A Look o’er Jordan
16 June 1967—You pass from the Israeli sector of Jerusalem to the Jordanian along improvised corridors of brown Jerusalem dust; through coils of figure-eight barbed wire, steering around oil-drum barriers at the checkpoint where the fighting was heavy.
New Israeli apartment buildings were shelled. From some windows, inexplicably, dangle baby strollers and tricycles. Out in the dry weeds, soldiers in bush hats are digging up mines. They prod the ground lightly with metal rods and mark out safe lanes with white tapes.
This is touchy work. The Arabs were generous with their mines in this neighborhood around the United Nations relief warehouse. The UN building was shot up, but roof and walls are intact, and so are the sacks and cases of U.S. flour and rice, Swiss powdered milk, the cakes of soap, the beans, the Argentine corned beef, and the blended ground vegetable matter sent from America for the Arab refugees. The dried milk is labeled “Gift of the Swiss Confederation.”
We—that is, Sydney Gruson, the representative of the New York Times, the Israeli liaison officer, the driver, and myself—are going down into the Jordan valley, territory taken last week. We are bound for Ramallah and will be going as far as Nablus, which the Bible calls Shechem. In Shechem, a passionate prince fell in love with Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, and took advantage of her. In revenge, her brothers killed all the young men of the town. Someone briefly mentions this piece of ancient history as the convoys pass.
Tanks and cannon are still going down toward the river (“I looked o’er the Jordan, an’ what did I see”). Toward us come trucks, heavily loaded. The day is hot; the parching dusty wind, the khamsin, is blowing. New automobiles damaged by shrapnel and crumpled by tanks are a common sight. The trucks coming up the road carry British and American munitions. Enormous quantities of these have been found in storage dumps cut into Jordanian mountainsides. No one is surprised.
We Americans examine these exports curiously. The wooden cases, containing more than a hundred tons of munitions, are quite new. They bear a proud sticker—stars, stripes, red, white, and blue—and come from the Anniston Army Depot in Alabama. On the U.S.A. sticker two strong hands are joined in a heartening symbol of unity and friendship. One of the friends is unnamed. It might be anybody—anybody, that is, able to use 4.2-inch mortars or 106-mm ammunition for recoilless rifles, capable of launching W-20 grenades or of firing artillery shells. The caves in which this stuff was stored are two miles from biblical Shiloh and are very spacious, cool and airy. Ventilators are visible on the cliff above.
A soldier, British by birth, bare head, bare dusty chest streaked with sweat, says a few things to us about our country and our President, which I cannot reproduce. He says, “You bastards are awfully nice to us. You let us have tractors. And you give the peaceful natives all this other stuff.” In fairness it should be added that some of the supplies are British.
There are also large cans of potatoes from Poland, neatly peeled, there are peas from Holland, and there is canned meat from Nigeria. Over the meat an Orthodox sergeant raises his arms in interdiction. The Israeli army keeps a kosher diet. Some of the soldiers, however, fix a hungry eye on the cans. But who knows, says someone, what the Nigerians are canning?
In Ramallah, before curfew, the Arab population is in the streets, the shops are open, and although one informant tells us there is nothing to eat, nothing to drink, we see meat in the butcher shops, bananas on the carts. Crews are repairing electrical lines.
The military governor here is Colonel Orial, a reserve paratroop officer. There are twin cities here, he tells us. Fibira is largely Moslem. Ramallah’s Arabs are Christians. In addition to the combined population of 32,000, there are 25,000 Palestinians in the refugee camp. Several thousand Jordanian villagers took refuge in the town when the fighting began. There are two mayors, one from each community, who are cooperating with the colonel. Water will be in short supply until the electrical repairs are completed. The pumping is staggered, but no one is dying of thirst. There is no danger of epidemics. The Jordanian casualties are being buried. An Israeli medic supervises public health. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East continues to feed refugees.
Colonel Orial says that we will probably be interested as Americans in the plight of eighty or ninety American citizens of Arab birth visiting here and caught by the war. Since they are now in Israeli territory but with passports showing no Israeli entrance stamp, they are temporarily unable to leave. Himself a lawyer, Colonel Orial thinks this a nice point in law. “But we will solve it,” he says. The colonel does not appear to be the sort of man who finds it hard to solve problems.
Going down, we meet an elderly couple from Chile visiting their old Ramallah home and have a Spanish chat with them. We have in common the Western hemisphere and are soaring above all local questions. The itinerary they show us ranges from Cairo to Spitzbergen. The old gentleman wears Arab cloth on his head, bound with a braided plush cord, but he is quite an American in spirit. He is in his seventies. About the neck he is somewhat crumpled, but he does not seem weak or frightened.
Others, waiting to talk to the colonel, are near tears. Two soldiers in a jeep, leading us to the large refugee camp, lose their way and ask us to wait at the Ramallah Hilton while they make inquiries. There we talk with other soldiers and prowl about the empty hotel.
The Ramallah is not one of the classier Hiltons. It has a truncated look, as if severed from something much grander.
I get into the kitchen—always drawn to kitchens—and admire the great saucepans and cleavers, grinders, the chopping block a piece of tree trunk with the bark still on it. Nothing edible here—not that one has much appetite in the Holy Land while the khamsin blows and the hot mountains glitter. Shade and water count much more. Investigation, not hunger, is my motive.
I look into old gravy in a sauceboat covered with a crust of mutton fat. The deep freeze, unfrozen, is empty and smelly. A lily-pad pool has a coat of slime. “Our garden,” the hotel’s publicity reads, “6,800 sq. meters, is a relaxation to all. And during summer, Oriental delicious with the local ‘arak’ is served in folkloric presentation—an experience not to be missed. The cuisine blending west and eastern food will satisfy the most exacting appetite.”
We are informed also that the hotel is five minutes from the airport. That is indeed so. The terminal and the runways are now in the hands of the Israelis. They seemed from the road to be intact. We drive up to the Kalandia camp and are at once surrounded by Arabs.
Young men in shirtsleeves come running from all directions. Two soldiers with submachine guns stand apart. Five deep, the stocky young men crowd in on us. At the center is someone speaking English. Three or four days unshaven, he has large fillings in his front teeth. Arms crossed, his eager nose and his eyes dilated, he is here to deliver the goods to the foreign press, the goods being a tale of hunger and grief.
The claim that people are starving is a little hard to support. We see bread everywhere and know that there is plenty of flour. The UN may not offer a varied diet, but there is no hunger. In tiny corners of soil near their stone warren, the refugees have tomato plants, squash vines, and a few small fig trees.
Less propaganda-conscious, the older people, the men in their pillow-ticking coats and the wives busty and comfortable in coarse white, ask us into their houses with elaborate courtesy. The tiny, sunken, windowless rooms have a few scraps of carpet, a stool, a bedroll, a piece of broken mirror. I look into the latrine—the cement floors with slots for the feet are washed down. There is water.
The men study trades at the UN schools but do little with them. It was impossible to find out how many of these Palestinian refugees had actually fought against Israel. Some—a considerable number, probably—had taken off and crossed the Jordan.
Israelis say that the Jordanians armed the entire population two days before the war. Guns are now being surrendered. Some sniping has occurred in Ramallah. But snipers are far more active
in Gaza, where the refugee problem is acute. In Gaza, the UN is trying to feed 300,000 people, who are in an explosive state. I have been told that not even UN officials are safe among the Gaza refugees.
A Jordanian report says that 70,000 people who fled from Jericho and from the Syrian borders are in the Zerka area, near Amman. The Jordanians are now supposedly turning refugees back. And defeated Egyptians in the Sinai Desert are trying to make it back to Suez without food or water. Nasser does not want these survivors to spread details of the disaster. In rumor-happy Tel Aviv, people are saying that Egyptian soldiers emerging from the Sinai have been shot on Nasser’s orders, and a French newspaper this morning has put this in print.
That Nasser, endorsed by Marxist leaders like Tito as a progressive and by the Russians and the Chinese as a true enemy of imperialism, might order a massacre of the survivors is not inconceivable. In any case, more men are dying at this moment of hunger, thirst, and exposure than were killed in battle.
An editorial in the London Times urges the great powers to send emergency help. Their fleets are still in the eastern Mediterranean. It seems to have taken Israel some time to realize that in disarming the Egyptians and allowing them to go free, “they were in fact sentencing them to death,” says the Times.
Obviously the refugee problem requires an international solution. No one can reasonably claim that right is entirely on the Israeli side, and although some Arab leaders exploited the misery of the refugees to intensify hatred of Israel, the Israelis might have done more for the Arabs. It should have been possible, for instance, to set aside money for indemnity and reconstruction. Part of the money paid to Israel by West Germany might have been used for this purpose. Now the number of refugees has increased enormously, and if the old system is followed, the UN will be supporting more dozens of rotting slums in which demoralized, idle young men can concentrate on “politics.”
Only Arab extremists can profit from this. A negligible percentage of the oil royalties of Kuwait would have paid for the rehabilitation of the Palestinian Arabs. So would the billions spent on two campaigns in the Sinai. So would the Suez Canal tolls.
A big Arab crowd in Nablus waits for gas or kerosene rations. Curfew has been advanced to 6:00 P.M., according to the military authorities. It is now 2:00 P.M. The streets are filled. The light comes down sharply, with a stony glitter from the Judean hills. Under this parching heat, I begin to sag somewhat.
I am glad to sit down in the thick-walled HQ building. An Israeli sergeant pours us a slug of whiskey. When we get our second wind, we venture into the heat again. The sun hits you at the back of the neck, and you get an odd thickening sensation in the skull.
We go down the street, looking into shops. We can buy nothing. Israeli currency is not accepted. Half a dozen Arabs stare at us from a barbershop and seem to be inviting us to enter. All the customers but one wear Western clothes. The exception, an elderly gentleman, has a tarboosh covering his head down to the sad brows. His chin is puckered with many emotions, but it is curiosity that wins out. He stands near us listening, a hookah tube (as near as I can make out) hanging from his pocket like a stethoscope.
The mirror is straight from a Coney Island funhouse. We all look very wide, with squash noses, split grins, and distorted eyes. Here, too, there is a spokesman. Very handsome, dark-browed, he has a furious nonsmile, and as the old barber, engrossed and even doting, cuts steadily at his black hair, the spokesman tells us, to begin with, that the Americans are spies. No, he does not believe that the Americans flew air cover for Israel. But Americans did spot the Egyptian airfields for the Israelis. Come, come, says the New York Times representative.
The hair snipping continues, and the spokesman tries to be pleasant but has too many passions to manage. His grin is bitter. Still, he wants to talk. Speaking to correspondents, he feels that his truth will reach the world. He is a dairy farmer, he says. He has sixty cows to milk. He can’t get the gas to go to the relief of his suffering cows. They need their hay, and the children need milk. It occurs to me that the job might be done with donkeys. There are plenty of people here listening to music, being shaved, passing the time of day, and the farm is only two miles up the road.
Instead we go on about the future, Arab unity, hints of vengeance. “But you declared war on Israel,” says the Times. “We had a treaty,” says the gentleman dairy farmer. He adds, “King Hussein was pushed, outsidely, and pulled, insidely.” Then he is silent and looks at us from under his brows, like the late John Gilbert playing an Arab role.
It is instructive to see what Middle Eastern poster artists do with the faces of Hollywood stars, the feelings they impart to them. Robert Mitchum Arabized is strong, honorable, but his features are twisted with foreknowledge of defeat. Fate is dead against him. We know that he is not going to make it. Our gentleman farmer is like that.
Now, having his neck trimmed with a Schick electric razor, he sits with stilted suffering pride. I am unable to give a T. E. Lawrence/Freya Stark interpretation to this look. In my cruder Midwestern judgment, it seems all wrong. What good are these traditional dignities? No good at all if they lead to the Sinai roads with their blasted Russian tanks, the black faces of the dead dissolving, and the survivors fighting for a sip of ditch water.
New York: World-Famous ImpossibilitY
(1970)
The New York Times Book Review, 6 December 1970.
How do Americans think of New York? That is perhaps like asking how Scotsmen feel about the Loch Ness monster. It is our legendary phenomenon, our great thing, our world-famous impossibility. Some seem to wish that it were nothing more than a persistent rumor. It is, however, as human things go, very real, superreal. What is barely hinted in other American cities is condensed and enlarged in New York. There people feel themselves to be in the center of things. That is certainly true, and it is certainly odd.
In New York, as in all great capitals, people often behave symbolically and try to express the spirit of the place. A visiting diplomat writes a letter to express gratitude to the anonymous person who discovered his wallet and returned it intact to a lost and found. Off Times Square, a blind man has been assaulted, his Seeing Eye dog stolen, he is bleeding and weeping. A cop mutters, “This could only happen in New York.” Impulses can be released here that in calmer environments are restrained. On every street, people are taught “what life is like.”
New York is stirring, insupportable, agitated, ungovernable, demonic. No single individual can judge it adequately. Not even Walt Whitman could today embrace it emotionally; the attempt might capsize him. Those who want to contemplate the phenomenon are well advised to assume a contemplative position elsewhere. Those who wish to feel its depth had better be careful. For fifteen years I lived in and with New York. I now reside in Chicago.
In other cities and regions, local pride has subsided. The old naive self-confidence is gone. After the events of the last decade, Texas no longer brags, Mayor Daley’s Chicago does not boost. At the turn of the century, Chicago was a regional capital. In 1893, it dreamed of being a world city. Scholars, architects, poets, musicians, came up from Indiana, down from Wisconsin, east from Nebraska, but by the end of the twenties the cultural life of the Midwest was dying. Trains leaving Chicago carried poets as well as pork, and the city rapidly sank into provincialism.
Several generations of young Americans, seeking a broader and deeper life, abandoned Main Street to the businessmen and yokels and went to Paris or Greenwich Village. America’s great aim was not, after all, to encourage painters, philosophers, and novelists. To live as a painter or an intellectual, one had to go “somewhere else,” away from Detroit, Minneapolis, or Kansas City. As bohemians and expatriates, these emigrants hoped to find the dream states and the special atmospheres on which art thrives.
Bohemian life in the Village was, in the twenties, quite elegant—even patrician, for it attracted the rich as well as writers, painters, and radicals. The old Village was a grand success, and for a time New Y
ork really was the center of the country for certain rare and valuable qualities. Its free versers, free lovers, elegant boozers, its rich ninnies and eccentrics, its artists and revolutionists, charmed and heartened the younger generation, strengthening their resistance to the ugliness and philistinism of the hometown.
All that, of course, is over. New York is now the business center of American culture, the amusement or frivolity center, the excitement center, the anxiety center. But it has no independent and original intellectual life. It provides no equilibrium, it offers no mental space to artists. Ideas are no longer discussed here. Meeting an old Village intellectual, now gray-bearded and hugely goggled, I find him as densely covered with protest buttons as a fish is with scales. He has become a former intellectual.
For better or for worse, the intellectual life of the country has found sanctuary in the universities. Bohemian manners and notions have also spread over the continent. New York is the principal processor and distributor of the mental goods consumed by the American public. The present leaders of culture in New York are its publicity intellectuals. These are college-educated men and women who have never lived as poets, painters, composers, or thinkers but who have successfully organized writing, art, thought, and science in publishing houses, in museums, in foundations, in magazines, in newspapers (mainly the New York Times), in the fashion industry, in television, and in advertising. All these things have been made to pay and pay handsomely.
No less an authority than Mr. Jason Epstein of Random House has told us in the New York Review of Books that New York can be a splendid place—if you are making fifty thousand dollars a year. He might have added that what Mr. Theodore Roszak has called the “counterculture” and Professor Lionel Trilling the “adversary culture” is the Dick Whittington’s cat that brings in this sort of wealth; that the sale of radical ideas (some of them quite old, but people have been too busy to read Baudelaire, Proudhon, or Marx for themselves) is profitable; and that criticism, or even open hatred of society, is no impediment to success in this glittering city.