January 2011

As a member and affiliate of the 28th Division for more than sixty years, I’ve read with interest “The Example of Private Slovik” (September/October).

The author accents the inexperience of members of the general court-martial who tried Private Slovik for desertion. Certainly the author is the best judge of his own qualifications for that duty. However, since all U.S. military officers are deemed competent to serve on courts-martial, and since that court had been serving for some months, a 1987 judgment on others who served in 1944 seems questionable, to say the least.

A couple of years ago I visited the Stanford campus at PaIo Alto, and as I stood with a university official under a long cloister that rimmed a bright green lawn, I said what a very handsome place it was. “Oh yes,” he replied instantly. “It’s the loveliest college campus in America.”

ON AUGUST 31, 1837, THE DAY AFTER COMMENCEMENT—they don’t seem to have gone in for vacations in those earnest times—the academic year at Harvard was ushered in with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s address to Phi Beta Kappa on a stock topic, “The American Scholar.” The meeting was held in the First Parish Church, on the exact spot where Anne Hutchinson had been examined for heresy two centuries before.

The choice of an ex-minister to address a group of future ministers was a little strange. And Emerson, thirtieth in his 1821 class of fifty-nine, had not even made Phi Beta Kappa on his own. Just as he had been chosen class poet in 1821 after six others had declined the honor, so on this occasion he was a substitute, apparently for the Reverend Dr. Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright (a future Episcopal bishop of New York), who had declined two months before.

A photograph taken in New York’s Chinatown in 1933 seems to sum up the special place of Chinese restaurants in American culture. The windows of a storefront are hung with Chinese characters, but there is also a large vertical sign, edged in neon, that proudly proclaims CHOP SUEY. REAL CHINESE CUISINE. Although chop suey is no more Chinese than succotash, it is this mix of the exotic and the familiar that has made the Chinese restaurant a ubiquitous national fixture.

Americans who would hesitate to visit an Ethiopian, a Thai, or even a French restaurant think nothing of going out to eat Chinese food. Like Italian cuisine, it has caped the classification of “ethnic.” In fact, there is a restaurant in the small northern California town of Crescent City that serves Italian food on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays and Chinese food on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. It’s closed on Sundays.

Raphael Soyer’s Village East Street Scene (left) is a kind of group portrait of New York writers in the mid-1960s, including, left to right, the playwright LeRoi Jones and the poets Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, and Allen Ginsberg. Born in Russia, Soyer came to the United States in 1912 and studied at Cooper Union. During the late 1950s and 1960s, he lived on lower Second Avenue. In this painting, he once wrote, he tried to “capture the feeling of that area—the bearded long-haired young men; the loosehaired, blue-jeaned girls with ecstatic faces, white mothers with Negro babies.…” Soyer himself appears in the painting, touching his hand to his hat.

Not much is known about the man who painted this view of Niagara Falls except that his name was Thomas Chambers, he was born in 1815, he worked in New York State and Boston, and he died in 1866. This work dates from about 1850, by which time the falls loomed so large in the national consciousness that many tourists felt disappointed by the real thing. Chambers was clearly not one of these. And although he probably had little formal art training, he placed Table Rock in his composition with the assurance of Hokusai painting a wave.

In Streetlight 1930 by Constance Coleman Richardson (right), the place is Indianapolis and the time a summer night: a mother is taking her children for a walk after dinner. Almost obliterated by trees in full leaf, a streetlight casts long blue shadows worthy of Magritte, and a man’s cigarette glows in the dusk. Although she was reasonably successful during the 1930s and 1940s, today Constance Richardson is all but forgotten. Her painting was hung this year in the inaugural exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.—an example of the kind of work the new museum hopes to make better known.

No sooner had Richmond, Virginia, fallen to Union troops on April 3, 1865, than photographers entered the former Confederate capital. Mathew Brady and his team were there; so was the firm of Alexander Gardner. On April 14, John Reekie, working for Gardner, made the moody photograph above of a war-weary populace clustered near the Washington Monument, at the edge of Capitol Square. In the foreground are some recently paroled Confederate soldiers. Dedicated only three years before the start of the war, the monument appears to have survived the conflict undamaged. And even today its encirclement by automobiles and state office buildings doesn’t diminish its sixty-foot-high presence.

This interview took place at the end of May in William Safire’s office at the Washington bureau of The New York Times. Safire is a trim and affable man of fifty-seven. We had first met in 1971 at the house of the Washington columnist Rowland Evans, Jr. Our host had advertised Safire in advance as the compulsively alliterative speech writer for the then Vice-President, Spiro T. Agnew (“the nattering nabobs of negativism”), and also as one of the few members of the Nixon troupe who dared circulate at large in Georgetown. While disapproving of Safire in principle, I found him, as too often happens, quite amiable in practice.

Your “Special: Women in Their Time” feature in the September/October issue not only promises more than it delivers but misconstrues the meaning of the contemporary women’s movement. While it is true that Georgia O’Keeffe is a remarkable genius and that the Peabody sisters did good works and that hitching electricity to housework is a phenomenon, all any of the articles devoted to them do is confine women to what is traditionally and stereotypically either women’s work or inspirational and creative works. In doing so, you omit the great social revolution that the current women’s movement has accomplished. You ignore everything from suffrage and changes in credit law to changes in job descriptions, income levels, family structure, child care, clothing, language, the demeanor of men, the physical and psychological changes in women, and the enormous shift in politics.…

Women don’t need tribute. Reality will do.