A Colossal Wreck (5 page)

July 5

I talked today to M. I. “Red” Beckman, who once wrote a little book,
The Church Deceived
, which contains anti-Semitic passages. A
reporter in the
Wall Street Journal
, Wade Lambert, charged that such writings by Beckman somehow compromised FIJA, of which he is an active member.

I talked with Beckman on the phone at some length. His central focus seemed to be the government’s abuse of power via the IRS, which he termed a “terrorist” organization. A Christian, he thinks all organized religions and governments use people ruthlessly. He says many adherents of Judaism are slaves of Satan, but he says the same of adherents to other religions, particularly those assenting to a 501(c)(3) relationship with the state. He was against the Vietnam War. He says the pendulum swung too far to the left and people like him are working to stop it swinging too far to the right. He says Hitler was a criminal, Reagan was a criminal. He thinks … But, so far as FIJA is concerned, what Beckman thinks and says is not the point. To denounce FIJA because Beckman supports jury nullification is like denouncing the Fifth Amendment because Communists used it in the ’50s.

All over America constituencies written off as hopelessly uneducable have been abandoned to their own resources to deal with American capital moving abroad. The “farm crisis,” “oil politics,” NAFTA, the IMF and the World Bank can produce simultaneously militias in America and Chiapas. The “left” should get off its high horse and re-examine the real-life grass-roots’ resourcefulness in America; to acknowledge that abandoned constituencies have fallen back on the Bill of Rights, and that this turns out to be a pretty good compass; and to think about joining in the defense of the jury.

July 12

The “shadowy one-world government” the militias worry about is the Fed and the big banks both here and abroad, plus the IMF and the World Bank and other multinational financial institutions reaching broad agreement on tight money and “favorable business conditions,” meaning enough unemployment to ensure that employers have the upper hand.

These days banker-bashing or Fed-bashing, which used to be a
decent national sport, is taken to be uncouth in respectable circles—as though one was somehow ranting about the Freemasons. Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, chairman of the House Banking Committee, recently suggested that such attacks were tantamount to anti-Semitism. So now it’s anti-Semitic to attack banks and bond houses?

When I lived in England back in the 1960s one could hear Prime Minister Harold Wilson denounce the “gnomes of Zurich” on an almost daily basis. He was talking about the international bankers who made life difficult for his Labour government. No one accused Wilson of being anti-Semitic. People knew he was talking about the behavior of bankers, not the behavior of Jews.

July 14

Dear Bruce,

Remember that fellow I warned you about from the
San Francisco Chronicle
? I think his name was Jerry Carroll (not Jon). Back at the end of the 1980s this Carroll invited me to have lunch at what he described as a “good place to eat.” This turned out to be one of the most expensive restaurants—The Campton Grill—in San Francisco. When the bill came he asked me to put up $50, on the grounds that he didn’t have enough money and the newspaper would never stand for it. Then, when he wrote up the interview, he derided me for eating in costly places.

I swore never to eat another lunch with an interviewer. Of course I forgot and agreed on a rendezvous with Jack Shafer, the new editor of the
San Francisco Weekly
. We had what I thought was a perfectly amiable lunch at a place of his choosing—pleasant and by no means pretentious—called George’s Global Kitchen, somewhere south of Market in San Francisco.

I knew almost from the moment I sat down that Shafer had already written most of the story in his head, that he’d figured out his angle and it didn’t much matter what I said. But everything passed off calmly enough and he even faxed me a friendly note a few days later saying he’d enjoyed it.

Then the actual piece comes through the fax machine from the
AVA [
Anderson Valley Advertiser
]. Here’s how it began: “If you’ve ever handled a venomous snake you already know what it’s like to chat with Alexander Cockburn.” (The piece, by the way, was headed “The Tale of an Asp.”) “Not just your average poisonous Marxist reptile, Cockburn is all grins and hisses and eye contact and bared Irish fangs as he chomps his soft-shell-crab sandwich at George’s Global Kitchen. It’s a giddy thrill to be inside the kill zone of the greatest living exponent of bilious journalism and in my reverie I ponder the original Irish diaspora in which St. Patrick chased the serpents from the island and for a moment fantasize that Cockburn himself is descended from a race of socialistic bogtrotting snake people who escaped Ireland to sting and paralyze capitalists such as myself …”

How can you win? I smile at the man and this becomes “all grins and hisses and eye contact.” Suppose I’d given him a more somber greeting. Then we’d have had “all sullen stares and shifty glances and pursed lips as he self-righteously declined all nourishment.”

July 19

The marketing director of Verso, my publisher, calls. It is Wednesday. He has in his hand the
New York Times Book Review
for the following Sunday. The
Book Review
goes out early to subscribers in the book trade.

He begins to read. I hear phrases like “self-proclaimed Leninist,” and await paragraphs about my addiction to Stalin, my forgiving posture toward the Purges, my determination to evict all Jews in Israel into the sea. This is, after all, the
New York Times
.

But no. It seems the reviewer, a fellow called Douglas Brinkley, billed as an historian at the University of New Orleans, actually likes my book,
The Golden Age Is in Us
.

“Whether journeying to Key West, Fla., Humboldt County, Calif., Ireland or Istanbul, Mr. Cockburn is a warrior/freethinker, armed with courage and gifted prose to cut down the hypocrisies of tyrants. He is a Marxist Mencken—a composite of comic-poet Andrei Condrescu (minus the Transylvanian sarcasm), the erudite Christopher Hitchens (minus the radical chic impulse) and the
gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson (minus the drugs, guns and rock-and-roll).”

The marketing director tells me this is worth 500 book sales. I think to myself maybe it’s worth another $5,000 on the next book contract.

By the last paragraph the review is calling me “a life-loving anarchist,” presumably having abandoned the self-proclaimed Leninism of the reviewer’s beginning. I’m a quick learner! “Still,” the review concludes, “many readers will be astonished to discover that the ‘irrelevant’ left still has much to offer as we search for a utopian resolution to your tangled social problems.
The Golden Age Is in Us
is a delightful reminder that the New Left, which blossomed in the 1960s, has not completely withered and died.”

Better than waking up in bed with a dead policeman or a wet umbrella, as my father used to say.

July 26

“When I began work on this biography, I intended it to be a very favorable portrait …” Thus Shelden, in the opening chapter of his new book,
Graham Greene
:
The Enemy Within
. Shelden goes on to say that examination of Greene disclosed unsavory aspects of his character. So he reversed track and wrote a character assassination.

This is an old rhetorical trick, in which the biographer sadly announces that in mid-investigation the scales fell from his eyes. In Shelden’s case the truth is more likely that with Greene dead and thus incapable of suing for libel, the time was ripe for a demolition job running counter to the official biography being slowly released in three volumes by Norman Sherry.

Shelden’s book is substantively thin and pretty silly. Poor Greene can’t do anything without being assailed for low motives and possible misbehavior. A trip to Africa in the company of his cousin Barbara adds up to inferences by Shelden about Greene’s conduct merely because the cousin wore shorts, thus displaying bare legs to her putatively ravenous relative who, as Shelden prissily emphasizes, had a wife and child back in England.

I have an interest in all this because my father, Claud, was a lifelong pal of Greene’s, going to the same school (of which the headmaster was Greene’s father, Charles) and sharing in many escapades into their twenties and beyond. In his introduction to my father’s final collection of his memoirs,
Claud Cockburn Sums Up
, Greene wrote, “If I were asked who are the greatest journalists of the twentieth century, my answer would be G. K. Chesterton and Claud Cockburn. Both are more than journalists: both produced at least one novel which will be rediscovered with delight, I believe, in every generation:
The Man Who Was Thursday
and
Ballantyne’s Folly
.” Knowing of this friendship, biographers would beat a path to my father’s door. I once heard a television interviewer solemnly ask him about Greene’s assertion that he—Graham that is—had been “dead drunk every day” of his first term at Oxford.

“Well, I didn’t notice,” my father replied.

“You mean, he wasn’t?”

“No, Greene is a very truthful man and if he said he was dead drunk every day, he was and the fact that I didn’t notice it must have meant I was equally drunk.”

The transcript of this conversation turns up in Sherry’s first volume, plus my father’s gloss to the assiduous biographer on what heavy drinking meant at Oxford in the mid-1920s.

“I got up fairly early, 8 a.m. I would then drink a large sherry glass of neat whiskey before breakfast and drank heavily throughout the day. I drank approximately a bottle and a half of whiskey every day, exclusive of wines and beers. God the amount of liquor one took on board! How the hell could I notice how much Greene had. I suppose I was two-thirds stewed the whole time. It seems to me I remembered everything—perfectly alert and so on. In those days it was alright.”

Evelyn Waugh, my father’s cousin and also at Oxford at that time, added helpfully that drinking is the “greatest thing Oxford has to teach.”

Shelden roots about, coming up with supposed dirt about Greene’s deviousness, penchant for dirty tricks and double crosses of a wife, mistresses and friends.

Under this sort of earnestly malicious scrutiny most people
wouldn’t look too good, and it takes an effort of will to turn aside from Shelden’s litany of presumptive encounters with women and young things of both sexes (scant evidence offered in the latter two instances) to remember that Greene essentially had three serious relationships with women in his life: his wife, Vivien; Catherine Walston, the American heiress with whom he had a tortured life in the ’40s and with whom he planned to have sexual congress behind every altar in Italy; and Yvonne Cloetta, in whose company he spent much of the last quarter century of his life. This is scarcely the helter-skelter progress of a committed Don Juan.

Greene’s Catholicism is another irresistible opportunity for biographers to turn out page after page on guilt, the bite of conscience, the nature of evil and so forth. My father regarded Greene’s conversion in a more mundane light: “I knew him before Vivien. Quite early on, Graham said to me that he had fallen madly in love with this girl, but she wouldn’t go to bed with him unless he married her. So I said, ‘Well, there are lots of other girls in the world, but still if that’s the way you feel, well go ahead and marry her. What difference does it make?’ And then he came back and said (this went on over quite a number of weeks), ‘The trouble is that she won’t marry me unless I become a Catholic.’ I said, ‘Why not? If you’re really so obsessed with this girl, you’ve got to get it out of your system.’ He was rather shocked, because he said, ‘You of all people, a noted atheist.’ I said, ‘Yes, because you’re the one that’s superstitious, because I don’t think it matters. If you worry about becoming a Catholic, it means you take it seriously, and you think there is something there.’ I said, ‘Go right ahead—take instruction or what ever balderdash they want you to go through, if you need this for your fuck, go ahead and do it, and as we both know the whole thing is a bloody nonsense. It’s like Central Africa—some witch doctor says you must do this before you can lay the girl.’ And then to my amazement the whole thing suddenly took off and became serious and he became a Catholic convert. So I felt perhaps I’d done the wrong thing.”

Greene wasn’t that complicated a fellow, though the biographers have a vested interest in making him so. He loved elaborate practical jokes and often these were designed to cock a snook at authority,
“throw grit in the State machinery,” as he once put it. What more estimable course for a writer?

August 9

The Unabomber got several thousand words of his prose published at the start of August in the
New York Times
and
Washington Post
. Price of his admission: Three murdered people, plus maimings, with threats of more to come. Of course you can find people with a much higher career body count—Henry Kissinger for example—in the Op-Ed columns. Bombing one’s way onto the front pages is usually the last recourse of a president heading down in the polls. At all events it’s not a practice to be encouraged.

September 23

Most of the time people don’t really read things, particularly opinion pieces by politicians. They see a couple of predictable phrases bowing and scraping at them, register a small blip on the brainscan and move on. I doubt whether anyone has ever read a piece by Henry Kissinger from start to finish. You see words like “resolve,” “statesmanship” and so forth and avert your eyes. The same is true of most TV punditry too.

When my father was working in the Berlin office of the London
Times
, back in the late 1920s, he became irritated by the complacent obtuseness of the bureau chief and put a satiric report from “Our Correspondent in Jerusalem” on his desk. “Small disposition here,” cabled the correspondent, “attach undue importance raised certain quarters result recent arrest and trial leading revolutionary agitator followed by what is known locally as ‘the Calvary incident.’ ” The piece was obviously based on an off-the-record interview with Pontius Pilate. The bureau chief glanced through the dispatch, saw all the usual phrases and passed it on to London, where only the vigilance of a telex operator prevented it from appearing in the
Times
the following morning.