BOOKS
FROM VIETNAM TO WATERGATE
THE SEVENTEENTH DEGREE.
By Mary McCarthy . Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich. $7 .95.
THE MASK OF STATE: WATERGATE PORTRAITS.
By Mary
McCarthy . Harcourt Brace Jovanovich . $6.95 .
It
is spring . I am writing this review of Mary McCarthy's books on
Vietnam and Watergate while I listen to an extraordinary pianist, Alexis
Weissenberg, play Bach . The fugue which Weissenberg plays reminds me of
Sartre 's discussion on Bach . He says that Bach does not cause him to think of
the austerity ofLiepzig or the Puritan stolidity of the German princes. It seems
that music touches the soul, the principles of morality which we insist are
there within us and which we must seek to discover. Politics deals with
momentary and seemingly transitional concerns. But art is unique and un–
repeatable in each' 'creative act and remains ftxed, enduring through the real
historical process. . . . Politics and art are two ways of overcoming time, but
the victory of politics over time is transitory" (Sanchez Vazquez) .
Not only is it spring, but today is very special to me. It is my forty-ftrst
birthday and incredibly, it is the day that the war in Indo-China has formally
ended . I pick up Mary McCarthy's book,
The Seventeenth Degree,
and there
she is posing with a grinning Bernard Fall in front of a helicopter or two. I
wrote the
Viet Nam Reader
with Fall. That spring of 1967 he was going to take
me around Indo-China. Instead, he was killed. He was forty-one. So many
memories come back to me reading McCarthy's passionate accounts of the mo–
ment.
It
was a time which showed us in Out fantasy and forcefulness. The war
seemed to be the culmination and the contradiction of our beliefs . The only
music which touched us was music of the moment. It was music of protest and
marches, just as the literature which seemed to matter the most was the
analysis and reportage of the moment. Newspapers and weekly magazines
became Out daily prayer. Whether in music or literature the structure was
rudimentary . It reminded me of a ftgured bass to which the marcher and the
chorus of young supporters could easily spin a variation on the basic tune of
