Book Reviews

Saki: The Complete Saki, H. H. Munro. Penguin U.S.A., reissued edition, May 1998, ISBN: 0141180781, $11.90 paperback.

      Still fresh after 100 years! Saki (H. H. Munro, 1870-1916) is unique. His mise-en-scene is the world of P. G. Wodehouse, with its Edwardian country houses and formidable noblewomen. On the other hand, his septic view of human nature is closer to that of Ambrose Bierce, or Juvenal.

      His protagonists—not really heroes—are typically youthful scapegraces, idlers, and dandies. Self-absorbed and perverse, they may come to bad ends, like Comus Bassington. Despite, or perhaps because, of their character defects, they make gorgeous epigrammatic observations, worldly beyond their years, on human nature:

You needn’t tell me that a man who doesn’t love oysters and asparagus and good wine has got a soul, or a stomach either. He’s simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.

People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity; the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.

Waldo is the sort of person who would be immensely improved by death.

      Saki is politically incorrect. Like W. S. Gilbert, he lampooned suffragettes; this has led some to call him “misogynistic.” His Jewish characters are not always portrayed in a flattering light; this has led some to call him “anti-Semitic.” Earnest folk full of impractical good intentions for the uplift of humanity got the fullest dose of his venom. In “The Toys of Peace,” children brought up by insufferably and sanctimoniously progressive parents who refuse to give them “warlike” playthings nonetheless improvise violent and destructive games. In “Filboid Studge” he describes a “health food” fad that succeeds wildly on the assumption that if it tastes disgusting, it must be good for you. Saki would have reveled in the gruesome irony of a recent news account about an “animal rights” protestor mauled at Yellowstone by a grizzly. He was no friend to the puritan, the do-gooder, and the reformer; critics accordingly tag him “reactionary.”

      Bizarre scenarios abound. Pet hyenas, werewolf boys, riotous young women mistaken for newly-hired governesses, exploding babies, and other violent plots and twisted themes are related in spare narrative, often with absurdity at the end. Evelyn Waugh followed Saki’s lead in such novels as Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust. But if these Waugh novels might be as described as resembling minor Mozart symphonies, Saki’s tales are more like Scarlatti sonatas: short, dense with information, virtuosic, and perfect things of their kind. The taste for them is perhaps an acquired one, but it is easy to acquire.

—Michael S. Swisher

Vixi, Memoirs of a Non-Belonger, by Richard Pipes. Yale University Press, 304 pp., $30.

      Richard Pipes is one of our most eminent historians. His books on Russian and Soviet history have been among the most influential and (at least as far as the academic left and Russian nationalists like Alexander Solzhenitsyn are concerned) among the most controversial. But his new autobiography—“Vixi,” Latin for “I lived”—is of interest not just for his academic work but also for his service as a White House adviser. The book is also an informal history of the last days of the Cold War, documented in dramatic fashion by someone who was most assuredly not a belonger in official Washington.

      Pipes came to America in 1939 as a sixteen-year-old refugee from Poland. A Warsaw-born predecessor in the White House, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was already in Canada with his family when World War II broke out—and one wonders what the Kremlin thought when two anti-Communist Poles became White House foreign-policy advisers: Brzezinski as national-security adviser to a waffling Jimmy Carter, and Pipes as a national-security desk officer to Ronald Reagan. Moving from his longtime home, Harvard, to Washington during the first two years of Reagan’s presidency, Pipes was able to apply his knowledge and sense of strategy to the formulation of policies that helped bring down the Soviet Union. He had had some earlier experience with Washington as a member of the Committee on the Present Danger and later as head of an official group that audited the CIA’s analyses of the Soviet economy—and found the CIA work to be woefully inadequate. Unfortunately, this experience didn’t prepare him for the kind of stealth needed to win Washington’s battles.

      Nevertheless, Pipes’s appointment (thanks to Richard V. Allen, head of the National Security Council and himself a leading anti-Soviet strategist) was felicitous: a president who believed that the Soviet Union was not here to stay, a national-security chief who shared that view, and a Polish-American intellectual who agreed wholeheartedly. And they were all blessed with such superb speechwriters as Tony Dolan and Peter Robinson, and their successors who shared their clients’ anti-Sovietism. That was why Reagan made his “evil empire” and Westminster speeches, and why later in 1987, over the hysterical objections of the State Department, he spoke at the Brandenburg Gate, with the Berlin Wall behind him, to utter his dramatic apostrophe to the Soviet Union: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” One thing is clear from Vixi: Pipes simply didn’t or wouldn’t understand the principles of a town where a bureau chief frequently has more power than his cabinet-secretary superior. As Pipes, the Harvard professor, describes it:

Such vanity as I possess was and remains that of an intellectual who wants to influence the way people think and feel rather than one who enjoys power over them or craves the status of a celebrity.

But the only sure way to achieve that influence is through political power. Henry Kissinger wrote a number of highly influential foreign-policy books as a Harvard professor. His influence, however, only became measurable when he went to work for President Nixon as National Security Adviser, a post from which he made his great leap forward to become Secretary of State. Pipes’s complaint about mistreatment by Allen—who, he says, looked upon Pipes “as a potential rival and hence kept me in the background”—is unattractive. Far more significant is Pipes’s assertion that Nancy Reagan and Michael Deaver took a dim view of Allen “since they were determined to tame Reagan’s anti-Communism and draw him closer to the mainstream,” the mainstream being the anti-anti-Communism which, I assume, they favored. Mrs. Reagan, he says, “was troubled by her husband’s reputation as a primitive cold warrior.” Anti-Communists like Allen and Pipes did not fit into the Nancy Reagan-Deaver world. Deaver and James Baker, says Pipes, “seemed to treat [Reagan] like a grandfather whom one humors but does not take seriously.”

      The man against whom Pipes directs a good deal of his fire is Secretary of State Alexander Haig, whose behavior he compares to that of “a harried animal” and whose “principal concern was not with the substance of the country’s foreign policy but with his personal control of it.” Haig didn’t last. His oft-proffered resignation was offered once too often, and after Haig had served for a year and a half, Reagan finally accepted it. That very day Reagan appointed George Shultz, about whom Pipes comments dryly that he “knew less about foreign affairs than Haig but had a steadier personality.” That’s an undeserved putdown for a man who had been Secretary of Labor, director of O.M.B., Secretary of the Treasury—three major posts—and dean of the University of Chicago’s graduate school of business. Much of what Pipes complains about in Washington ought not to have come as a surprise to him. He was accorded respect and attention, he says, “not for what I did, said or wrote but for what I was or at any rate was perceived to be”—but why should exposure to the universal condition of mankind be a shock? He felt “muzzled because I was sufficiently highly positioned so that every word I uttered could be interpreted as representing the administration”—but why shouldn’t the media consider an interview with a famous historian about German and Soviet foreign policy, conducted in the Executive Office Building across the road from the Oval Office, as reflecting the views of the president who appointed him?

      Pipes also misjudges Reagan as a thinker. Others before him—Edmund Morris, for example—have made the same misjudgment. What Reagan understood about the Soviet Union was intuitive rather than intellectual. Pipes tut-tuts. He once heard Reagan say that a million Sears Roebuck catalogues distributed in the Soviet Union would bring the regime down—from which Pipes concludes that Reagan’s ideas were simplistic. But in Vixi, Pipes also knows that he must ask the crucial question:

How did it happen that this man, regarded by the intelligentsia as an amiable duffer, grasped that the Soviet Union was in the throes of terminal illness, whereas nearly all the licensed physicians certified its robustness?

And the answer he comes to is that Reagan

. . . possessed to a high degree the imponderable quality of political judgment. He instinctively understood, as all great statesmen do, what matters and what does not, what is right and what wrong for his country.

A good part of Pipes’s memoir deals with Sovietology and its practitioners, many of whom are “revisionists,” a pejorative term applied to academic apologists for the Soviet Union—who blame the United States for instigating the Cold War, deny Stalin’s genocidal history, regard Communism as a great idea that got diverted, and believe the Communist Party U.S.A. membership consisted of idealists who had nothing to do with Soviet espionage. Pipes says of these revisionists, “They write bloodless history about a time that drowned in blood.”

      As for Pipes, now professor emeritus, and his two years in Washington during the Reagan Revolution, he can repeat the words of Abbe Sieyes—who, when asked what he had done during the French Revolution, replied, “J’ai vecu”: I survived. Survived, indeed, to write a fascinating memoir.

—Arnold Beichman