Edmund Wilson - Red, Black, Blond and Olive

RED, BLACK, BLOND AND OLIVE
Studies in Four Civilizations: Zui, Haiti, Soviet Russia , Israel

RED, BLACK, BLOND AND OLIVE
Studies in Four Civilizations: Zui, Haiti, Soviet Russia , Israel

EDMUND WILSON

W. H. ALLEN LONDON 1956

CONTENTS ZUI (1947)

The Pueblo 3

The Anthropologists 15

Shlako 23

Navaho Interlude 43

Shilako Continued 51

Departure 65

HAITI (1949)

Cotton Blossom Express 71

Miami 71

Two West Indian Authors 74

King Christophe's Citadel 78

Color Politics 86

Marbial 95

Haitian Literature 109

Voodoo Converts 125

Pastor McConnell 130

Port-au-Prince 135

SOVIET RUSSIA (1935)

I. Old England 149

II. London to Leningrad 153

III. Leningrad Theaters 166

IV. On the Margin of Moscow 189

V. Volga Idyll 306

VI. Odessa: Counter-Idyll 322

VII. Final Reflections 374

ISRAEL (1954)

I. On First Reading Genesis 387

II. retz Yisral 427

Samaritan Passover 427

The Guardians of the City 435

The Fiction of S. Y. Agnn 443

Theocracy 452

Tanch 456

Jerusalem the Golden 468

Degniya 483

retz Yisral 488

RELIGION: NONE; CONDITIONING: PROTESTANT

By Robert Graves

The four colours in the title refer to the skins of, respectively, New Mexico Indian Zuis, Haitians, Russians, and Israelis; and this is a study of their four contrastive civilizations written by a blond East Coast critic-in-chief with a cantankerous, well-stocked mind, a keen eye for the absurd as well as the essential, and so admirable a sense of English prose that he must surely have started as a poet. Come to think of it-wasn't he the Edmund Wilson, Junior, whose poem about Quinctilian I read thirty years ago in (perhaps) Vanity Fair, and still carry about in my head?

Quinctilian enjoyed the quince-buds, Which he couldn't distinguish from peach;

He was musing on Asyndeton, Astyanax, And other figures of speech.

Nero and his sycophants

Were violating their uncles and aunts...

Edmund Wilson plays fair: does not pretend that his is the impartial camera-eye, and makes it easy for us to allow for bias. Thus we learn that, although when filling out a form of application for leave to visit Israel, he wrote 'Religion: none', he cannot deny his early religious conditioning, and has to admit that he remains a confirmed Protestant individualist.

In 1947 he attended the Zui Shalako Festival. The Zui pueblo, which he admires immensely for its prolonged and triumphant re sistance to cultural assimilation, by first the Spaniards and then the Americans, nevertheless exasperates him:

Its strength and cohesion it seems mainly to owe to the extraordinary tribal religion: a complicated system of priesthoods, fraternities and clans which not only performs the usual functions of religions but also supplies it with a medical serv ice, a judiciary machinery and year-long entertainment. This cult includes the whole community, distributing and rotating offices, and organizing it so tightly that it is completely self- contained in a way that perhaps no white community is, and equipped to resist the pressures that have disintegrated other Indian groups ... The early Catholic missionaries found Zui so tough a nut that they abandoned it for a hundred years. The present Catholic priest in the pueblo is said to feel that he has made some progress, now that the Zuis, after a quarter of a century, when they meet him out of doors, do not spit at him...

However, though the Zuis' scornful rejection of Catholicism ob viously pleases Mr Wilson, they seem to criticize his Protestantism when saying, of missionaries in general: 'They throw their religion away as if it weren't worth anything, and expect us to believe it.' And so:

... My feelings about the Zuis, as I left, were mixed. I was torn between admiration for their stoutness and self-con sistency, and impatience at their exclusiveness and bigotry in relation to the rest of the world. One had to admit that a highly developed and vividly imagined mythology was a great thing to hold a people together and to inspire them with confidence in themselves...

But Mr. Wilson cannot allow that the Salado system is any good, even if it works. It is just one more mythology, and:

... The effects on our own society of the mythologies which have influenced it lately are anything but reassuring. The Christian mythology is obsolete, almost as impracticable for the modern man as that of Sayatasha and his colleagues .

Sayatasha is a Rain-god, patron of the Shalako Festival, and the Shalakos are masked male dancers, dressed as birds of good luck. They dance all night in houses especially built for the occasion, and by their grace and vigour guarantee not only the year's fertility- like the masked dancers who 'leaped for the Son of Cronus' in an cient Crete-but the permanence of the whole Zui cult. The Zuis have no sense of sin, but only a desire for perfection; the Shalako bird does not bring pardon and redemption, like the Christian dove, but only a promise of fertility and mirth:

... It was marvellous what this dancer could do, as he balanced his huge bird-body. He would slowly pavane across the floor; he would pirouette and teeter; he would glide in one flight the whole length of the room as smoothly as a bird alighting. The masks are constructed like crinolines; there are hoops sewn inside a long cylinder that diminishes toward the top; and the whole thing hangs from a slender pole attached to the dancer's belt. So the movements are never stiff. The Shalakos, ungainly though they may seem at first when one watches them from afar by daylight, are created in the dance as live beings; and this one was animated from top to toe, vibrating as if with excitementgleaming with its turquoise face, flashing its white embroidered skirt, while its foxskins flapped like wings at the shoulders... And I found that it was only with effort that I, too, could withstand its hypnotic effect. I had finally to take myself in hand in order to turn my attention and to direct myself out of the house. For something in me began to fight the Shalako, to reject and repulse its in fluence just at the moment when it was most compelling. One did not want to rejoin the Zuis in their primitive Nature cult; and it was hardly worth while for a Protestant to have stripped off the mummeries of Rome in order to fall a victim to an agile young man in a ten-foot mask.

Not more than one American has ever been accepted by the Zuis as a member of the pueblo: Frank Hamilton Gushing, a frail ethnologist who settled there in 1879. He had spent most of his life hardening himself by an Indian-like existence in the woods of cen tral New York State, and his studies of Indian handicrafts and customs made him feel completely at home among the Zuis. Even tually they took away his white-man's clothes, insisted on his en tering their society and even appointed him Priest of the Bow, an important office which carried with it a seat on the tribal council and allowed him to participate in their most esoteric rites. Gushing was removed from Zui after four years' residence by jealous com patriots; he had successfully defended the tribe against Idaho land- grabbers and persuaded the President to intervene personally. He and his fellow-ethnologist, Mrs Matilda Coxe Stevenson, published certain reports on Zui mythology and customs which the tribe now condemn as a breach of faith, though before his death Cushing de stroyed all his notes on really crucial tribal lore. Mr Wilson admires Cushing because, refusing to marry a Zui, he went home for a church wedding with a girl from his own State and brought her back with him. Yet Cushing yielded to the obsolete mythology and even brought himself to appreciate the Zui cuisine, which at first re volted him, including as it did a greenish paste with a flavour of aromatic plants, made from boiled and mashed-up woodrats.