But Enough About You: Essays (39 page)

No crop of Lincoln books would be complete without yet another version of the assassination. So comes Wilmot Dimwiddle’s expansive, five-volume
Sic Semper
.

Somewhat boiled down, Dimwiddle’s thesis is that Lincoln, bored “out of his gourd” by the play
Our American Cousin
, was scratching the back of his head with his own .44-caliber derringer when it went off accidentally. Dimwiddle asserts that John Wilkes Booth had snuck into Lincoln’s box to congratulate him personally on winning the war and freeing the slaves. When the gun went off, Booth’s “acting instincts spontaneously took hold of him, like a sudden fever.” Realizing this could be “the role of a lifetime,” he pulled out his knife, carved Major Rathbone “like a Thanksgiving turkey, and leapt onto the stage, spouting Latin.” Dimwiddle even goes so far as to allege that Booth, “an early proponent of Method Acting, broke his leg on purpose, knowing that this would give his performance extra authenticity.”

—
The Daily Beast
, February 2009

I first read
Our Man in Havana
in my teens and ever since have recalled it as being kind of a hoot: the hapless protagonist Wormold, recruited by the British Secret Service, sends London diagrams of the vacuum cleaners that he sells for a meager living, resulting in high-comic mayhem. Fun stuff.

So I was surprised, on returning to the novel after all these years, to find it rather darker than I had remembered. The basic premise remains hilarious, if perhaps less so in the era of “Curveball,” the supposed Iraqi intelligence “asset” who managed to convince our government that there were abundant Weapons of Mass Destruction to be found in Iraq.

The novel’s atmospherics are intense, the characters vividly morose or menacing. I dare you not to wince when Wormold’s only friend, the forlorn Dr. Hasselbacher, reveals what happened to him in the trenches in the First World War; or not to squirm when Captain Segura (nickname: “The Red Vulture”) explains the difference between the “torturable” and “untorturable” classes. So what I had remembered as comedy, one of Greene’s “entertainments,” turned out to be quite grim. When I came across Greene’s own description of the novel as “light-hearted comedy,” I wasn’t sure quite what to think, but then Greene himself remains a slippery character: you never quite know when he’s pulling your leg or up to mischief.

If
Our Man
seems darker now, it is almost eerily undated, no small compliment for a book first published in the waning years of the Eisenhower administration. In its adumbration of the coming conflict between the superpowers over Cuba, it was bizarrely prescient. Within three years of the book’s publication, the world was nearly turned to cinders because of missile silos planted amid the Cuban verdure. Not much comedy there.

Few novels become everyday phrases. “Catch-22” has entered the language to such an extent that one uses it all the time, usually to describe an encounter with some agency of municipal government. “Our Man in [blank]” is not quite as common, but one hears it often enough. When I worked at the White House, various people in our embassies were pointed out to me—wink, wink—as “Our Man in [Moscow, Paris, etc.].” It is also one of those rare novels that went on to become a movie, an opera,
and
a play. I’m surprised that my eighteen-year-old son isn’t playing an “Our Man in Havana” game on his Xbox.

If you’ve seen the movie, made only a year after the novel came out, you may find it impossible not to hear Alec Guinness’s voice rising up at you from the pages. Guinness’s quiet monotone is deceptive, for it contains a vast emotional diapason; it’s like listening to tapes of whale sounds, slowed down, and discovering that enormous vocabularies are being deployed. Guinness was as perfect a Jim Wormold as Michael Caine was a Thomas Fowler in the 2002 remake of
The Quiet American
: two of England’s finest actors in roles created by
England’s finest twentieth-century novelist (a distinction he shares with his fellow Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh).

For Americans, Greene remains problematic. To put it bluntly, he despised us.
Really
despised us. (As indeed did Waugh.) His anti-Americanism is muted here, but you can see the periscope poking through the surface. We might just as well relax and live with it. Ones doesn’t read Greene to have our sense of American exceptionalism validated. We read him because he was an incomparable writer who heard the beating of the human heart like few others, and because he was possessed of what Hemingway called the writer’s most indispensable tool, “a first-rate s— detector.” Fowler understood that America’s anti-Communist crusade in Vietnam was doomed from the start, and to boot, pernicious; in Havana, Wormold understands that America has thrown in on the wrong side. Within months of the publication of
Our Man
, the foul Batista regime and its Captain Seguras were casting off from the dock and headed to Miami in a flotilla that has held American electoral politics hostage ever since.

Toward the end of the novel, Wormold tells his secretary, Beatrice, “I don’t care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations. . . . I don’t think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren’t there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?” Fair question; still, I wonder what King Priam, whose kingdom was brought down over loyalty to love, might have to say.

Later Beatrice introduces the hoary old moral equivalence argument that we used to hear from the left during the Cold War: “But they [NATO, SEATO, and other international organizations] don’t mean any more to most of us than all the other letters, U.S.A. and U.S.S.R.”
All the other letters?
Really, Mr. Greene. Given his public record of discerning no moral difference between the United States and the nation that came up with the Gulag Archipelago, it’s no small leap to venture that Beatrice’s views are a proxy for the man who put these words in her mouth.

In real life, Greene notoriously defended Kim Philby, a traitor
of Judas Iscariot dimension. Greene’s championing of Fidel Castro also goes down the gullet hard. As I type these words, fifty-one years into the Castro dictatorship, the papers relate the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who starved himself in prison after seven years’ captivity for the crime of “disrespecting authority.” If Greene were alive today, he’d be cheering on Hugo Chavez, the latest minatory clown in the Tropic of Cancer.

But I come to praise, not to bury.
Our Man in Havana
is a great book: for its plot, its characters, and, despite my cavils, for its rendering of the uncomfortable moral ambiguities that it lays on the bar before us, along with the copious daiquiris. And—yes—for its humor, which if not exactly lightheartedly comic, tickles the funny bone deep within.

Wormold’s recruiter Hawthorne, played to tight-assed British perfection in the movie by Nöel Coward, provides him with a copy of
Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare
, for his code work. “It was the only book I could find in duplicate except
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
.” Back in London, Hawthorne’s superior at MI6 tells him that he has great expectations of Wormold: “I believe we may be on to something so big that the H-bomb will become a conventional weapon.”

“Is that desirable, sir?”

“Of course it’s desirable. Nobody worries about conventional weapons.”

This is comedy of a high order.

Finally, there’s the virtuosity of language, the hauntingly perfect phrasing. This is a book to be read slowly:

“He carried with him the breath of beaches and the leathery smell of a good club.”

“He had left his elegance behind in the Caribbean.”

“Captain Segura squeezed out a smile. It seemed to come from the wrong place like toothpaste when the tube splits.”

“The girl screamed but only in a tentative way.”

“The skyscrapers of the new town stood up ahead of them like icicles in the moonlight.”

“He found himself taking to truth like a tranquilizer.”

“A grey stone statue of Columbus stood outside the Cathedral
and looked as though it had been formed through the centuries under water, like a coral reef, by the action of insects.”

“Captain Segura gleamed. His leather gleamed, his buttons gleamed, and there was fresh pomade upon his hair. He was like a well-cared-for weapon.”

If you are holding this splendid new hand-bound edition of
Our Man
in your hands, it’s a fair bet that you are not reading it for the first time. So fix yourself a daiquiri and turn now to Chapter One and immerse yourself in Greeneland and the ever-vivid world of Wormold and his daughter, Milly, Dr. Hasselbacher, Hawthorne, and Captain Segura. But for heaven’s sake, don’t spill the daiquiri on it.

—Introduction to the Arion Press edition of the novel, 2007

“The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.”

A dollar to the first reader who can identify who said that. Christopher Hitchens? Bill Maher? The editor of
Pravda
?

No, Peggy Noonan, in her otherwise fawning 1990 memoir as one of Reagan’s speechwriters. That was then. Now it’s 2011, centennial of the Great Man’s birth. In recent years a profusion of books have put paid to the notion that our fortieth president was an “amiable dunce,” in the phrase of the late Clark Clifford (as in Washington “Wise Man” and disgraced BCCI bank scandal player).

At the top of this syllabus would be the somewhat verbosely
titled:
Reagan, in His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America
(2001). Then comes
The Age of Reagan
, by Steven Hayward, and the almost identically titled
The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008
, by the left-leaning but admiring Sean Wilentz. And most recently,
The Reagan Diaries
, edited by the historian Douglas Brinkley.

Here, again, comes the indefatigable Brinkley with this fascinating addition to the No-Dummy-He subgenre of Reaganalia. As he writes in his introduction,
The Notes
consists of the collection of four-by-six-inch index cards Reagan kept over the years—his chrestomathy, or commonplace book of wit and wisdom, all of which were written in his “impeccable” scrawl. Brinkley speculates that Reagan began them between 1954 and 1962, when he traveled around the country as spokesman for General Electric, and kept amassing them after he became in 1981 the most powerful man in the world. Thankfully, the Iran-contra counsel Lawrence Walsh didn’t know of their existence or he’d have subpoenaed them and they’d be still languishing in some government warehouse like the one in the final scene of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
.

Instead, amazingly, they languished for years in a cardboard box at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. They were discovered only during a renovation leading up to this year’s centennial. The library staff calls them “The Rosetta Stone,” but their discovery puts me more in mind of the archaeologist Howard Carter’s utterance in 1922, upon first peering into King Tut’s tomb. Asked what he saw inside, he replied, “Wonderful things.”

Indeed, these notes—which make up Reagan’s own personal
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
—are wonderful things. Witticisms, observations, apothegms, newspaper cuttings, statistics,
bon mots
—as well as some
mal mots
—from Aristophanes to Mao. In between there’s a lot of Jefferson, a lot of Lincoln, FDR, and a French politician of the 1840s whom I’d never heard of, by the name of Claude-Frédéric Batiat. Also Hilaire Belloc, Whittaker Chambers, Abba Eban, Ho Chi Minh, Ibn Khaldoun (about whom, more in a moment), Lenin, Ortega y Gassett, Pascal, Seneca, and Sun Tzu. For a dunce, Reagan was a voracious pack rat of wisdom in the pre-Google era.

These notes provide a portal into the—dare one say, fertile?—mind of one of the late-twentieth-century’s great leaders. Two big themes run through the notes: (a) the imperilment of individual liberty by growth of the state; and (b) the oppressive taxation that Leviathan demands. As Barry Goldwater once put it—though the quote is strangely not included here—“A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.”

Yet for a so-called right-wing ideologue, Reagan seems to have gotten his inspiration from a diversity of sources:

“Every time we that we try to lift a problem to the govt., to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of the people.” Irving Kristol? Actually, JFK.

“Strike for the jugular. Reduce taxes
and spending
. Keep govt. poor and remain free.” Jack Kemp? No, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

I’d bet an (aftertax) dollar you won’t guess the provenance of this one:

“At the beginning of the dynasty taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the Dynasty taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments.” Give up? Who knew that Ibn Khaldoun, identified by the Gipper as “Moslem Phil. 14th Century,” anticipated the Laffer Curve by seven hundred years? Not me.

Reagan’s delight in humor and wit, never really in doubt even among his detractors, is on full display here. The section titled “Humor” is indeed the book’s longest. My favorite is the “Chinese Proverb, 400 B.C.” that says, “When the music of a nation becomes fast, wild & discordant it shows the nation is in confusion.” Did Reagan come across this one after his first exposure to Janis Joplin? Or the dulcet arpeggios of Meat Loaf’s singing “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”?

Alas, Brinkley doesn’t tell us when Reagan found this one, or for that matter, any of the notes. In fairness, it’s possible there was no way of knowing, but even so,
The Notes
is somewhat lacking in footnotes. There’s a glossary at the back that will tell you who Ibn Khaldoun was. (Answer: a forefather of social science in the East, and as the Gipper noted, something of a philosopher.) Or Claude-Frédéric Batiat. (An early economist known for his clever attacks on certain
state policies.) But many of the notes cry out for more notes, unless you already knew why Harrison Gray Otis of the
Los Angeles Times
circa 1910 was such a stinker. (It’s a long story.)