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Through Their Own Eyes: The Autobiographies of Martin Van Buren, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush
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15316 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1989 |
10,595 Words |
| Author
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Milton Hindus
The fourteenth and most recent book written by Milton Hindus,
a professor emeritus at Brandeis University, is Essays:
Personal and Impersonal. His Crippled Giant, the first book
on Celine in English, has been described by scholars as a
classic and has been translated into French and Japanese. He
has been awarded the Walt Whitman Prize by the Poetry Society
of America. Articles and reviews by Dr. Hindus have appeared
in the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic Monthly, Le
Monde, and the Jerusalem Post. |
Poets, like the rest of us, I suppose, read newspapers and watch television, but it is possible that they do less of either and that the news they do take in, they take in more skeptically, with not one but several grains of salt, because of their interest in what one of them describes as "the news that stays news." Very little, if anything, in any newspaper fits that description. It is all ephemeral, transitory--which are polysyllabic words from Greek and Latin roots that define their aim and contents--even in so-called newspapers "of record." It is not that editors are in a conspiracy to deprive us of news, but that they often do not know what the real news of the day is and, therefore, either bury it in out-of-the way corners or fail to report it altogether. Newsprint is rightly treated like other waste, except when, as in my own state of Massachusetts, it is separated from the rest of the rubbish and reprocessed. What writers like James Joyce think of the matter is memorably conveyed by that scene in Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom, finding himself in "the Jakes" where he reads the paper each morning, finishes a prize winning story and, lacking some softer tissue, wipes himself with it. The image of the perfect modern journalist is caught in the swaggering, condescending character Gallaher in the story "A Little Cloud" in Dubliners. Joyce would have understood Thomas Jefferson when he wrote to John Adams in January 1812, after the retirement of both from the political arena: "I have taken my final leave [of politics]. I think little of them and say less. I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much the happier."
I have been retracing in my thoughts last year's elections and wondering once again what they were essentially about and what, if anything, may have been missed in all the noise, the news, and buzz of opinion, well-informed, ill-informed or uninformed. Martin Van Buren used to speak of "sober second thoughts," which were possible, according to him, not only for individuals but even for the electorate as a whole. There surely must be some sort of mean between the newspapers and the classics to which Jefferson so happily returned from politics. Even politics may produce writings that are more than ephemeral. Surely there was more to be learned about how the Democrats thought from reading Woodrow Wilson's doctoral dissertation of more than a century ago, Congressional Government (1885), than there was from listening to their candidate or his numerous partisans in the press or in person. The same may be said about the Republicans and what my be learned from the Heritage Foundation's 1988 volume, The Imperial Congress: Crisis in the Separation of Powers, which is a kind of collective scholarly answer to the issues
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