot help being struck by how relatively humane and well intentioned this interven- tion was; and the reform school and foster homes Malcolm X was sent to were by no means a Dickensian horror. What the state agencies could not provide is, alas, what no state can: dignity, self-respect, a tranquil affirm- ation of the rightness of one's fundamental self. Palpable in Malcolm X's autobiography is his own search for wholeness, a search which was not fulfilled until his pilgrimage to Mecca, ''the first time I had ever stood be- fore the Creator of All and felt like a complete human being.'' After this experience, Malcolm X dropped much of his racist and separatist rhetoric and was able to declare, ''I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.'' One of Malcolm X's daughters has said that her father has never really been understood, and a new collection of essays by black writers, titled Malcolm X: In Our Own Image (St. Martin's, 246 pp., $18.95), supports her assertion. Indeed, as the subtitle indicates, these writers may not even be trying to understand him on his own terms. Some of the essays are concerned with discrepancies in Malcolm X's biography; sometimes this concern is legitimate but sometimes it seems to be merely by way of claiming him for one or another cause. Quite a few of the essays are pre- occupied with Malcolm X's possible and actual violations of political cor- rectness. One faults him for criticizing the ghetto style of his hustler days too much, for failing to recognize it as a form of rebellion against racist America. Some fret about what they see as his excessive puritanism. Oth- ers worry over his ''sexism'' and ''homophobia.'' Some try to make him into a proto-feminist or Marxist. The last essay is told by a student at Spelman College named Deidre Bailey to a couple of black journalists. She is a young black woman we may hope to hear more from in the future. Her understanding of Malcolm X's legacy is his respect for women and his ex- ample that one can, by conscious choice, change one's life for the better. She deplores a lot of the ''X'' phenomenon and the association of Malcolm X with hatred and random violence. AS MALCOLM X has been given a bad rap on some scores, Martin Luther King has perhaps been overidealized. In an ironic way, King may be more responsible than Malcolm X for the enmity in black - white relationships today. ''Let us therefore continue our triumphant march to the realization of the American dream,'' said King in one of his brilliantly ringing ad- dresses. ''Let us march on segregated housing until every ghetto of social and economic oppression is dissolved and Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary houses. Let us march on segregated schools until every vestige of segregated and inferior education becomes a thing of the past. . . . Let us march on poverty . . . until no starved man walks the streets of our cities and towns, in search of jobs that do not exist. Let us march on poverty until the wrinkled stomachs in Mississippi are filled . . . the idle industries of Appalachia are . . . revitalized, and broken lives in sweltering ghettoes are mended and remolded.'' These were the kind of words that young people in the Sixties thrilled to hear. Taken inspirationally and motivationally, they are wonderful; taken absolutely literally, which is apparently how they were taken, they are a recipe for disillusionment and despair. Even Jesus said that we would always have some poor with us. Martin Luther King set the goals so high that America had no way of achieving them, and today's angry, never-satisfied liberals, both white and black, may well have learned their disenchantment and disgust with their country from just this style of rhetoric. Conservative and traditional civil-rights thought often protests that King's legacy of color-blind justice and equality of opportunity has been forgotten or distorted by subsequent black spokesmen, but in truth he seems to have left them plenty of ammunition. If, after the passage of the civil-rights laws, King escalated the moral demands he placed on our soci- ety, he also began to de-emphasize the only real way by which they could at least partly be achieved: by the assumption of individual responsibility. In many ways Martin Luther King was a privileged middle-class liberal as much as he was a black. One good look at the black underclass in the North after the Watts riots of 1965, and he began to speak of the need for massive government intervention at every level, redistribution of income, and the restructuring of American society. He who had prophesied black - white brotherhood began to speak of America as a ''sick society'' and to insist ''that the vast majority of white Americans are racist, either con- sciously or unconsciously.'' After Watts, according to James H. Cone, author of Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Orbis Books, 358 pp., $22.95), the anti-capitalist sentiments of King's graduate-school days combined with his new-found admiration of Sweden to bring him to the point of advanc- ing socialism as the solution for America's black underclass. He began to challenge many of his own advisors who were strongly pro-capitalist: ''We've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society,'' he insisted. ''We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. 'Who owns the oil?' . . . 'Who owns the iron ore?' . . . Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?''' A recent article in The New Yorker reported critically Malcolm X's com- mon-sense observation from his Middle East experience -- that even with- out racism, people of the same kind tend to flock together. This sort of ob- servation is an embarrassment to the utopian universalism according to which we can never call ourselves a just society until each and every area of life is proportionally integrated; anything short of that represents pan- demic racism that must be rooted out by endless agitation. ''We must all learn to live together as brothers,'' said Martin Luther King. But Malcolm X understood that ''no government laws can ever force brotherhood.'' ''Men are attracted by spirit,'' he said. ''Love is engendered by spirit. . . . The only true world solution today is governments guided by true religion -- of the spirit.'' The conventional wisdom sometimes asserts that we've lost King's dream and are now living Malcolm X's nightmare, but perhaps it's not Malcolm X's nightmare that we are living, but King's dream turned into a nightmare, like all the utopian dreams of this century. And maybe it is Malcolm X who can wake us up. ******************************************************************** The Great Game ANTHONY HARTLEY Kissinger: A Biography, by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 789 pp., $30) Mr. Hartley published a study of the foreign policy of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, for the International Institute of Strategic Studies in 1975. DIPLOMACY is a profession that produces its own type of human being. The great diplomatic players -- such as Talleyrand, Metternich, Bismarck -- have something in common. A cold eye cast on power, a lack of moral prejudices, an appreciation for balance and stability in the international system -- these are the attributes that mark them. They are not men of conviction, but the reverse of good fellows. Bismarck used to regard it as disloyalty to the King of Prussia if he allowed himself to like a foreign leader or country. As seen by such men, the game was one of raison d'etat, but this was a point of view that took into account the legitimate interests of other states, which were seen as facts to be heeded rather than obstacles to be overcome. The objective of such diplomacy was the avoidance of damage rather than the furtherance of good; perhaps this is the most that mere diplomacy can expect. Kissinger had this cast of mind. He was a great foreign minister -- his position in the Nixon Administration was tantamount to that even before he became secretary of state. In 1969 the United States was faced with fighting its way out of the impasse into which the efforts of previous Ad- ministrations -- not least the soaring ambitions of the Kennedy years -- had led it. When Richard Nixon took office, with Kissinger as his national- security advisor, the United States was losing the war in Vietnam. It was Kissinger's task to find a way out of Vietnam that was not too humiliating and not too destructive of America's credibility. He did it, but there was no elegant way of retreat. The path out of Vietnam was unpleasant and devious. Kissinger was clear that the war must end, but in a way that would not leave America's allies or enemies with the impression that the country had been crippled by the experience. Much of Kissinger's activity, therefore, was devoted to impressing on the Soviet Union that the United States could still stand up for itself. In this he succeeded, most notably in the Middle East during the threatened Syrian invasion of Jordan in 1970 and the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. Had it not been for the Watergate affair and the subsequent tram- mels laid on the executive branch by Congress, the rewards of this achievement would have been greater. America would have resisted more actively the Brezhnev policy of expansion in Africa (bases in Angola and the Horn of Africa), and the Soviet Union might have hesitated before em- broiling itself in Afghanistan. Now, of course, all this makes little differ- ence. The aims and errors of Soviet power have become irrelevant, since the Soviet Union no longer exists. Walter Isaacson's biography of Kissinger recognizes its subject's merits as a negotiator and a connoisseur of the balance of power. However, it is not quite fair to him. His achievement is recounted, but not adequately analyzed. For instance, America's desperate position in the world at the time Kissinger took over is not sufficiently emphasized. Moreover, the narrative of events is submerged in a flood of anecdotes about Kissinger's personal habits. He is presented as a rather ludicrous figure, flying into rages (''Kissinger began throwing books about, a sure sign that he was angry''), enjoying the company of starlets and expensive meals, obsessed with secrecy, and devious, even when deviousness was unnecessary. A su- perficial glance at this biography would give the impression that, when not bullying his staff, Kissinger was tapping their phones, and when not being obsequious to the President, he was slanging him behind his back. Isaacson is quite stern about all this. Yet has he never enjoyed an ex- pensive meal or criticized his editor behind the latter's back? Most jour- nalists do both. As to the secrecy and staged fits of anger, it should be remembered that Kissinger, a foreign-born American, had suddenly been precipitated into a leading position within a government machine, to whose bureaucratic ways he was a stranger. To be able to carry out his policies he needed control -- control over his own staff and that of other departments, influence over a neurotic and changeable President. With- out secrecy and ''back channels,'' without overcoming the inveterate ten- dency of American institutions to produce pluralistic policies, Kissinger would never have been able to carry on his remarkable diplomatic activities. Isaacson's most sustained criticism of Kissinger, however, concerns the problem of morality in foreign policy. How can Kissinger's ruthless diplo- matic opportunism be reconciled with American idealism? Opposed to his ''conspiratorial nature'' is the vision of Woodrow Wilson sailing across the Atlantic to give Europe ''open covenants, openly arrived at.'' Yes, one might retort, but what did that get him? Repudiation by the American people and another world war in twenty years' time. The final conse- quences of President Wilson's policy of ''self-determination'' are to be seen in the Balkans today. In 1969 the difficulties of the United States were simply not soluble by the application of moral fervor or straight talk. Without the edged tools of the old diplomacy America might have seen its enemies progress and its alliances dissolve in those difficult years. No ''scout's honor'' style of diplomacy could have achieved what Kissinger did. Ruthlessness is hardly unknown in American political life. If Kissinger was devious, what about Franklin Roosevelt? If he was prepared to over- ride the rights of other countries, what about the Spanish - American war? There is a dark thread of Realpolitik that runs through the idealistic woof of American foreign policy. Every nation has interests. Almost any nation, when pushed into a corner, will fight like a cat to defend itself. The United States, a very powerful country, does not differ from others in this respect. A more telling criticism is that Kissinger created a system of foreign policy which only he could work. After he left, the central control of policy broke down, as the long-smoldering row between Cyrus Vance at the State Department and Zbigniew Brzezinski at the National Security Council testifies. In other hands, Kissinger's policy of ''binding'' the Soviet Union into the international system proved insufficient to restrain Brezhnev from taking advantage of imagined American weakness. But Kissinger had little choice in his strategy or tactics. Propping up the State Department as an institution hardly counted in comparison with what was at stake. Once in power, he had to take what opportunities he could by what means he had at his disposal. History did not deal him an easy hand; it is futile to suggest possible variations in the fall of the cards. Isaacson has written a fascinating book, but future historians will be more generous. Still, it is unlikely that Kissinger will ever be an attractive figure for those who want their foreign policy ''open'' or ''moral.'' Those gifted enough to play an effective game on the international chessboard appear to others as ambiguous and untrustworthy figures. But it is hardly their function to do otherwise. ******************************************************************** The Character Issue ANTHONY LEJEUNE The Porcupine, by Julian Barnes (Knopf, 138 pp., $17) Mr. Lejeune is NR's longtime London correspondent. THE so-called ''literary novel'' is a curious kind of artifact. You might think that all novels were, by definition, ''literary,'' but the term actually excludes most novels. To read one of these highly revered and much re- viewed volumes for the story (which is surely what novels are primarily about) would entail the urgent need of a fast-forward button. For colorful characters then? But very few modern novelists seem even to have en- tered themselves in the Dickens Stakes. Should we read them, as the Church of England says we should read the Apocrypha, ''for example of life and instruction of manners,'' or for a social and political message? Per- haps: but there must be more efficient and quicker methods of study. In fact, much ''literary'' writing appears to be phrase-making for its own sake. Julian Barnes is unquestionably a skilled manipulator of words. His new book, The Porcupine, can indeed be described as a literary novel (or novella, since it is very short), but, although many sentences are conspic- uously and imaginatively well-turned, there is little of the tricksiness and jokiness for which his writing has been admired. Of plot development -- narrative -- there is almost none: the only potential twist is allowed to es- cape virtually unexplored. Effectively, there are just two characters, pro- tagonist and antagonist, mere animate arguments with little flesh on them, backed by an occasional burst of comment from a chorus of observers. What we are offered is an exercise in political imagination. Mr. Barnes has taken for his subject the changes in Eastern Europe, the transforma- tion from Communism to whatever you wish to call the passionate, con- fused, ambivalent regimes which now prevail. Bulgaria was his rough model -- indeed, the book was first published in Bulgarian. Todor Zhivkov, the deposed head of state, sent for a copy to read in his prison cell. It describes succinctly the show-trial (under the new democratic guise, which proves not so very different from the old totalitarian guise) of just such a fallen Communist leader. Mr. Barnes has made an intense effort to understand, from inside, the positions both of the prosecutor and of the defendant. The exposition is fair and emotionally sympathetic. If it re- veals nothing unexpected or brilliantly illuminating, the reason may sim- ply be that those positions are familiar, painfully familiar, to anyone who has lived through, and thought about, the history of our times. The Communist, Petkanov, is allowed to have the best of it, perhaps be- cause Mr. Barnes thinks the less fashionable cause the more interesting to expound. Petkanov still thinks it the nobler cause: ''What do people want? They want stability and hope. We gave them that. Things might not have been perfect, but with Socialism people could dream that one day they might be. You have only given them instability and hopelessness. A crime wave. The black market. Pornography. Prostitution. . . . We gave them sausage and higher things. You do not believe in higher things, and you do not even give them sausage. There is none in the shops.'' Petkanov plays with the court, as a master musician tunes and plays a long-practiced instrument. He lists the honors which the outside world once piled on him, recalls the praise he once received from Western lead- ers seeking to ingratiate themselves and do business with the Communist bloc. And he remains, in his own mind, chillingly confident of the future. ''You don't get to Heaven on the first jump. . . . What was happening was that just for a brief historical moment the old system was being allowed a last little hop in its slimy frog-pond. But then, inevitably, the spirit of Socialism will shake itself again, and in our next jump we shall squelch the capitalists down into the mud until they expire beneath our boots.'' The prosecutor, meanwhile, finds what had seemed to be his quarry's obvious guilt running through his fingers like sand. A ''moral trial,'' with- out the need for specific provable charges, being judged impossible and an- yway incompatible with new ideas about the rule of law, and a Ceausescu- type killing (which some of the young would prefer) also having been ex- cluded, the best he can manage is an unconvincing, inadequate, predeter- mined verdict. After which, like the old man at the beginning of Plato's Republic, though with less confidence, he goes off to church, while an old woman in the street outside holds up a picture of Lenin. That The Porcupine is extremely well written hardly needs saying; Mr. Barnes has earned his reputation. The constant sprinkling of obscenities may be considered obligatory in a literary novel. The political analysis rings true and is often shrewd. The narrative, however, lacks warmth or, in the end, any particular moral force. It is a purely intellectual construction. This in turn provokes a question. Why does this theme -- the collapse, ideological as well as practical, of the Communist regimes in Eastern Eu- rope -- hold such fascination for Western intellectuals? One clear answer is that the Western intellectuals were themselves morally involved. They had their own investment in the regimes that have collapsed. At the very least, they felt themselves to be part of the argument: its vocabulary and ideology were not altogether alien to them, as that way of thinking was and is quite alien to many of us. Mr. Barnes, being a literary more than a philosophic intellectual, hints, in one significant passage, at a different approach, a different worry. ''We have moved,'' fears the prosecutor, ''into an era when 'character' is a mis- leading concept.'' If this were true, one crucial element of bourgeois fiction, especially highbrow fiction, would have been obliterated. Just such destruction has been the common currency of Western academia lately. But there is an even worse disaster implied. According to a British re- viewer, the failure of the trial in The Porcupine represents ''quiet despair about the value of liberal discourse.'' If that despair were justified, the intellectuals' occupation would really have gone. ******************************************************************** FILM Not for Enlightened Buddhists JOHN SIMON Mr. Simon, NR's film critic, is also theater critic for New York magazine. WHY THE perennial fascination of horror movies? If we are to believe Gore Vidal (in Screening History) it is that ''any confirmation that life con- tinues after death has an appeal to almost everyone except enlightened Buddhists. No one wants to be extinct.'' But extinction may be preferable to afterlife as a vampire in a Francis Ford Coppola movie. The latest, Bram Stoker's Dracula, tries to be for Dracula what Apocalypse Now was for Vietnam, and the Godfather trilogy for the Mafia: gigantism as an end in itself, lusher as a synonym for better. Perhaps I am being hopelessly old-fashioned but I don't trust people who can't tell the difference between lie and lay as far as I can throw up. In this movie, we keep hearing ''lay down'' and ''lay back,'' and in the screenplay by James V. Hart (scenarist also of the hopeless Hook) we read: ''Panels pull apart to reveal Dracula laying in his 'day coma.''' Would you, mutatis mutandis, commission a score from a tone-deaf composer? If you lust for luxury, to be sure, Bram Stoker's Dracula, i.e., Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, may be your Dracula, too. But if you want a film that knows what it wants and goes about its business efficiently, don't touch this one with a ten-foot stake. Coppola has engaged the services of a talented jet-set crew. The Japanese designer Eiko Ishioka has dreamed up her most nightmarish costumes, the German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus has come up with his customary spellbinding images, and the Polish composer Wojciech Kilar (best known for his work for Wajda) has concocted music that is no joke. Countless craftsmen, technicians, and special-effects wizards -- and no fewer than three editors -- have contrib- uted their skills. The eye and the ear are dazzled, but the nose must be held. The movie may be faithful in its fashion-show fashion to Bram Stoker's fustian novel, but faithfulness is a virtue only if its object is deserving. The film does not know what it is doing. It tries to make Dracula as sym- pathetic as he is horrible, for which the genius of a Shakespeare would be required. It makes Mina, the lovable heroine, love Dracula more than she does Jonathan, her fiance, which does not make our hearts go out to her. It tries to give us the historic background of Dracula, the Rumanian des- pot Vlad the Impaler, but in a kind of foreshortening that turns history into a comic strip. The protagonist is allowed so many different shapes that we perceive him more as a quick-change artist than as a vampire. And Coppola and Hart do not know how to invest the preposterous with the slightest aura of plausibility. The film steals from all over. Its debt to Murnau's Nosferatu and Tay Garnett's Dracula is understandable, but must there also be cribbing from Cocteau's La Belle et la bete and Fellini's Casanova? I refer to the human arms as flambeaus, and to the twin-peaks sausage-roll hairdo for Dracula, which makes his head look impaled on the horns of a dilemma. But the worst theft may be replicating a dated novel about Victorian dread of sex- uality instead of imaginatively rethinking it along modern lines -- or, bet- ter yet, dropping it altogether. Gary Oldman, a fine actor, strives to play a thinking man's Dracula, but between that effort and the straining to sound Transylvanian, he ends up giving a performance so carefully calibrated as to lose all semblance of trash-movie spontaneity. As Doctor Van Helsing, Anthony Hopkins has an even harder time with his Dutch accent, and ends up merely peppering his lines with random jas. But what to do with a part that calls on him to answer Mina's anguished ''You want to dissect her?'' with a casual ''Not really; I just want to cut off her head and take out her heart''? Winona Ryder, as Mina, manages a better British accent than one might have ex- pected, and is very pretty except for her slightly batlike ears, which may explain her susceptibility to vampires. As Jonathan, Keanu Reeves looks befuddled, and delivers his lines in an electronically amplified whisper. Tom Waits, as Renfield, swallows various insects with real gusto, which may account for his patented growl as mere flies on the voice box. A young English actress, Sadie Frost, plays the campy role of Lucy rather too cloyingly, but with a persuasively bared left breast. Three in- ternational models play the brides of Dracula even more bared -- from fangs to (nearly) crotch -- and would do any burlesque house proud. Cop- pola indulges himself in any number of such fancy touches. Thus he makes Dracula wear contact lenses of various colors to match the degree of luridness of the situation; allows ''Dracula'' to be pronounced in three separate ways; and cuts whimsically from a stake being driven into some- one to someone eating steak, which makes the more sophisticated pun- sters in the audience squeal like a bunch of moon-mad paronomasiacs. Children looking for more wholesome fare can be safely directed to Alad- din, Disney's new feature-length cartoon. Something, however, seems to have gone out of animation, or else out of me, for it no longer thrills me. But I was surrounded by hordes of tots -- not to mention doting parents -- who appeared to be having a blue whale of a time. I mean, of course, the blue-whale-like Genie that dwarfs the rest of the cast as Robin Wil- liams's verbal excesses are devoutly given objective correlatives by the an- imation. Not actually having to see Williams is, of course, an asset, but, ideally, it should be possible to do away with hearing him, too. Williams's bloated blue-bottle Genie balloons all over the film, and who- ever relishes our own Robin Goodfellow should float as high as his effigy. Unfortunately, the lovable boy-thief Aladdin (spoken by Scott Weinger, sung by Brad Kane) and the spunky Princess Jasmine (voice: Linda Larkin; vocals: Lea Salonga) are of little interest, distinguished mostly by being the first cartoon hero and heroine sporting faintly Semitic noses. The songs, whether by the old team of Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman, or by the new combo of Menken and Tim Rice, are equally unremarkable. As usual, there are all kinds of kissable or hissable supporting charac- ters: the monkey (later turned elephant) Abu, the parrot Iago (sidekick to the villainous vizier Jaffar), the kindly Sultan (drolly voiced by Douglas Seale), and Jasmine's pet tiger, the pussycatty Rajah. Perhaps the best invention is the anthropoid Magic Carpet, which uses its tassels with a ''gestic'' eloquence that would have delighted Bertolt Brecht. Arguably the strangest film I've ever seen is Tous les Matins du monde, which won seven Cesars (French Oscars) in 1991, as well as other prizes, and turned all France baroque-happy. It is the fictionalized story of two real-life baroque musicians: Monsieur de Sainte Colombe, so reclusive that his first name remains unknown, and Marin Marais (1656 - 1728), whose viola da gamba gambols are much better known. The film is based on a novel by Pascal Quignard, who co-wrote the script with Alain Cor- neau, the director. Although Matins has a plot of sorts, it is mostly about playing the bass viol. The film flaunts almost continuous bass-viol playing, on the sound- track by one, two, or three instruments; on the screen by Sainte Colombe, his daughters Madeleine and Toinette, and Marin Marais in various com- binations. If in a moment of charity the bass viols stop their infernal scraping, the characters discuss bass-viol playing and musicianship in general ad nauseam. Let not Bill Buckley read this review, for I am about to confess that I know of no sounds less bearable than those of baroque music, unless it be baroque music played on one, two, or three bass viols, than which I can think of nothing more base and vile. Since the two-hour film seems to go on for centuries, I kept hoping we would get to Berlioz, where French music gets bearable, but no such luck. Jordi Savall and his consort of mu- sicians just kept fiddling away on the soundtrack; not since the unendura- bly 'umble Uriah Heep has there been such bowing and scraping. The story, or what passes for it, concerns Sainte Colombe's rude refusal to play for the king at court, and eventual ceasing to play even for his fel- low villagers. He now makes music only at home with his daughters. In the end, he has a cottage built on the grounds where he plays for no one but the ghost of his beloved dead wife, who sits there, untouchable but undeterred, raptly listening to him. Brash young Marais intrudes on the master's isolation and demands lessons; the contemptuous master listens to him and sneers, ''You make music; you are not a musician.'' But with support from the sex-starved daughters, Marin gets reluctantly taken on as a pupil by Papa, and taken into her bed by Madeleine, the elder sister. In due time, however, nothing can keep the virtuosic Marais from aban- doning Madeleine and artistic purity (''Life, to be sweet, must be cruel!'') and hotfingering it to Versailles to become Musician Ordinary to the King's Chamber and, later on, time beater (there were no conductors yet) to the Paris Opera. Still, for three years running, he keeps riding back clandestinely every night to glue his ear to the master's cabin in the hope of overhearing his secret. (Earlier, he and Madeleine used to hide in a ditch under the cabin, listening, but were discovered by Papa and chased away.) When he comes upon Sainte Colombe dying, Marais is let in for a final debate about music and a last session of battling bass viols. But no summary can do justice to the absurdity of the film, with its al- ternating dawdlings and lurchings forward, static camera setups, hope- lessly arty visual compositions, and sublimely artsy-fartsy dialogue. Yet it exercises a horrible fascination, like watching midgets playing basket- ball or listening to stutterers discussing Wittgenstein. Any moment, you feel, you might lapse into helpless giggles or a rampaging rage. But you end up just sitting there, as if suspended by your disbelief, anaesthetized by your incredulity at such toweringly arrogant kitsch. If hokum has a stratosphere, you are in it. Jean-Pierre Marielle is a marvelously sourpussy Sainte Colombe of whom you can easily believe that he would punitively lock his daughters into the cellar and forget them there -- the baroque precursor of Home Alone. No less superb is Anne Brochet as Madeleine, the jolie laide, love- starved virgin who falls hard for young Marin, and, ditched, dies linger- ingly of accumulated bitterness. Mlle Brochet in a nightgown ugly enough to become her shroud, and tossing about and out of her sickbed as she lets the camera scan her ravaged-looking legs and pudenda, offers a vision of spurned femininity powerful enough to make watching her an almost guilty pleasure. As young Marin, Guillaume Depardieu seems quite untalented, but wonderfully doltish and loutish. Papa Gerard, as the aging -- bloated, ber- ibboned, bedizened -- Marais, looking in a peruke like a mastiff masquer- ading as a poodle, is at least more credible here than as Columbus else- where. Yves Angelo's cinematography and Alain Corneau's direction are appropriately stilted and emphatic, but the English subtitles try to jazz up things by translating the decorous sexe (penis) as prick. It doesn't work; baroque will not be jazzed up. ******************************************************************** THEATER Crank It Up DAVID KLINGHOFFER Mr. Klinghoffer is NR's associate literary editor. WITH THEIR calls for ever more public money and their equally insistent denials that any disease matters as much as their own, AIDS activists have done their best to deter sympathy. So much so that to find one of them worthy of affection and admiration comes as a shock. Larry Kramer helped found the quasi-terrorist ACT-UP -- which makes sense, terrorism being an appropriate response to ''genocide,'' which is what he says the (pre-Clinton) Federal Government has waged against homosexuals. He is also a playwright, novelist, and screenwriter who, for all his experience creating dramas, has refused to admit there is such a thing in human life as tragedy. AIDS is no tragedy, according to Kramer. It is, instead, an entirely preventable phenomenon, the outcome of bu- reaucratic ineptitude and hostility on the part of heterosexual health offi- cials -- ''genocide.'' Says Ned Weeks, the obnoxious autobiographical hero of Kramer's two AIDS plays: ''What do you do when you're dying from a disease you need not be dying from?'' And yet it's hard to watch Kramer's newest AIDS play, The Destiny of Me, at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on (where else?) Christopher Street, and come away without warm feelings for the guy. A writer for the Village Voice recently visited Kramer at his apartment in Greenwich Village and pronounced him ''adorable,'' in a fuzzy beard and oversized sweater. I wouldn't go that far. Both The Destiny of Me and The Normal Heart, his previous AIDS play, along with Faggots, his novel, take Kramer's own life as their primary text. In Heart (1985), Ned Weeks is a writer who, confronted with the early blossoming of AIDS among several friends and lovers, turns activist and inaugurates an unnamed AIDS-fighting group. By the time of Des- tiny, Ned has himself become a host to the HIV virus -- as, in real life, has Kramer. The play opens to find Ned unpacking his bags for a stay at the National Institutes of Health, where he greets the chief doctor with the demand, ''How long can you keep me alive?'' In three acts, scenes from Ned's childhood and youth are played out, items of furniture from his old bedroom, family room, and college dorm sliding elegantly out through openings in the white-tiled hospital walls. The seeds of family drama have been lifted from Faggots (1978). There as here, the mother of the Larry Kramer stand-in character is an over- bearing woman, physically large and emotionally smothering; the father, an embittered man who feels his Yale education entitled him to a better life than the one, as a minor government functionary, he actually leads. In Destiny the couple are acted, by Piper Laurie and David Spielberg, con- vincingly enough to make you cringe. As a younger Ned, John Cameron Mitchell looks a little like Juliette Lewis (Woody Allen's love interest in Husbands and Wives). Though Mitchell is effective as a foil to Ned's parents -- cowering in the presence of Ned's dad, looking rightfully disturbed as he complains to his mom about the way her nightgown exposes too much of her bosom -- it's Jon- athan Hadary, as the adult and hospitalized Ned, who really represents Larry Kramer and captures all his charms. Ned, like Kramer, is a ranter. But he differs from the usual run of rant- ing AIDS activists in the focused and entirely straightforward quality of his anger. When ACT-UP (from which Kramer has since dissociated him- self) acts up, part of the aim is to secure money and attention. Another part is to secure society-wide approval of the gay lifestyle and all it en- tails. That's why the Catholic Church, with no hand at all in medical re- search, has inspired such fury. Among AIDS activists, perhaps more ur- gently desired than a cure for AIDS is a cure for their own guilt. The anger of Larry Kramer, on the other hand, is no masquerade. Ned rails at his doctor, Tony Della Vida (Bruce McCarty); calls the National Institutes of Health the ''National Institute of Quacks''; and has nothing but contempt for the hundreds of researchers currently attempting to fig- ure out what makes AIDS tick. There is something, not adorable, but lov- able in this. His is the lovability of a champion crank: single-minded, irra- tional, 100 per cent sincere. Even as Dr. Della Vida works tirelessly to pro- tect Ned's health, Ned posts a sign on his wall: ''Tony, You Are Murdering Us.'' Jonathan Hadary plays the role with a combination of cheerfulness and disgust in his voice that makes you feel as if you've spent an evening with Larry Kramer himself. As Kramer has made clear in his previous work, he has no great inter- est in forcing the nation to endorse the habits of homosexuals. Faggots satirized the world of bathhouses and Fire Island beach cottages, a world where grown-up males go by irritating diminutives such as Derry, Dinky, and Mikie. Kramer found the scene at once hilarious and contemptible. He also found it deeply depressing that, as Ned Weeks puts it in The Normal Heart, ''All we've created is generations of guys who can't deal with each other as anything but erections.'' Or, as Ned asks in The Destiny of Me, ''Doesn't having so much sex make love impossible?'' For years Kramer has been asking whether gay men should be having sex with each other at all. That they should not is the inevitable message of both The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me, making Kramer an ob- ject of ambivalence among gays. At a tenth-anniversary smash for Gay Men's Health Crisis (another Kramer creation) at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, he got up to speak and ended up denouncing practically everyone present. And yet he has failed so far to win the attention he de- serves from his (unlikely, and to him probably distasteful) allies on the Right. Here is an open homosexual and enemy of euphemisms who prefers the term ''faggot'' to ''gay'' because of its ''punch, bite, a no-nonsense, chin-out assertiveness.'' A man of genuine seriousness, he wants to know (in Heart), when it comes to fighting any threat to human life, whether there aren't ''moral obligations, moral commandments to try everything possi- ble.'' The other day we received here at NR a copy of the new, updated edition of The Joy of Gay Sex (HarperCollins). The volume includes sec- tions on sadomasochism, sex with animals, and sex with children. Against such a moral landscape Larry Kramer absolutely towers. There is no denying that, as an artist, Kramer can be crude. His charac- ters tend to launch into paragraphs of prose better suited to the letters section of the New York Times. The power of his conviction, though, makes up for this lack of artfulness. The Destiny of Me is propaganda, but propaganda of a type that leaves you feeling as if you've been punched in the gut. You don't have to believe what Larry Kramer says about the Na- tional Institutes of Health. He deserves our respect, though, and certainly our prayers. ******************************************************************** ART American Graffiti JAMES GARDNER Mr. Gardner writes about art for NR and Commentary. JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT spent most of his career as a has-been -- a remarkable achievement if you consider that he was only 27 when he OD'd on heroin. In the decade prior to that, however, he had moved from the periphery of the art world to its very center before slipping, by swift degrees, into marginalized irrelevance. For most of the Eighties the only opinion you really needed if you wanted to sound informed about contem- porary painting (and who didn't?) was that Basquiat's latest productions lacked the spontaneity and freshness of his earlier works. His paintings continued to sell and he was still being written about, but the listless gaze of the art world was now looking for fresher meat. His overdose four years ago changed all that. Death had turned him into a finite commodity. Death might not alter the quality of his work, but it certainly affected their quantity. Suddenly the works of this all-too-pro- lific artist started to feel rare indeed. SoHo awoke to what had been lost. No more would the wild child of the art world be shooting up in Annina Nosei's basement. No more would he be spilling coffee on critics or vomit- ing into the latrines of the Mudd Club. There was the vague certitude that they, whoever they were, had done this to him, that he had been done in by a cold, uncaring world that hated youth and genius and all that. His death cried out for noisy, fulsome piaculation, and the stream of eulogies has been flowing ever since. The present retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum is the final stage in the apotheosis of Jean-Michel Basquiat. With this exhibition he passes into the art-historical pantheon, from which eminence he need no longer abide the questions of a doubting public. The Whitney's large and pompous proceedings put the subject to bed with full honors in a catalogue tumid with footnotes and bibliographies and scholarly apparatus. Some idea of the objectivity of the essays will be suggested by Rene Ricard's ob- servation, on page 49, that ''[Basquiat] remains wrapped in the silent pur- ple toga of Immortality.'' Basquiat surfed to prominence on the neo-Expressionist wave that marked the Eighties' reaction against the cool, rarefied conceptualism of the Seventies. His was an art of anger and rebellion, we were told, of graf- fiti images and street slang. Everything about this art was designed to keep you guessing, to keep you hoping, and sometimes believing, that you were seeing more than you really were seeing. Basquiat was anomaly made flesh: a graffiti artist fully aware of the European avant garde, a defacer of public property who had attended a private school, a formalist who raised the banner of social protest, a gritty black presence in the con- spicuously white world of SoHo. It was this enigmatic lack of focus that lent him, while he lived, the semblance of something more than ever met the eye. In an early work like Aaron 1, depicting a brutally crude male head surrounded by childish ren- derings of cars, one finds the crazed and jagged Crayola scribblings of Cy Twombly allied to Francis Bacon's perspectives and the colorism of Jasper Johns. A later work like Philistines, whose title of course is ironic, depicts three spikily abstracted skeletons whose manic gaze confronts the viewer with the ghosts of Jean Dubuffet and the late Picasso. The quite pleasant L.A. Painting (1982), with its cinemascopic expanse of swimming pool blue and tawny yellow, recalls any number of Color Field abstractionists from the Fifties and early Sixties. To enhance this formal weightiness, in al- most all of Basquiat's paintings, the viewer is given a lot to read, discon- nected words and phrases like ''Gangsterism,'' ''Colonization: Part Two in a Series,'' ''Asecticism'' [sic], and ''Sugar Coated Corn Puffs.'' If you find yourself asking what all of this is supposed to mean, you are probably temperamentally unsuited to the enjoyment of his art. I have been returning periodically to Basquiat for close to ten years, each time hoping to see some point in him that others saw but that had eluded me. I hereby renounce the effort. Surely there are things in the Whitney retrospective which may in part be approved. In principle, there is nothing wrong with the formal premises of these paintings. Even if they cannot survive comparison with the works from which they filch their pic- torial underpinnings, at least they can be judged by the same criteria of composition, color, and drawing. Given the present affection for floating basketballs and burping cathode ray tubes, this seems positively reaction- ary. But in truth Basquiat's paintings are a tangle of competing forms of mediocrity. In some paintings the colors work well, in others they collapse into complete arbitrariness. The same could be said for the draftsmanship and composition. In no one work do all the elements effortlessly come to- gether. This is why Basquiat never rises to equality with any of the sources of his inspiration. The appeal of Basquiat's paintings lies elsewhere. Like so much that be- comes fashionable, this art began to appeal through its newness, through the crisp acidity of its acrylic, through the manifest fact of its bigness. Soon it was being exhibited in the right museums and the right galleries and the right living rooms in New York and L.A. and Cologne, until it started to seem a classic of its kind, inscrutable, definitive unto itself. And that is how things stand now. Given all the hype and all the fluid capital that have been poured into these paintings, we can confidently predict that they will not be sinking soon into that oblivion to which they are ul- timately condemned. ******************************************************************** Nofziger, by Lyn Nofziger (Regnery Gateway, 358 pp., $21.95) WRONG TITLE. This intensely personal memoir should have been called Pure Nofziger. These are the chatty, no-bark ramblings of the legendary Franklyn C. Nofziger as he travels, with Ronald Reagan and the conserva- tive movement, from the outhouse to the White House. Nofziger spins yarns, settles score after score, and, best of all, opens old wounds. The feuds with Nancy (true, but overstated), the homosexual ring in the gover- nor's office (yep, but Kemp wasn't part of it), the Kitchen Cabinet (yep, but Justin Dart wasn't part of it), Mike Deaver (the rarity, even in politics, who turned on both of his mentors, Meese and Clark), George Bush (in Reagan's eyes, he finally outgrew wimpdom), James A. Baker III -- well, we ought to save something, but just to get you started: Nofziger defines fratricide as Baker bagging a turkey. Verily, all the Washington Post Style section's open questions are herein resolved. In other words, a great read, and recommended as a companion volume to Ed Meese's all-but-offi- cial account of the Reagan years. These two books will stand as the case for the defense, at least until the Morgan biography appears, and possibly beyond. -- NEAL B. FREEMAN The Rebirth of the West: The Americanization of the Democratic World, by Peter Duignan and Lewis Gann (Blackwell, 733 pp., $40) IN 1945 Western intellectuals would have regarded as lunacy the notion that Europe would soon be wealthier by far than it had ever been before. They were aghast when the Old World Americanized itself and began to rival America in its prosperity. The tale of Europe's rise from the ashes has been told many times, but never as comprehensively as by Duignan and Gann. The authors show that the rebirth of the West was due little if at all to government programs, but rather to the infusion of American attitudes into a European population which war had cleansed of illusion, liberated from dysfunctional elites, and wedded to common sense. The book traces the immediate effects of World War II on politics, economics, society, and culture. It deals in facts and illustrative anecdotes, showing the psychological changes wrought by American notions of equality and meritocracy, by American optimism, and by such material examples of Americanization as flush toilets. Similarly it shows how the growth of bu- reaucracy threatens to choke Europe's rebirth. Written in the crisp, de- clarative English of Macaulay, this book is essential for understanding the mess that Europe has lately become. -- ANGELO M. CODEVILLA Jungle in Black, by Steve Maguire (Bantam, 288 pp., $4.95) THERE HAVE BEEN so many books written about the Vietnam War that one fears another can only lead to oversaturation. What sets Jungle in Black apart, however, is its tone and theme, which are not anti-American. Steve Maguire paints the war in Southeast Asia in all its true horror and brutality, but does so with respect -- the weird sort of respect all wars and their veterans deserve. The author, who commanded the 9th Infantry Di- vision battalion in the Mekong Delta, was blinded for life by a Vietcong landmine. Jungle in Black tells the story of how he put his life back to- gether in a country that has shunned any respectful memory of the war and those who fought it. And to his surprise, he finds himself a better and happier man because of his handicap. The book of course is also about courage and honor, duty and sacrifice. It is a true story with all the drama, character sketches, and human emotion of fiction. -- GEOFFREY MORRIS Hemingway: A Life without Consequences, by James R. Mellow (Hough- ton Mifflin, 704 pp., $30) EVERYBODY WHO knew him should write his own biography of Hem- ingway -- and many have. This one is mistitled: ''A Life without Conse- quences.'' Mellow calls Hemingway a creative genius and implies that he was our greatest novelist; but every one of his books explored a different phase of his life. The biography I would write, if I were so foolish, would not be the one Mellow writes. The Hemingway he depicts is opportunistic, mean-spirited, publicity-mad, bitchy, envious, and cruel. Mostly that is what you find in the letters, as more and more become accessible. The Hemingway I knew was humble, generous, brave, self-mocking, kind. That one is there too, but harder to find, the novelist not being given to self-scrutiny or self-pity. What I have written about that second Hemingway has been published, but it is not what the biographers are looking for. Will the whole Hemingway ever be captured between two covers? -- SELDEN RODMAN This article is copyright 1992 National Review. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM