My Generation (37 page)

Certainly, whatever the exact metaphor it summoned up, the sight seemed to presage the shape of the world to come, but by now we were up, all of us, off and away—not running,
walking
, fast—toward Clark Street, bleeding tears from the gas. The streets next to the park became a madhouse. The police had not been content to run us out of the park, but charging from the opposite direction, had flanked us, and were harrying people down the streets and up alleys. On a traffic island in the middle of Clark Street a young man was knocked to his knees and beaten senseless. Unsuspecting motorists, caught up in the pandemonium, began to collide with one another up and down the street. The crowd wailed with alarm and split into fragments. I heard the sound of splintering glass as a stone went through the windshield of a police car. Then somehow we disengaged ourselves from the center of the crowd and made our way down Wells Street, relatively deserted where in the dingy nightclubs go-go girls oblivious to the rout outside calmly wiggled their asses in silhouette against crimson windows.

It hardly needs mention that Daley might have dealt with these demonstrators without having to resort to such praetorian measures, but violence was the gut and sinew of Chicago during the week, and it was this sort of scene—not the antiseptic convention itself, with its tedium and tawdriness and its bought and paid-for delegates—that makes its claim on my memory. Amid the confusion, I recall certain serene little vignettes: in the lobby of the Pick-Congress Hotel, Senator Tom Dodd flushing beet-red, smiling a frozen smile while being pounded on the back by a burly delegate, steelworker type, with fists the size of cabbages, the man roaring, “I'm a Polack! We know how to ride that greased pig, too!” Or the visit I made—purportedly to win over delegates to McCarthy—to the Virginia delegation, where I was told by at least three members of the group that, while nominally for
Humphrey, they would bolt for Teddy Kennedy in a shot (this helped to convince me that he could have won the nomination hands down had he come to Chicago).

But it is mainly that night scene out of Armageddon that I recollect or, the next day, the tremendous confrontation in front of the Hilton, at the intersection of Michigan and Balbo (named for Italo Balbo, the Italian aviator who first dumped bombs on the Ethiopians) where, half blinded from the gas I had just caught on the street, I watched the unbelievable melee not from the outside this time, but in the surreal shelter of the Haymarket bar, a hermetically sealed igloo whose sound-resistant plate-glass windows offered me the dumbshow of cops clubbing people to the concrete, swirling squadrons of people in Panavision blue and polystyrene visors hurling back the crowds, chopping skulls and noses while above me on the invincible TV screen a girl with a fantastic body enacted a comic commercial for Bic ball-point pens, and the bartender impassively mooned over his daiquiris (once pausing to inquire of a girl whether she was over twenty-one), and the Muzak in the background whispered “Mood Indigo.” Even the denouement seemed unreal—played out not in the flesh but as part of some animated cartoon where one watches all hell break loose in tolerant boredom—when an explosion of glass at the rear of the bar announced the arrival of half a dozen bystanders who, hurled inward by the crush outside, had shattered the huge window and now sprawled cut and bleeding all over the floor of the place while others, chased by a wedge of cops, fled screaming into the adjacent lobby.

I left Chicago in a hurry—like many others—pursued by an unshakable gloom and by an even profounder sense of irrelevance. If all this anguish, all this naked protest, had yielded nothing but such a primitive impasse—perhaps in the end best symbolized not even by the strife itself but by a “victorious” Hubert Humphrey promising us still another commission to investigate the violence he might have helped circumvent—then the country truly seemed locked, crystallized in its own politics of immobility. There were, to be sure, some significant changes—removal of the unit rule, for one—at least partially brought about by those who worked outside the establishment, including many amateurs in politics; had they been effected in less hysterical circumstances, they might have been considered in themselves prodigious achievements.

And there were some bearable moments amid all the dreck: the going to
bed unblanketed on the cold ground by the fires in Grant Park when I came back just before dawn after our encounter with the police in Lincoln Park, the crowds by the hundreds hemmed in by National Guard troops (themselves Illinois plowboys or young miners from places like Carbondale, most of them abashed and ill at ease—quite a contrast to the brutal belly-swagger of the cops—but all of them just as ignorant about the clash of ideologies that brought them up here from the prairies); or the next night when again there was a vigil in the park and over a thousand people, including protesting delegates from the convention, came bearing candles and sat until dawn beneath the stirring leaves singing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” as they waved their candles, a forest of arms; or the moment in the daylight, totally unexpected, when a busload of children, no more than six or seven years old, rode up from somewhere on the South Side with a gift of sandwiches for the demonstrators and slowly passed by in front of the park, chanting from the windows in voices almost hurtfully young and sweet: “We want peace! We want peace!” But these moments were rare and intermittent and the emotional gloss they provided was unable to alleviate not just the sense of betrayal (which at least carries the idea of promise victimized) but the sorrow of a promise that never really existed.

[
New York Review of Books
, September 26, 1968.]

I
n the autumn of 1849, Gustave Flaubert and a friend, Maxime Du Camp, made a wonderful trip to Egypt. At twenty-eight, Flaubert was a handsome, tall, high-spirited, neurotic young man with an ardent yearning for the exotic enchantments of the Orient. It may have been flight from his adored but incredibly dominating mother that in part impelled this journey, or perhaps it was disappointment over his first serious literary effort,
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
. More understandably, he had a serious and informed taste for antiquity and an irrepressible love of prostitutes, and in Egypt he knew he would find both in abundance. In any case, Flaubert, who was unknown as a writer (
Madame Bovary
would not appear until seven years later and bring him instantaneous fame), was even then indefatigably recording his impressions of the world, and his travel notes and letters from that nine-month odyssey along the Nile remarkably foreshadow the powers of observation and the acute sensibility that brought his masterpiece into being. By turns beautiful, rapturous, bawdy, hideous, and brutal, his record is also from time to time quite funny. Not only because of the contrasts it presents between the Egypt of now and then but because of the similarities, it comprises a fascinating and instructive document, delicious reading in itself but required reading—let me assign it as a text:
Flaubert in Egypt
, translated and edited by Francis Steegmuller, Academy Chicago Limited Edition, 1979—for all present-day voyagers along the Nile.

It can accurately be said that there is almost no place on earth that any longer is safe from tourism. When cruises to the Galápagos Islands are within reach of middle-class vacationers, and jumbo jets from New Zealand fly past the ice mountains of Antarctica for panoramic sightseeing trips (and tragically crash, as one plane did not long ago), we have truly begun to inhabit the “global village.” Not only is the Nile no exception, it was beginning to be overrun by tourists even in Flaubert's time, when the exigencies of transportation were complicated to a degree that people accustomed to modern luxury travel can only reflect upon with discomfort. In the Egypt of the mid-nineteenth century, the invaders were already on the scene, inflicting their characteristic wounds. Their ubiquitous spoor—the inescapable graffiti—caused Flaubert some of his deepest moments of depression. “In the temples we read travelers' names; they strike us as petty and futile. We never write ours; there are some that must have taken three days to carve, so deeply are they cut in the stone. There are some that you keep meeting everywhere—sublime persistence of stupidity.” At the Pyramid of Khepren his despair deepens. Under the name of Belzoni, the great archaeologist, he discovers “no less large, that of M. Just de Chasseloup-Laubat. One is irritated by the number of imbeciles' names written everywhere: on the top of the Great Pyramid there is a certain Buffard, 79 rue Saint-Martin, wallpaper manufacturer, in black letters; an English fan of Jenny Lind's has written her name; there is also a pear, representing Louis-Philippe.”

Tourism is, in general, a human activity that is neither desirable nor undesirable, merely existing in relationship with some landscape or other because people in their incessant curiosity will travel and observe and explore. Under certain circumstances, however, and usually after the passing of a long period of time, tourism becomes absolutely essential to the life of a place, becomes symbiotic, indeed so organically linked as to resemble the teeming bacterial flora that inhabits the human alimentary tract and that contributes to the body's very survival. Over the past one hundred and fifty years or so, Egypt has developed just such a relationship with its legions of visitors. The tourists who pour in season after season, year after year, comprise a critical factor in Egypt's economy; remove tourism, and the country would suffer a catastrophic blow. What makes the present situation so ironic, and so gloomy to contemplate, is that the very tourism that supplies Egypt with an essential part of its sustenance is threatening to destroy the body of the host. Aggravating as they were to Flaubert, and are to the modern
visitor, the composers of graffiti are a minor annoyance compared to the larger menace. Both the proliferation of people—in multinational droves becoming more uncontrollable each year—and the sheer physical damage caused by so many millions of shoes stirring up so many tons of abrasive dust, by countless lungs exhaling huge volumes of corrosive carbon dioxide into the fragile environment of the tombs, have brought on a situation of real crisis. Expert observers believe that only immediate and drastic measures will enable Egypt to save the Nile and its treasures for future generations.

As if this were not enough, there is the matter of the dam—the High Dam at Aswan. Built in the 1960s by the Russians at the behest of Gamal Abdel Nasser, then Egypt's president, this vast edifice—now the second-largest rock-filled dam in the world—was intended to usher in the nation's new economic millennium; by the trapping of billions of tons of Nile water in a prodigious reservoir named Lake Nasser, the river would be subjugated, while judicious control and manipulation of the water would bring cheap electrical energy to the entire Nile Valley, along with the potential for millions of newly irrigated acres of fertile land. That much of this has already been accomplished seems indisputable, but, it is becoming increasingly clear, the cost may eventually cancel out the benefits. Many observers believe that the negative effects wrought upon the river by the dam will prove in the long run to be, quite simply, disastrous. I was to learn in detail about these consequences and to view at first hand some of the harbingers of the Nile's change for the worse (I had been on the river once before, in 1967) during a recent February trip down the waterway from Aswan to Cairo, when I was from time to time made uneasily aware that I, too, along with my companions on the voyage, had become yet another manifestation of the tourist pestilence. But even so, it was possible to take some comfort from the fact that the auspices under which we traveled were both dignified and felicitous. Our host on the trip, and a good friend of each of the dozen or so Americans and Europeans whom he had invited aboard the M.S.
Abu Simbel
, was Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, son of the late Aga Khan and until recently the High Commissioner for Refugees of the United Nations. Married to an Egyptian and profoundly involved in Egypt, its culture, and its history, the prince has a house in Cairo; even more significantly, it was in large measure due to his efforts through UNESCO that the majestic colossi and temples of Abu Simbel and Philae were rescued from the encroaching
waters created by the High Dam. Thus, plainly, although we were traveling in privacy and style (the comfort of a boat of one's own is something one need not apologize for), the prince's intimate connection with the Nile and his concern for its heritage and its future allowed his guests a unique perspective—without overly solemnizing what still remains, despite the foregoing auguries, one of the most mysteriously ravishing and moving journeys it is possible to make on the face of the earth.

“Handsome heads, ugly feet” is Flaubert's comment upon the Colossi of Abu Simbel, those gargantuan figures that stand guard on the shores of the Upper Nile, six hundred miles from Cairo; in 1850 the four statues were still partially buried under the sand. Flaubert's companion, Du Camp, made the first known photographs of these sandstone figures of Rameses II, after a boat trip from Cairo that lasted nearly two months. Our own trip from Cairo to Abu Simbel (which we visit before boarding our vessel in Aswan) takes a bare two hours by Egypt Air Boeing 737. In these upper reaches of the waterway, the Nile itself, of course, has become obliterated below the vast and murky expanse of Lake Nasser, which spills out across the desert in a desolate pool nearly the size of Delaware. Interspersed with jagged rock promontories and devoid of vegetation at its edges save for a rare patch of the palest green, like lichen, the lake from the air has an evil, unearthly look, resembling the kind of lake astronauts might encounter beneath the mantle of Saturn or Venus. We land on the recently built airstrip, step out into desert air, which at noon is briskly chill, and are thankful that it is winter. In the depths of summer it has sometimes become so hot that planes have been unable to land; the tarmac melts, turned to the consistency of black glue. A brief overland trip by bus brings us to the site.

Rescued from the flood and, by a marvel of engineering, hoisted above it nearly two hundred feet, the Abu Simbel colossi are appallingly big, exceeding all preconceived notions (derived from photographs, even Du Camp's flat, primitive ones) of their bigness; they are simply
immense
. And awe-inspiring, without a doubt. That these great effigies might have been allowed to sink without trace beneath the waters of Nasser's lake is unthinkable. But despite the sense of awe that they elicit—monuments to human ingenuity, human toil—they do not, for me at least, inspire that ineffable thrill of pleasure that one experiences in the presence of great heroic art. This could be partly due to that “pitiless rigidity” of which Flaubert complained in regard to Egyptian sculpture; or it might be because the colossi,
with their enigmatic smiles that so often seem to possess the faintest shadow of a smirk, are simply intimidating, vainglorious, invoking the idea not of true grandeur but of pelf, influence, power. Also, to reproduce one's self four times in figures sixty-six feet high would seem to be a redundancy. The playwright Arthur Miller, one of the
Abu Simbel'
s voyagers, sits in the chill afternoon light regarding these grandiose duplications (a cast on a recently fractured ankle renders Miller less mobile than the rest of us). “Think of the poor people in those days,” he muses, “who dared to come down the river to invade Egypt from the south. One look at this display and they'd be ready to run back home.” One agrees. They are paradigms of a universal motif: human domination. They would not look out of place adorning the façade of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Even so, they may be more perishable than one might imagine. Farida Galassi, the eloquent French-born Egyptologist who is our guide and who has lived in Egypt for most of her seventy-four years, speaks dispiritedly of the future of the colossi, remarking that she and some of her colleagues feel that the elevation of the statues to higher ground is not only a mere reprieve but a move that in itself contains the seeds of doom. The reason for this is that the old site offered shelter to these vulnerable sandstone figures, while the new location provides exposure to frequent sandstorms, which could prove to be completely destructive in no more than an eyewink in Egyptian time—seventy-five to a hundred years. Thus the High Dam, in a perverse and unpredicted way, may claim Abu Simbel as a victim after all.

Our eponymous vessel awaits at dockside in Aswan. The son of a shipbuilder, I look over the M.S.
Abu Simbel
with thoughtful attention and am utterly pleased. Relatively small by Nile standards—one hundred and twenty feet long—she and her sister vessel, the
Aswan
, were built in 1979, the first metal boats to be constructed in Egypt. With a catamaran bottom, she is able to negotiate the shallows. She has nice clean lines, with no furbelows or waste space; yet there are ample cabins with efficient plumbing and abundant hot water (essential after each day's desert dust), a comfortable dining saloon with bar, and, perhaps most attractive of all, an open upper deck of fine proportions, allowing visual access to what for many travelers is a Nile voyage's greatest glory: the incomparable river itself and the timeless tableaux of its shores. Flaubert and Du Camp navigated the Nile by
cange
, a small sailboat also supplied with oarsmen. “Our two sails, their angles intersecting,” Flaubert wrote, “swelled to their entire width, and the
cange
skimmed along, heeling, its keel cutting the water….Standing on the poop that forms the roof of our cabin, the mate held the tiller, smoking his black wood
chibouk
.” Flaubert and his friend traveled with a crew of twelve, a fairly high ratio for two passengers; our baker's dozen requires twenty in the crew, likewise a high ratio when one considers that none are oarsmen. A passage by sail and oar would surely have its own enchantments, and such a trip can still be managed for one or two adventurers; but this form of cruising has virtually disappeared from the river. We are enfolded, rather, in soothing decadence. The food is excellent, often superb. Fully air-conditioned, our vessel travels downstream at an almost vibrationless eight knots, powered by twin one-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower Caterpillar engines. But if our motors are modern, our helm is nearly as ancient as the river itself. There is not a single navigational aid on the Nile—not a buoy, not a marker or a beacon—and our helmsmen steer by sight, most often discerning the bars and shoals in this generally shallow river by the characteristic rippling effect on the surface (sometimes completely undetectable to the casual eye) and proceeding boldly at night as long as moonlight permits. They are incredibly gifted navigators but, alas, not perfect; once in a great while, the boat scrapes bottom.

We remain in Aswan for a day or two. The city, situated above the rapids of the river and its clumps of vivid green islands, is a beautiful one, even though its runaway growth (from fifty thousand to almost a million in twenty years) is a measure in itself of Egypt's huge population explosion. Just as the city dominates the river, the city is dominated by the High Dam. Dams, with their attendant benefits and mischief, are not new to Aswan. Around the turn of the century, the British built a dam that, though lower than the new Russian model, was considered a prodigy among dams in its day, allowing the cultivation of vast tracts of land in middle Egypt. It also caused the submergence, for most of the year, of the nearby Temple of Philae, a grand edifice of the Ptolemaic period dedicated to the goddess Isis. Sixty years later the High Dam threatened inundation of Philae forever. But thanks to the similar, almost superhuman efforts that saved Abu Simbel, Philae was rescued, lifted up stone by stone with astonishing precision and deposited in perfect rebirth of itself on a nearby island. Thus was effected over the High Dam a major cultural triumph. It is a pity that such triumphs are few, for it is becoming clear that the harm inflicted by the new dam is enormous. Just one unforeseen case in point may be demonstrated by a crucial difference
between the old dam and the new. Whatever its drawbacks, the British structure, with its elaborate chain of sluiceways, did permit an unquestionably major function: it allowed most of the huge tonnage of silt to pass through. By contrast, the High Dam is badly flawed in this respect: so much silt has backed up in Lake Nasser that it has become an obstruction, making necessary a diversionary channel to deposit this life-giving soil in, of all places, the desert.