Harper
Review by George Yatchisin
Here’s why Francine Prose is a better writer than you or me—she can craft a sentence like, “Tony was very funny, though when you say that about a person, you can’t think of one funny thing that they said, just as you can describe someone as charming without being able to begin to explain what charm is, exactly.” Beyond the elegant grammatical balance of this relatively long sentence, there’s Prose’s unfolding insight. Yes, we get a sense of Tony’s character, but even more so learn about our own. How much of the world we sense but can’t limn, point to, but fail to name.
Such considerations are at the very heart of Prose’s memoir, a Blakean tale of innocence succumbing to experience, of the passion and desire for change of the 1960s sliding into the conformity and a collusion with capitalism of the 1970s. As she sagely puts it, “People often talked about being true to themselves. But by 1974, what they meant by truth was beginning to shift from the collective to the individual, from political action to personal fulfillment. My truth, they began to say.”
The book centers on 1974 as that’s the year Prose, then 27, was involved with Tony Russo. That many readers no doubt fail to remember Russo is a crucial part of the tale—he, along with the much more famous Daniel Ellsberg, helped bring the notorious Pentagon Papers to light. Even with decades of hindsight, and Russo’s death in 2008, Prose struggles with what he meant to her. While the two did become physical lovers, eventually (the sexual revolution is one of the book’s fascinating subthemes), they never seem in love. While she makes it clear she’s at first drawn to him to bask in his outlaw energy—she admits how much Bonnie and Clyde, particularly as played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, warped her sense of romance at the time—she struggles to decide what he found in her.
1974 is a book with a boatload of mea culpas to go around. Russo is driven by all he has seen in Vietnam—he’s particularly moved by one encounter with a prisoner of war, AG132, that humanizes the “enemy” for him—and all the murderous bullshit his work at RAND was meant to prop up. Could ending the war sooner help exculpate all he had done? Would he ever be able to get his story out to the world, especially after his separation from Ellsberg, who would go on to be the heroic face of the Pentagon Papers? Probably not, for Prose quotes him as saying, “I’m your policy-wonk radical Lady Macbeth.”
Then there’s Prose’s guilt, and she’s tough on herself as anyone (except for Henry Kissinger—if you hate him the book will make you spit an extra time on his it took too damn long to come grave). “One danger of writing about yourself,” Prose, better known as a novelist after publishing 19 works of highly acclaimed fiction, “is that you may learn things about yourself that you don’t want to know.” The evening Russo and Prose meet, after she offers a clever perception, he half jokes she could be a good interrogator, or maybe a witch. Instead she’s “just” a writer, through and through. Life could not just be lived but of use; “If I wanted to be someone on whom nothing is wasted,” she writes, “I needed to listen.” And Russo desperately needed to be heard. Coming to terms with that need is one of the reasons 1974 exists now.
Of course the book also questions how much writing and art accomplishes anything in the world. (Art most definitely includes film: how Prose deftly weaves in her obsession with Vertigo makes that compulsive study of San Francisco and the male gaze richer than most film critic’s takes.) Tony Russo was willing to go to jail for his convictions, 47 days for refusing to testify against Ellsberg, who never did any jail time btw. Prose went on to become one of the more lauded writers of her generation. And, although she leaves it out of the book, a two-term president of the PEN American Center, working to defend free expression around the globe.
But ultimately 1974 suggests even the silent are now guilty in our empire of the senseless, as the Mekons would have it. With Christian nationalism more than a glimmer in a vice presidential candidate’s eyesight now (for one example), the loss of 1960s idealism hurts even more, seems more a distant dream. What does it mean to mature as a person, writer, citizen, nation?
Prose writes: “It had been cool to want to change the world, but began to seem embarrassing. Once, you could let your hair grow long and unkempt, but by 1974, you were supposed to clean up. You were expected to rethink, and even apologize for, the impossible things you’d wanted.” Without apology, 1974 is Prose still working her way to find as much want—for every form of liberty—as she can.
