Lytton Strachey's New York

AMERICA

From MURRAY KEMPTON

NEW YORK

To see the Beatles is to confront a gallery of eminent women of the nineteenth century: women of character, to be sure, who got them- selves criticised as masculine in their time as the Beatles are entirely masculine now.

But the hair is a mask obscuring every other feature; it is not merely long but Victorian long, vicar's-daughter-long, governess-long, unexpec- tedly great-lady long. No comparisons arise except with women long dead; the image so over- rides that one's own mind turns womanly and the thought at the first sight of the Beatles in the flesh is what American ladies always tell you about their glimpse of the Queen: 'My dear, that lovely British skin; it cannot be photo- graphed.'

So Ringo is George Sand and Paul is Elizabeth Bennett and John looks like Florence Nightingale —'We are ducks,' said her mother, 'who have hatched a wild swan'—and George, the only one who dares let the black devils come through occasionally, is the Caroline Lamb who drove Byron to such a frenzy of detestation that he begged only `to be spared from meeting her until we may be chained together in Dante's Inferno.'

All the women the Beatles evoke were strug- gling with the problem of being women in the nineteenth century, when one was adored and never taken seriously but where the least little thing one said might make scandal, which is rather like being a Beatle now.

The first question from the journalists was to John and about Vietnam, of course. He answered that he didn't like it. 'We don't like it,' said George suddenly. His voice was grim; Caroline Lamb was declaring her independence. War's wrong and that's all. We can elaborate on that if we want to in England.'

The questions passed, of course, to John on Christianity. 'There's more people in America,' Paul answered, 'so there's more bigots. We hear more from American bigots than we do from Rooshan bigots.' Besides there were countries, Paul went on, where what John said about Jesus as a dying doll would not be taken up and mis- interpreted as it was here. 'Here somebody will take it up and use it and not have too many scruples.' Paul paused and thought of the next

scandal and his face lied by habit that he was just a child and did not mean it. 'It's just won- derful here,' he finished. Everyone laughed.

'And now that you've learned to play the sitar,' a journalist asked George, 'what instrument will you try next?' I haven't learned to play the sitar,' George answered coldly. 'Ravi Shankar hasn't learned to play it, and he's been playing for thirty-five years.'

The tone was bitter, as of deprivation of adven- ture. And you began to understand that, as women of the nineteenth century. the Beatles are insulated and protected from the nonsense of the convention which surrounds them by the sweet- ness and safety of their home. They only play at the sitar; Ravi Shankar lives by it. For it is only the men who can go to the wars and bleed and kill and hate; and one moment of Joe Turner singing that it's your dollar now but it's gonna be mine some sweet day is more than all they have ever said. What is raw and crude in life is not for them; they are only translators. They make us remember that the nineteenth-century woman, stay home though she usually had to, was something of a piece of goods.

Across the street from them, the Veterans of Foreign Wars were assembled in convention. It was a curious, perhaps mistaken, fixation in one visitor's memory of his middle youth that he had been a member of this scruffiest of our societies of anciens combatants in Eastern North Carolina. That, he was afraid, would have been less a response to his country's call than a recognition of the Veterans of Foreign Wars' special contri- bution to our civilisation; its club is the only place in a dry town where a man barred by penury and humble origin from the country club can sit down and order a drink in public.

They were soldiers of the sort that was allowed to sit down only for some compulsory lecture. Run to death or bored to distraction; that life has changed very little; Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, who is the epitome of the man who ships your outfit over the water, was the major speaker at Tuesday's session.

His subject was poverty and its engagement by our society. 'Illiteracy, disease, hunger and hope- lessness are characteristics that, of their own Momentum, spiral human aspirations downward,' the Secretary told them.

A certain fun was had by the conscript journa- lists present over the apathy of the veterans in responding to this vibrant summons to the relief of human suffering; but was there, after all, any possible human reaction to language so awful except to wonder whatever happened to the lively prose of the old training manuals?

It was altogether a pity that McNamara's lan- guage made it so difficult to attend to him, be- cause in his way he is a Victorian later than but as eminent as the Beatles themselves. For he was talking about the poor as a great natural resource; his Department, he explained, proposed now to recruit 40,000 new soldiers until now disqualified by lack of education from meeting the standards of the draft, and who can be trained for our battles and return home as victors in their own private war: 'the battle against built-in poverty.'

Most of the poor uplifted in the Secretary's vision are negroes, who will join the high pro- portion of negroes already fighting in Vietnam. Thinking of Mr McNamara's promise, ond could understand that we are at last an empire to whose wars silence never comes; at home life can go on comfortable and removed from their reality, for we have found our Gurkhas.

Once the Secretary for Defence had departed, the day's business was approval of messages of sympathy to the House Committee on Un- American Activities for its sufferings at the hands

of the Vietnam protestants. Former Congressman James Van Zandt arose to shake them from the languor which persisted even then : 'Are we going to sit idly by,' he cried, 4. . . Beatniks, vietniks and filthy women. There was one Of those women sitting down in the Capitol—now, I tell my wife that, when I stop looking, I'll stop living—well that woman had legs crossed exposing everything. That was the only part of the visual exhibition I enjoyed. But she needs a bath.'

They went on for another hour, refreshed and aroused at last. until Anthony Calvalante, another former Congressman, took the micro- phone to say that, even now, there were pickets outside carrying signs 'calling us murderers and McNamara a war criminal' and that, although he did not believe in violence, two or three of the comrades ought to be appointed to 'go and tell these hoodlums to get out of here or we may be forced to do something more drastic.'

At this prospect of freedom, perhaps fifty comrades left; and, even with the shrinkage of the sensible to the bar, enough were left when they got to the street outside to form a platoon and reconnoitre. The Youth against War and Fascism were barely visible across a street loaded with little girls and the cops assigned to protect the Beatles from those who love them most.

'Damn cops,' said one scout, `they ran me off the street this morning just for standing there....' They trailed back upstairs to report their frustra- tion. We could thank the Beatles for saving us one other great confrontation.