COMPANY SECRETS: AN INTERVIEW WITH LOUIS WOLF

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00845R000201220001-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 24
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 24, 2010
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: August 1, 1981
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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Wash ington
Book Review
$1.25
STAT
volume 1, Number 1 August/September 1981
WASSERMAN
I'M SICK AND TIRED OF OF COURSE, I BELIEVE IN
ATTACKS ON THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS ..?
INTELLIGENCE A& Ic.tES
RWD THE RI &HT OF BUT LOT'S NOT' FOF&C-T
JOURNALISTS TO IWVESTI&ATE~
WHO'S THE CHICKENS
AND WHO'S THE FOX
Company Secrets:
An Interview
With Louis Wolf
Nelson Algren:
Write on the
wild Side
Paul Fericano's
A Stoogist
Manifesto
Plus reviews of The Terror Network, Cry of the People,
Trilateralism, Pornography and Silence,
and more...
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setween
the dines
Naming Names
T he resurgent right wing, flushed with victory in its most
recent budget battles, is intent not only on
the dismemberment of cherished liberal social pro-
grams but also on a frontal attack against First Amendment
rights. A partial list of the right wing agenda includes:
? A proposed Executive Order which would greatly ex-
pand the powers of the CIA and FBI to spy on citizens
within the U.S.
? Amending the Freedom of Information Act to curtail
public access to government records.
? Establishing a House Internal Security Committee.
? A proposed Intelligence Identities Protection Act,
which, as worded, does little to protect the identities of
CIA agents and officers, but which instead limits the rights
of citizens to debate national security issues.
The above proposal is, perhaps, among the most
dangerous. Because it is aimed primarily at Louis Wolf and
others writing for such magazines as Covert Action Informa-
tion Bulletin, which have been regularly publishing the names
of CIA agents and officers and thereby allegedly endangering
their lives, the mood on Capital Hill is to "get" Louis Wolf,
never mind how such a law would affect the rights of other
citizens.
The "Names of Agents" legislation is before congressional
Intelligence and Judiciary subcommittees in several versions.
Their basic features include: 1) a broad (and somewhat am-
biguous) definition of a covert agent; and 2) the punishment
of journalists as well as current or former CIA officers for
revealing covert agents' names, even if obtained from already
published sources.
Defining who a CIA covert agent is seems a relatively unim-
portant issue. However, because so many foreign political
leaders (Savimbi in Angola, King Hussein in Jordan, for ex-
ample) have had CIA ties, any linking of their names with the
U.S. intelligence community in a story would be a violation of
the proposed law. Moreover, a journalist who even unknow-
ingly identifies a CIA covert agent in an intelligence related
story would be liable for prosecution.
Needless to say, such a law would place stringent limits on
journalists investigating national security issues. Although
proponents of the bill insist that they only wish to punish
"non-mainstream" writers such as Louis Wolf, the language
of the proposed law in no way distinguishes between so-called
mainstream and non-mainstream journalists. Nor is there a
constitutional way to do so.
Perhaps the most dangerous provision of the Agents Iden-
tities Bill is Section 501(c), which prohibits publishing the
names of CIA covert agents culled from unclassified sources.
It is difficult to understand how this would protect CIA
covert agents, if, as is implied, many of their names can be
gleaned from public sources with some educated guesswork
(in fact, The Biographic Register, which lists foreign service
officers, has become the main source by which those oppos-
ing the CIA can, through certain widely published techniques,
learn the identities of covert agents under light diplomatic
cover). But what is more disturbing is the section's language
on criminal intent.
Previously,. the government could only prosecute in es-
pionage cases if there were proof of intent to injure the U.S.
or to give advantage to a foreign power. Now intent is
broadened to include impeding or impairing the foreign in-
telligence activities of the U.S.
Clearly, the above intent is not criminal. Anyone under the
constitution has the right to oppose a law, program, or activi-
ty through legal means. The language in this section does not
just chip away at the edges of the Bill of Rights, but strikes at
its very heart.
Congress, in attempting to cast such a wide net to catch the
writers for Covert Action Information Bulletin and other
magazines, would, in the process, ensnare all national securi-
ty critics. And even if a law is passed that is aimed solely at
Louis Wolf and others who also "name names," such a law
would be a bill of attainder (that is, establishes the guilt of a
particular individual in advance of a trial) and is therefore
also unconstitutional.
The national press is sending clear signals that such a law
would be very bad for freedom of the press and of speech.
The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Chicago
Tribune, and scores of other newspapers have already voiced
their opposition.
But despite the obvious danger of such a law, and the op-
position it faces from journalists and civil libertarians, the
mood in Congress and in the nation is for "something" to be
done.
Unfortunately, that "something" could do irreparable
damage to the Bill of Rights.
For more information concerning the Intelligence Identities
Protection Act, contact the Center for National Security
Studies, a project of the American Civil Liberties Union
Foundation and the Fund for Peace, 122 Maryland Avenue,
NE, Washington, D.C. 20002.
Joseph Lerner is the editor of The Washington Book Review.
The Washington Book Review believes that the respon-
sibility of reviewers, who are writers first and reviewers
second, extends beyond judging the literary merits of any
particular book, and that any threats to freedom of the
press and of speech should be matters of urgent concern.
That is why we are initiating in this issue a column entit-
led First Amendment Update, which will note and com-
ment on national trends that endanger the Bill of Rights.
2 The Washington Book Review
August/September 1981
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TW
S I AL
W,! hangwn
Book Review 40
Editor
Joseph Lerner
Associate Editor
Judy Zins
Senior Editor
David Ransom
Contributing Editors
Eric Baizer, Pat Dahl,
Frank Gallant
Editorial Staff
Marie Giblin, Michael Lerner,
Richard Peabody, Howard Smead
Art Director
Allyson Everngam
Public Relations
Clayton-Davis & Associates
1735 DeSales St. NW, Suite 601
Washington, D.C. 20036
Phone: [phone]
Publisher Emeritus
David Johnston
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August/September 1981
Volume 1, Number 1
In
this Issue...
ARTICLES
August/September 1981
Between the Lines (Joseph Lerner) ............................. 2
Write on the Wild Side (Nelson Algren) ......................... 4
Company Secrets: An Interview with Louis Wolf (Joseph Lerner) ...6
Letter from San Francisco: A Stoogist Manifesto (Paul Fericano) . . 20
First Amendment Update .................................. 22
REVIEWS
Cry of the People (Penny Lernoux) ............................. 6
The Terror Network (Claire Sterling) ........................... 6
Trilateralism (Holly Sklar) .................................... 7
Riding on a Blue Note (Gary Giddins) ......................... 10
The Geography of the Imagination (Guy Davenport) ............. 10
Pornography and Silence (Susan Griffin) ....................... 12
Nothing to do with Love (Joyce Reiser Kornblatt) ................. 13
Fireworks (Angela Carter) ................................... 13
Letargo (Frank Samperi) ..................................... 14
Kafka Na Cama (lair Ferreira Dos Santos) ....................... is
Editor's Choice (Morty Sklar & Jim Mulac) ...................... 16
ART CREDITS__
Cover by Dan Wasserman, < 1981 by Dan Wasserman
Linoleum cuts, pages 5, 7, 11, 16, 18 by Norman Strike, 1981 by Norman Strike
Cartoon, page 22, by Tony Auth, c 1Q80 by The Washington Post Writers Group
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Nelson Algren:
Write on the
Wild Side
Nelson Algren, the author of The Man With the Golden Arm,
A Walk on the Wild Side (for which he won the first National
Book A ward), and scores of reviews, essays, and short
stories, died on May 9, 1981. Called "the poet of the Chicago
slums, " his stories are about whores, drunks, small-time
thieves, the poor and the uneducated, society's rejects and
outcasts. Because Nelson Algren was Contributing Editor in
1979-1980 for the first Washington Book Review, his death
has had an added significance for us. Below is an adaptation
of his introduction to his short story anthology The Neon
Wilderness, which we believe aptly summarizes what Nelson
Algren stood for throughout his writing career.
never look behind me," Satchel Paige once ex-
plained himself, "there might be something follow-
ing." To put this present collection together, f
made a U-turn in 1946 and ran down several memories I had
been haunting, before they could start haunting me. I closed
in before they knew something was following.
One was of standing reveille in the woods below Duessel-
dorf on old Germany's final morning. I saw our orderly-room
wires suddenly divide the daybreak, making two skies for
Germany: one rainbowed in light, the other troubled by
night. As long as skies divided at day, I saw, peace would
leave us one more war to be fought.
Just when everyone had had enough of the last one.
Behind the last bivouac, the last sea-bell and last bar, the
ordinary Milwaukee Avenue moon of home shone like a
memory for me of people whose peace had always been one
more war to go.
When I returned to Chicago that ordinary moon was still
working nights. Yet its light had strangely changed, burning
both darker and more bright.
The last of Chicago's gaslamps had gone out. Fluorescent
neon lit brands of beer never named before. Some of the
drinkers had been to the war and some had sat it out; yet all
seemed equally survivors.
"I will not have a single person slighted or turned away,"
Whitman had written, "I am not the poet of goodness only, I
do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also." Here
among West Division Street drinkers I felt that, did I deny
them, I denied myself.
This identification with those whom our civilization has by-
passed, discarded, or accused had lent the American writer
the special dignity of standing beside the accused. As the ac-
cused had gained dignity for having the writer's concern.
"I play not marches for accepted visitors only, I play mar-
ches for conquered and slain persons" had been the prevail-
ing passion of American letters from Whitman through Crane
to Steinbeck and Richard Wright. But by the mid-40s those
writers who had depended upon this passion were either in
flight or gone passionless.
New owners moved in.
They were (I ought to have told you before) young men, but
burdened by a grouchiness caused by not having gone to any
Behind the last bivouac, the.
last sea-bell and last bar, the or-
dinary Milwaukee Avenue moon
of home shone like a memory
for me of people whose peace
had always been one more war
to go.
war. And their names were as strange as those brands of beer
that had been put on the market while yet green in the vat.
They arrived directly from their respective campuses armed
with blueprints to which the novel and the short story would
have to conform, were a passing grade to be awarded. For
they were footnote fellows mostly, a species of public boy
that talked like a head on a stick. %
Prewar mottoes still hung on the walls, ancestral homilies
offering obsolete mysteries: "No Man Is An Island." "I
Have Always Depended Upon The Kindness Of Strangers."
"While There Is A Soul In Prison I Am Not Free."-it was
plain the old mottoes would have to come down.
For such signs irritated the new owners and made them
wish Hemingway would move out. For he was not, it was
plain, a head on a stick, and yet he wouldn't move out. And a
saying like "no man is an island" made him uneasy because it
implied responsibilities that might well keep a headstick kid
from rising. And rising (I wish I had told you before) is what
a headstick kid likes to do best of all.
"Hemingway has never written anything that could disturb
an eight-year-old," one new owner wrote, and, as far as it
went, that was true; but overlooked the fact that what he had
written had disturbed two decades of adults deeply. And hav-
ing his heels snapped at didn't make him pack up; he had
been snapped at before.
Yet make no mistake-O, why didn't I tell you before?-
the headstick heads knew where the levers were. They formed
a loose federation, between the literary quarterlies,
publishers' offices and book review columns, presenting a
view of American letters untouched by the life of America:
the view of the encapsulated man from a glasswalled life who
was made personally insecure at mention of beetles and rain.
Consequently the most dreadful stench, like that of a but-
cher shop whose owner has died, began to rise from such
journals as Commentary and Partisan Review.
"What I really object to," one explained, "is the writer
who offers me the world's horrors without offering a solu-
tion." For the life of me I couldn't recall offering this fellow
a choice of horrors or joys-yet the explanation was in-
teresting in its assumption that the American novelist was
now hard at work in hope of making a passing grade.
One could not escape the feeling that the New York literary
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bench had become peopled by those for whom all allowances
are made, yet who make no allowances. And of New York as
a place where our new affluence, failing to feel its own
possibilities, was settling for the lowest possible returns: a
place where the song, once felt in the heart, becomes a pro-
Whitman had written, "I am not
the poet of goodness only, I do
not decline to be the poet of
wickedness also. " Here among
West Division Street drinkers I
felt that, did I deny them, I
denied myself.
Thus the stories here presented were out of style with the
new owners almost as soon as they were published, and it is a
constant curiosity to me that, while available in translation, in
the libraries of all the large cities of Europe, they are not
available in the library of the city about which they were writ-
ten. In those fourteen years, too, the street, lit by night-
burning neon on Chicago's West Side, has extended to where
the lights of the cocktail lounges glow. West Division Street
now moves past tree-lined boulevards and up flights, by wall-
to-wall carpeting where a hidden hi-fi is playing softly. And the
big Milwaukee Avenue moon of home casts an equal light on
neon wilderness and payola jungle.
Upon men and women forced to choices too hard to bear.
From the penthouse twenty-five glass-windowed stories up,
to the night-blue bar below, in a time that is neither one of
peace nor of war, where new wars start before old ones are
done. Where all, all are survivors.
Where not one should be slighted. Blows on the head or
blows on the ear, not one should be turned away.
Under any old moon at all. ^
perty to be recorded. Where the latest novel is discussed and
the senior editor takes a little white pill because a junior editor
has just come in looking well rested.
A place where one whose life has been sheltered from rough
weather from nursery to campus to the day his name is
painted beside his dad's on a frost-glass office door, begins to
feel an increasing contempt for men; while one who has had
to take his own chances, blows on the head or blows on the
ear, gains respect for the same identical race.
"There is no true compassion in these modern works," one
new owner expressed it for all, "the degraded, the antisocial
and the criminal are sentimentalized over, identified with.. .one
has to be a pervert or a savage to elicit sympathy."
Until that moment I hadn't known that sympathy for per-
verts and savages had gone out of style, yet the point was
clear: compassion was just too good for some people. Dis-
tributing it in bulk had been a mistake. Had I thought the
kept woman and the thief were invited? Had I thought, "I do
not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become
the wounded person"? That was out.
Blanche du Bois, trapped between degradation and the
loony bin, was out. Willie Loman with his back to the wall,
and Studs Lonigan dead before his true life began, were out.
Seen in the fresh light cast by the headstick heads, one realized
that when Scott Fitzgerald asked, at the end, "Why was I
identified with the very objects of my horror and compas-
sion?" he had brought his trouble upon himself. For writers
who revealed horrors, yet offered no solutions, low marks
were in readiness. What was needed now was writers with
solutions.
Yet Whitman had taken his stand with the accused. Guilty
or not guilty, he had pled the defense. As Stephen Crane had
taken his place beside Maggie. As had Dreiser beside Clyde
Griffiths. As had O'Neill beside Anna Christiansen and as
Wright had beside Bigger Thomas. And it seemed to me then,
when the new owners came in, and seems to me yet, the most
honorable place an American writer can stand, good times or
hard. It seems to me that in this-to draw upon the feelings of
others, of the woman doing hard time in brothel or jail, of the
youth forced to a choice of informing or going up himself-lies
the distinction between the mere academician and the writer
whose task is to reveal the ways things are with us; be it horrors
or joys.
From the book NEON WILDERNESS by Nelson Algren.
Copyright ? 1947. Published by Doubleday & Co., Inc.
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Company Secrets:
An Interview
with Louis Wolf
Joseph Lerner
Along with Philip Agee, Ellen Ray, William H.
Schaap, Karl Van Meter, and Stewart Klepper, Louis
Wolf is co-editor of the books Dirty Work: The CIA
In Western Europe and Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa, as
well as the magazine CovertAction Information Bulletin. In
them he has named names of covert CIA agents. Moderates
and those on the right label Wolf "extreme" and ."in-
temperate," but he also is ostracized by some on the left who
claim he jeopardizes the lives of the covert agents whose covers
he has blown. Below, Louis Wolf tells why he names names
and analyzes what the CIA does and why they are doing it.
TWBR: Those opposed to CIA whistle-blowing have singled
out the staff of CovertAction Information Bulletin in par-
ticular for attack. Why?
WOLF: I think it is fair to say we have been singled out not
because of any untruthfulness of what we have published or
written or have said in public speeches, but because the CIA
AVoice is Heard
Cry of the People
Penny Lernoux
535 pp. Doubleday & Company. $12.95
A s the Reagan Administration asks
Americans to wake up to the
alleged Cuban/Soviet buildup in Latin
America, it ignores and/or denies the
third force that finds itself wedged be-
tween fascist regimes and Marxist guer-
rillas. It is the cry of the people
themselves who have found their voice
within the Catholic Church.
With impressive breadth of detail
Penny Lernoux's Cry of the People
chronicles the evolution of that part of
the Church which has embraced a
grass-roots partnership with Latin
America's poor.
Lernoux's careful documentation of
techniques of torture and economic
feudalism specific to Paraguay,
Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile,
Nicaragua, and El Salvador answers
the question that U.S. foreign policy
experts don't ask: Why would mem-
bers of the Catholic Church embrace
and foment insurgence?
and its friends in Congress and in the media perceive us as a
threat to their hold over the national security apparatus. I
can't believe that four people in a small office in the National
Press Building in Washington, D.C. could be such a tremen-
dous threat to an organization with a multibillion dollar
budget, 30,000 employees, and the unlimited resources of the
government. It is obvious that the CIA wants to widen the
wall of secrecy that has always surrounded it since its incep-
tion in 1947. Surely, the exposures that have been made about
its illegal operations around the world as well as in the United
States have caused a lot of embarrassment for the CIA and its
friends. Anyone who meaningfully challenges that organiza-
tion is bound to come in for attack. There are many others
who have published articles in other journals who are also
under attack.
TWBR: Philp Agee toward the end of his book Inside the
Company: CIA Diary wrote that the CIA had bugged his
typewriter. How closely are you being watched?
WOLF: You have this edition? (Louis Wolf picks up from
his desk a Penguin copy of Agee's book, which has on the
cover a photograph of a typewriter whose battered, torn case
reveals hidden electronic circuitry.) That photograph is not a
mock-up by Penguin Books. The typewriter is for real.
TWBR: Do you think your phone is tapped?
WOLF: We don't think, we know so. For instance on several
occasions we've overheard on the phone people talking about
our conversations or we've overheard recordings of conversa-
tions we have had either the day before or the same day. Were
What Catholic activists Have dis-
covered is that attempts to improve the
living conditions of Latin America's
poor conflict fundamentally and ir-
resolvably with the needs of multina-
tional corporations and with the small,
wealthy Latin elite who share the spoils
with them.
It is no wonder, then, that today
"wherever farm laborers demand bet-
ter wages and more equitable distribu-
tion of land, wherever attempts are
made to establish cooperatives or
unions, the government suddenly
discovers a `communist conspiracy'
and sends troops into the countryside
to destroy the cooperatives, burn the
peasants' huts, rape the women, and
kill or imprison the men."
For centuries, the Church hierar-
chies were willing to trade blessings
with dictators in exchange for a
measure of power. Why then, in the
last decade, have they turned away
from their traditional partnership with
the privileged to attend to the peasants
and slum dwellers? Why the change of
heart by a Church that helped divide
and conquer a continent?
(Continued on page 17)
America's New
Moral Crusade
The Terror Network: The Secret
War of International Terrorism
Claire Sterling
357 pp. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $13.95
T errorism is a problem that won't
go away. It plagues the West like
poverty plagues the Third World, and
like poverty its effects ripple across the
great separating oceans with relentless
persistence. What began with sporadic
skyjackings evolved into isolated
violence and from there into bomb-
ings, kidnappings and murders too
widespread to be dismissed as the other
guy's problem.
With the world awash in kneecap-
pings and assassinations, Claire Ster-
ling's book, The Terror Network, has
come along just as the war against ter-
rorism has become America's latest
moral crusade. And it brings the im-
pact of terrorism's terrible swift sword
home to the reader with an impact wor-
thy of considerable praise. Through
her wide-ranging (geographically at
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the CIA, the National Security Agency, and FBI not bugging
our phone we would be wondering if we were doing a very
good job. That's not to say we are happy about it or that we
accept it.
"I can't believe that four
people... could be such a tremen-
dous threat to an organization
with a multibillion dollar budget,
30, 000 employees, and the
unlimited resources of the
government. "
TWBR: Then the reforms of the past few years haven't
changed such practices?
WOLF: They've admitted that there are still wiretaps and
mail openings of a number of people and organizations.
We've found again and again that whatever they've admitted
to, you can multiply many times over. For those who talk
now about wanting to "unleash the CIA," it's our view that
while the CIA claims that they haven't been able to do all that
they would have liked to have done in the past few years, to
say that they've been "leashed" is ludicrous.
least) treatment of the subject, it is
possible to catch a frightening glimpse
of the harsh and heady, brutal and
spectacular world of the international
terrorist. With their weather map at-
tack on democracy, it is easy to im-
agine a group of fiendish little men
somewhere plotting our destruction.
All too easy.
After tipping her hat to the left's
nobler intentions, she tells us she
doesn't plan to distinguish between ter-
rorism of the right and terrorism of the
left because, she explains, one man's
terrorist is another man's freedom
fighter. "There are no good killers and
bad killers," she says, "only killers."
All terrorists are killers; after all, the
purpose of terrorism is to terrorize,
isn't it? But The Terror Network is a
lurid account of left wing terrorism on-
ly and how Russia supposedly supports
it through proxies in Eastern Europe,
Cuba, and the Middle East.
Terrorism is such an oppressive fact
of life, anyone writing a serious book
about it ought to have some sort of
device for separating freedom fighters
from terrorists. Isn't there anyone
(Continued on page 18)
August/September 1981
The large number of cabinet members
who were trilateralists-Carter himself
was one-became a subject discussed
even in the Sunday .supplement.
But the corporate guardians of pop-
ular culture carefully published no
serious book-length study of tri-
lateralism, let alone expose. The great
capitalist conglomerates currently con-
suming the publishing industry have
really no reason to publicize the details
of their political command structure.
Into this void comes Trilateral-
ism-a massive collection of challeng-
ing essays carefully organized and in-
troduced by Holly Sklar.
These essays make the reader work,
but those who do will be rewarded with
a deeper understanding of the underly-
ing forces in American politics than
they will get in a decade of reading The
Washington Post.
As with most collections, some of
these essays are insightful, others less
so. But all are carefully argued, and the
challenge is partly in figuring out
what's good and why.
The best pieces are those that pro-
ceed from an understanding that
(Continued on page 19)
Taking Care
of Business
Trilateralism: The Trilateral
Commission & Elite Planning
for World Management
Ed. Holly Sklar
600 pp. South End Press, P.O. Box 68, Astor
Station, Boston, MA 02123. $20 cloth, $9 paper
P eople who have been to El Salva-
dor say that, reading the govern-
ment-issue newspapers there, you
wouldn't know a war is going on.
Similarly, how revealing it is that the
big publishing houses have brought out
no serious critique of trilateralism.
Founded in 1973 by the unofficial
chief of the world financial communi-
ty, David Rockefeller, the Trilateral
Commission has included the top ex-
ecutives in business, banking and
government from the U.S., Europe,
and Japan (hence, "trilateral").
"Trilateralism" is its political strategy
and tactics.
With the election of Jimmy Carter,
the Trilateral Commission gained wide
name recognition, almost notoriety.
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TWBR: Many persons who are critical of CIA covert action
nonetheless oppose the practice of naming names. Why do
you believe that such an activity is not counterproductive?
Why do you persist in it?
WOLF: It comes down to one thing: accountability.
Employees of the CIA, in this case the covert operators, are
accountable for what they do the same way as you or me or
any private citizen are accountable for what they do. The dif-
ference, of course, is that they spend our money and are civil
servants. They must be all the more accountable for what they
do. Time and time again, it's been proven to be impossible to
talk about the CIA's dirty work without talking about who is
doing it. It's impossible to analyze one without the other. The
people, particularly those in the CIA, who suggest that we are
"Were the CIA... not bugging our
phone we would be wondering
if we were doing a good job. "
placing CIA officers in danger by identifying them are not
telling the truth. First of all, not a single person among the
several thousand we and other journalists have named, in-
cluding stories in The New York Times, The Washington
Post, and many other media-some two to three thousand
people identifed-not one has been hurt or killed. I am iri-
cluding the cases of Richard Welch, who was assassinated in
Athens in 1975, and N. Richard Kinsman in Jamaica. N.
Richard Kinsman wasn't scratched, and his name was iden-
tified in our magazine nine months previous to the incident in
which his window was shot up. Nothing happened in those
nine months. The allegation also falls apart when you con-
sider that if their lives were in danger, the CIA would remove
them from their posts. We have found on repeated occasions
that people who were identified in CovertAction Information
Bulletin were still to be found in the same posts a year or two
later. If they were in such great danger, why weren't they
brought back to the United States? As for Richard Welch, he
had been named four to six times since 1968 and in 1975 just
before he was killed in Athens he was warned by the CIA not
to stay in the house he chose to live in. They sent him a secret
cable, as Morton Halperin pointed out in an article in The
Washington Post, urging him not to live there because anyone
living there would be identitied as the top CIA person in
Athens. He cabled back that he liked the house and wasn't
going to move. Two weeks later he was killed. The people
who killed him had every intention of killing his predecessor.
The primary reason he was killed was because of the close
identification the Greek people had of the CIA with the junta,
a very brutal regime whose main sponsor over many years was
the CIA.
TWBR: Revelations about CIA covert activities have been
going on since Victor Marchetti's and Agee's books in 1975
and the evidence of complicity in murder and torture in
Africa, Latin America and elsewhere is chilling and over-
whelming. Yet the net effect has been in Congress and the rest
of the country not to curb such activities but to make the ,
Agency more leakproof. Why don't people care?
WOLF: I think the American people do care very much. The
image that the United States has now in many countries,
among millions of people around the world, is one of world
policeman. This has not changed since Senator Fulbright
discussed and condemned the world policeman role, and, in
fact, it has been strengthened rather than weakened since that
time. I think there has been a feeling among politicians in the
White House and on Capitol Hill that the American defeat in
Vietnam, the fall of Somoza in Nicaragua, the fall of the
Shah of Iran and several other incidents where the United
States imposed governments and regimes which have fallen
have made some of these politicians wonder, "Are we still in
charge?" I've seen quotations by some of these people, for
example, where they talk of the Caribbean as an "American
lake." Many Caribbean people find this specious, just as
Americans and Canadians would find it specious for Fidel
Castro to say the St. Lawrence seaway is Cuban territory.
Down through the years and most particularly since these
events have happened, there is a fantasy, of people in Con-
gress and of some of their media friends, the so-called Moral
Majority and the New Right, that the United States should
reassert its power in the world. This means, among other
things, "unleashing the CIA," strengthening the Rapid
Deployment Force, chemical and biological warfare training,
an expanded 222-billion dollar military budget, the MX
missile, and so on and so on. But we must understand that the
CIA has a very special place in this strategy. You cannot view
these other developments and ignore the CIA's role, which is
essential, because the CIA's role is now and always has been
one of covert intervention in the affairs of other countries, in-
cluding bribery, buying elections, recruiting foreign leaders,
trade union officials, church people, professors, journalists,
and so on, all the way to overthrowing governments to
possibly assassinating a foreign leader. This is what CIA has
done and what is looming in the very near future.
TWBR: It is disengenuous for Arnaud de Borchgrave and
Robert Moss, authors of The Spike, to suggest that progressive
organizations such as The Institute for Policy Studies engage in
disinformation for the Soviet Union, in light of the authors'
own connections with the U.S. intelligence community, which
routinely uses disinformation. Could you elaborate on that?
WOLF: It is well documented that Robert Moss received a
considerable sum of money-a commission from the Chilean
government provided by the CIA-for the book Chile's
Marxist Experiment. Although this book for some years has
not been available in bookstores, if you go to the Chilean Em-
bassy they hand it to you as part of their propaganda
package. Moss and de Borchgrave also did not disclose that
they were no longer working for their respective publications,
Robert Moss for the London Foreign Report and Arnaud de
Borchgrave for many years with Newsweek. Only last week de
Borchgrave was speaking on the Larry King Show, and he
was saying he was with Newsweek and that Robert Moss's last
job was with the Foreign Report. This is the first time, to my
knowledge, that de Borchgrave has been candid about it. De
Borchgrave was fired because he had been compiling exten-
sive dossiers on his colleagues at Newsweek. In his
ultraparanoid mind he believes anyone who is not waving the
flag, must be a KGB agent, and if not he is a dupe. On a
number of occasions de Borchgrave has openly stated he has
received extensive information from western intelligence ser-
vices and that The Spike was allegedly based on interviews
from defectors. It's not for me to say the book is disinforma-
tion-it speaks for itself. And for Moss and de Borchgrave to
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suggest that the KGB created the word disinformation is ab-
solute idiocy. I have obtained documents through the
Freedom of Information Act which show that the OSS, the
forerunner of the CIA, in 1944-45 talked about disinforma-
tion campaigns.
TWBR: Why have you limited your revelations to the CIA
and not the KGB?
WOLF: Quite simple. Our focus is primarily on the United
States intelligence agencies and most of all the CIA and we do
this because as American citizens, as persons concerned about
what the government does with our tax money, in our names,
using the United States Constitution, the Declaration of In-
dependence, and all the most important principles on which
the United States was founded, as a basis and using a pretext
"Most knowledgeable people
know that the CIA's main role is
not collecting intelligence but
covert action. "
of "national security" for all its activities around the world.
As Americans it is our right and duty to stand up and say this
is wrong, particularly when it involves covert action around
the globe. What other governments might do, whether China,
the USSR, Vietnam, Cuba or any other government anywhere
is their province. But we as Americans must deal with what
our government does.
TWBR: Do you intend to challenge the Intelligence Iden-
tities Protection Act if it becomes law?
WOLF: Absolutely. As a number of Congressmen and many
editorials around the country have noted, the bill is totally un-
constitutional. It is unconstitutional because it would
criminalize the use of information in the public domain which
is easily obtained in many libraries, books, news articles,
speeches by public officials, and even testimony from suc-
cessive administrations. All of this information plainly in the
public domain would be placed out of the public domain.
Suddenly, it would be unlawful to analyze, research or even
talk about it. If this bill becomes law, it would be impossible
for the press to talk about something like Watergate. Like-
wise, many cases of illegal FBI or CIA or other intelligence
agency activities would have been impossible for the media to
find out about or if found even mentioned. Half of this town
would be in jail if this bill became law, for Washington leaks
like a sieve. It wouldn't be just journalists who would go to
prison but other people, including many in government. If the
Agents Identities legislation becomes law, CovertAction In-
formation Bulletin intends to go straight into court within
twenty-four hours. Not to go into court to challenge it would
be dangerously wrong.
TWBR: Despite your criticisms of the CIA, don't you think
that the gathering of intelligence is a legitimate function of
the government?
WOLF: Any government, including ours, has the right to
know what's going on in the world, which is a far cry from
what the CIA's role has been in the last 33 years. If all they
did was the collection and analysis of intelligence so they
could provide information to the Executive branch in order to
enable it to have a more rational foreign policy, we would
support that. There are no less than 18 different government
agencies that gather intelligence here and abroad. Without the
CIA the United States would still have access to all the in-
telligence that the agency gathers. Most knowledgeable peo-
ple in Washington and elsewhere know that the CIA's main
role is not collecting intelligence but covert action
TWBR: Philip Agee has been deported from a number of
European countries, although he is now living in West Ger-
many. What is his current status vis a vis the United States
and the CIA?
WOLF: He's somewhat in limbo, but for the first time since
the publication of Inside the Company: CIA Diary his life has
been relatively calm. He has his family with him and he no
longer has to live out of suitcases. Nevertheless, the previous
administration did revoke his passport, and the case is before
the Supreme Court now. I think that to take someone's
passport purely because of political reasons-he has not
violated any law, because if he had they would have charged
him-is another instance of unconstitutional harassment
against Agee. The CIA has had him under surveillance, has
hounded him out of four countries, and has prevented him
from entering several others. He now hopes very much that
this harassment will stop so that he may lead a life like the rest
of us. The fact that he is a critic of the government and of the
CIA should not mean that his life has to be like this. A
number of CIA people have stated in interviews that they
want to kill him, but Agee has never once said that he wants
to kill any of them for what they did. I think this is a one way
street they're driving on.
TWBR: Is there anything in conclusion you wish to say?
WOLF: I would just like to reiterate the very grave threat
embodied in the thrust of the CIA today vis a vis these various
pieces of legislation that I mentioned-the Intelligence Iden-
tities Protection Act, which would be a threat not to just us or
to you as another journalist, not just to The New York Times,
The Washington Post or The Los Angeles Times, or national
television and radio networks, or to historians, but to every
citizen in this country. It is an attempt to create an official
secrets act. There's no room in a democratic society for such a
law. If it's enacted and if its companion bills seeking to gut
the Freedom of Information Act and the Clark Amendment
(outlawing CIA involvement in Angola) become law,
Americans will be faced with a very grave future. Moreover, I
feel that even more serious is the effect that these
developments will have on other countries and people around
the world. The nub of the problem is that the American peo-
ple always seem to be the last to learn what the CIA is doing
around the world. And these proposed legislative initiatives,
which were initiated and in fact the Intelligence Identities
Protection Act was written by the CIA, not by Congress, will
again reinforce the same syndrome in which we the American
people won't know what our government is doing. Let us
hope that it doesn't end in war. ^
Those who wish to contact the staff of CovertAction Infor-
mation Bulletin may write to: P.O. Box 50272, Washington,
D. C. 20004.
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in on a wave
Riding on a Blue Note
Gary Giddins
313 pp. Oxford University Press. $16.95
A s a college student twelve years
ago, Gary Giddins was a
rather peculiar fellow. He seemed
obsessed with obtaining every jazz
album and tape ever made and squir-
reling them away in his small dorm
room-a pursuit particularly in-
congruous in the hick Iowa town of
cornfields and dim Midwestern
students. In retrospect, one realizes
that it must have taken some guts to
bring in avant garde composer and
pianist Cecil Taylor for a gig. Taylor,
scarcely a famous personality today,
was far more obscure a decade ago
when, dressed in black and shades, he
assaulted a piano before a group of
disbelieving students. The minority
who fancied themselves as jazz
buffs-that is, followers of Miles
Davis, Getz, and Brubeck-'were also
startled. It did not require a seer to
predict that Giddins, champion of the
avant garde and a discographer's
discographer, would probably become
a jazz critic. Fortunately, he was able
to find a context for his scholarship
and musical interests in regular jazz
columns for the Village Voice, which
he has written since the early 70's.
Thirty essays and reviews are collected
in this volume.
Riding On A Blue Note is not intend-
ed to be a comprehensive narrative or
history of modern American music,
although most of its subjects are cen-
tral figures in that history. It does
cover a wide range of artists practicing
many genres throughout the century,
including rhythm 'n blues (for example
Bobby Bland and Otis Blackwell), pop
(Irving Berlin, Bing Crosby, Sinatra),
and mostly, jazz (Ellington, Mingus,
Coleman, and many others). The book
suffers from some of the problems in-
herent in almost any compilation of
reviews; namely, breaks in continuity
and the inclusion of some material
which is not important enough to merit
reprinting. Also, the collection requires
some familiarity with Afro-American
music on the part of the reader. Access
to a good record collection wouldn't
hurt, either. Otherwise, one gets lost in
certain passages, such as this descrip-
tion of a Charlie Parker recording:
...when he develops the six-note motif into a
two-measure phrase (measures six and seven),
imposing a triplet over an already lightning-
fast melody, he runs out of breath. But never
again. For the rest of the solo, his phrasing is
so authoritative and relaxed and singing that
when he winds down with a legato two-
measure configuration (measures 27 and 28),
only the listener is left breathless.
So this is a book for the somewhat ini-
tiated. After all, aren't Voice readers
pretty hip?
But most of the book is accessible,
especially given Giddins' preoccupa-
tion with innovators working in a
music which has always been for in-
siders. The history of jazz is one of
movements reaching familiarity, only
to find iconoclasts on the scene ready
to shake things up and challenge that
which has become conventional.
Human stories are presented alongside
musical analysis, and some of the por-
traits, particularly those which employ
first-hand reporting and interviews, as
with Dizzie Gillespie and Cecil Taylor,
are quite immediate.
The book also contains many good
tips about underrated artists past and
present, prompts a new appreciation of
others with bigger reputations, and ef-
fectively captures the breadth,
richness, and diversity of black con-
tributions to twentieth century
American music. Moreover, important
problems are raised, such as ? the ex-
ploitation of jazz musicians by
elements in the music industry. Wes
Montgomery is cited as an example of
an artist whose brief recording career,
although not his talent, was drowned
in the schlock of insensitive producers.
"The jazzman," writes Giddins,
"may be the last American hero. He
has to fight for his sound, his vision,
his tradition. His victories are mostly
private and frequently pyrrhic: most of
the great innovators never reach fifty."
Jazzman as hero-a knee-jerk liberal
conceit? No, not at all! For the history
of black American music is indeed one
of heroics, and a touch of romanticism
without racism is an excellent approach
to bring to the subject. Riding On A
Blue Note is an important and useful
addition to the still insufficient
literature about the heroes who have
done so much to enrich our culture.
Eric Baizer is a Washington, D.C.
writer and musician.
The Washington Book Review
Oracle of our
Ancient Future
The Geography
of the Imagination
Guy Davenport
400 pp. North Point Press, 850 Talbot Ave.,
Berkeley, CA 94708. $20 cloth, $10 paper
E zra Pound comes alive and starts
walking around in your head,
making statements you never knew he
made but that were right there all
along. The past becomes very present,
the future wrapped up in every ar-
chaeological find. The Greek myths
jump from graves and books, more sen-
sual and sensuous than ever in your ab-
stracted mental life. Suddenly that silly
poem you were taught to despise breaks
out of its bad press and enters a context
that makes you see its originality, its im-
portance. You wait for a new surprise
on the next page-and you get it!
Who is this guy, Guy Davenport?
You may wonder if you haven't been
reading him fairly regularly in places
like The New York Times, The Wash-
ington Post, The Hudson Review, and
even Life Magazine, or more literary
places, scholarly journals and the like,
or if you weren't at the Conference on
Twentieth-Century Literature in 1974
at the University of Louisville, where
Mr. Davenport read "The Symbol of
the Archaic," or if you didn't hear
"The House that Jack Built," the in-
augural lecture to open the Yale Center
for the Study of Ezra Pound and His
Contemporaries, or "The Geography
of the Imagination," the Distinguished
Professor Lecture at the University of
Kentucky for 1978, or "Joyce's Forest
of Symbols," the Eberhardt Faber
Lecture for 1973 at Princeton. And
here I cut a long list short.
Who is this superstar professor, this
academic box office hit? First, he is
someone who does not fit the academic
stereotype: he is a very non-academic
resident of Academia; no anemia
plagues his blood the way it does that
of most. Perhaps that's why he's in-
vited to speak before so many aca-
demic gatherings: he shows the
scholars that there is a chance of
human redemption, a possibility of
passion among the books. He is an ex-
ample of what intense, authentic,
organic miracles can be created out of
scholarship when it is mixed with .
enough pure creative force.
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Passion is the key word. Mr. Daven-
port lets us see, touch, enjoy, laugh
over, marvel at, get aroused by his
ideas. He is not exclusively an essayist;
he has a body of short fiction to his
credit. But it is in his essays that he
sings like a poet, perceives in multiple
layers like a poet, and indeed is a poet.
This collection of forty "essays" is
really a collection of poems, many more
than forty if you count individual lyrical
paragraphs, or one 400-page epic if you
would rather look at his vision as a
unified continuum, which it is.
The intellect is not dead and dry
when we enter these whirling waters of
thought. But the unity is always there,
emerging from a diversity, just as
water comes in countless different
forms and shapes but is always unified
at the molecular level by two hydrogen
atoms linked securely to an oxygen
atom. I use a metaphor from science
because Mr. Davenport has an affinity
for all the categories of knowledge; for
him science is not opposed to poetry,
and parallels between the two are
found everywhere. The first essay in
the book gives its title and takes as its
thesis the unity of the imagination
underlying its great diversity, just as
our planet has a great variety of ter-
rains and climates in its geography all
solidly married into a single sphere.
These essays entertain in several
ways. First, they are written in a style
that has grace, music, wit, and a wealth
of telling details. Unexpected turns and
convergences keep you alternately in
suspenseful curiosity and suddenly
satisfied. Second, you witness the com-
ing together into a mysterious coher-
ence the many separate, out-of-the-
way discoveries of a man who must be
a tireless searcher and at the same time
possess a divining rod to lead him to
just the right spots for digging up
buried treasure. For example, in shed-
ding new light on a rather neglected
poem by Whitman, he travels into a
book on palentology to find out about
George Peabody, one of the first great
"merchant philanthropists," also in-
terested in scientific matters, and then
in a footnote Davenport tosses in this:
"You can also see in this book a photo-
graph of Edgar Allen Poe inspecting
the fossil skeleton of a prehistoric
horse: a photograph still unknown to
the Poe scholars."
But a powerful style and interesting
revelations would be superficial by
themselves. What makes it all worth
more than the sum of its parts is the vi-
August/September 1981
sion that is constantly being implied,
gradually brought more and more into
clear view. It is a vision that cannot be
verbalized fully; otherwise it would not
be a vision. A most rudimentary hint
can be given, however. My attempt at a
hint would go like this: today we are
craving, without knowing it, the most
primitive ways off seeing and relating
to the universe, and the extent to which
we are ignorant of these primitive ways
or refuse to take them seriously, much
less embrace them, determines the
degree of empty activities we must
mechanically act out to ward of the
paralyzing fear of impending extinc-
tion from within and without.
The first half of my hint is pretty
close to what Davenport actually says
in several places; the second half is my
interpretation of his tone, his imagery,
his exasperations. This is a book that
mixes great hope and optimism with
great despair and pessimism. If it did
not, we would not recognize it as hav-
ing anything to do with us and our
deepest concerns. But the vision is im-
portant also because it can contain and
intuitively explain so many different
subjects, as a partial list will show: an-
cient art, literature, and philosophy
woven deftly into the modern; poets
like Pound, Whitman, Olson, Zukof-
sky, Marianne Moore, Stevens, Jon-
athan Williams, Ronald Johnson, and
even Joyce Kilmer; scientists and ar-
tists and thinkers like Louis Agassiz
and Tchelitchew and Wittgenstein.
At this point there is only one way to
convey the flavor of this book, the way
it swings from fun facts to penetrating
The Washington Book Review
insight and back again without an ex-
cuse needed or an awkward lapse.
Quoting from a book this size in a
review this size is a little like a child
dipping his toy pail in the ocean, but it
will have to do for now. But it doesn't
have to be your last or only dose of
Davenport, because you can-and
should-get this book and read it, get
seduced by it, even obsessed by it. It
reminds you of how much there is that
we need to know, how many important
facts have been allowed to drop from
our cultural pool, how startlingly
related all human experience and art
really are, how many obscure ref-
erences wait to be deciphered so they
can glow brightly in our awareness and
heal the many splits we have imagined
into existence. Our categories are
symptoms of a blinding disease, and
Davenport shows us ways of leaping
across those crippling categories, free-
ing us from at least some of our mental
paralysis.
In "Hobbitry" we find: "Even when
I came to read The Lord of the Rings I
had trouble, as I still do, realizing that
it was written by the mumbling and
pedantic Prof. J.R.R. Tolkien." And
later in this brief, modest essay, we
learn this:
The closest I have ever gotten to the secret
and inner Tolkien was in a casual conversa-
tion on a snowy day in Shelbyville, Kentucky.
I forget how in the world we came to talk of
Tolkien at all, but I began plying questions as
soon as I knew that I was talking to a man
who had been at Oxford as a classmate of
Ronald Tolkien's.
Davenport gets an amazing response
from this man:
"You know, he [Tolkien) used to have the
most extraordinary interest in the people here
in Kentucky. He could never get enough of
my tales of Kentucky folk. He used to make
me repeat family names like Barefeet and
Boffin and Baggins and good country names
like that."
Then Davenport tells us, "Practically
all the names of Tolkien's hobbits are
listed in my Lexington phone book,
and those that aren't can be found over
in Shelbyville."
The essay on Tolkien is not typical
of those in this book; perhaps it was in-
cluded for a bit of relief from the long,
intense, challenging pieces that you feel
your mental scope being stretched by.
But even here the central vision is being
served: the connections of culture are
profound, intricate, inescapable.
Davenport writes in a breathless voice,
always on the verge of unveiling a sur-
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prising turn of events that thickens the
plot. His is an intellectual and artistic
and cultural detective story of immense
complexity. Here is a taste:
The appeal of popular culture must lie
precisely in its faithfulness to ancient tradi-
tions. The charming little children's book by
Carlo Collodi, Le Avventuri di Pinocchio,
can scarcely claim to be included in a history
of Italian literature, and yet to a geographer
of the imagination it is a more elegant
paradigm of the narrative art of the Mediter-
ranean than any other book since Ovid's
Metamorphoses, rehearses all the central
myths, and adds its own to the rich stock of
tradition.
It reaches back to a Gnostic theme known
to both Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson:
"Split the stick," said Jesus, "and I am
there." It combines Pygmalion, Ovid, the
book of Jonah, the Commedia dell'Arte, and
Apuleius; and will continue to be a touch-
stone of the imagination.
And here is another:
There was, however, a silent believer from
the beginning of his career, who saw
prehistoric art with eyes which would in-
fluence all other eyes in our time. When
Breuil was copying the ceiling of bulls in the
Spanish cave Altamira, a young man from
Barcelona crawled in beside him and mar-
velled at the beauty of the painting, at the
energy of the designs. He would in a few
years teach himself to draw with a similar
energy and primal clarity, and would incor-
porate one of these engimatic bulls into his
largest painting, the Guernica. He was Pablo
Picasso.
He then pulls out this idea:
If we say, as we can, that the archaic is one of
the great inventions of the twentieth century,
we mean that as the first European renais-
sance looked back to Hellenistic Rome for a
range of models and symbols, the twentieth
century has looked back to a deeper past in
which it has imagined it sees the very begin-
ping of civilization....
Behind all this passion for the archaic,
which is far more pervasive in the arts of our
time than can be suggested here, is a longing
for something lost, for energies, values, and
certainties unwisely abandoned in an in-
dustrial age. Things, Proust says, are gods,
and one way our arts seem to regard our
world is to question what gods have come to
dwell among us in the internal combustion
engine, the cash register, and the computer.
This is the point, far more devastating
than we are likely to admit, where all
of Davenport's thinking ultimately
leads. What are we doing? Why are we
living in this landscape that is the
enemy of life? After all the penetrating
insights into literature and art and
science, Davenport's vision finally has
a political thrust: what are we going to
do with the world, and is there a
chance of salvaging our human es-
sence, our capacity for celebrating the
matter and spirit out of which we
come, matter and spirit we have in-
sulated ourselves from and ignored
much longer than is safe?
If The Geography of the Imagina-
tion were somehow brought into the
consciousness of the people of this
planet, especially its leaders, the
dangers we now face would fade quick-
ly, perhaps vanish. Davenport, if you
listen to him attentively and devote the
necessary time to understanding his
ideas, instills you with a reverence for
life that could protect us all.
Brown Miller has written several books
of poetry, including Hiroshima Flows
Through Us, Cherry Valley Editions.
He is also the Poetry Review Editor for
The San Francisco Review of Books.
The
Pornographic
Mind
Pornography and Silence:
Culture's Revenge Against Nature
Susan Griffin
277 pp. Harper and Row. $12.95
C o-option, the ability to neutralize
perceived or actual dissent, or
the threat of radical change by absorb-
ing it into the socio-economic
mainstream, is the greatest genius of
the American system. It is often suc-
cessful when overt oppression is either
ineffective or unfeasible. In more
cynical moments, I have worried that
feminism has been recycled into TV
programs about female reporters,
slogans on tee shirts on sale at
Korvette's, slick national magazines,
and cathartic fantasies about secre-
taries triumphing over scuzzy bosses.
Unquestionably, for many years there
has been a bourgeois feminism which,
while not necessarily in opposition to
the more radical elements, does
nothing to jeopardize the system which
allows the continuing exploitation of
women.
Susan Griffin's new book is a re-
minder that there are still formidable,
troubling ideas and challenges in the
movement not soon likely to be wat-
ered down for Nielsen's top ten.
The feminist attack on pornography
is surrounded by a number of con-
troversies, most specious; some
tangential. Although these controver-
sies usually have the effect of obscur-
ing consideration of the essential
feminist case against pornography, it is
illuminating to discuss them in relation
to Griffin's work:
? Censorship of pornography
would be a dangerous erosion of our
civil liberties, setting a precedent for
the suppression of other materials
and ideas.
? The new anti-pornography advo-
cates are really feminist versions of
the Moral Majority-a bunch of
narrow-minded prudes.
? Pornography has been associated
with human liberation. Even if some
of it is distasteful, it is basically pro-
gressive.
? Pornography consists of mostly
harmless escapist fantasies. It is an
outlet, not a cause of crime or
violence.
First, it is true that censorship of
pornography could set a dangerous
precedent. However, Pornography and
Silence is not a brief on behalf of cen-
sorship. The censorship issue should
not be allowed to replace a serious
debate about pornography and its im-
plications.
The characterization of anti-por-
nography feminists as counterparts of
Jerry Falwell is nonsense. They are not
prudes; rather than attempting to hide
the female body, they are demanding
an end to the imagery that separates
the body from the soul. Pornography,
it is argued, is rooted in a strain of
Romanticism which one critic des-
cribed as "loving men spiritually and
women physically." Pornography is
counter to eros, or at least Ms.
Griffin's ideal of eros: rediscovering
innocence and the primal unity of mind
and body. Consequently, by robbing
women of their identities and turning
them into objects, pornography is "a
delusional system" which is not com-
patible with human liberation.
Finally, as to the contention that
pornography is harmless, Griffin wise-
ly chooses to examine pornography
within the context of the "porno-
graphic mind", instead of viewing it as
the principal cause of various evils.
The pornographic mentality, she feels,
is essentially the same one responsible
for racism and anti-semitism. Thus,
Pornography and Silence is ultimately
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not about dirty books and girlie maga-
zines, what Lennie Bruce called
"stroke books"; it is about a mind set.
Turn on a TV or walk into any res-
taurant or office and you can find ex-
amples of our pornographic culture.
Female clone-victims are required to
approximate a stroke book standard of
beauty and to be silent as paper-to be
seen and not heard.
By viewing pornography as a mani-
festation of pornographic culture-one
that degrades, abuses, and humiliates
women-Griffin has made an impor-
tant contribution to raising of the in-
tellectual standards of the porno-
graphy debate.
Pornography and Silence is as com-
plex as its subject. It is at once an
original philosophical statement, a
manifesto, and a poem for liberation.
As a catalog of abuses against women,
it will no doubt effectively stir up more
anger among the angry. But it deserves
a much wider audience. For if the
spiritual and sexual exploitation of
women is an aberration of culture
rather than an inevitability, then the
only solution is a massive, sustained
consciousness-raising effort that
reaches far beyond the convinced.
Evidently, Griffin sees hope: "We
know that culture need not be opposed
to eros," she writes, "for not all
culture is delusion, and culture itself
can be dangerous to the ego. It can
contain and reflect the natural world
and lead us back into our deepest
selves."
One hopes that Pornography and
Silence will play a role in activating a
far-reaching discussion about the mind
set that sustains pornography. It is a
disturbing book which may emerge as
one of the most important humani-
tarian documents of the decade.
Something
to do with Love
Nothing to do with Love
Joyce Reiser Kornblatt
208 pp. Viking Press. $11.95
Although most of the best short
story markets no longer exist,
good short stories continue to be
published, even if for miniscule au-
August/September 1981
diences and for little or no money. So
when a major New York house like
Viking Press publishes a short story
collection by a new author, that is en-
couraging news indeed.
Joyce Reiser Kornblatt is a Wash-
ington, D.C. writer who teaches
Creative Writing at the University of
Maryland. Her stories have appeared
in The Atlantic, The Ohio Review, and
The Transatlantic Review, as well as in
such D.C. small presses as Sun &
Moon, Sibyl-Child, and Calvert.
This collection contains a novella
and seven short stories. Kornblatt's
style is very metaphorical and poetic,
and while it sometimes is too literal and
self-conscious, it succeeds often
enough to justify the failures.
The novella, "Nothing to do with
Love," is about a divorced woman
who, while looking for her runaway
daughter, analyzes their past for clues
to why she left and where she might be.
The mother is a geneticist, and her
dissection of their relationship is cold,
precise, and unsettling. But sometimes
the reader is too much aware of the
language as symbol and metaphor, and
may have difficulty believing in the
reality of the characters. For instance,
in a section told from the daughter's
viewpoint (she is at a house for
runaways), the people she meets are
stereotypical and cliched. She says to
Gabriel, who helps run the house, "I
feel you know me better than I know
myself." He replies, "Never...
Another person can never know you
better than you know yourself."
"Red Camero" is also self-con-
sciously metaphorical (a red Camero is
the only thing a woman salvages from
her marriage), and again the reader is
too much aware of the car as a symbol
rather than as part of a reality.
The remaining six stories are very
good, among the best I've read any-
where. "Richard" is lyrical and poetic
(and as surrealistic as Kornblatt gets in
this collection), a very short story that
succeeds perfectly in articulating a
small boy's fantasies. "Balancing Act"
is about the fine line marriages often
walk, and is itself a delicately balanced
work. "Memoirs of a Cold Child"
concerns the sibling rivalry between a
young girl and her baby sister, and
has a very unexpected (and funny)
resolution.
"Thanksgiving" is divided into two
sections, each told from the separate
viewpoints of a husband and wife, and
are about their secret (to each other)
The Washington Book Review
extramarital affairs. The sections are
really two different stories, and the ef-
fect on the reader is of a severe distanc-
ing and severing of the two characters'
lives. "Relics" is about a man's at-
tempt at auctioning off his past
through a garage sale, and a woman
who, while rummaging through it,
hopes to find something salvageable
for them both, but doesn't. In "Or-
dinary Mysteries" an elderly stroke
victim, although helpless and near
death, lucidly reminisces over a past
which seems incomplete and discon-
nective.
These stories cover a wide range of
characters and subjects, but all are
about the inability of people to connect
and to shed their defensive armor.
Joyce Reiser Kornblatt is currently
working on a novel. But I hope that,
unlike many writers who seldom return
to the short story because novels are so
much more lucrative, she will continue
writing in a form for which she has so
much felicity.
Michael Lerner is a Washington, D.C.
writer who has written for, among
other magazines, The San Francisco
Review of Books.
Lyrical Tales
of Horror
Fireworks: Nine Stories
In Various Disguises
Angela Carter
208 pp. Harper & Row. $11.95
In Fireworks: Nine Stories in Various
Disguises Angela Carter proves her
understanding of the vital importance
of atmosphere in fantasy/horror
storytelling. Using her command of
lyrical and sensual language, Carter
writes nine stories that pulsate with ter-
ror. We envision fantasies of architec-
tural nightmares.. .a museum of di-
seases, windowless dwellings, a wet
airless mountain.
In the gothic tradition of Poe and
Hoffman, Carter's use of unearthly
music helps darken the atmosphere of
her stories. Even the instruments are
exotic, such as the guitar-like samisen,
or, inherently horrifying, the flute
played by Lady Purple of "The Loves
of Lady Purple" which was made from
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the thighbone of a former lover whom
she had murdered. In "The Execu-
tioner's Beautiful Daughter," hand-
made stringed instruments produce
"an almost-music" which echoes a
funeral march, and is played by moun-
tain dwellers who enthusiastically prac-
tice incest in a country where incest is a
capital crime.
Like her method with music, Carter
weaves color into her nine tales to add
still another dimension to the weird
darkness of her narrative. Black, rust,
blood red, and (Carter's favorite) pur-
ple are mentioned repeatedly in nearly
all the stories. Carter's fascination with
purple is particularly remarkable in
"The Loves of Lady Purple." The
Lady Purple, "the famous prostitute
and wonder of the East!", is a life-
sized puppet who is covered with a skin
of supple white leather, wears broken
mirrors in her hair, and is dressed in
"the vibrating purple with which she
was synonymous, a purple the color of
blood in a love suicide." This purple
foreshadows the puppet's entry into
reality which she facilitates by sucking
the blood from the throat of her loving
puppeteer.
Carter's lyrical and sensual language
is fundamental to what she calls her
moral function-that of provoking un-
ease. So too is her obsession with three
themes: incest, cannibalism, and reali-
ty versus fantasy.
Curiously, those tales about incest
and cannibalism are not as unsettling
as those about reality versus fantasy.
For example, "Penetrating to the
Heart of the Forest," a re-telling of the
legend of the Fall in which a brother
and sister make love in an eerie forest,
is far less disturbing than "Elegy for a
Freelance," a story of a woman who
grows up amidst so much wealth that
her world is unreal; she thinks the ter-
rorist philosophy of her lover is an in-
teresting subject for tea conversation.
Then suddenly everything becomes all
too real when her lover murders a blind
old man for practice. This story, the
last and best of Fireworks, generates
freezer burns.
Perhaps Carter's themes of can-
nibalism and incest do not cause as
much discomfort as that of fantasy
versus reality because the former prac-
tices are removed from the mainstream
of today's culture whereas fantasy is a
part of daily life. Surely, we are all
guilty of shuttling from reality into our
own personal fantasy world. I'm not so
sure we're all preoccupied with incest
and cannibalism. Maybe Carter would
argue otherwise. It's food for thought.
Judy Zins is Associate Editor of The
Washington Book Review.
Beyond
Minimalism
Letargo
Frank Samperi
Station Hill Press (Barrytown, NY). No price
listed
L et her go. Largo. Letargo. Mini-
malist poets try both to es-
chew words and be profound, to infuse
the prosaic universe of sticks and
stones and broken bones with an old
Chinese philosopher's chin-whisker,
haiku-esque insights. The old oriental
farts often succeeded in achieving both
ideals because much of their work was
written at high mountain altitudes; the
altitude thinned their word and brush
strokes, as it thinned their blood and
chin hairs. American poets, alas, seem
to compose mainly at sea-level. Their
minimalist efforts are contrived rather
than created by any euphoria-inducing
altitudes of either mind or landscape.
The result is apt to be a phony, mud-
spattered, pretentious effort. These
poets seem to say: "Look at me, folks.
I can write poems with one hand clap-
ping"; or, "Watch while I perch
flamingo-fashion in a stream of words
and, again, flamingo-fashion spear
nouns and verbs as my beak chooses."
The alpjabet soup of the poem-
stream!
Like the dedicated minimalist, Frank
Samperi in Letargo dwells a lot in
nature. He is fond of the sprats and
orts one comes to expect in these briefs
(poems) as they slip along legless and
armless, greased by the poet's good in-
tentions and his apparent feelings that
the vernal wood/stream is still where
it's at. So, we find suns, moons, bran-
ches, hawks, eagles, other "faraway
birds," pigeons, snow, rain, trees, and
windows. Combine these gentle-esques
(Nature poems that neither turn you on
nor turn you off) with painterly effects
of the still-life picture (tree branches
framed in a window viewed from with-
in a room; motionless cats in sunlight
by an iron gate) and you have a sense
of Samperi's interests. Some of the
motifs seem sentimental-the visionary
poet in his tower at night, a "cloud of
glory" riding in the sky. The poet is a
kind of Adam:
There was odor
there was garden
seraph dwelt in him
he responded in grace
he branch
finally light
in itself
He almost saves this stanza (the last of
the book) by the Hiawatha or Tarzan-
like touch "he branch"; but light
strikes me as cliched. Here is another
example of Hiawatha-writing, a poem
so minimalist it merely hints at possible
vicious hawk plummetings:
faraway bird
light my
heart
defeat
hawk school
not eagle
my
thy
eye
In this one, Samperi juxtaposes sket-
chy landscape details with some word-
fun, a kind of delicious showing off:
bright water sky
conjoint dissolver
of the dispositive
A common device of the minimalists is
to suggest momentosity (a poem of
great moment) by leaving a lot of white
space around a single repeated word.
One can defend the practice, I suppose,
by saying that this is what painters
have always done-isolate small
strokes of the same hue as a signature
for the whole picture. Here is one of
Samperi's poems:
see full moon
from roof line
to cloud band
and then imperceptibly
higher
higher
Higher doesn't have much to work
up/or down. The furniture of the
poem is trite (moon, roof, cloud).
Samperi seeks a cryptic quality by leav-
ing out words (his one-liners resemble
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August/September 1981
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koans), hoping to generate more mean-
ings than pallid landscapes deserve.
Also, he suggests meditation-mean-
ings. Gurus and meditators are
notoriously fond of banal concepts.
There are still boring sermons poets
love to find in babbling brooks and
stones. The method rarely works for
me. In this set of lines, for example,
Samperi's framing of windows and
boxing us in suggests one of Paul
Klee's drawings. Groveling provides
interest; but the closing line undercuts
the effect via its weak adverbs:
window within window,
the negation,
the primary groveling,
certainly simply space.
I may be unfair in raising these issues
over so slight a book as Letargo. I do
feel, however, that it is time critics pro-
tested the abuses wrought by mini-
malist poets who seem to seek the ar-
cane via the trivial. In defense, such
poets say that universals are every-
where, especially in the mundane, if we
could only seethed. I insist, though,
that brush strokes of an Oriental
master, or the clean arrangements of a
Klee or a Matisse, have little to do with
minimalist poems. I've never been
much moved by the idea of Tarzan or
Hiawatha as poets.
Robert Peters's best known book is A
Gift to be Simple: A Garland for Anne
Lee, Norton. He currently teaches
English at the University of California,
Irvine.
A Brazilian
Kafka
Kafka Na Cama
Jair Ferreira Dos Santos
Civilizacao Brasileira, Rua Muniz Barreto,
91193, Rio de Janeiro, RJ. $3.00
Y ou find out all about the tech-
nique tricks, cutting the narrative
into scraps and then interspersing
(spacing) the scraps with other
"elements" (narrative or otherwise),
neologisming, free-flowing, sur-
realisming, withholding key elements,
a name, a face, not identifying the
Who or the Where, you work in
nonsense, myth, throw in unrelated-
related "elements," and if you don't
watch out, when you're all through
you've got an Avant-Garde Wiseass
Old-Hat stew.
Which is one of Jair Ferreira Dos
Santos' dangers.
Take a story like "Joel Sad ou week-
end, mais ou menos a Saroyan," (Joel
Sad or Weekend, more or less a la
Saroyan) with its "motto" from Anais
Nin's The Novel of the Future (in
English):
The new swift novel could match our modern
life in speed, rhythms, condensation, abstrac-
tion, miniaturization, X rays of our secrets, a
subjective gauge of external events...
Kind of a re-run of Marinetti's
Futurist Manifesto non e vero? Well,
the story's full of "good touches," like
the comparison of a men's room at the
airport to a chapel:
The polygon mosaic of the clean tiles, the
clarity coming in through the stained glass
windows and being absorbed by the silence
that inexorably suggested the serenity of a
chapel....
Touches like "the fecal monism of
things," and a sometimes-surreal flow
that I love so much in Durrell's Black
Book, most of Henry Miller and
Plymell's The Last of the Mocassins:
Stupid heart. Your Foolish Heart (in English
in original). A thousand Leaves (Mil-folhas).
Cabbage (Repolho). The valves of luck.
It's a little better in the original,
puns on folhas and repolho, etc., but
it's not bad in English either: Mind-
Flow. And let me half reverse myself
(paragraph 1) and suggest that avant-
garde virtuosity when done perfectly,
like any other kind of magic, leave you
breathlessly excited, confounded, ex-
hilerated.
Only.. .Dos Santos mixes traditional
narrative with this virtuosity so that
you get the effect of magic going
soft/sloppy and unable to pick up its
pace again.
There's one story here that is the
most touching, moving, at the same
time objective/adroit writing I've read
since Clarice Lispector, another
Brazilian who's fast on the road to
becoming (via Paris) an American
literary byword. Title of the story:
"Sextuor: 0 Pai." Topic: the author's
family.
The Washington Book Review
I keep thinking about Plymell's
poem about his father, the one record-
ed by Rod McKuen. I played it to a
roomful of students down here and the
room stopped. In "Sextuor: 0 Pai"
the portrait of the mother, the sister,
the brother, are all very "accu-
rate"/sympathetic, but the father is a
masterpiece, this old mulatto, lady's
man, great swimmer, played violin,
owned a bakery, was a fancy dresser,
liked good (women's) cologne...
and then he gets Chagas, this disease
that "wastes" the heart of the victim.
And he's lying dying as his son records
this "letter" to him:
Now it's dark. Points of light on the other
side of the city. Ariel late. He's dying, he's
killing himself, I know and that still isn't it.
It's so "cloudy" in his life that he shouldn't
die. People have one life but they die various
times inside us. It's not that I disdain his
death, but I don't think about it, it's an emp-
tiness, an extreme, an immense reminder that
I'm here/on this side.
The childish belief in words: stay around,
dad. But why isn't there any force in my
words? He's my Lazarus, and I'm his Jesus
without faith. I feel outside this death and
even though a messenger from him has sta-
tioned himself inside me, he lights me up
without any heat/flame... for him I try to
believe, but this space between this belief and
me is so huge, this flat, ownerless hope in-
vented inside me to keep me from knowing
what I know.
My eyes burn. My ears close. If I could at
least stop understanding and lift my hand and
tear away this flight of my heart to my heart.
And now, why cry, completely exposed like a
lifeless wound, and why wipe the mascara
getting messed up by this abstract crying that
I don't really believe me?
It's a bitch to translate this because
it's so subtle/nuance-filled, such an in-
timate personalized fabric of words.
But I'll tell you one thing, this story
comes out of the vast heart of what
makes Brazilian art-music-literature
the greatest when it's great, the heart
of the Mystic, the Long-Suffering, the
Vision of Desolation tempered with a
distance, coldness, aloofness that
keeps just this side of the whirlpool of
self-dissolution, or, to put it another
way, sentimentality.
Hugh Fox teaches English at Michigan
State University. His latest book, The
Guernica Cycle, will be out soon from
Cherry Valley Editions.
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Best of the
Small Press
Editor's Choice: Literature
& Graphics from the U.S.
Small Press
Eds. Morty Sklar & Jim Mulac
501 pp. The Spirit That Moves Us Press. P.O.
Box 1585, Iowa City, 1A 52244. $14.50 cloth,
$9.50 paper
E ditor's Choice is clearly a labor
of love. Editors Sklar and Mulac
wanted to gather the best work from
the independent, non-commercial
presses and magazines of the so-called
"small press revolution." The task was
monumental; it is not difficult to imag-
ine them up to their elbows in brown
envelopes after invitations went out in
late 1977. After three years of fighting
through the pile they have selected a
collection of poetry, graphics, fiction
and essays which represents writers
from all walks of life. A book this size
couldn't possibly collect everything of
value printed during that period, but
the editors are to be commended for
their effort to capture the diversity of
experience and spirit of community
that exist in independent publishing
today.
Strong graphics have been the back-
bone of many fine magazines and what
separates this anthology from the an-
nual Pushcart Prize collection (1976 to
present), and George Plimpton's Amer-
ican Literary Anthology (1968-69), is
the inclusion of 21 art works.
Baltimore-Washington artist Tom
Chalkley is represented, as well as
works from magazines such as The
Fault, Zone, Second Coming, Aura,
Gallimaufry, Painted Bride Quarterly,
Trace, and others.
The essay section is the strongest in
the book. Robert Bly's "Leaping into
Poetry," reprinted from his magazine
The Seventies, deals with how words
and imaginative concepts relate to
brain structure. The late Paul Good-
man is represented by "The Politics of
Being Queer" from Unmuzzled Ox,
wherein he compares the civil rights
and gay rights movements. Merrit Clif-
ton's oft-reprinted fingernail sketch of
the history of independent publishing,
"On Small Press As Class Struggle," is
also included, as well as local writer-
editor E. Ethelbert Miller's interview
16
with South African poet and activist
Dennis Brutus.
William Stafford, Charles Bukow-
ski, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Amiri
Baraka, and William Wantling are
some of the big name poets who made
it into these pages, but small press
legends like Charles Potts, Lyn Lif-
shin, Ronald Koertge, and James
Magorian are also represented, along
with names familiar to Baltimore-
Washington audiences-Michael Lal-
ly, Anselm Hollo, and David Hilton.
The best in the fiction section in-
cludes Ruskin Bond's story of a
writer's life in India and Tony Cohan's
similar study set in Morocco. Jean
Thompson's "Birds in the Air" con-
tains the most inventive writing, in
what would normally be a fairly con-
ventional story. Robert Creely's ex-
cerpt from "Mabel: A Story" is the
token experimental piece. However, as
strong as some of these stories are, the
editors seem to have overlooked many
good works. It's possible they chose
not to duplicate already anthologized
stories, but one can only conjecture.
Any project that attempts as much
The Washington Book Review
as this one is bound to disappoint
somebody. As Mulac states in his in-
troduction, "You can't be objective
about real art because it forgets all the
rules and is totally personal." Yet
there's something in here to please any
intelligent reader. And many of the
people included have never ' before
received such wide exposure. That's
the joy of anthologies like this
one-making people aware of good
writing from sources other than the big
slicks or New York publishing firms.
Alternatives to Pushcart-like an-
thologies are needed because nobody
has cornered the market or should be
left in a position of power from which
to try. The editors admit they received
enough good material for five or six
more anthologies. If this book proves
successful, Volume II might not be a
bad idea.
Richard Peabody, Jr., is the editor of
the Washington, D. C. based Gargoyle
magazine.
August/September 1981
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CRY OF THE PEOPLE
(Continued from page 6)
Certainly the Cuban revolution
helped to shake up the Church when 70
percent of Cuba's clergy fled the
island. But equally alarming was the
Latin Church's own decline. Churches
were growing emptier by the year and
the tradition among privileged families
of promising a son to the priesthood
was so much on the wane that more
and more. clergy had to be imported
from Ireland and Spain.
Meanwhile, proclamations from
Rome encouraged a reexamination of
the Church's place in the lives of its
communicants. Pope John XXIII's en-
cyclicals, Mater et Magistra (1961) and
Pacem in Terris (1963) emphasized the
right to a decent standard of living,
education, and political participation,
and Pope Paul VI's Populorum Pro-
gressio encouraged the Latin American
bishops to hold a hemispheric con-
ference to examine the conclusions of
Vatican II in the context of Latin
American problems.
The conference that followed in
Medellin, Colombia (1963), gave birth
to what Lernoux calls a "Magna Car-
ta" that shattered the old alliance be-
tween the Church and the rich and that
hailed the advent of a "Church of the
Poor."
Among the Medellin documents
were educational and organizational
plans with, what turned out to be, far
reaching consequences. Brazil's educa-
tional philosopher Paulo Friere in-
fluenced the structure of these plans in-
tended to advance self-reliance and
self-esteem in small, tightly-knit Chris-
tian communities among Latin Ameri-
ca's poor.
Since the Medellin conference,
thousands of these Christian grass-root
communities (communidades de base)
have grown up in Latin America. In
Brazil alone there are 80,000.
The activist clergy who organizes
these communities selects peasants to
run catechism classes and bible
readings. Gradually the base of ac-
tivities broadens to include efforts by
the peasants to improve their com-
munities' education, health, and land
allocations.
Except for a handful, however, most
of the bishops at Medellin did not
recognize their proclamations of
human rights and equality as having
revolutionary implications. Gradually,
August/September 1981
throughout the 1960s, the more radical
elements within the Church were de-
nounced and more conservative bish-
ops regained influence.
At first, the Church went to work
much like the U.S., Lernoux says.
"The primary goal of reform was seen
as the defeat of left-wing political
movements and guerrilla groups."
But by the end of the 1960s, religious
vocations were still declining and the
social and economic conditions of the
people were even worse than at the
beginning of the decade. "Reform was
a means, not an end, and therefore it
failed."
More than encyclicals from Rome, it
was the political and economic events
of the 1960s and early 70s that moved
the Church farther left. Where, in the
early 60s there was hope of developing
a bridge between the poor and the rich,
the activist clergy realized by the end of
the decade that to expect Latin
America's small elite to give up cen-
turies of privilege was naive.
There was growing disenchantment
with capitalism, too. Panama's Arch-
bishop Marcos McGrath has noted the
"great doubt" that "has been cast on
the possibility of achieving the
necessary reforms for the.. .develop-
ment of our people within the capitalist
structure of the international, and par-
ticularly, the interAmerican economy.
"In Brazil, during the `seven-year
economic miracle,' which collapsed in
1976, the richest one percent of the
population increased its share of the
nation's wealth from 11.7 to 17.8 per-
cent. Almost half the country's 38
million workers now earn less than the
minimum monthly wage of $70, ac-
cording to the government's own
statistics."
Lernoux indicates that "develop-
ment" has become a dirty word. A
series of foreign, mostly U.S. loans,
have "so burdened the Latin American
countries that many are now spending
an average 25 percent of their foreign
earnings just to service the debt." As
for foreign investment, "far from
creating the millions of new jobs pro-
mised. . .nearly half of this money went
to take over existing Latin American
industries. By the end of the 60s, 99
percent of the loans made by AID to
Latin American countries was being
spent in the United States for products
costing 30 to 40 percent more than the
going world price."
Even so, the activist clergy remained
The Washington Book Review
on the outs with the rest of the Church
until the early 1970s. What caused the
more conservative elements of the
Church to affirm the doctrines that
came out of Medellin was the "reign of
terror" unleashed by Latin America's
military regimes. By attacking the
political center of the Church, these
regimes forced the moderates back into
the ranks of the progressives. "Even
the most conservative hierarchies like
Argentina's have come to protest the
reign of terror that has converted
South America into a giant concentra-
tion camp."
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