B. Navitsky's
letter
Dear old
friend,
Goddammit, here
I am in paradise and can't stop thinking. You'd think
fishing would suffice. I have an abundance right at
the end of my dock. Big Blue the neighborhood heron
flies in each morning to sit and commune with me by
the water about the fish. I've ignored him.
Something's been nagging me and I've sat in the air
conditioning for weeks reading Das Kapital.
When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet system
collapsed, I didn't notice at first. When you were
here last time, I wanted to ask--had you ever really
thought about Marxism? Then the time went by and you
left before I got around to it. I can't
remember ever talking about Marx with you.
And that's what
has been nagging me. How in the hell could we live
through two-thirds of the twentieth century without
ever asking ourselves--why didn't we become
Marxists?
I've thought of
different answers to that. The main one was that we
never even considered the question. Did you ever read
Das Kapital cover to cover--or even in
substantial chunks? Damned if I did. If you did, you
never told me. You didn't, I'm sure.
I'll start with
basics. We eat, sleep, screw (in changing ratios as
the years go on, admittedly). But so do birds and
reindeer. The difference with us is our consciousness
of these things, mainly our consciousness of
ourselves. We're not given; we work to make
ourselves--consciously. So we study; we develop an
epistemology; we build up the grounds of our
knowledge of ourselves and the world. We do that in
the social whirlwind of living, picking up all sorts
of pieces from friends. You gave to me and I gave to
you.
That
social whirlwind of ground-building happens at its
best surrounding books. Read books and talk about
books--what joy. "We are what we read," I
read somewhere. "We are what we say about what
we read," I would say.
Agree with me,
if you will, that there were four figures at the top
of the reading list when we were seriously forming
our mental landscape, from, say, 1945 to 1960. Freud.
Einstein. Darwin. And Marx. I never felt I had
to exhaust their bibliography. We didn't even have to
read much of what they wrote because everybody else
was writing about what they wrote. Everyone assumed
we knew what they had written and we could move on in
our talk about how to lead a life. Therein lay a vast
complacency of intellect. Most of us were complicit
in it, I think. We floated in that mainstream culture
like sticks in the current, naturally and
effortlessly.
With Freud,
Einstein, and Darwin, it didn't matter if someone
failed to equip himself sufficiently with the primary
texts. The consensus held them in equilibrium across
the social space--only fringe kooks thought Freud's
construct of the person or Darwin's evolutionism was
bad or bogus. Einstein's thinking was simply given.
You see my
drift. Marx was different. Marxism cleaved our world.
You and I were much too young to know the romance of
the pre-World War II Left. We could only read about
it in our undergraduate courses. We knew that Marxism
had excited the Depression generation with a promise
of better things. It was the experience of some of
our elders, not ours. Ralph Ellison's youthful
journals have surfaced. He wrote to his mother about
Harlem in the depth of the Depression--hungry men in
cold doorways, hunger gnawing his own stomach as he
looked for work. Momma, he said, they're trying a new
way in Russia and he hoped it would work.
The system
appeared broken. Many of the thinkers formed in the
1930s found an alternative model in Marx and thought
it could work. That melodramatic ending of The
Grapes of Wrath sticks in the mind--the Joads
find safe haven in a workers' camp, an idealized
Communist solution.
But you and I
were post-World War II students. And you remember
what that meant. The Cold War descended on us. The
Iron Curtain clanged down and divided the world in
two. The public rose up in fear of Marxism--a.k.a.
Soviet Communism. Red-baiting won the day. The
Establishment leftists ducked for cover when the
finality of Alger Hiss's conviction on perjury hit
home.
One
of my favorite books in college was F. O.
Matthiessen's American Renaissance. He
published it a decade before we read it in college in
the early 1950s. I just recently learned something
about Matthiessen. He had committed suicide not long
before I read the book. His former student, Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr., told the story in his autobiography
(A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent
Beginnings, 1917-1950, NY: Houghton Mifflin,
2000). It apparently was the only way
"Matty" could find to reconcile his Yankee
values with the Communist Party, to which he was
drawn. American Innocence met Continental Experience
in one tortured psyche--white vs. black, good vs.
evil. God. I was totally unaware of what happened to
Matthiessen and why.
I blush to
think how much about Marxism went under my faint
little political radar screen. I guess we all had a
general understanding that Edmund (Bunny) Wilson and
Kenneth Burke and people like Philip Rahv, the whole
New York school of intellectuals, resonated to
something at least minimally Marxian. Did I know in
any real sense what that meant? Don't make me answer.
My memory tells me the English Department at Penn in
our years there managed to build a wall against the
mess in the public arena. We were studying literary history,
not literary politics, if you please. There may have
been a Marxist or two lurking among the untenured
transients but they sure never got to me.
Sitting in the
sunshine does wonders for your reflections about your
youth. Do you remember our bewilderment when the Age
of Aquarius burst in the mid-1960s? It caught us with
our pants up. We already were thirtysomething. It was
too late for us. We never could get them down.
Do you remember
that moment, a decade before, when the design of a
1957 Ford Fairlane seemed like the most advanced
shape of modern western civilization? It's hard to
believe today. But that's the way it seemed. They
called it "poetry in motion" but if you see
a picture of it now it was clearly sculpted
repression. It was the same with social mores, sexual
conventions. We dared not climb those high walls that
kept us out of the tropical garden. Looking back, I
can't really believe our only reality was so narrow.
The high walls fell and now a generation doesn't even
know they ever stood.
I'll
speak for
myself but
I think I speak for us all. The libido was in
bondage. It was unable to fly. It never flew. Not
even after I knew I would not die if it did. The
comedy of the 1950s on TV is not funny to me because
it hurts so much, remembering the narrowness of our
choices. I was held in by a fear that was so
pervasive it had no name. It was the integument of
what I was. It is why I married young and remained
married. If I had split--finally after many years I
became conscious it was an option (after Aquarius)--I
would have fallen into a pit of failure and never
come out. Part of this was the little middling sort
of world I was born into. I didn't know then I had
inherited it--didn't even know I had it.
But how would I
know then that my tight-cheeked take on life came
only partly from where my mother bore me? It also
came from Karl Marx. This is what you come to see in
the bright light of the sun when you have left the
game up there and it doesn't matter.
People now can
make light of the Cold War. When we were in college,
we lived in the shadow of doomsday. I wrote it in my
diary so I have evidence. "We will have to
have a nuclear contest before the Free World and the
Soviets know who will prevail; and the contest will
destroy whatever will be worth having
afterward." Talk about no-win scenarios--it
was the only scenario I could imagine. So, the longer
we could repress our desire and the longer we could
hold our fire--the longer it would be before we faced
the inevitable debacle.
Subconsciously,
I could feel like a Soviet man on the street. We were
not that much different. The state of terror there
only differed in degree from the terror here. We were
going to blow each other up and there was no control
that would stop it. Except to tie the libido in a
knot and keep that bucking son of a bitch locked in a
dungeon without a key. State terror was necessary to
induce and sustain the terror of the singular
subject. People free to feel and fornicate would have
been the ultimate threat to the state and the world.
The catatonic condition was the surest condition for
survival. That's why we thought the FBI and the CIA
were a-okay. That's why we liked Ike--not to like Ike
would have been to like annihilation. The ultimate
icon was the unexploded nuclear rocket sheathed in an
underground silo. If it burst out of the silo, all
hell would descend. Not just on the Soviets but,
given the retaliatory power poised to strike, on us
equally. Keep upward pointing shafts from bursting at
all costs. You know that was the mandate, and we all
saluted and said yes sir, barely knowing how doing so
diminished us--ourselves, personally.
No
wonder when
the Baby Boomers stripped naked and waved their asses
in the air I was numbed to insignificance. It was too
late for me; the conditioning was too profound to
allow a change. There was no key to my dungeon. For
the world, you know the Cold War started ending then;
it was just a matter of waiting until 1989 to see it
completed.
So, I got all
the way through the classic crisis of our time
without ever really knowing the Marxian thought that
solidified the Soviets. I didn't read Das Kapital
partly because I did not have to. Our teachers and
propaganda machinery told me what I needed to know.
It was the other civic religion. Since it
contradicted ours, it was evil. It turned familiar
tenets of our religion, such as the people and
democracy, inside out, transforming good into
evil. I saw a fuzzy line differentiating Marx from
the Kremlin demons--but in the end it didn't separate
them. Whittaker Chambers was pivotal for me. His
baroque phrasing succeeded in isolating Communism in
a dimension utterly apart from ours. He saw the
struggle to the death in an absolute and final war of
minds. Put such soaring rhetoric together with the
daily stuff from Washington, from pulpits, from
newspapers. The message was ubiquitous. There was no
other way to think.
I never read Mein
Kampf either. In that case, I figured there was
nothing for me to learn. Pure evil was like a black
ink swatch, perfectly uniform and unsubtle. It never
would have occurred to me that kids someday would
skin their heads and salute Hitler's text--yet you
see their idiotic mugs every day in the news.
Hitler's evil for me relativized Marx's evil. Marx
could not be as evil as Hitler. Marx had an
influence--mysterious and unexplainable though it
seemed to me--on writers I read and liked, such as
Wilson. So Marx was bad but he was not all bad. And
to think, within a day's drive to New York, people my
age knew and understood why Marx's idea shook the
world, and they believed the world could be better
because he shook it. I'm glad to be hiding behind the
sunshine so that you can't see how embarrassed I
become when I realize how narrowly I saw our world,
how much I missed seeing. Do you ever get the
feeling? Why didn't you make me read Marx?
I
hear you saying, "You're history, Navitsky;
so is Marx. Why are you upset about Marx now? Capital
won." Here me: capitalism may now rule the globe
but Marxism lives and you'd better learn what it's
about, even now. I have to suppose it would have
horrified Marx to see his theories transformed into
the totalitarian statist terror that Lenin and Stalin
created. He would have wanted his ideas to make
history differently. His ideas, or a mutated form of
them, may yet get another chance, since they show
evidence of still surviving. Sitting one morning with
Big Blue, I heard the lapping waves tell me,
"Read Das Kapital, Navitsky. Wise
up." I lamented my life of ignorance and told
Blue I would make up for it. Fundamentally, you
aren't finished trying to understand until you're
finished. Even on the Indian River.
A Peace
Corpsman's article about students in China finally
pushed me into reading Marx. His assignment was to
teach English lit to future Chinese teachers. All the
students carried a red identity card that reminded
them of their three primary duties. The last and
least of the three was to master their subjects
as good students. The first and most important was to
love China, support the Chinese Communist Party
leaders, and serve Socialism. Just as important, they
should "diligently study Marxism-Leninism
and Mao Zedong Thought, progressively establish a
Proletariat class viewpoint, authenticate a viewpoint
of Historical Materialism."
The students
told the Peace Corps volunteer that America's
spiritual hollowness would end only when we gave up
capitalism. They thought Shakespeare, when he scolded
the greed of royalty, spoke with the voice of the
proletariat. Revolution was the government, which
they supported with enthusiasm. In their new China
eyes, the students at Tiananmen Square had been
counter-revolutionaries. Just typical dictatorship
double-speak, you say. Still, Marxist categories
drove their malleable minds. [Peter Hassler. "Letter from
China: Hamlet Meets Mao." The New Yorker.
13 November 2000, p. 110.]
So, a lifetime
late, I wondered about Marx and finally read Das
Kapital. Reading this text, old friend, made
me feel at first as if I was in a museum of world
violence, staring at the bomb that shook the world.
Think what it did to the twentieth century--our
century. I marvel that I never read it before. I
marvel that I am alive to read it with its safety on,
after the Soviet bastardization of it has ended
(though the fuse is still in place, as the students
in China attest.)
Of course we
all read the Communist Manifesto in our
world civilization classes, but you remember the spin
it got from our professors. They told us it was
propaganda wrapped up as bogus history. I didn't pay
much attention. You didn't either. What I have
discovered in Das Kapital was implicit
in the Manifesto, which came out nearly
twenty years before the big book. Marx may have been
a bold economic theorist. He may have had a brilliant
insight into the dialectic of historical development.
He may have been a diligent scholar. He may have felt
moral outrage at the human degradation he observed in
English factories. But it hit me like a ton of
dynamite when I realized what Marx mainly was: Marx
was the tragic voice of dissent within the great
modernist ascendancy.
After Das
Kapital, I read Francis Wheen's new biography
of Marx. Then I read a review of Wheen in The
New York Review of Books by Robert Skidelsky,
biographer of John Maynard Keynes. Then I heard
another ton of dynamite go off: Our times have so
changed that Marx no longer looks tragic but comic. But
then I had yet another thought. I'm enclosing a paper
that attempts to pull all this reading together with
my belated discovery about Marx. Excuse a few
repetitions of things I say above. I will be
expecting you to come and comment in person. Come
discuss this with Big Blue and me!
Your friend,
Ivan
Navitsky Skavar
End of B. Navitsky's
letter
Go to C.
Navitsky's essay
.. 
