On August 16 the pioneering punk-rock band the Ramones made its debut at CBGB’s, a seedy Bowery bar that one French reference work extravagantly calls le temple new-yorkais du punk . Only someone who has never been to CBGB’s could use the word temple to describe it; in truth it was, and is, a miserable hole that you would compliment by calling a dive. Even today a visit will open the eyes of anyone who thinks a flannel shirt defines grunge.
The “Business of America” column about the passion of Henry Clay Frick (April) had an interesting ending, but I almost didn’t get that far. The first part of John Steele Gordon’s article was directed toward explaining how the robber barons of yesterday were undeserving of the title. His primary objective seems to have been to serve as apologist for the ultra-wealthy. The workers opposing Frick and others were desperately righting for nothing more than a fair share. They worked under dangerous conditions, were paid little, and lived in squalor. There was no justification for the actions of the owners. And I am not much impressed or inspired by the benevolent gifts of philanthropists who have the sweat and (literally) blood of workers on their hands. A little care on the part of top management for their workers’ children would have been more meaningful.
I want my friends to do well. I want the people I don’t like to fail. When the people I don’t like succeed, I assume that they’re corrupt, or that they’ve cheated. I don’t want the bad guys to win the race.
I don’t like Mark Helprin. I once beat him in the 880. That’s what I tell people when his name comes up. We both went to the Scarborough Country Day School. The race is precious to me, because it breaks the form. In most every other contest, Mark has not just won but shown himself to be in an entirely different and superior class. When The New Yorker was turning down my stories, it was publishing his. And it goes on like that. I was pleased when he started writing speeches for Dole. There were suddenly a lot of new members in the I-hate-Mark-Helprin club.
So when I saw his essay in your February/March “Summing Up” column, I ground my teeth with angry pleasure. “He’s going to blow some famous wind at me,” I thought. “More documents for the hate file.”
The editors reply: The headline on the Custer story is all our doing and none of Mr. McMurtry’s. The article, drawn from his new biography of Crazy Horse, came to us without a title; in seeking one, we were struck by the sentence, “Half Yellow Face, poetically, told Custer that they would all go home that day by a road they did not know.”
I was surprised to see that the title of Larry McMurtry’s essay about George Armstrong Custer in the February/ March issue, “A Road They Did Not Know,” was apparently borrowed without attribution from Frederick J. Chiaventone’s novel, A Road We Do Not Know: A Novel of Custer at the Little Bighorn , published in 1996 by Simon & Schuster. True, titles are not copyrighted, but ripping one off from a recent novel is bad form. At the very least, I would like to call attention to the work, for Chiaventone’s mixture of horse sweat, prejudice, stupidity, ambition, hot blood, and unbending pride casts a brilliant light on the sublime tragedy that was the collision of the white and Native American cultures. The book is a fierce tour de force, a literary triumph of the first order of magnitude.
An army in modern warfare means a brevet officer with his brevet command. A brevet officer is commonly a soldier who has reaped laurels by going where other soldiers go & who, by a discriminating Congress, is designated as one who forever after is fit for no practical purpose whatever, except to clamor for a brevet command, tyranise over his former equals, & abuse his superiors.
Warfare under such men consists in disgusting those under them, keeping their own feet dry in all swamp operations (now the field of military achievements), while they heap unnecessary labor on others, & making long papers giving learned reasons why nothing has been accomplished, called reports.