BOOKS
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What is the difference, for example , between the liberal Robert
McNamara and the conservative John Mitchell? We now know that the
destructive and terrifying secret-police agencies which operated abroad also
operated at home under liberal, more constitutionally minded Presidents .
But these are questions which McCarthy knows from the Indo-China
experience. Why were they not dealt with in her newspaper accounts? Walter
Benjamin has said that the newspaper's content is material which refuses any
form oforganization other than that imposed by the reader's impatience . But
the intellectual's role is not
to
be impatient, even though his or her attention
turns to politics, a transient subject matter. The task is to inform and inter–
pret, suggest and prod, to describe the fundamental questions under the
transient ones . The ex-Catholic, but I suspect deeply religious, McCarthy says
that she is concerned ' 'about the problem of purgation and atonement." She
wonders how leadership can redeem itself and the country .
It
is this theme
which she should have dealt with in her book at great length. It is under–
standable that newspapers or weekly journals, corrupted by impatience,
would not have found the requisite number of lines necessary to allow a
discussion of this elemental question.
MARCUS RASKIN
,
CAFE CRITICISM
THE PAINTED WORD.
By
Tom Wolfe. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
$5.95 .
" It's kind of a goof." That is what Linda Lovelace said to every
question a journalist put to her about starring in the fIrst-run pornography of
Deep Throat .
And that , in essence, is how Tom Wolfe responded in a recent
interview about his latest book,
The Painted Word.
The interviewer had
supposed that the book's flamboyant attack on modern art-its makers, its
critics , its patrons-issued from some sort ofposition on the part of its author.
If Mr. Wolfe thought modern art empty , what kind ofart did he support in its
