Quote of the Day (Comic Gonzalo Cordova, on Threesomes)

“I think the closest I'll ever come to making a threesome happen is being asked to leave a foursome.”—Comic Gonzalo Cordova, quoted in “Joke of the Week,” Time Out New York, January 30-February 5, 2014

Photo of the Day: A Berry, Berry Good Carnival

While walking around this afternoon at Overpeck County Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, I snapped this photo of one of the rides at a carnival on the grounds.

Quote of the Day (Peggy Noonan, on the Inspiring Imperfection of Saints)

“There is a misunderstanding regarding sainthood itself, and it is that saints are perfect. Saints aren’t perfect, they’re human. A saint is recognized for heroic virtue in the service of Christ, but saints have flaws, failings and eccentricities. It is because they are not perfect that they are inspiring. They remind you what you could become.”—Peggy Noonan, “‘Santo Subito!’ They Chanted,” The Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2014

This weekend’s column by Peggy Noonan reads like an indirect response to Maureen Dowd’s takedown in The New York Times of Pope John Paul II’s simultaneous canonization along with Pope John XXIII. Dowd's commentary—notably, criticizing the late pontiff for not cracking down on the sexual abuse scandal—was predictable, as was the torrent of comments from online readers weighing in on MoDo’s side. (Opinions ran about 20 to 1 against John Paul before I gave up reading.)

Noonan—herself a scathing critic of the Church’s response to the scandal—makes the two necessary and appropriate arguments regarding John Paul’s response to this. First, that the Communists and Nazis he had struggled against all his life used false allegations of sexual misconduct to undermine opponents, including priests (such happened in the early 1980s, when the Soviets and their lackey Polish regime when they tried that line of attack, unsuccessfully, against Lech Walesa). That left him inclined to discounts any scattered reports he may have initially about priestly misconduct. Second, that, had he been fully apprised of the widespread and widening nature of the abuse crisis by his bishops (who, so often, had their own reasons to downplay the threat), he would not have tolerated the damage to children, who meant so much to him.

Noonan does offer a useful catalogue of how history will recall John Paul:

“He was a crucial actor in defeating the Soviet Union, an expansionist, atheistic, totalitarian state that for 70 years bedeviled mankind. After he was shot and almost killed in 1981, he made a point to go to the would-be assassin’s prison cell to assure him that he was personally forgiven, and that God loved him. He wrote and spoke in a new way of the true nature and meaning of the Catholic faith from its beginnings to its missions to its meaning in the world. As Francis would, he stood for the powerless, from the unborn to the unwell to the aged.”

Even this, however, does not go far enough. The essential place to start, I think, is with Jonathan Kwitny’s biography Man of the Century. The hyperbolic title is unfortunate, given the author’s far more nuanced argument for John Paul’s greatness. While fully acknowledging the late pontiff’s faults, in a depth far surpassing even Dowd’s, he nevertheless points to John Paul’s crucial role in bringing down Communism. It was not, as so many American conservatives have claimed, primarily owing to Ronald Reagan or even Margaret Thatcher that the specter of Communism vanished from Eastern Europe, but because of John Paul, his fellow Poles, and other (more often than not, Catholic) subject peoples behind the Iron Curtain.

The magnitude of that achievement, the product of John Paul's stubborn faith as well as his political dexterity, cannot, as Dowd tries to do, be underestimated. East Bloc Communism fell without a shot being fired. No less an authority than Mikhail Gorbachev has noted that this would not have occurred without John Paul. Just how extraordinary that is can be seen in comparison to the contemporaneous crackdown in Tiananmen Square or Vladimir Putin’s maneuvers in the Ukraine today.

In providing essential leadership in the peaceful movement of mass numbers of people from oppression to liberty, John Paul’s achievement ranks with that of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. In short, if for this alone, he fully merits being called the Church’s apostle of freedom through nonviolence.

Photo of the Day: Grant’s Tomb, NYC

Two weeks ago, while walking around Riverside Park, I made it a point to stop at Grant’s Tomb, and snapped as many photographs as I could in my short time there. When I read, then, that the 192^nd anniversary of the birth of the Civil War general and postwar President would be held today, I was disappointed I couldn’t make it. But I knew that this post, with this photo, would be all the more appropriate, even necessary.

I was glad to see, in mid-afternoon of that gloriously sunny spring day, that this massive structure, still the largest mausoleum in North America, had attracted a steady, if not enormous, stream of visitors. It wasn’t always this way.

Dedicated in 1897, with diplomats from 26 countries in attendance, the tomb of Ulysses S.Grant and his wife Julia Dent Grant had fallen into disrepair nearly a century later. Meanwhile, in Lexington, Va., the tomb of Robert E. Lee and his family had been kept in immaculate condition. The contrast was glaring and scandalous: the history-haunted South honored Lee's life enough to maintain his final resting place with pride, while the man who defeated him—and saved the Union in the process—had been forgotten by the North that benefited from his undaunted courage.

That was the state of affairs until some two decades ago, when a Columbia University law student and part-time tour guide Frank Scaturro took matters into his own hands, after his pleas to the National Park Service to maintain the site had been ignored. The resulting story in The Philadelphia Inquirer angered Grant’s descendants, who threatened to transfer the remains of Ulysses and Julia back to Illinois. The National Park Service then devoted $1.8 million to restoring the memorial, providing for its upkeep, and increasing security monitoring, with the site rededicated in 1997 for its centennial.

“Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?” is, as some people think, a trick question, though for the wrong question. It’s not that people other than the President and First Lady are there; rather, it’s that the two of them are not, technically speaking, buried. This being a mausoleum, it’s more correct to say they are entombed here.

After entering the circular gallery inside the memorial, you behold their remains from above, as they rest in twin red granite sarcophagi in an open crypt. (Five busts in niches around the coffins—of Grant lieutenants William Sherman, Philip Sheridan, George Thomas, James McPherson, and Edward Ord—were added by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.) The design was based on another classically inspired one across the Atlantic, Les Invalides in Paris, for another common soldier who became one of history’s most innovative generals.

There was, of course, a rather large difference between the two, and it’s spelled out just below the circular dome atop the building: “Let us have peace,” Grant's 1868 campaign slogan--a reminder that he sought to reunite the two sections after the conflict, rather than, like Napoleon, embroil a continent in bloodshed for a generation. 

A number of the explanatory panels around the site implicitly refute the notion that Grant was one of the worst U.S. Presidents. In fact, before the mid-20^th century, no President besides Abraham Lincoln moved so decisively to uphold the rights of African-Americans as Grant. The so-called “Reconstruction Amendments” to the Constitution, guaranteeing civil rights for the freedmen, were passed in his two terms. 

Grant wanted peace but with justice, and to ensure that result he used the federal government to crack down on the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. The gratitude of the freedmen can be seen in the fact that initial fundraising for the nation’s tribute to the man who saved it came from Richard T. Greener, the first African-American graduate of Harvard.  Greener liked to quote the motto of Grant, which serves as well for possibility of self-advancement in the country he loved as much as it did for his astonishing military career: Odon eureso a poieso (I will find a way or make one).

(Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on Writing as a Jewish American ‘For All Men’)

I’m an American, I’m a Jew, and I write for all men. A novelist has to, or he’s built himself a cage. I write about Jews, when I write about Jews, because they set my imagination going. I know something about their history, the quality of their experience and belief, and of their literature, though not as much as I would like. Like many writers I’m influenced especially by the Bible, both Testaments. I respond in particular to the East European immigrants of my father’s and mother’s generation; many of them were Jews of the Pale as described by the classic Yiddish writers. And of course I’ve been deeply moved by the Jews of the concentration camps, and the refugees wandering from nowhere to nowhere. I’m concerned about Israel….Sometimes I make characters Jewish because I think I will understand them better as people, not because I am out to prove anything. That’s a qualification. Still another is that I know that, as a writer, I’ve been influenced by Hawthorne, James, Mark Twain, Hemingway, more than I have been by Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, whom I read with pleasure. Of course I admire and have been moved by other writers, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, for instance, but the point I’m making is that I was born in America and respond, in American life, to more than Jewish experience. I wrote for those who read.”— Bernard Malamud interviewed by Daniel Stern in “Bernard Malamud, The Art of Fiction No. 52,” The Paris Review, Spring 1975

You can truly understand the vicissitudes of literary reputations when you consider the reviews of Adam Begley’s new biography of John Updike, which frequently have noted that the late man of letters could sure use a boost among critics these days. The fact that such a fate could befall the prolific and accomplished Updike—long a ubiquitous presence, and only dead five years—makes you appreciate the rather sorry posthumous fate of Bernard Malamud, with nowhere near his output and dead 28 years now. Several years ago, his daughter Jenna, a psychiatrist, came out with a biography in which she frankly admitted to the hope of bringing him back to where he was in the late Seventies: i.e., spoken as one of the "big three" postwar voices of Jewish America, along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.

Janna Malamud Smith’s 2006 bio, My Father is a Book, doesn’t seem to have done the trick, but the time might be right now for her father’s rising critical stock. Anniversaries, for instance, concentrate readers’ and publishers’ attention. Today, as it happens, marks the centennial of the birth of the novelist-short story writer in Brooklyn. Right on time come two volumes from the Library of America—Novels and Stories of the 1940s and 1950s and Novels and Stories of the 1960s—that, in effect, admit him to the American literary pantheon. Now, hopefully, more readers will approach him in the same spirit of astonished delight as Flannery O'Connor, who wrote a friend in 1958: "I have discovered a short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself. Go to the library and get a book called The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud."

Longtime readers of this blog might recall my prior post on the novel that won Malamud the Pulitzer Prize, The Fixer. But really, I don’t think that comes close to exhausting all that might be written about his carefully calibrated, exquisite prose; his compassion for his suffering characters and suffering humanity as a whole; and his quiet sense of irony and humor.

Malamud’s quote above comes cocooned in all kinds of irony. In the interview from which it came, he spoke of how protégé Philip Roth needed to stop writing so obsessively about his troubled first wife. Roth indeed followed that advice that year: his My Life as a Man, a thinly veiled exorcism of that matrimonial disaster.

Yet you can also practically hear the note of exasperation in Malamud’s voice when he says: “the point I’m making is that I was born in America and respond, in American life, to more than Jewish experience.” The best reminder of that is an apprentice novel that, over the years, has become one of his best known: The Natural (1952).

For more than three decades, my admiration for Robert Redford’s Capraesque film adaptation has led me to avoid what I have long known to be Malamud’s far more somber take on baseball. Now, however, I may be in the mood for the original. 

At a basic psychological level, Malamud can probably tell much about why athletes such as Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez could misuse their many, pure gifts to spoil America’s pastime. More broadly, its dominant literary conceit—Roy Hobbs’ New York Knights as a counterpart to King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table—can enable us understand the short-lived promise of the Camelot that held sway in the Kennedy White House within a decade of the novel’s publication—as well as why its collapse, amid treachery and tragedy, has proved so traumatic.

Short-story writer-critic Cynthia Ozick gave the correct response to her own question about whether Malamud was "an American Master": "Of course. He augmented it with fresh plasticity, he shaped our English into startling new configurations....He wrote about the plentitude and unity of the world."