If, like Gore Vidal, you think of Hemingway as humorless, you might look again at this late passage in “A Farewell to Arms” (1929) where two border officials compete for the attention of a foreign couple, arguing over which idyllic Swiss resort offers the best winter sport: Italian-speaking Locarno, where they are standing, or Francophone Montreux, on the eastern end of Lake Geneva where the little Montreux-Oberland Bernois railway rises steeply above the town and runs deep into the Alps, toward Gstaad. The comedy anticipates the sorts of polite hostile exchanges one would later find in Beckett and Pinter. In Montreux, says the one official, there are possibilities for “luge-ing,” adding perhaps unnecessarily, “Luge-ing is certainly winter sport.” His colleague turns to the foreigner: “Is luge-ing your idea of winter sport, sir? I tell you you would be very comfortable here in Locarno.” It continues:
“The gentleman has expressed a wish to go to Montreux.”
“What is luge-ing”? I asked.
“You see he has never even heard of luge-ing!” That meant a great deal to the second official. He was pleased by that.
“Luge-ing,” said the first official, “is tobogganing.”
“I beg to differ,” the other official shook his head. “I must differ again. The toboggan is very different from the luge. The toboggan is constructed in Canada of flat laths. The luge is a common sled with runners.”
But Montreux it is. (“I congratulate you,” says the first officer; “I believe you will regret leaving Locarno,” says the second.) The end of the road will be nearby Lausanne, with death in a Swiss hospital, whose conventions are well known in literature — from the sanatorium in the high alpine station of Davos in Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” (1924), to the Zugersee psychiatric clinic in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night” (1934) and the Vevey hospital where, in Graham Greene’s “Doctor Fischer of Geneva or, The Bomb Party” (1980), the narrator’s young wife meets her end after a ski accident in Les Paccots (which isn’t quite the Alps but geologically close enough: the Préalpes, whose name speaks for itself).
The great mountain range that is the Alps forms a 750-mile-long crescent, with one tip in southeastern France reaching almost right down to the Mediterranean (the Alpes Maritimes), and the other in the Julian Alps of Slovenia, with the Italian lake district propping up the southern flank. In between lies over half of Switzerland, three-quarters of Austria, and a nice helping of Bavaria. There is no more awesome landscape on the European continent. The Alps invite speculation into our mortality because mountains, after all, are dangerous; writers (usually male) attracted to danger and physical risk, and interested in locale, will naturally attend. The immensity of these gray solemn peaks capped by snow seems to dominate even the skies above, inspiring in visitors a rare solitude in a crowded continent.
The exquisite novel “Solo Faces” (1979), by James Salter, manages to be solely on the subject of mountains and their constant peril for those who fixate on them: testimony to the author’s own general preoccupation with greatness and great acts, with the spirit expressed purely without distraction or contamination. In “Solo Faces,” the American Rand climbs the French Alps at Chamonix for feelings both aesthetic (“The most hazardous attempt is made beautiful by its rightness”) and emotional, for the “feeling of invulnerability … as if the mountain had ordained him.” There is also the ethical question, for climbers: “The classic decision is always the same, whether to retreat or go on.”
Mountaineering, then, more than skiing or even lugeing, is the primary focus of alpine books. “Mountain-scrambling,” Edward Whymper, first man up the Matterhorn, called it, and the Englishman’s account of that climb (preceded by several failures) and others, “Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the Years 1860-69,” remains an engaging read; its liveliest characters are not so much Whymper or his gentlemanly companions but their rough native guides (“strangely-apparelled and queer-faced men”) and innkeepers. Four men died on the descent from that first Matterhorn triumph, which Whymper describes prior to some final moralizing: “We know that each height, each step, must be gained by patient, laborious toil, and that wishing cannot take the place of working … we come back to our daily occupations better fitted to fight the battle of life.” If they come back at all! As a philosopher of life, Whymper is facile; but the succinctness of his expedition descriptions rather compensates. The mountains themselves, except for their technical features such as ridges and cols, remain mostly unrecalled. Whymper has learned his own lesson, that the “ablest pens have failed, and I think must always fail, to give a true idea of the grandeur of the Alps.”
Much alpine writing takes place on the periphery: You need a place to start from, after all. A trip into the Alps begins in the valley, from a place like Hemingway’s Montreux (also Nabokov’s, who lived out his final years in the Montreux Palace Hotel; and Fitzgerald’s, whose protagonist Dick Diver passes through town), where the Rhone River flows into Lake Geneva heading west toward Geneva itself. Vevey, on the lake 10 kilometers west of Montreux, with heart-raising views of the Alps south and east, is a popular literary stopping place; Henry James’ Daisy Miller stayed at the Hotel des Trois Couronnes, which still exists. Less glamorously, Jones, from “Doctor Fischer,” worked at the glass chocolate headquarters of Nestlé, in Vevey, translating documents and returning to a small flat with no view. It will be noted that alpine fiction is, almost invariably, about expatriates, with nationality depending on authorship: Jones (Graham Greene) is British; Hans Castorp, who spends seven years in that Davos sanatorium (probably since converted, like many such institutions, into an expensive hotel for the likes of Bill Gates visiting January’s World Economic Forum), is a north German like Thomas Mann. Even in 1924 Mann could see the coming changes, with the village “swallowed up” by the resort’s “extending further and further toward the entrance of the valley … Hotels and pensions, amply equipped with covered verandahs, balconies and reclining-halls, lay on both sides of their way.”
One of my many jobs during nearly a decade of winters spent primarily in the Swiss Alps was manager of a four-story apartment hotel with, like all buildings that size, a substantial bomb shelter in the basement. Before the snow came the Swiss Army did: reservists from the Francophone Rhone Valley and Vaud, wine-making regions where families sent local vintages to the soldiers to drink in the evenings after their long days blowing things up in the mountain woods. As hotel manager I watched the empty bottles come down each morning from the rooms, admiring the esprit de corps of men who, although formidably trained and armed and apparently dutiful in their other, professional lives, hardly took themselves seriously. No book could better express this sardonic, unassailable state of mind than John McPhee’s “La Place de la Concorde Suisse” (1984), which I read before my acquaintance with the Swiss Army and again after, where the author tags along with a mountain patrol playing war games that, inexorably, lead the group to a cozy small restaurant serving fondue and wine. “Two companies of enemy motorized fusiliers have reached Raron,” says the group leader into his walkie-talkie, while behind him the customers moo, like the cows in the alpine pastures the soldiers are meant to be reconnoitering. “Fifteen army vehicles have been destroyed.” He turns the device upside down to stir the cheese with its aerial.
So far, nothing of Austria, the most alpine country of all. But we can end as we began, with Hemingway, not “A Farewell to Arms” but “A Moveable Feast” (1964), which is famous for being a book about Paris. So it is, but for its poignant final chapter, set in Schruns in the Austrian Voralberg where the author takes up skiing, revels in the good company of locals and especially family: wife Hadley and baby Bumby. The idyll is soon to end, the author knows, with more than 30 years of hindsight encompassing three more wives; already another liaison has begun. But while in Schruns the three, or two, were happy and strong; “It wasn’t until we were out of the mountains in late spring, and back in Paris that the other thing started again” — so a final theme: the Alps as sanctuary.
At the George Orwell centenary conference at Wellesley College in May, I began a short talk by quoting perhaps the most boring piece of writing by Orwell that I know:
“I like praising things, when there is anything to praise, and I would like here to write a few lines — they have to be retrospective, unfortunately — in praise of the Woolworth’s Rose.
“In the good days when nothing in Woolworth’s cost over sixpence, one of their best lines was their rose bushes. They were always very young plants, but they came into bloom in their second year, and I don’t think I ever had one die on me. Their chief interest was that they were never, or very seldom, what they claimed to be on their labels. One that I bought for a Dorothy Perkins turned out to be a beautiful little white rose with a yellow heart, one of the finest ramblers I have ever seen. A polyantha rose labelled yellow turned out to be deep red. Another, bought for an Albertine, was like an Albertine, but more double, and gave astonishing masses of blossom. These roses had all the interest of a surprise packet, and there was always the chance that you might happen upon a new variety which you would have the right to name John Smithii or something of that kind.”
At the conference, I was standing in for Andrew Sullivan, one of the more prominent pioneers of the Internet weblog. That, and the short notice — two days — may explain how I made the connection between Sullivan and Orwell, whom one could call a proto-blogger of sorts: Orwell specialized in much the same sort of running political and social commentary as Sullivan in a wartime Tribune column known as “As I Please.”
Although not Orwell’s invention — Michael Shelden’s biography tells us that Tribune editor Raymond Postgate called his own 1939 column “I Write As I Please” — this phrase has seemed to me for a long time now the blogger’s credo, for most bloggers are not of the level of Sullivan or Mickey Kaus but are bores and cranks and, one would think, only a bore could call his site “As I Please,” with its suggestions of windy self-satisfaction, tedious opinions on everything, and the lack of a firm editorial or restraining hand.
The blogger assumes his every spittle is of the greatest import, for why else share the daily meanderings of his mind? In fairness it is a question we should ask Orwell. Does the blogger’s rose-buying adventure, even if it is George Orwell doing the buying and beforehand the sniffing, merit our attention? The excerpt above ends with an anecdote about two roses Orwell planted in 1936 that cost him sixpence; now it is “a huge vigorous,” and beautiful, bush: all for the price of ten cigarettes, or a pint and a half at the pub, or a week’s subscription to the Daily Mail: one of Orwell’s little lists. Are we so desperate for Orwell trivia and “sweepings,” as E.M. Forster put it, in the same way we are for Shakespeare’s or — the other iconic mid-century writer — Hemingway’s?
The answer seems to be yes; certainly his biographers Crick, Shelden and Meyers seem to feel so. But what does that mean for readers of present-day bloggers? First we have to weed out those readers who claim no interest in literature or even language: a significant number, one would think, among politicos; and we can measure this by how badly written, ungrammatical, actually, many of these political weblogs are. (This includes the very amusing Mickey Kaus of Slate.) They will be happy with the news or spin of their favored blog the minute it comes out; others might wonder how these things will read months or years later. Will the blog prove as enduring as that 18th century invention, the essay?
Perhaps. First, let us consider just how “As I Please,” or as it would now be, As_I_Please.com, anticipates the modern weblog. For one thing, there are the “links” (not clickable) to recently published articles and other small pieces of forgettable or perishable journalism. No. 23 “links” to a book where poetry snobs can test their knowledge, and probably embarrass themselves; No. 27 “links” to a passage from Herodotus about Babylonian wedding customs, inspired by something Orwell has read about 1940s personal ads. Andrew Sullivan frequently links to what he dubs offensive cartoons or photos; Orwell does the same in No. 41, to a photo of shaven-headed Parisian women accused of collaboration that was printed in the Star, he says, ten days before. And in No. 48, a reader sends in his own link, to a cheap Tory pamphlet he presumes, rightly, that Orwell will find offensive.
A blog is also a place to respond to attacks made elsewhere, and there is some of this too in “As I Please.” Most blogs recommend books, or unrecommend them as the case may be, or focus on certain passages usually of nonsense. Orwell does this to Bernard Shaw, for instance. Sullivan waged a near-daily campaign against the Howell Raines New York Times for over a year, and much of “As I Please,” while not focusing on any one paper as its target, is a relentless and unsettled eye on the London press. Most of all, in blogs, there is an interest in provoking and sometimes baiting readers, who then write in to (e-mail) the paper (the site) with their outbursts of indignation or scorn or disbelief or supplication.
Orwell wrote 80 “As I Please” columns between Dec. 3, 1943, and April 4, 1947 — all but the last 21 during the war — and nearly a third of them respond to readers’ questions or thoughts or complaints. The boring excerpt above, from “As I Please” No. 8, begins: “A correspondent reproaches me with being ‘negative’ and ‘always attacking things.’ The fact is we that we live in a time when causes for rejoicing are not numerous.” Thus Orwell’s ironic concession to his reader: Indeed he has something to praise and will spend two lengthy and tedious paragraphs doing so. Ultimately a blogger’s domain is the paragraph, and just as blogs are really no more than a collection of often unrelated paragraphs posted each day, so “As I Please” is each week three or four long paragraphs on two or three subjects; it is never an entire essay, with exposition from start to end. It plunges us in without preliminaries, and ends only with the next day’s, or week’s, or hour’s, post. In short, it is continuous, which the essay never is.
For that Orwell conference the first weekend of May, and my last-minute talk, I had to read all 80 “As I Please” columns in a period of two days. The timing turned out to be more opportune than I had expected. If I had read them a month or more before, just before the Iraq war, the echoes would not have resonated, only faded within the walls of an empty room. Beyond well-fed, well-paid American soldiers carrying about the place, the following all surface in Orwell’s first 40 or so columns: tense British-U.S. relations although allies, “unsinkable” military experts wrong in their predictions, air bombing and bomb shelters, the faults and problems inherent in the BBC, the writing of history, “the freedom for which we are fighting,” Jews and anti-Semitism, maps and politics, a well-informed citizenry, or not, and its right to influence policy, postwar redevelopment of a damaged country (the U.K., not Germany), punishing collaborators and war criminals, postwar policy toward the vanquished enemy, vulgar newspapers becoming temporarily serious but also, in Orwell’s words, “reticent,” gas and other weapons, pilotless planes, millions of irreplaceable books disappearing in the Blitz and emptied libraries, psychological operations, human or civilian shields, and provisioning the capital.
This is London, of course, not defeated Berlin; and the wartime “As I Please’s” have very much a London or metropolitan tone to them. Harold Pinter, who for all we know may have learned something about terror from Winston Smith, is not the first writer to be obsessed with London bus routes; in No. 5 there is Orwell on the 53 bus, despising the “hideous war memorial” that blocks the facade of a Regency church across the road from Lord’s cricket ground.
What is the importance of any of this to us now? Then, of course, it would have been important, in the sense that any opinion-writing in an intelligent magazine read by intelligent people is important; and it’s not as though Orwell is slumming with these pieces. They are hack work like any regular journalism, but they are distinguished hack work, and often playful or witty, and certainly highly observant, which is another way of saying they’re intelligent. If you like Orwell for himself, the man you think he is, he is an attractive figure in these pages, and for biographers, who must have everything a man writes, “As I Please” is indispensable. Same too for those who have an agenda, and most people who claim Orwell have an agenda. If it’s important that Orwell be sound on the Jews, he is: Some of his most robust writing against anti-Semitism can be found here. If you believe your country should welcome large numbers of refugees or immigrants with no impediment to race or ethnic background, you will be heartened to read Orwell encouraging whole-scale immigration to the U.K. in No. 61, of November 1946. In short, if you want to like Orwell as you do your friends, dipping into “As I Please” humanizes or relaxes him, but some of us don’t want our important writers in a relaxed mode. We prefer the urgency, the concentration.
Judged as literature — and why shouldn’t it be? — or at the very least belles-lettres, the blog on its own is insufficient unless a prelude to greater things, and in Orwell’s case the better stuff to come, first worked out in some aspect beforehand in “As I Please,” includes the landmark essays “You and the Atom Bomb,” “The Prevention of Literature” and “Politics and the English Language.” (“Looking Back on the Spanish War” is the reverse: the great essay preceding its shallower echoes in “As I Please.”)
In the last few months, we’ve been told that Iraq: The Second Coming is the first bloggers’ war, that bloggers brought down the leadership of the New York Times; and even before that, in 2000, we were told that bloggers had started to change our election campaigns: first evidence of this being the midterm elections last fall, the most decisive evidence still to come in the presidential year 2004. All of which may be true, but beside the point. The bloggers’ aim is the immediate response, and first thoughts are seldom the sharpest; rough drafts are never read except by scholars and pedants. If Orwell’s blogs are readable now yet not especially interesting, it tells us how lesser writers like the rest of us will appear in the decades to come. Any writer worthy of the name (now there’s an Orwell generalization for you) wonders about his legacy, how foolish or sensible or eloquent he will seem after he is gone. The best record of a writing life is on paper, collected into volumes that are then printed; in that way does the essay survive, whereas we don’t know yet how the weblog will.
So John Walker Lindh has given up without a fight, just as, apparently, he did in Afghanistan. Of course, based on what we know about his time abroad, he never had any fight in him — as opposed to, say, a real Taliban or Qaida warrior — which should have told his prosecutors, or any American paying attention, that he was never a threat to begin with. And yet the government seems strangely pleased with itself for having put him away for 20 years, or as Attorney General John Ashcroft has noted, with typical un-Christian glee, “nearly as long as he has been alive.”
How to explain the obsessive interest of men like Ashcroft in the minor case of criminal jurisprudence that is John Walker Lindh? It is shocking, really, how many powerful men, all of them old enough to be his father, have it in for Walker. Of course it is just that fact — their power and prestige, their age vs. his — that explains it: They see in Walker their own renegade son, real or imagined, the kind of elusive, questioning young man whose deep suspicion of their motives and accomplishments — as congressmen, commentators, law professors or Cabinet secretaries — stands as an unforgivable personal rebuke.
Not surprising, then, that the only notable figure who seemed to have shown any sympathy, at least in the beginning, for the so-called American Taliban was another former wayward son, George Walker Bush. While his own father wanted to send John Walker around the country in his dirty, unwashed clothes begging for the sympathy of the American people, the younger Bush simply called him a “a poor fellow” who had been misled, and left it at that.
I’m not old enough to be Walker’s father, but maybe I could have been his teacher. A 20-year-old child of privilege from the wealthy suburbs, son of a lawyer and New Age enthusiast whose family has broken up, a young man whose interests are encouraged by having money thrown at him by his parents — this is the kind of student I see every day at Harvard.
Of course, as far as I know, none of my students found their way to fundamentalist Islam, much less to weaponry and military training and finally, into battle, but this only goes to show that Walker’s is an extreme of a rather typical journey. Twenty or thereabouts is the age of dissatisfaction for intelligent, introverted men who feel themselves alienated from their upbringing or surroundings, and can lead to play-acting; hence the affectation of John Walker wandering Marin County with his new Islamic name and strange clothes, mumbling about the Koran. Exotic, perhaps, yet not entirely unlike the Californian I met on my third night as a Yale freshman 17 years ago, a young man who fervently believed that the only true civilization was English, circa 1920 at Oxford, and wanted to stay up the night reading “Brideshead Revisited” aloud.
What the verdict in the Lindh case has established is that A) Walker fell in with the Taliban, and B) he carried weapons. All terrorism charges are dropped. Those who fall in with gangs and carry weapons in Los Angeles and other cities don’t spend 20 years in jail for these crimes, yet it seems that Walker will spend at least the next 18 behind bars. The government can be assured of his good behavior, after all. But we are often most savage when punishing our own, their crimes made worse by our humiliation. Only a short time ago they intended to pursue treason charges against him, wisely dropped because that would raise all sorts of unwanted questions — for the feds — about what this antiquated, rather abstract offense actually means in the global age of porous borders and mutating loyalties.
Keeping the law out of it, however, most Americans became convinced that Walker is a traitor; and so last winter we faced the unlovely spectacle of a maddened public baying for the head of a young man more privileged than their sons or neighbors’ sons, the kind of bright, muddled boy that some of us might remember from high school or college.
The agreed facts now suggest that Walker never attacked much less killed any American, and it was never credible that a small-time foreign “combatant” would have any special information beforehand about the events of Sept. 11. Normally, after a war, the small fry are disarmed and sent home; because he is American, Walker came back to us in chains, facing life imprisonment for shooting his mouth off in front of his interrogators in Afghanistan. Which suggests that his real crime has been arrogance, his presumption that life in America is sinful and wicked, inferior to the true Islamic religion. He has spurned Uncle Sam — in the words of Ashcroft and his prosecutor Paul McNulty, “turned his back on the United States” — and the family, or paterfamilias, can’t forgive him.
But why — logically speaking — should an American raised with America’s freedoms and privileges have to accept them? Or if he accepts them, be grateful? I live in this country, an American citizen who enjoys its power and protections, but I am not a proud American. A childhood spent in Europe returned me to this country thinking of myself as neither American nor European but as some sort of restless, vaguely global citizen; Walker’s path may have been different, but the effect on his character is substantially the same. The world is full of such Americans, some of whom live here and many of whom don’t. In fact, by rejecting America for the harsh restrictions of life with the Taliban, Walker proves himself far less a hypocrite than me. His life has its own integrity in his act of departure two years ago. Did anyone ask him, over in Kandahar or on that Navy ship, if he wanted to stay?
Surely we have the right — short of actual proven violence or conspiracy — to test our loyalty to our country, which is the only useful way, it seems to me, of finally embracing it. A noble American is one who has considered the alternatives and still returned, which is presumably not a journey on which Ashcroft and Co. have ever embarked. Yanking him home as we did — the hand of John Ashcroft pulling a miscreant boy along by his ear — we cut short the journey of John Walker before its time, and for no greater reason than to make an example of him.
Did we need the example, however? Walker’s case is not even exceptional; it is unique. Our Puritan attorney general, hating the sin and the sinner alike, has daubed his own scarlet letter on a probably harmless young man and would gladly have killed him if he had half a chance, because in the scraggly bearded face (now clean-shaven) of John Walker Lindh he sees the kind of American who frightens him most: the kind with his own certainties, which are not the same as his elders’.
