March-April 1999:
Thinking About David's Retirement
David McReynolds: Socialist Peacemaker, by Paul Buhle
Thinking About Retirement, by David McReynolds
Activist News: Student Sit-Ins, Jill Boskey
WRL News: NC Lovefest, New Locals, DWOP Lives
Activist Reviews (Grace Paley; Johnny Got His Gun)
Homepages:
War Resisters League
Nonviolent Activist
Activist Reviews
Pieces of Grace
Just As I Thought, by Grace Paley
Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1999,
336 pages, $14.35 paper, $24.00 hardcover
Reviewed by Judith Mahoney Pasternak
We're born with a sense of wonder, the object of which is the world around us. Living uses it up for most of us, and we turn, in time, to romance, heroes, drink or drugs or visions of Utopia, looking for the magic of childhood.
But for Grace Paley, the wonder has never palled. This grandmother, this chronicler of ordinary lives, still gazes, wide-eyed, at sky, trees, parks, at people, at politics. "What you do when you write is, you try to illuminate what's hidden-you pick up a rock and shine a light under it, saying, 'Oh, see this life!,'" she said in an interview a few years ago. Here, in the first collection of her nonfiction (with a few pieces of short fiction and poems thrown in), are some fifty rays of vintage Paley illumination, written over the last four decades. Just As I Thought shines the author's own unique light on war and peace and nonviolent resistance, on writing (her own and that of other writers), on families (especially Russian-Jewish families), on watching her father get older and on getting older herself.
For those same four decades, Paley has been an activist as well as a writer, and almost always, whatever she is writing about, she is also writing about politics, about what is worth changing and resisting and about acts of resistance in this country in her lifetime. More than half of these pieces, in fact, are her accounts from the trenches: the long struggle against the war in Vietnam, the antinuclear and women's peace movements that grew out of that struggle, the resistance to the Gulf War.
Yet even at her most political, Paley is also, always, personal. Always, these articles and speeches and reports are about people first and last. In "Home," she writes about Vietnamese exiles longing for their green, green land; in "Conversations in Moscow," about Russian dissidents trying to be heard during an international peace conference; in "Cop Tales,"about police officers at U.S. street demonstrations, some of them sympathetic, others brutal. When she writes about the Seneca Women's Encampment for Peace and Justice, she writes about the women of the peace camp, but also about the people of the town of Waterloo, NY-both those who supported the camp and those who shouted "Lezzies go home!"
There are also more intimate pieces, including Paley's stories of growing up among socialist Russian Jewish immigrants and two poems about her father's old age. In this section, too, is "Traveling," a magical, moving account of Paley's first trip through the segregated South that reaches across time to see in an African-American baby on a bus the grandchild Paley will hold decades later. Since Paley has not yet attempted an autobiography or memoirs, Just As I Thought will have to stand in for one, at least for the time being.
Alas, however, the book badly needs annotation. The articles in it, written between 1955 and 1997, are reprinted just as they were published, often in such movement periodicals as WIN and Seven Days, magazines whose readers knew the ins and outs of the wars and struggles Paley was writing about. These many years later, even a reader who was around at the time may forget under whose auspices the Moscow Peace Conference of 1974 was held, a fact that is central-but not explicit-in "Conversations in Moscow." Few younger readers will know why Paley threw herself sobbing into the arms of Morton Sobell's mother when they met on the street. (Sobell was accused of espionage with Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1950; they were executed, he was sentenced to 30 years.)
The problem pervades Just As I Thought. The section called "A Few Reflections on Teaching and Writing" contains essays and appreciations of writers Isaac Babel, Kay Boyle, Donald Barthelme, Barbara Deming and others, all of are less than fully comprehensible without an intimate knowledge of the writers and their works.
On the other hand, the same section includes a wonderful essay from the mid-'60s on "The Value of Not Understanding Everything." In it, Paley advises writing students, "[I]n areas in which you are very smart, you might try writing history or criticism ... [but] where you are kind of dumb, write a story or a novel, depending on the depth and breadth of your dumbness." It's a lovely piece of advice, absolute Paley. Like everything else in this collection, it could have been written by no one else.
The editor of Nonviolent Activist, Judith Mahoney Pasternak has been writing about women and women's issues for almost three decades.
Revisiting
the Classics
Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo
Available
in a 1989 Bantam edition; 243 pages, paper, $6.99
Reviewed by Ethan Young
When I first read Johnny Got His Gun I was in high school. It was the peak of the Vietnam war, and Phil Ochs' song "I Ain't Marchin' Anymore" was all the convincing I needed to join the peace movement. But only the photos of napalmed children gave me any inkling of the real face of war, until Dalton Trumbo's Depression-era work upended my teenage dream world.
Trumbo sought to write an argument against war that would sink into our memories and never leave. He succeeded with me and with everyone I've met who read the novel. Like many other rich and affecting modern works, it was inspired by World War I, the war that launched revolutions and forever rusted the cast-iron fantasies of the gilded age.
But Johnny is distinguished from All Quiet on the Western Front or A Farewell to Arms in that it had the added historical edge provided by the experience of economic collapse following the postwar boom. Trumbo's war was not an abstraction, or simply a horrible experience, but an inseparable outgrowth of the capitalist system. And even in a time when "unbridled capitalism" is accepted as part of nature-like oxygen-and a sentiment like "war is bad" is seen as a cliche in some circles, the work still burns through the veil of everyday denial.
Johnny is the first-person narrative of a doughboy whose face, arms and legs were blown off at the front. The title is a response to the patriotic pop refrain of the war: "Johnny get your gun, get your gun, get your gun. ..." The Johnny in question was the product of an "age of innocence," a generation bred to live in ignorance of the bloodshed that lurked in the history of every secure little town and hamlet. Johnny was the healthy, idealistic young man ready to taste the world as only a full-fledged American boy could. The reader is witness to his unfolding realization of his condition as a "basket case" (as victims of such injuries were called). In the novel, as in life, the war rips Johnny to shreds and leaves him his memories, unanswerable questions and irremediable loneliness.
Trumbo's point could not be clearer: War dehumanizes. Specifically, it dehumanizes you. The point is made repeatedly, but always in a different way; the reader is challenged, even screamed at, but never lectured. The narrative's black humor is exemplified by the doughboy's memory of "Lazarus," the corpse of a German soldier behind British lines, who will not stay buried despite valiant efforts by the brass. Lazarus is the U.S. sense of war: he is supposed to be "over there," destroying some other people's lives. But here he is, his rot filling our nostrils, making us crazy as we try to pretend to ignore him. The comedy immediately shifts back into tragedy, not to make the reader suffer, but to create recognition of the psychosis involved in co-existing with war.
Johnny Got His Gun is not a wholeheartedly pacifist novel. Like many social protest works of the 30s, it ends with a call to arms against the masters of war: "If you tell us to make the world safe for democracy we will take you seriously and by god and by Christ we will make it so." The novel embodies the blunt, defiant anti-militarist spirit of Eugene Debs, Socialist Party writer Mary Marcy and Gen. Smedley ("War is a racket!") Butler, the much-decorated WWI general who later changed his mind about war. Shortly after the publication of Johnny Got His Gun, this spirit waned as support for the new war effort enveloped the majority of the Left. (In 1947, Trumbo would become one of the "Hollywood 10" who defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities and were jailed and blacklisted for their stand.)
Then a generation later, along with that spirit, the novel resurfaced unexpectedly. They keep each other alive. Trumbo, who died in 1976, would have appreciated how quickly the hoopla for the Gulf War evaporated. His book played a part in that. Watch for its rediscovery amidst the ground force deployments of the next administration.
Ethan Young is a writer and editor
in New York.
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