RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/robert-caro

Working, by Robert Caro (Knopf, 207 pp., $25)

In Working, Robert Caro tells us how, exactly, it is done. “Truth takes time,” Caro writes. He began his epic study of Lyndon Johnson in 1976, and now, 43 years later, having published four volumes, he is at work on the fifth, which tells of LBJ’s presidency and the disaster of Vietnam. He has interrupted that labor to offer Working.

If I were teaching journalism or nonfiction writing, especially the writing of history and biography, I would build a course around Caro, with Working as my primary text and scenes from his Johnson books as case studies. I would tell my students: “In a given situation, ask yourself, ‘How would Caro handle this?’” The course would teach Caro’s instincts and methods. It’s possible that he is all the education that a writer in this line of work requires.

First, choose the right subject, he advises. Read all available books on the subject. Then read all magazine and journal articles. After that, all national newspaper coverage of the subject—then local coverage. Plunge now into the documents: “turn every page,” as a newspaper editor advised the young Caro long ago. You never know what you might stumble upon. Luck emerges from diligence. In the LBJ Library in Austin, pages from 32 million documents awaited turning. Caro and his wife Ina, his research partner, spent years there, turning pages—panning for gold.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/books/review/adina-hoffman-julien-gorbach-ben-hecht-biography.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

BEN HECHT
Fighting Words, Moving Pictures
By Adina Hoffman

THE NOTORIOUS BEN HECHT
Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist
By Julien Gorbach

For understandable reasons, biographies about Ben Hecht have focused
almost exclusively on his screenwriting career in Hollywood. And why
wouldn’t they? Consider a few of his credits: “Underworld,” directed
by Josef von Sternberg, for which Hecht won the first Academy Award.
(Not his first Academy Award, the first Academy Award ever given for
best story. The year was 1927.) “Scarface,” “The Front Page,”
“Twentieth Century,” “Design for Living,” “Wuthering Heights,” “His
Girl Friday,” “Spellbound,” “Notorious.” And that’s just films with
his name on them. Uncredited, he script-doctored countless others,
including “Stagecoach,” “Gone With the Wind,” “A Star Is Born” (1937)
and “Roman Holiday.”

Across four decades, Hecht worked on about 200 movies. He helped
establish the ground rules for entire genres, including the gangster
film, the newspaper picture, the screwball comedy and postwar film
noir. Jean-Luc Godard said “he invented 80 percent of what is used in
Hollywood movies today.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/05/06/socialisms-rise-and-fall-heaven-on-earth-book-review/

The volume here reviewed is the second edition of a book first published in 2002. I reviewed it favorably (with some reservations) in 2003. A good case can be made for the new edition, given the survival of socialist ideals and the persisting disagreements about their nature and realizability. It remains of interest why people in different parts of the world are still attracted to these ideals and why the same ideals have been so difficult to implement. Of special interest is what Joshua Muravchik calls the “afterlife” of socialism — what happened to these ideals and political aspirations after the political systems supposedly dedicated to their realization, such as the Soviet Union, ceased to exist.

As the reader is informed in the preface, the new edition is largely unchanged, except for the addition of an epilogue, some updating of the chapter on the kibbutzim (collective farms of modern Israel), and the correction of small errors.

The difficulty of coming to grips with the subject — that is, the proper understanding of the nature of socialist ideals and their realizability — has not diminished since the book was first published. The problem begins with the widely held, undifferentiated views of socialism shared by most Americans. They are unaware of the fundamental differences between authoritarian (or totalitarian) state socialism embedded in one-party systems, such as the former Soviet one or the Chinese one under Mao, and social-democratic societies, such as those in Scandinavia.

https://quillette.com/2019/04/19/george-faludy-hungarian-poet-and-hero-for-our-times/

Had the poet George Faludy not written in his native Hungarian—arguably the most impenetrable of European languages—he would, as many have argued, be world famous. He died aged 95 in 2006, his life spanning the First and Second World Wars, the Russian revolution, and the Nazi and communist takeovers of his country.

Having achieved literary fame at 20, he would be imprisoned by both regimes and spend much of his life as an exile in France, Morocco, America (where he was a tail-gunner for the U.S. Airforce), and Canada, where he fled communism, only to find his lectures picketed and disrupted by campus leftists to whom his experience was an inconvenient truth. A ladies’ man all his life, he surprised the world by suddenly entering a gay relationship with Eric, a Russian ballet dancer, who’d fallen in love with Faludy in print and then rushed across the globe to find him.

In his 90s, after communism fell and Faludy, returning to Budapest, achieved living legend status, he married a poetess 70 years his junior with whom he produced his verses right up to his death. Faludy ignored the rulebook, spurred on by the knowledge that a man like himself would never exist again. He was right.

https://quillette.com/2019/04/10/michel-houellebecq

A review of Serotonine (French Edition), by Michel Houellebecq. French and European Publications Inc (January 3, 2019), 352 pages.

Michel Houllebecq, the bestselling French novelist and provocateur, has a knack for predicting disasters. His sex-tourism novel Plateforme (2001) featured a terrorist incident at a resort in Thailand that was eerily similar to the 2002 Bali bombings. Soumission (2015) was released on the day of the al-Qaeda-linked Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris; the novel’s subject (an Islamist takeover of France) made the coincidence distinctly uncomfortable. Now Houellebecq’s most recent book, Sérotonine (2019), appears to have foreseen the ‘gilet jaune’ (‘yellow vest’) protests that have rocked France since November.

Clearly Houellebecq saw something like this coming, and understood that it was inevitable. Yet for all his perspicacity, Houellebecq is often dismissed as a mere literary troll. Certainly he has a troll’s gift for identifying weak spots in his targets, and then attacking them relentlessly. He is not above this sort of nihilistic glee; but unlike a normal troll, he focuses his rage and disgust, not on random individuals, but on the culture that has grown to dominate the French governing class in the wake of the May 1968 student protests in Paris.

Houellebecq is not a conventional literary artist, or a particularly skilled one. His attempts at philosophical discussion cannot withstand scrutiny for long. He has little critical acumen; even his opinions are, for the most part, conventional and unsurprising, except (sometimes) in their provocative manner of expression. Where Houellebecq stands out from his peers is in his freakish gift for observation. He is not a lyrical writer or a storyteller: he is a seer.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-unwanted-review-one-small-town-in-germany-11555107612

When I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., recently, I found the lobby packed with middle- and high-school students from around the country. At first their spirits seemed buoyed by a day away from the classroom. It did not take long, however, for the chilling documentary evidence of Nazi genocide—gruesome photographs of partially burned corpses, a display of bales of hair shaved from female prisoners at Auschwitz—to shock the youths into solemnity. As the students stepped inside a cattle car used to transport Jews to the death camp, their mouths began to open wide as if to ask, What if this had been me sealed inside?

I finished reading Michael Dobbs’s “The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught In Between” with much the same question. Mr. Dobbs affectingly braids three separate narratives into one. His primary goal is to trace the plight and fate of the Jewish families who lived in one small town in Hitler’s Germany. But the outcome of these personal stories cannot be untangled from two other historical strands: Hitler’s increasingly brutal war against the Jews; and America’s ambivalent response to the urgent pleas of those trapped inside Nazi Europe. From these threads Mr. Dobbs weaves a devastating tapestry of too many hopes wrecked and too few lives saved.