Robert Caro. The Years of Lyndon Johnson

“Though George Brown wasn’t surprised by Marsh’s offer, he was surprised by the response it received.  Johnson thanked Marsh, polite, ingratiating and deferential as he always was with the older man.  But he was also, Brown recalls, quite firm.  He would like to think the offer over, he said, but he felt almost certain he was going to have to decline with thanks.  I can’t be an oil man, he said; if the public knew I had oil interests, it would kill me politically.

“All that week, Lyndon Johnson considered the offer – in a setting that emphasized what he would be giving up if he declined it.  The Greenbrier [Hotel in the mountains of West Virginia] – with its immense, colonnaded main House rearing up, gleaming white, in the midst of 6,500 acres of lush lawns and serene gardens, its vast,  marble-floored ballroom in which guests danced under huge cut-glass chandeliers, its cupolaed Spring House, around which, every afternoon, chilled champagne was served at canopied tables, its arcade lined with expensive shops, its indoor swimming pool as big as a lake, its battalions of green-liveried servants, its fleet of limousines which met guests arriving at a nearby station in their private railroad cars – was, as Holiday magazine put it, ‘opulent America at its richest,’ the distillation of all that was available in the United States to the wealthy, and not to others.  As the three men lay every morning on their blanket, which had been spread on a slope in front of their accommodations – a row of white cottages, set away from the main building for privacy, which were the resort’s most expensive – Johnson discussed the offer with Brown, telling him details of his life he had often told him before:  about the terrible poverty of his youth, about his struggle to go to college – and about the fact (which, Brown felt, preyed constantly on his mind) that after three years in Congress, three years, moreover, in which he had accumulated, thanks to President Roosevelt’s friendship, far more than three years’ worth of power, he still had nothing – not a thousand dollars, he said – in the bank.  Again and again he spoke to Brown of his fear (a fear which, Brown believed, tormented him) of ending up like his father, who had also been an elected official – six times elected to the Texas State legislature – but had died penniless.  He talked repeatedly about his realization that a seat in Congress was no hedge against that fate; so many times since he had come to Washington, he said, he had seen former Congressmen, men who had once sat in the great Chamber as he was sitting now, but who had lost their seats – working in poorly paid or humiliating jobs.  Again and again, he harked back to one particular incident he could not get out of his mind:  while riding an elevator in the Capitol one day, he had struck up a conversation with the elevator operator – who had said that he had once been a Congressman, too.  He didn’t want to end up an elevator operator, Johnson said.  Accepting Marsh’s offer would free him from such fears forever – Brown could see that Johnson had not misunderstood the offer, that he was aware he had been offered great wealth.  But again and again Johnson returned to the statement he had made when Marsh had first made the offer:  “it would kill me politically.”

“George Brown had been working closely with Johnson for three years; Johnson’s initial nomination to congress, in 1937, had, in fact, been brought about to ensure an immensely complicated transaction with a very simple central point:  the firm in which George and his brother Herman were the principals – Brown & Root, Inc. – was building a dam near Austin under an unauthorized arrangement with the federal government, and it needed a Congressman who could get the arrangement authorized.  Johnson had succeeded in doing so – the Browns made millions of dollars from that federal contract – and ever since he had been trying to make them more, an effort that had recently been crowned with success by the award to Brown & Root of the contract for a gigantic United States Navy base at Corpus Christi.  Having worked with Johnson so long, Brown felt he knew him – and knew how important money was to him, how anxious he was to obtain it.  He sensed, moreover, that this anxiety was increasing, a belief nurtured not only by the growing intensity of Johnson’s pleas that the Browns find him a business of his own, but by a story circulating among Johnson’s intimates:  several months before, at a party, Johnson had introduced two men, and one of them had later purchased a piece of Austin real estate from the other.  The seller, a local businessman, had been astonished when the Congressman approached him one evening and asked for a ‘finder’s fee’ for the ‘role’ he had played in the transaction.  Telling Johnson that he hadn’t played any role beyond the social introduction, he had refused to give him anything, and had considered the matter closed; the transaction, he recalls, was small, and the finder’s fee would not have amounted to “more than a thousand dollars, if that.’  When, therefore, he opened the front door of his home at seven the next morning to pick up his newspaper, he was astonished to see his
Congressman sitting on the curb, waiting to ask him again for the money.  And when he again explained to Johnson that he wasn’t entitled to a fee, ‘Lyndon started – well, really, to beg me for it – and when I refused, I thought he was going to cry.’  Brown, knowing how desperate Johnson had recently been over a thousand dollars, was surprised to see him hesitating over three-quarters of a million.

“He was surprised also by Johnson’s reason for hesitating.  It would kill me politically – what ‘politically’ was Johnson talking about?  Until that week at the Greenbrier, Brown had thought he had measured Johnson’s political ambition – had measured it easily, he thought, for Johnson talked so incessantly about what he wanted out of politics.  He was always saying that he wanted to stay in Congress until a Senate seat opened up, and then run for the Senate.  Well, his congressional district was absolutely safe; being an oil man couldn‘t hurt him there.  And when he ran for the Senate, he would be running in Texas, and being an oil man wouldn’t hurt him in Texas.  For what office, then, would Johnson be ‘killed’ by being an ‘oil man’?

“Only when he asked himself that question, George Brown recalls, did he finally realize, after three years of intimate association with Lyndon Johnson, what Johnson really wanted.  And only when, at the end of that week, Johnson firmly refused Marsh’s offer did Brown realize how much Johnson wanted it.”  (Robert Caro, “Introduction” to The Path to Power (pp. xiv-xvi), Vol. 1 of The Years of Lyndon Johnson.)

“He had noticed something in the State Department briefing cards, he said.  ‘The people I talked to tonight, out of a hundred nations, there are only six of them that have an income of as much as eighty dollars a month.  We don’t really recognize how lucky and fortunate we are until something tragic like this happens to us.  Here is our President shot in the head and his wife holds his skull in her lap as they drive down the street.  Here is our Governor who looked around and said, “Oh, no, no, no,” and because he turned a bullet just missed his heart.  It went down through his lung into his leg and tore his left hand off.  And, then, yesterday, they take the law into their own hands.  We have to do something to stop that hate, and the way we have to do it is to meet the problem of injustice that exists in this land, meet the problem of inequality that exists in this land, meet the problem of poverty that exists in this land, and the unemployment that exists in this land.’” (Robert Caro, The Passage of Power, p. 420).

“The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act would not be Lyndon Johnson’s only victories in the fight for social justice.  Other bills passed during his Administration made strides toward ending discrimination in public accommodations, in education, employment, even in private housing.  Almost a century after Abraham Lincoln had freed black men and women from slavery, ‘black men and women – and Mexican-American men and women, and indeed most Americans of color – still did not enjoy many of the rights which America supposedly guaranteed its citizens,’ I have written.  ‘It was Lyndon Johnson who gave them those rights.’  Lincoln had been president during the nineteenth century.  During the twentieth century, of all of its seventeen American presidents, ‘Lyndon Baines Johnson was the greatest champion that black Americans and Mexican-Americans and indeed all Americans of color had in the White House, the greatest champion they had in all the halls of government.  With the single exception of Lincoln, he was the greatest champion with a white skin that they had in the history of the Republic.  He was to become the lawmaker for the poor and the downtrodden and the oppressed.  He was to be the bearer of at least a measure of social justice to those to whom social justice had so long been denied, the restorer of at least a measure of dignity to those who so desperately needed to be given some dignity, the redeemer of the promises made to them by America.’  ‘It is time … to write it in the books of law.’  By the time Lyndon Johnson left office, he had done a lot of writing in those books, had become, above all Presidents save Lincoln, the codifier of compassion, the President who, as I have said, ‘wrote mercy and justice into the statute books by which America was governed.’  And as president he had begun to do that writing – had taken a small but crucial, ineluctable, first step toward breaking the century-old barriers that, at the time he took office, still stood against civil rights on Capitol Hill – with that telephone call he had made to Representative Bolling on December 2, 1963; with that decision he had made, so early in his presidency, to support the discharge petition; with that decision he made, when he realized that only one lever was available to him, to lean into it with all his might.”  (Robert Caro, The Passage of Power, pp. 569-70)

(The word “magisterial” was surely invented to describe Robert Caro’s eloquent, monumental, and galvanizing account of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, 4 volumes, 3,388 pages, and 36 years in the making -- with one, or two, more volumes to go.  Having won the Pulitzer Prize for The Power Broker, about the New York urban planner and titan Robert Moses, Caro has continued his obsessive fascination with the nature and levers of power in this multi-volume biography of the 37^th President of the United States:  The Path to Power (1982), an account of the tall, awkward Johnson’s move from the hard-scrabble Texas hill country to the House of Congress, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award (Caro, not Johnson); Means of Ascent (1990), a gripping account of how Johnson stole his first Senate seat with an 87-vote margin, winning the same award again; Master of the Senate (2002), winner of Caro’s second Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Award, beginning with a 100-page account of the history of the Senate and telling the story of how Johnson became its youngest majority leader, turning a moribund institution into a force to be reckoned with, maneuvering to passage the first civil rights legislation since 1875; and, ten years later, The Passage of Power (2012), which, after describing Johnson’s wretched powerlessness as Vice President, while in the shadow of JFK, spends the second half of its 700 pages recording in riveting detail what it was that Johnson accomplished in the 47 days between JFK’s assassination and his State of the Union address the following January, achieving critical tax cut and civil rights legislation while “yanking the bit out of Congress’s teeth” (p. 601).

We despised him back then.  “Hey, Hey, LBJ!  How many kids did you kill today?!” chanted the protesters.  I still remember dancing, if not in the streets, alongside the freeway in Wisconsin or Minnesota, when my wife and I heard the incredible news, that Johnson had decided not to run for a second term in 1968.  So it has come as a real revelation to discover the shadows of light and dark, the streaks of ugliness and the wealth of compassion that made of him, finally, neither an ogre nor a hero, but a human being who used power ruthlessly, at times for his own sake, but at times as well for the sake of good.

“Caro has learned about Johnson’s rages, his ruthlessness, his lies, his bribes, his insecurities, his wheedling, his groveling, his bluster, his sycophancy,” writes Charles McGrath in a recent article in the New York Times Magazine entitled “Robert Caro is a Dinosaur,” but he also writes of “his charm, his kindness, his streak of compassion, his friends, his enemies, his girlfriends, his gofers and bagmen, his table manners, his drinking habits….”  “If Caro’s Moses is an operatic character – a city-transforming Faust,” McGrath concludes, “his Johnson is a Shakespearean one:  Richard, III, Lear, Iago and Cassio all rolled into one.  You practically feel Caro’s gorge rise when he describes how awful Johnson was in college, wheeling and dealing, blackmailing fellow students and sucking up to the faculty, or when he describes the vicious negative [Senate] campaign Johnson waged against Coke Stevenson.  But then a volume later, describing Johnson’s championing of civil rights legislation, he seems to warm to his subject all over again.”

Already widely acknowledged as the greatest political biography of the century, Robert Caro’s Years of Lyndon Johnson is simply magnificent – easily one of the half dozen greatest works that I have had the pleasure of reading.  The shadows of Vietnam loom ahead.)

H.W. Tilman. The Seven Mountain-Travel Books

“We argued and debated our future course of action with the earnestness due to its importance, and, like the tribe of whom Gibbon [in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire] writes, we took counsel together when drunk to give our resolutions fire and when sober to give them moderation.”  (Snow on the Equator, p. 97)

“At the height of the pilgrim season the scene in the one narrow street of Badrinath brings back memories of Kim.  Wealthy babus in ‘jhampans’, or dandies, carried by four sweating coolies, the more economically minded in long cylindrical baskets carried by only one; old men and women of all classes arriving on foot travel-stained and weary, clutching their pilgrim’s staff; all welcomed by a roll of drums nicely proportioned in length and loudness to the probable state of the pilgrim’s purse; naked fakirs smeared with ashes, long-haired saddhus, blind and deformed beggars thrusting their wooden bowls under the nose of every shopkeeper in the bazaar, getting here a little flour or a handful of rice, there some spices or salt, and nowhere a refusal; all these jostle each other in the narrow stone-flagged street between the open-fronted shops where yak-tails and Manchester cottons, musk and cheap photographs lie huddled together; and over all, aloof, watchful, stand the snows of Himachal where the gods live.”  (The Ascent of Nanda Devi, p. 171)

 “If bread is the staff of life, to the Turkoman melons are life itself, and here they are in prodigious quantity and variety – green and golden spheres, sliced half-moons of cream and scarlet – major planets among a galaxy of peaches, nectarines, apricots, rosy deceitful pomegranates, and white and purple grapes.  Against this rich back-cloth are set piles of more homely massive onions, mountains of grated onion, stately leeks, radishes as big as turnips, pyramids of eggs, hills of rice, and towers of bread.”  (Two Mountains and a River, p. 611)

“Although at Shambu-nath a smaller but similar stupa, with the same grave, all-seeing eyes, occupies a commanding position, its effect is less striking.  The eyes are too far above the earth-bound mortals of the valley, so that their searching admonitory gaze is directed to the four quarters in vain.  I felt I could live in the village at the foot of Shabu-nath and sin at ease.  The temple stands a mile west of Katmandu on a wooded hill which is climbed by several hundreds of stone steps.  The whole hill, the temple itself, and the neighbouring houses of its attendants, are the home and playground of a far too numerous colony of Rhesus monkeys, which pay even less attention than their human brothers to the unspoken question of those eyes.  Instead of studying the medley of architecture, I stood fascinated by the antics of these amusing but disgusting beasts as they clambered upon and defiled the dieties, and played hide-and-seek among the prayer wheels.  As a climber I could only regret that if we are descended from apes, monkeys, chimpanzees, gorillas, or a blend of all four, we have not inherited their prehensile toes.  I stood spellbound by the ease with which they climbed the holdless walls of the adjacent houses to poke their long arms through the carefully barred windows reaching for anything within.  Living in one of those houses must be an everlasting nightmare, what with the eyes of the stupa just about level with the upper window, the sad, unblinking eyes of some damned monkey on the sill outside, and the hairy arms groping within.”  (Nepal Himalaya, pp. 757-58)

“That the majority of our porters were women would surprise no one who had studied life in the Langtang.  In addition to their household work the women do the digging, the weeding, carry much to the fields, and harvest the crop.  Except for a few who are up the hill tending the cattle, the men sit about and weave mats.  In a more perfect world, no doubt, they will just sit.”  (Nepal Himalaya p. 775)

“At Calcutta I had made some enquiries as to whether a war which had seen the invention of atomic bombs and self-heating soups had not also given birth to something of more general benefit such as a leech repellent.  My surmise was correct.”  (Nepal Himalaya p. 778)

 “Poised high above the Naur river, the village [of Naurgaon] surprised us by its comfortable and prosperous air.  The houses, as usual, appeared to grow out of the brown, stony hillside, while below lay terrace upon terrace of young barley of the liveliest green where a swarm of women and children were busy weeding.  We camped short of the village by a brook, its grassy bank fragrant with thyme, where the headman soon found us.  This man, whose every word confirmed the shiftiness of his eyes, amused me by his anxiety to play down the obvious well-being of his village.  Like Justice Shallow, fearing a call was about to be made upon it, he deprecated his goodly heritage: ‘Barren, barren, barren; beggars all, beggars all, Sir John.’”  (Nepal Himalaya p. 843; quoting Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV 5.3)

“This little green patch betokening human activity shone like a good deed in a naughty world – a word of shocking sterility, harsh colour and violent shapes.”  (Nepal Himalaya p. 854; quoting Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice 5.1)

(Having survived WWI, H.W. “Bill” Tilman joined a number of fellow refugees, including George Mallory, Eric Shipton, and Robert Graves, in spending much of the remainder of their lives travelling abroad – as far from home as possible.  Tilman started out growing coffee in Kenya and climbing pretty much everything on the continent, after which he bicycled across the waist of Africa in order to catch a freighter back home  (Snow on the Equator [1937]).  In the 1930s he joined several Himalayan expeditions, penetrating the Nanda Devi sanctuary with Eric Shipton in 1934; two years later leading an Anglo-American expedition up the 25,643 ft Nanda Devi – the tallest mountain to be climbed by man until 1950 (The Ascent of Nanda Devi [1937]), and reconnoitering Mount Everest, reaching 27,200 feet without oxygen in 1938.  During WWII, after action in North Africa and Dunkirk, he was dropped behind enemy lines to fight with Albanian and Italian partisans, which naturally provided him with opportunities to climb in the Italian Alps as well (When Men and Mountains Meet [1946]).  After the war, he took up sailing, seeking out still more distant mountains, all of which is accounted for in a second massive anthology called Eight Sailing/Mountain-Exploration Books.  He died at sea en route to the Falklands, his ship foundering with all hands in 1977.

Tilman took good care of me while I went trekking in Nepal during the Fall of 2011.  In an age of Goretex, nylon tents, freeze-dried dinners, ultra-light headlamps, “smart wool,” GPS devices, cell phones, and more, it’s sobering and wonderful to imagine a rag-tag bunch of climbers wandering on hobnailed boots through the unmapped Himalayas for months on end, surviving pretty much on pemmican, sardines, courage, and imagination.  He writes wonderfully, quoting Gibbon, Shakespeare, Johnson and others with ease, drawing such exquisite, detailed pictures of people, places, and hair-raising adventures, that you cannot help but sweat and shiver in his company, sharing his exhaustion and exhilaration at every turn.  I held a first edition of The Ascent of Nanda Devi in my hands at Pilgrim Book House in Katmandu, but I couldn’t afford it.  I’ve been kicking myself ever since.

But I’ll let Jim Perrin -- an English rock climber and travel writer, author of the superbly written, eccentric Travels with the Flea, and author as well of the introduction to this anthology -- have the last word, because his comments on the effects of WWI on Tilman and his generation are memorable:

“The general run of his humour is towards irony, and Tilman’s irony, which frequently has about it something of a Switftian saeva indignatio, is a way of coping with a world the moral stability of which was thoroughly eroded throughout his lifetime, and shattered by the effects and implications of two world wars.

            Tilman went to war a month before his eighteenth birthday.  He was wounded in the thigh shortly afterwards, but was back in action in time to see the start of the Battle of the Somme.  In the next six months over a million soldiers were to die, 420,000 of them British, and dying as much through the fault of a cold-eyed, antediluvian British High Command as by German machine-gun fire.  Tilman was a first-hand witness to this slaughter channelled between two bitter winters.  Thirty years after the event, he wrote:

… after the first war, when one took stock, shame mingled with satisfaction at finding oneself still alive.  One felt a bit like the Ancient Mariner; so many better men, a few of them friends, were dead:

            And a thousand thousand slimy things

            Lived on; and so did I….

            The experience of the Great War coloured Tilman’s later attitude in two important ways.  Firstly, it put him out of all patience with whiners, complainers, and malingerers – how could a man who had seen death and suffering at first hand so early in his life have fellow-feeling for such people?  Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it put him out of all patience with England.  The dreams of soldiers who spent their days in muddy trenches, waterlogged craters or out in the winter snow, are probably accurately expressed in Max Plowman’s poem When It’s Over, which I heard Tilman quote on several occasions.  There are the aspirations of the lotus-eater:

            I shall lie on the beach

            Of a shore where the rippling waves just sigh,

            And listen and dream and sleep and die.

Or, more constructively, those of the soldier who will

            … get out and across the sea,

            Where land’s cheap, and a man can thrive.

            Which is what Tilman did in 1919, joining that astonishing exodus from England which was to make travel-writing the characteristic literary genre of the twenties and thirties.”  (Jim Perrin, “Introduction” to H.W. Tilman: The Seven Mountain-Travel Books, pp. 9-10)

Geoff Dyer. Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

"Hearing that I was ‘working on Lawrence’, an acquaintance lent me a book he thought I might find interesting: A Longman Critical Reader on Lawrence, edited by Peter Widdowson.  I glanced at the contents page:  old Eagleton was there, of course, together with some other state-of-the-fart theorists: Lydia Blanchard on‘Lawrence, Foucault and the Language of Sexuality’ (in the section on ‘Gender, Sexuality, Feminism’), Daniel J. Schneider on ‘Alternatives to Logocentrism in D.H. Lawrence’ (in the section featuring ‘Post-Structuralist Turns’).  I could feel myself getting angry and then I flicked through the introductory essay on ‘Radical Indeterminacy: a post-modern Lawrence’ and become angrier still.  How could it have happened?  How could these people with no feeling for literature have ended up teaching it, writing about it?  I should have stopped there, should have avoided looking at any more, but I didn’t because telling myself to stop always has the effect of urging me on.  Instead, I kept looking at this group of wankers huddled in a circle, backs turned to the world so that no one would see them pulling each other off.  Oh, it was too much, it was too stupid.  I threw the book across the room and then I tried to tear it up but it was too resilient.  By now I was blazing mad.  I thought about getting Widdowson’s phone number and making threatening calls.  Then I looked around for the means to destroy his vile, filthy book.  In the end it took a whole box of matches and some risk of personal injury before I succeeded in deconstructing it.

"I burned it in self-defence.  It was the book or me because writing like that kills everything it touches.  That is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches.  Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch.  I recently met an academic who said that he taught German literature.  I was aghast: to think, this man who had been in universities all his life was teaching Rilke.  Rilke!  Oh, it was too much to bear. You don’t teach Rilke, I wanted, to say, you kill Rilke!  You turn him to dust and then you go off to conferences where dozens of other academic-morticians gather with the express intention of killing Rilke and turning him to dust.  Then as part of the cover-up, the conference papers are published, the dust is embalmed and before you know it literature is a vast graveyard of dust, a dustyard of graves.  I was beside myself with indignation.  I wanted to maim and harm this polite, well-meaning academic who, for all I knew, was a brilliant teacher who had turned on generations of students to the Duino Elegies.  Still, I thought to myself the following morning when I had calmed down, the general point stands:  how can you know anything about literature if all you’ve done is read books?"  (Out of Sheer Rage pp. 100-101)

"What has happened in the interim to the people who are in the picture and the people who should have been in it but aren't?  The same things that happen to everyone:  home ownership, marriage, a kid or two, disappointment, divorce, cancer scares, worsening hangovers, death of a parent or two, qualified success, school fees, depression, sudden rejuvenation following the discovery of Ecstasy, holidays in India or Ibiza, telly watching, coming out (as homosexuals), coming in (as heterosexuals), going to the gym, more telly watching, new computers, bad knees, less squash, more tennis, rewriting (and downplaying) of earlier ambitions to diminish scale of disappointment, fatal breast cancer, less sleep, less beer, more wine, more cocaine, hardly any acid, frightening ketamine overdose, total breakdown, more money, discreet tattoos, baldness, stopping going to the gym, yoga, even more telly watching....  looking at the picture and its inscription, I realize it was familiar to me back then, that the taste of ashes in the mouth was as much a generalized premonition as it was a particular reaction to a football result.  Destiny, I think, is not what lies in store for you; it's what is already stored up inside you -- and it's as patient as death."  (Otherwise Known, "On the Roof," pp. 372-73).

"It takes a bit of getting used to, the idea that spending 365 days a year doing exactly as you please might be a viable proposition.  Getting sacked from that job was what allowed this notion -- that the three years I spent as a student could actually be extended indefinitely and rather profitably -- to gain some kind of purchase on my adult consciousness.  Since then I've done pretty much as I pleased, letting life find its own rhythm, working when I felt like it, not working when I didn't.  I've not always been happy -- far from it -- but I've always felt responsible for my happiness and liable for my unhappiness.  I've been free to waste my time as I please -- and I have wasted  tons of it, but at least it's been me doing the wasting; as such, it's not been wasted at all, not a moment of it." (Otherwise Known, "Sacked," p. 366.)

(If I were teaching a course on "the essay," I'd bookend it with Montaigne and Dyer:  the former, looking intently at one's face, one's life, in the mirror, celebrating the significance of individual, human experience; the latter, breaking the mirror, combining, as James Woods has written of Dyer in a recent New Yorker review, "fiction, autobiography, travel writing, cultural criticism, literary theory, and a kind of comic English whining" into witty, exuberant, post-modern essays.  "The result," writes Woods, who is twice the better essayist but with a tenth of Dyer's range -- "the result ought to be mutant mulch but is almost always a louche and canny delight."

An Oxford grad with a Bachelor's in English, Dyer is the author of four novels and a half-dozen genre-busting alternatives.  My favorite is Out of Sheer Rage, which spends its time determined to write an academic work on Dyer's hero, D.H. Lawrence, only to find itself continually loitering on the author's doorstep, visiting his haunts, reading Rilke, moving from Rome to Greece, perpetually finding something to distract him -- "not quite pursuing his subject but hanging around it," writes Woods, "like a clever aimless boy on a street corner."  He's also written But Beautiful, on jazz; The Missing of the Somme; a travelogue, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It; and most recently a book-length, unreadable meditation on Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker, called Zona.

At times it's hard to take seriously an author who, in a recent column in the New York Times Book Review, spoke of bleeding on the pages -- only to reveal that he'd been picking his nose.  And at times there's something self-indulgent and adolescent about his repeated collapses into sex and E.  (There is an ecstatic essay on hanging out at Burning Man.)  But if he writes like a drunk, at times, he manages to keep his wits and his intelligence about him.  The result is probing, provocative, often insightful accounts of the works of Fitzgerald, Johnson, McEwan, DeLillo, West, Cheever, Sebald, and more.  Although E.B. White remains my gold standard for the modern essay, genial and humane; and although James Woods is the more insightful literary critic and David Foster Wallace is the most intelligent of the lot, nobody writes essays that take greater, insouciant delight in thinking and writing and living -- with all of its ecstasy and heartbreak and sorrow, all of its light and darkness, all of its humor and stupidity and despair and hope, its longing to soar on wings are made of wax and the feathers of old birds -- than Geoff Dyer.)

Robert Graves. Goodbye to All That

"Those were the early days of trench warfare, the days of the jam-tin bomb and the gas-pipe trench-mortar; still innocent of Lewis or Stokes guns, steel helmets, telescopic rifle-sights, gas-shells, pill-boxes, tanks, well-organized trench-raids, or any of the later refinements of trench warfare.

After a meal of bread, bacon, rum, and bitter stewed tea sickly with sugar, we went through the broken trees to the east of the village and up a long trench to battalion headquarters.  The wet and slippery trench ran through dull red clay.  I had a torch with me, and saw that hundreds of field mice and frogs had fallen into the trench but found no way out.  The light dazzled them, and because I could not help treading on them, I put the torch back in my pocket.  We had no mental picture of what the trenches would be like, and were almost as ignorant as a young soldier who joined us a week or two later.  He called out excitedly to old Burford, who was cooking up a bit of stew in a dixie, apart from the others:  'Hi, mate, where's the battle?  I want to do my bit.'

The guide gave us hoarse directions all the time.  'Hole right.' 'Wire high.'  'Wire low.'  'Deep place here, sir.' 'Wire low.'  'Deep place here, sir.' 'Wire low.'  The field-telephone wires had been fastened by staples to the side of the trench, and when it rained the staples were constantly falling out and the wire falling down and tripping people up.  If it sagged too much, one stretched it across the trench to the other side to correct the sag, but then it would catch one's head.  The holes were sump-pits used for draining the trenches."  (pp. 82-83)

(Robert Graves [1895-1985], English poet, classicist, and novelist -- the author of over 140 works -- despised Virgil's Aeneid.  His article entitled "The Virgil Cult" begins:  "Whenever a golden age of stable government, full churches, and expanding wealth dawns among the Western nations, Virgil always returns to supreme favor.... Why Virgil's poems have for the last two thousand years exercised so great an influence on our Western culture is, paradoxically, because he was a renegade to the true Muse.  His pliability; his subservience; his narrowness; his denial of that stubborn imaginative freedom which the true poets who preceded him had prized ... these were the negative qualities which first commended him to government circles, and have kept him in favour ever since."

I never, quite, understood where this pathological loathing of all things Virgil (and all things Eliot) came from, until I chanced upon a Penguin copy in Nepal of Goodbye to All That, his grim, detailed, realistic, heartbreaking account of the tragic collapse of the British Empire in the muddy trenches of WWI.  Having survived the schoolyard persecutions, mockery, and bullying in response to his German ancestry (his full name was Robert von Ranke Graves), his outspokenness, as well as his moral seriousness and relative poverty, he took up boxing, poetry, choir, and an aristocratic boy three years younger.  Upon the outbreak of WWI in August, 1914, he promptly enlisted, taking a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, only to find himself leading young men to their inevitable, miserable, bloody, mud-stained slaughter at the hands of mindless generals, reading Virgil and studying the maps.  This stunning, moving account of the tragedy of WWI includes a fascinating panoply of secondary characters:  the poet Siegfried Sassoon, whom he befriended in the trenches and alienated with the publication of Goodbye in 1929; George Mallory, his schoolmaster at Charterhouse and fellow climber in the Lake District, who died on the Northeast Ridge of Everest in 1924 (see Wade Davies' Into the Silence for another account of the shell-shocked survivors of WWI); his landlord John Masefield; and T.E. Lawrence, his companion and fellow prankster at Oxford.  "Lawrence's eyes immediately held me," Graves writes.  "They were startlingly blue, even by artificial light, and never met the eyes of the person he addressed, but flickered up and down as though making an inventory of clothes and limbs" (p. 243).  He and his first wife, Nancy Nicholson, bicycled past the Stonehenge in the moonlight on their way to visit the aging Thomas Hardy.  "We rode ... [past] several deserted army camps which had an even more ghostly look.  They could provide accommodation for a million men; the number of men killed in the British and overseas Forces during the war" (p. 247).  Until the outbreak of WWII, Robert Graves lived abroad -- teaching in Cairo, living in Majorca, in Spain, until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and then, briefly, in the United States.  It was as if he could not bear to set foot, again, on the land of the country that had done what it had done.

For the best account of the outbreak of WWI, see Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, which was on JFK's mind, if not in his hands, during the Cuban Missile Crisis  For the best, relatively brief, extraordinarily well-written account of the whole of the First World War, see John Keegan's WWI.  Keegan, a military historian, has also written a thoughtful, fascinating comparison and contrast of technology and warfare in the Battle of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Battle of the Somme, entitled The Face of Battle.  For an account of the victors, dividing the spoils and unwittingly setting the table for WWII, see especially Margaret MacMillan and Richard Holbrooke's Paris 1919.)

George Orwell.  The Road to Wigan Pier

"On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave.  The place was beginning to depress me.  It was not only the dirt, the smells and the vile food, but the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay, of having got down into some subterranean place where people go creeping round and round, just like black beetles, in an endless muddle of slovened jobs and mean grievances.  The most dreadful thing about people like the Brookers is the way they say the same things over and over again.  It gives you the feeling that they are not real people at all, but a kind of ghost for ever rehearsing the same futile rigmarole.  In the end Mrs Brooker's self-pitying talk -- always ending with the tremulous whine of 'It does seem 'ard, don't it now?' -- revolted me even more than her habit of wiping her mouth with bits of newspaper.  But it is no use saying that people like the Brookers are just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind.  For they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic by-products of the modern world.  You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilisation that produced them.  For this is part at least of what industrialism has done for us.  Columbus sailed the Atlantic, the first steam engines tottered into motion, the British squares stood firm under the French guns at Waterloo ... and this is where it all led -- to labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creeping around and round them like black beetles.  It is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist...." (p. 14).

"Trade since the war [WWI] has had to adjust itself to meet the demands of underpaid, underfed people, with the result that a luxury is nowadays almost always cheaper than a necessity.  One pair of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs.  For the price of one square meal you can get two pounds of cheap sweets.  You can't get much meat for threepence, but you can get a lot of fish and chips....And above all there is gambling, the cheapest of all luxuries.  Even people on the verge of starvation can buy a few days' hope ('Something to live for', as they call it) by having a penny on a sweepstake.  Organised gambling has now risen almost to the status of a major industry.  Consider, for instance, a phenomenon like the Football Pools, with a turnover of about six million pounds a year, almost all of it from the pockets of working-class people." (p. 82)

"Working-people often have a vague reverence for learning in others, but where 'education' touches their own lives they see through it and reject it by a healthy instinct.  The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs.  It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a 'job' should descend upon anyone at fourteen.  Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school.  He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography.  To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly.  The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons!  Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned!.... There is much in middle-class life that looks sickly and debilitating when you see it from a working-class angle." (p. 107)

"The nomad who walks or rides, with his baggage stowed on a camel or an ox-cart, may suffer every kind of discomfort, but at least he is living while he is travelling; whereas for the passenger in an express train or a luxury liner his journey is an intergnum, a kind of temporary death." (p. 186)

"A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into...." (p. 84)

(In 1936, George Orwell was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to describe the plight of the working class in the depressed areas to the North of England.  He left London in January and spent two months living amongst the miners, mill workers, and homeless in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and then wrote and published the manuscript between April and December of the same year.  The result is a searing, vivid indictment of the underside of capitalism, industrialism, and cilivization -- all the more memorable for its insistence on the facts, the the smell and taste and look of things, for its grim humor, its bleak sadness, and the extraordinary indignation with which Orwell describes the unknown, forgotten, and largely ignored lives of tens of thousands of working-class poor, of whose existence middle- and upper-class England was scarcely aware.  The second half of this heart-breaking account of the unemployment-ridden, poverty-stricken North is a moving plea for Socialism -- perhaps of lesser interest on account of its quaint, hopefully outdated concern for the gulf between rich and poor in England of the 1930s.  "Everybody knows the fight was fixed," Leonard Cohen growls.  "The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.  That's how it goes.  Everybody knows.")