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McCain’s New Hampshire momentum

December 30, 2007 / admin

Will a victory in New Hampshire’s January primary once again make John McCain the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, as it did in 2000?

If McCain’s enthusiastic reception by an overflow crowd at Londonderry’s Lions Club Hall on Saturday night is any indication, the Arizona Senator may very well defy conventional political wisdom and pull off an upset in the Granite State’s January 8th primary.

That so many potential voters turned out for a town hall meeting just hours before the televised Big Game between the locally-beloved New England Patriots and New York Giants (with the Patriots’ undefeated season on the line), served as further evidence of McCain’s growing appeal. His campaign, it seems, has momentum (or what George H.W. Bush once called “the Big Mo”); McCain’s earlier stops on Saturday also drew large crowds.

Those gathered in Londonderry greeted McCain with a standing ovation; he mounted the stage holding a replica jersey of Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady, explaining that it had been a gift at an earlier campaign stop. “I know I’m pandering,” he told the cheering crowd, many of whom were wearing Patriots’ sweatshirts and hats, “but not enough to put the shirt on.”

Throughout the meeting, the 71-year-old McCain appeared energized and engaged—even though Londonderry was his final appearance of the day—suggesting that, despite his age, he has the stamina necessary for the demands of the presidency. His “Straight Talk Express” campaign has been on a roll for weeks. As his wife Cindy (who is just now back on the campaign trail after recovering from a knee replacement) noted in her brief comments, the country is beginning to take a hard look at the candidates, a development she thinks favors her husband.

A reconsideration

Voters do appear to be reconsidering the Republican presidential field. That’s been a positive development for the candidacy of the former naval aviator and Vietnam war hero. McCain’s reputation for political candor and personal courage has led some to call him “the only great man” in the race. A flood of recent endorsements (from New Hampshire’s largest newspaper, the Manchester Union-Leader; from both Boston dailies; from Red Sox hero Curt Schilling; and from fellow Iraqi war hawk Senator Joe Lieberman, who crossed party lines to back McCain) has helped to refocus attention on a candidate counted out by many political observers and pundits after his campaign faltered over the summer.

The gap in New Hampshire between McCain and current frontrunner Mitt Romney, former governor of neighboring Massachusetts, has narrowed, with some polls showing the race within the margin of error. At the Londonderry town hall meeting, McCain expressed confidence that the New Hampshire political process (“the laboratory of democracy”) would not favor the highest-spending candidate (a clear reference to Romney): “You can’t buy an election in New Hampshire. You can’t.”

Before taking questions, McCain talked about the troubled situation in Pakistan, (arguing for continued American support of President Pervez Musharraf) and what he described as progress in the war in Iraq. Noting that he was the only candidate to back the Bush Administration’s troop surge, McCain said his national security experience made him the best prepared leader to meet the “transcendent challenge of radical Islamist extremism.”

McCain fielded several questions about domestic issues (health care, education, the loss of manufacturing jobs, the need for new sources of energy) and offered traditional mainstream Republican solutions: “choice and competition” in health care and education, a vigorous defense of free trade, and a market-based response to climate change (citing General Electric’s green technology efforts as a model).

His fiscal conservatism—including his promise to veto all bills with earmarks and “pork barrel spending”—played well with the Londonderry crowd, as did his rejection of ethanol subsidies, which, he pointed out, wouldn’t help him politically in Iowa.

That, of course, has always been one of McCain’s strong points: his willingness to take principled positions on issues like farm subsidies, immigration, campaign finance reform, and the war in Iraq, even when it costs him politically.

When one Londonderry questioner asked about the influence of large drug companies in Washington, McCain noted that he had voted against the Medicare prescription drug benefit bill because “it had been written by the drug companies” and didn’t allow for competition. McCain added: “Everyone says they’re against the special interests, but I’m the only one they don’t give any money to.”

McCain’s reputation as a maverick has helped him in New Hampshire, where independents can vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary. Their shift to McCain in the final days in 2000 gave him the primary win. He needs that cross-over support again.

McCain’s own independence has made him less popular with some GOP party regulars. He has earned the enmity of Washington’s K Street lobbyists and opposition from elements of the religious Right. He isn’t seen as politically reliable: which is to say that McCain will think for himself and that isn’t an endearing quality for those within the Beltway whose livelihoods depend on “delivering votes.” (Is it any wonder that McCain’s fund-raising has fallen far short of original expectations?)

No easy road

Even if McCain does win in New Hampshire on January 8th, the road ahead is not an easy one. His campaign is short of cash. McCain trails Republican hopefuls Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee in national polls (although not by much), lags behind Romney and Huckabee in Michigan (Jan. 15), and is third, or fourth, in the polls in South Carolina (Jan. 19). He will need a significant bounce from a Granite State victory to make up this ground.

And yet, based on what might happen in New Hampshire and its impact on the race, McCain could still emerge as the Republican nominee. As a familiar, and admired, figure on the national stage, he fares well in head-to-head polls against potential Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It’s possible to envision McCain putting some blue states into play in 2008, something harder to imagine with a Huckabee or Romney at the top of the ticket.

Will McCain’s potential general election appeal make him more attractive to Republican conservatives eager to retain the White House? Will party loyalists rally around a maverick? Will McCain’s positions on immigration, campaign finance reform, and global warming prove too hard for some to swallow?

Of course answers to those questions will only matter if John McCain can beat the odds on January 8th and win in New Hampshire. Can he? A sign at the Londonderry Lions Club Hall claimed “Mac is Back!” In a race as volatile as Campaign 2008, don’t bet against it.

Belonging and betrayal

December 10, 2007 / admin / 0 Comments

More evidence surfaced recently to support the truism that one country’s traitor can become another country’s hero.

In October, Queen Elizabeth honored Oleg Gordievsky, formerly a senior KGB officer and double agent for the British who defected to the West in 1985, naming him Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George. After the ceremony Gordievsky was photographed with Baroness Margaret Thatcher, and the Cold War’s Iron Maiden managed a smile for the camera.

In November, in what The Times of London called “tit-for-tat,” Vladimir Putin’s Russia awarded the Order of Friendship to George Blake, a former MI6 agent who had spied for the Soviet Union. Blake was honored at his 85th birthday celebration in Moscow. (Tony Halpin of The Times described Blake as a “notorious traitor” in the lead sentence of his story, displaying an uncharacteristic lack of Anglo reserve.) “It is hard to overrate the importance of the information received through Blake,” explained Sergei Ivanov, a spokesman for the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service.

Blake, who betrayed numerous MI6 operatives to the KGB before his 1961 detection and apprehension, escaped from prison and fled to the Soviet Union in 1966. He is apparently unrepentant about his role as a double agent, telling the English-language Russia Today cable television network:

I could have left the service, and I could have joined the Communist Party, and I could have sold the Daily Worker at a street corner, and many people would say that would have been a more honorable cause. But I felt that I could do more for the cause, make a far greater contribution if I set aside my scruples.

Also in November Putin saw fit to posthumously honor a previously obscure American double agent, George Koval, awarding him the Hero of Russia medal for his role in penetrating the Manhattan Project, which developed America’s atomic bomb. Koval, dubbed the “spy who came in from the cornfields,” had what William J. Broad of the New York Times called “an all-American cover“: born in Iowa, educated in New York, and by all accounts a decent baseball player (a sport also beloved by Fidel Castro).

Whether Koval’s spying actually “helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own,” as the Russians claimed, is unknowable, given that the KGB and GRU archives have been closed to Western scholars. Putin’s intelligence agencies are fully capable of trying to rewrite history to shield other double agents, even those long gone, or to obscure the true outlines of the conspiracy.

There is some irony here, of course; Gordievsky, Blake, and Koval all earned these national decorations for their treachery, for behavior (lying, double dealing, revealing secrets, betraying trust) that is normally considered beyond the pale in any other circumstances by all civilized communities.

Their betrayals are not completely symmetrical, however, for they betrayed different societies: Blake and Koval conspired against the tolerant liberal Western democracies of Great Britain and the United States, while Gordiesvsky’s covert work was directed against a totalitarian police state. Certainly we can judge Gordiesvky’s treason differently; an argument can be made that he chose the lesser of two evils in spying on his colleagues, even if we don’t fully endorse the 17th century dramatist Pierre Corneille’s belief that “treachery is noble when aimed at tyranny.” And history suggests that Gordiesvky chose correctly, in the broadest sense.

The complexity of betrayal

This may all be true, and yet “honoring” a double agent, even a Gordiesvsky, can be tricky, an exercise fraught with ambiguity. What is being honored? Motives or results? Many of these agents became spies for reasons more personal than political. If their treachery was spurred by circumstance, rather than conviction or principle, should it be judged differently? (Which brings to mind the words of Archbishop Thomas Becket in T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: “The last temptation is the worst treason/ To do the right thing for the wrong reason.”)

Blake’s comments to Russia Today raised another complication for those who may be tempted to admire the “courage” of the double agent: Soviet moles in the West consciously chose to support the Communist cause covertly, instead of openly espousing their Marxist-Leninist beliefs. They could have opposed Western political systems directly and openly. Instead, they chose to “set aside their scruples,” as Blake did, and abandon those decadent bourgeois notions of patriotism, integrity, trust, and honor.

It is ironic, then, that some revisionist historians still try to find something honorable in the actions of those American Communists who spied for Stalin, arguing, as has Ellen Schrecker, that these men and women “did not subscribe to traditional forms of patriotism.” Gordiesvsky and other Iron Curtain spies, on the other hand, did not have the option of open political activism, unless they hankered for the Gulag or execution.

In considering the decisions made in the 1930s and 1940s, we should remember that many Americans and Britons opposed the rise of Hitler and Mussolini without volunteering to spy on their friends and colleagues. While the archival research of historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr has convincingly demonstrated the close connection between the American Communist Party leadership and Soviet-directed espionage, those who decided to spy for the KGB nevertheless had to elect to do so. The historical record shows that some refused to take that step; others agreed to disloyalty.

The mind of the traitor

What, then, compels people to betray their country? Historians, psychiatrists, and intelligence experts offer explanations which can be broadly grouped into three categories: betrayal for money; betrayal for ideological or political reasons; and betrayal linked to a spy’s personality. All of these factors can come into play in the making of a traitor.

The mercenary strain of double agent was prevalent during the last few decades of the Cold War: Aldrich H. Ames, Robert P. Hanssen, Earl Edwin Pitts, and John Anthony Walker, Jr., all accepted payment from the Soviets in exchange for classified information. These cases represented a break from the more ideologically-prompted espionage of the past.

Indeed, until the mid-1960s ideological commitment was the most common reason for spying against the U.S. or its Western allies. For example, historian Maurice Isserman, in his essay “Disloyalty As a Principle: Why Communists Spied” (published in 2000) argued that American Communists who doubled for the Soviets in the 1930s and 1940s did so because they felt they were “serving a greater cause,” what Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev called “romantic anti-fascism.” While Isserman conceded that some of this spying resulted from “the same complicated mixtures of reasons that almost always motivate people to break with accepted patterns of behavior and belief,” he nonetheless saw principle as a primary motivation.

Yet the more we learn about the psychology of the double agent, the less ideology alone appears to be a factor. The narcissistic excitement of wielding secret power, of revenging imagined or actual slights, of converting alienation into action, at some level seems more vital to the traitor than does “serving the cause.” Jerrold M. Post, a psychiatrist and psychological profiler for the CIA, wrote in his now de-classified 1975 paper “Anatomy of Treason,” that narcissism, or extreme self-absorption, was a characteristic quality found in many double agents; further, Post noted, these figures “… feel they are destined to play a special role, have an insatiable appetite for recognition and success.” Thus being passed over for promotion often triggered the spying, as it did with GRU mole Oleg Penkovsky, whose career was blocked because of his father’s past as a White Russian officer. (Penkovsky was discovered, convicted after a show trial, and executed by the Soviets in 1963).

This narcissism is often coupled with feelings of isolation, alienation, and marginalization. As Harold “Kim” Philby, who betrayed both Crown and country during the Cold War, once explained: “To betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged.” A sense of separation, of “not fitting in,” can arise from many factors: an awkward childhood; sexual orientation or behavior at odds with societal norms; outsider status (because of religion or class) in a closed community, such as a British public school or an Ivy League college; troubled family relationships; excessive drug and alcohol use; perhaps an innate aversion to authority.

Thus it is possible for even the most privileged members of a society, such as Philby and his fellow Cambridge Spies, Britain’s most infamous spy ring, to feel alienated, often for hidden or private reasons. The Cambridge Five were sexually rebellious in a morally conservative time: Philby and John Cairncross were drawn to adultery and sexual adventure; Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess were closeted homosexuals; and Donald Maclean struggled with his bisexuality.

Another example: while George Blake now claims that it was indiscriminate American bombing of villages during the Korean War that turned him towards Moscow, it is more likely that he was reacting to upper class English anti-Semitism. The son of a Spanish Jew, Blake was spurned as a suitor by the family of a proper English girl because of his background. Joel Barr, who was part of the Rosenberg spy ring, cited the eviction of his family from their Brooklyn apartment during the Depression as what spurred him to become a Communist, and later, a spy (Barr’s story is recounted in Steve Usdin’s Engineering Communism).

Secret compensation

There are compensations, primarily psychic, for becoming a double agent. Whether spying for the KGB, CIA, or MI6, the betrayer joins a welcoming new community, one that has not injured him and can help him settle old scores. The betrayer finally belongs. (Not surprisingly, intelligence agencies have often awarded secret medals and other honors, including high rank, to the double agent—recognizing that “insatiable appetite for recognition.”) In Alan Furst’s historical novel, Night Soldiers, the young Russians and Eastern Europeans recruited into the NKVD find they have joined a family of sorts, one that responds harshly to injustice and punishes its enemies. There is also the added pleasure of hitting back, secretly, at those who have wronged the double agent.

Intelligence agency talent spotters have long recognized the profile of the potential mole. As Ben Macintyre of The Times of London has noted, the KGB’s Pavel Sudoplatov looked for those “…who are hurt by fate or nature —the ugly, those craving power or influence but defeated by unfavorable circumstances. In co-operation with us, all these find a peculiar compensation. The sense of belonging to an influential, powerful organization will give them a feeling of superiority over the handsome and prosperous people around them.”

Macintyre adds: “As a trade, espionage attracts more than its share of the damaged, the lonely and the plain weird. But all spies crave undetected influence, that secret compensation. Espionage may spring from patriotism or treachery, but ultimately it is an act of imagination.”

Timeless concerns

If the Cold War drama involving Gordievsky, Blake, and Koval seemed a trifle dated, news reports in November of the discovery of a possible mole in the CIA with ties to the radical group Hezbollah served as a reminder that the dynamics of betrayal are timeless.

Nada Nadim Prouty, a Lebanese national who became an American citizen and had been employed by both the FBI and CIA, pleaded guilty to “charges of conspiracy, naturalization fraud and unauthorized computer access” and, according to court documents “at one point used her security clearance to access restricted files about the terrorist group Hezbollah.”

U.S. authorities said there was no evidence that Prouty had passed secrets to Hezbollah, but, as the Washington Post noted, Prouty’s “ability to conceal her past from two of the nation’s top anti-terrorism agencies raised new concerns about their vulnerability to infiltration.”

Whether Prouty’s crimes represented a serious security breach or not (and in a reflection of the inter-agency distrust endemic to Washington, the Daily News reported that former FBI and CIA officials disagreed on this question), her case is both disturbing and yet quite predictable. In fact, it’s safe to say it will not be the last time Western intelligence agencies confront their “vulnerability to infiltration.” Why should the “War on Terror” prove any different when it comes to the matter of betrayal?

Anton Chekhov and “The Lady with the Pet Dog”

August 30, 2007 / admin

I have come to appreciate Anton Chekhov’s stories more as I move deeper into middle age. Chekhov’s fiction explores the quiet drama in the lives of ordinary people, and the prolific Russian author often concludes his stories without much of a clear-cut resolution, something I found off-putting when I was younger but now, with the benefit of life-experience, recognize as closer to reality than the tidy and clever concluding epiphanies offered by more conventional writers.

Chekhov is fascinated by people, by their contradictory behavior, by their elusive inner lives, and their capacity for cruelty, and pettiness, and, yes, love. There’s little in the way of enveloping action in Chekhov’s fiction—few Tolstoyian connections to the political and social issues of the day—but his characters are universally human in a way that transcends the 19th century bourgeois Russian setting.

Chekhov approaches his characters with a slightly ironic empathy—the legacy, no doubt, of his years as a physician—and with few illusions. That’s evident in his much-anthologized “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” where we learn of the flaws of the two main characters, an adulterous couple, as Chekhov introduces them in the first few pages of the story. (That Chekhov narrows his focus to the couple is deliberate; he once wrote: “Let two people be the center of gravity in your story: he and she.”)

A flawed couple

Dimitry Dmitrich Gurov is a Moscow banker, trapped in a loveless marriage (he is, Chekhov tells us, somewhat afraid of his severe and forbidding wife); the story traces his seduction of a young married woman while they are both vacationing in the seaside resort Yalta. His conquest, Anna Sergeyevna, has been raised in St. Petersburg but now lives in a remote provincial city with her husband, a government official she describes as “a flunkey.” Her vacation is a break from her stifling marriage; she is vulnerable, alone except for her white Pomeranian (the pet dog of the story’s title). Gurov is not, at first, a sympathetic character—Chekhov describes him as having a “coarse arrogance,” and Gurov treats women with a mixture of calculated charm and disdain.

Gurov admires Anna Sergeyevna’s “slim delicate throat, her lovely gray eyes” but beyond the sexual attraction, this jaded Moscuvite isn’t particularly impressed by his younger lover (” ‘There’s something pathetic about her, though,’ he thought…”); later we learn he is quickly “bored with her” and “irritated by her naive tone.” Anna Sergeyevna seems starved for attention and love, although she is guilty and anxious about their affair; it is easier to sympathize with her neediness than with Gurov’s selfish vanity.

And there, you might think, it would end: a brief dalliance far from home, a liaison carrying more significance for the naive Anna Sergeyevna than for the worldly Gurov. Yet that is not what happens. When Gurov returns to his daily routine he finds that rather than fading from memory, Anna Sergeyevna remains more and more on his mind (“And his memories glowed more and more vividly.”)

He has been somehow touched deeply by his connection with this fair-haired young woman; when he tries to verbalize his feelings, however, he finds he is blocked both by convention and by the emotional tone-deafness of those around him. There is a tragi-comic moment when he broaches the subject of Anna Sergeyevna and finds a friend more concerned with the freshness of the fish being served at their club than with hearing about Gurov’s “fascinating woman.”

Gurov, now obsessed, decides that he must see Anna Sergeyevna again, and so he concocts an excuse and heads off to her drab, provincial city. He attends the opening night at the local theater, hoping to see her, and he is in luck; she is there, with her husband, seated in the third row.

…when Gurov looked at her his heart contracted, and he understood clearly that in the whole world there was no human being so neat, so precious, and so important to him; she, this little undistinguished woman, lost in a provincial crowd, with a vulgar lorgnette in her hand, filled his whole life now, was his sorrow and his joy, the only happiness he now desired for himself, and to the sounds of the bad orchestra, of the miserable local violins, he thought how lovely she was. He thought and dreamed.

The passage captures Chekhov’s clinically ironic approach as a writer. Gurov’s sudden awareness of his romantic love for Anna, is balanced with the reality that she is a “little undistinguished woman” with a “vulgar lorgnette”; and this moment of passion has a musical accompaniment of “miserable local violins.”

“The Lady with the Pet Dog” does not end with this dramatic reunion; instead, Chekhov describes the continuation of the affair, as Anna Sergeyevna visits Gurov in Moscow and their relationship and secret life together becomes “…everything that constituted the core of his life.” Doctor Chekhov is sensitive to the contrast between the external and internal—what is truly going on with a person (their health, their feelings, their desires and needs), he suggests, is hidden from public view.

What will happen to the lovers? Chekhov does not tell us directly but hints that, while “the end is still far off,” there will be no conventional happy ending—that there are complications and difficulties ahead. It is a mark of Chekhov’s artistry that, by the end of “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” we very much want to know how it turns out for Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna, ordinary people with an extraordinary love.

Excerpts from Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s translation of “The Lady with the Pet Dog.”

Jefferson Flanders is author of the Cold War thriller Herald Square.

Katherine Mansfield and “The Garden Party”

June 29, 2007 / admin

Americans don’t pay much attention to social class. Most of us think of ourselves as middle class, especially the “self-made” with their considerable wealth, and we’ve proved relatively resistant to the class envy found in other societies. It’s different for those who remained part of the British Empire for a longer period of time than did American colonials, because they seem to have inherited that particularly English obsession with relative social standing.

Outsiders and the excluded are often close observers of the world around them—which helps explain why a long line of authors and film-makers from former British colonies so tellingly limn the English class system. Take, for example, Jamaica Kincaid or Philip Michael Ondaatje or Timothy Mo—recent post-colonial outsiders with sharp insights into English manners and prejudices.

Katherine Mansfield fits this outsider profile. Born in 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand into a proper, bourgeois family, Mansfield left her comfortable and conventional existence to move to England to write. Her life in Europe was, to use the euphemism of the time, unconventional: affairs with men and women; a first marriage that lasted only a few days; a stint as an opera extra; the shame of catching gonorrhea; a second (happier) marriage to editor John Middleton Murry (a one-time tenant in her flat); friendship with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda; and death in January 1923 of a pulmonary hemorrhage, following a long bout with tuberculosis.

A story of memory

Mansfield wrote “The Garden Party” while being “treated” for TB at the mystic guru George Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau; it is a story of memory, drawn from her privileged New Zealand childhood. Mansfield is direct and unflinching in her description of the prevailing class structure, one imported from England, yet it would be a mistake to see “The Garden Party” as exclusively about social class; for it is also about the coming-of-age of a sensitive girl, Laura Sheridan, the protagonist of the story.

As the story opens, Laura’s upper class family is holding a garden party. We watch the interaction between her family and the servants and other working people as they prepare for the party; we see how their world is carefully ordered (“The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine.”) When a group of workmen come to set up a marquee for the party, Laura finds herself drawn to them, although Mansfield has some fun with Laura’s youthful flightiness (“Oh, how extraordinarily nice workmen were, she thought. Why couldn’t she have workmen for her friends rather than the silly boys she danced with and who came to Sunday night supper? She would get on much better with men like these.”) We learn that Laura has no use for “stupid convention” or “absurd class distinctions,” or at least that is what she tells herself.

The story darkens when we learn that a young working man who lives nearby in a small cottage with his wife and five children has been killed in an accident (a tumble from a horse). Laura’s first impulse: the garden party must be canceled. Her sister, Jose, is astonished at the idea.

“Stop the garden-party? My dear Laura, don’t be so absurd. Of course we can’t do anything of the kind. Nobody expects us to. Don’t be so extravagant.”

“But we can’t possibly have a garden-party with a man dead just outside the front gate.”

When Jose makes a nasty remark about the dead man (“You won’t bring a drunken workman back to life by being sentimental”) Laura turns to her mother for support, but discovers she shares Jose’s world-view (“People like that don’t expect sacrifices from us. And it’s not very sympathetic to spoil everybody’s enjoyment as you’re doing now.”) The party goes on, and Laura “goes along to get along.”

Her mother then encourages Laura to visit the grieving family, bringing a basket of sandwiches left-over from the party. (Is her mother guilty? Or does she want to jolt Laura by exposing her to the non-romantic realities of the working class?) To Laura’s dismay, once at the cottage she is brought to see the body of the dead man. Yet her reaction to the body surprises her (and us):

…He was wonderful, beautiful. While they were laughing and while the band was playing, this marvel had come to the lane. Happy . . . happy . . . All is well, said that sleeping face. This is just as it should be. I am content.

Laura has found death to be quite different from what she expected. When her brother meets her outside the cottage and asks “Was it awful?”, Laura struggles to capture her feelings in words, unable to fully explain the epiphany that she has experienced. That is where Mansfield ends the story.

An inevitable beauty

A Marxist critique of “The Garden Party” would see Laura’s coming-of-age as an awakening to “the hypocrisy of bourgeois society” and “middle class ruthlessness” (in the words of critic Simon Korner). While it is true that Mansfield touches on class and how it unites and divides us, there’s much more going on in “The Garden Party” than a simple parable about the evils of class. What propels the story is Laura’s perceptions, her feelings, the mix of her emotions, and her newly-awakened understanding of some of the contradictions of life—more so than any political or ideological lesson (although Mansfield’s sharp portraits of Laura’s mother and sister suggests that she despises upper class snobbery).

There are clues to this in a 1922 letter about “The Garden Party” to novelist and playwright William Gerhardi (who later spelled his last name with an “e”—Gerhardie), Mansfield wrote that she was trying to convey “[t]he diversity of life and how we try to fit everything in. Death included.” She added:

That is bewildering for a person of Laura’s age. She feels things ought to happen differently. First one and then another. But life isn’t like that. We haven’t the ordering of it. Laura says, “But all these things must not happen at once.” And Life answers, “Why not? How are they divided from each other.” And they do all happen, it is inevitable. And it seems to me there is beauty in that inevitability.

What happens in “The Garden Party” is what happens in life. Confronted with tragedy, or injustice, we avert our eyes, or we do what we can (or some of us do), but life goes on. Cathedrals are built, bread baked, weddings celebrated, satellites launched, classes taught, legislatures convened and yes, fatuous summer garden parties are held. The ridiculous and the sublime, the comic and the tragic, are all mixed up together. Mansfield asks: how could it be otherwise?

Perhaps Mansfield was thinking about her own isolated and desperate situation at Gurdjieff’s “clinic” as she wrote “The Garden Party,” wondering whether there would there be any interruption in the garden parties of her literary friends when death came for her. There is an air of resignation about “The Garden Party,” a sense that the world will indeed spin on, and a desperately ill Mansfield may indeed have accepted the “beauty in that inevitability.”

Jefferson Flanders is author of the Cold War thriller Herald Square.

Blocking and tackling

January 23, 2007 / admin

I’ll confess that I was pleased to find this quote from Joseph Heller the other day: “Every writer I know has trouble writing.”

Whenever I am struggling to find the right words—the blocking and tackling of writing—I’m convinced that others must find it easier to write than me. I’m jealous of the facile writer, the first-time-right composers, those with the gift of “flow.”

So Heller’s comment lifted my spirits.

I’m a block writer, for the most part. My method is similar to Ring Lardner’s (according to Harold Ross,”…he {Lardner} said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.”), followed by revision. And more revision. I spend more time rewriting than writing.

Some writers I’ve talked to tell me that they can only write from front to back, from the lead sentence onward. They don’t move on until they’re happy with each sentence. Adopting that technique would give me a vicious case of writer’s block: I find skipping ahead to work on a sentence here or a paragraph there keeps me going. I think of my writing as a patchwork quilt, passages and paragraphs stitched together with transitions.

Jefferson Flanders

Page 12 of 15

McCain’s New Hampshire momentum

Belonging and betrayal

Anton Chekhov and “The Lady with the Pet Dog”

Katherine Mansfield and “The Garden Party”

Blocking and tackling

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