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Jonathan Schell Memorial
It's astonishing how
voices can imprint themselves on us and reach places that images can't. I came
to love Jonathan's voice long before I knew his name. I was an adolescent,
young teenager, living in Utica New York and had become obsessed with the
Vietnam War — obsessed with Watergate and the procession of Watergate. I
obsessively watched the Watergate hearings to the extent that my parents would
essentially say, "Go out and play." They began to worry about me. One
night my father took me to the Utica public library hoping to distract me. And I
found on a great reading table in a great hall in the library a single copy of
The New Yorker, a magazine I had never heard of. And I read — I'm astonished to
say — that piece […] At the time it didn't occur to me that a single writer had
written this. It seemed like somehow the voice of God. It was an astonishing
piece. It opened my eyes and its clarity electrified me — the clear-eyed vision
of it. The idea that you could simply look at things hard enough, and with a
sensible, determined, patriotic, mildly indignant gaze, come to understand it,
and tell others about it, and tell others how to understand it. It was only
much later that I learned that this was a particular writer — his name was
Jonathan Schell — and I began to read him. And only much later that I really
realized — when I came to The New Yorker myself — that the comments were
actually written by individual writers.
Jonathan did his work armed with the newspaper, the Constitution and his own two eyes, and I've realized that the marvel of that only much later when I tried to become a writer myself. The “only two-eyes” part is what fascinates me. There's a voluptuous pleasure, I think, in being a reporter. And the voluptuous pleasure comes in knowing when you're far away from events you can be certain about them, you can understand them completely. Ideology can guide you, and then when you land in a particularly complicated, violent, contradictory, messed up place, suddenly all is darkness. You're inundated by a blizzard of sense of prescience and suddenly you know nothing.
And
that is a gorgeous moment — an immensely enjoyable moment — and I know from
reading Jonathan's early work in particular that he knew the voluptuousness of
that moment, of knowing nothing and of realizing that what he had to do is to
go out and to see things for himself and to report as clearly as possible what
he had seen.
And the difficulty of
this, I think, cannot be exaggerated. Reporters move — like most people — in
pacts. Reporters tell one another what they're seeing, what they've seen, what
should be seen. We all tell one another how to see the world. To actually see
it yourself uniquely is a triumph, a triumph of purpose and a triumph of the
will, I think.
I'm going to read the
passage from the Village of Ben Suc, the last paragraph of which Tom Iglehart
read, because I think it exemplifies his method, and when you say method you're
talking about something that came in some way from deep in his soul, because
this is a 24-year-old man, a young man, who has never written, and this is his
first published piece. It's an astonishing thing. Let me read this.
This is from the
first third of the article. It's a scene [...] well the village has been
cleared, it's going to be destroyed [...] The villagers are being taken away to
a camp that's been constructed for them. Jonathan has arrived on a helicopter
and he is sitting on the outskirts of the village with several soldiers, who
are simply sitting by the side of the road. And I will read:
The sky which had
been overcast, began to show streaks of blue, and a light wind stirred the
trees. The bombing, the machine-gunning from helicopters, the shelling, and the
rocket firing continued steadily. Suddenly a Vietnamese man on a bicycle
appeared, pedaling rapidly along the road from the direction of the village. He
was wearing the collarless, pajama like black garment that is both the
customary dress of the Vietnamese peasant and the uniform of the National
Liberation Front, and although he was riding away from the center of the
village — a move forbidden by the voices from the helicopters — he had, it
appeared, already run by a long gantlet of American soldiers without being
stopped. But when he had ridden about twenty yards past the point where he
first came in sight, there was a burst of machine-gun fire from a copse thirty
yards in front of him, joined immediately by a burst form a vegetable field to
one side, and he was hurled off his bicycle into a ditch a yard from the road.
The bicycle crashed into a side embankment. The man with the Minolta camera,
who had done the firing from the vegetable patch, stood up after about a minute
and walked over to the ditch, followed by one of the engineers. The Vietnamese
in the ditch appeared to be about twenty, and he lay on his side without
moving, blood flowing from his face, which, with the eyes open, was half buried
in the dirt at the bottom of the ditch. The engineer leaned down, felt the
man's wrist, and said, "He's dead."
The two men — both companions of mine on No. 47 — stood still for a
while, with folded arms, and stared down at the dead man's face, as though they were giving him a
chance to say something. Then the engineer said, with a tone of finality,
"That's a V.C. for you. He's a V.C., all right. That's what they wear. He
was leaving town.” He had to have some reason.
The two men walked
back to a ridge in the vegetable field and sat down on it, looking off into the
distance in a puzzled way and no longer bothering to keep low. The man who had
fired spoke suddenly as though coming out of deep thought. I saw this guy
coming down the road on a bicycle," he said. "And I thought, you
know, is this it? Do I shoot? Then some guy over there in the bushes opened up,
so I cut loose."
The engineer raised
his eyes in the manner of someone who has made a strange discovery and said,
"I'm not worried. You know, that's the first time I've ever seen a dead
guy, and I don't feel bad. I just don't, that's all." Then, with a hard
edge of defiance in his voice, he added, "Actually, I'm glad. I'm glad we
killed the little V.C.”
I'd say that this is a very simple
passage. It consists purely of description and the recording of dialogue, but
it does something very complicated. It shows you that this is a murder. It
shows you without telling you. It makes no case for itself, it argues no
editorial point, but it does something — the only writer I've ever seen do this
actually is Tolstoy, the critic Viktor Shklovsky calls this verfremdungseffekt or estrangement.
That is, you describe everyday things in an absolutely black, absolutely clear,
absolutely mechanical way and in so doing you show the undercurrent, what's
really going on. And in doing this, Jonathan shows that this is not just a
particular murder, a unrecorded murder, something that no one will ever talk
about or know about. It shows us the impossibility — as he does in this entire
piece — of this particular war. The fact that it is going to fail. And it is
very hard, I think, to read the Village of Ben Suc and not come away with the
impression conveyed to us by 24-year-old Jonathan Schell that the war is going
to fail, that the war was doomed.
Jonathan it seems to
me was an American Jeremiah. He had a prophetic streak in him. He had a
patriotic streak in him that was very very strong, and he had a streak of
humanism that told him — mixed with patriotism — that if you could just get
people to see what's going on, what's really going on, if you can get through
those ten-feet of lies, somehow, and reveal what's really happening, whether
its Vietnam, or Iraq or with nuclear deterrence or war economy — or you name
the subject — if you can just show them, they will act together to do the right
thing.
It's a deeply
patriotic notion. It goes along the lines of reveal, then investigate, then
expiate, then solve the problem. It was true about Watergate, and it's one of
the reasons I think I was so captivated as a 12 and 13 year old by Watergate, by
the great American processional, the American Oresteia, the American coming to
justice. The journalist revealed, the Congress investigated and a person went
to jail.