It’s ingenious, the idea for this book. Francine Prose has written twenty-two works of fiction, and 1974 is her first memoir. She takes one year in her life and one dramatic relationship she formed in that year, and she tells you everything she wants to about being twenty-six back then. You can’t tell the difference between the voice of the girl she was and the voice of the person talking to you now. It’s a voice that is always pliant about most things. She likes the novelist’s approach of “what if?”
Prose is modest by temperament, or maybe watchful is more descriptive of the girl she presents, a person suspended between now and forever, a style that defined her and all of the rest of us who are the same age, the same sex, the same Jewish, urban, good-schools creature who was political and who thought the word freedom was all you needed to make a life. Except that there was also the fear that you would never get into life, whatever that was.
In 1974, Francine is living in San Francisco as a runaway from her first marriage and from graduate school at Harvard. The marriage and graduate school are pinballs in holes that don’t pop out again. She feels no love. She’s gone along. The word no has not yet been invented for women, or the kind of woman Francine is. In San Francisco, she’s living in an apartment with a woman and a man who are a couple, and they are friends with Tony Russo, who, with Daniel Ellsberg, Xeroxed 7,000 pages of secret government documents and, in May 1971, released them to the press as the Pentagon Papers. The documents, which the New York Times began publishing on June 13, 1971, contained the truth of the government’s covert and illegal operations all over the world—including the lies the executive branch told Congress in order to wage war in Vietnam.
One night, Tony comes over to their apartment to play poker. He’s ten years older than Francine and a famous hero of the anti-war movement. He’s been to Vietnam and spent a brutal six weeks in jail for refusing to testify against Ellsberg at a grand jury hearing. Francine’s first novel has been published to acclaim and her second novel is about to appear. She’s working on a third novel, supposedly. This is the thing Tony pays attention to, that she’s a writer. That she works with an editor and knows how to put a book into the world. He, too, wants to write a book about what he’s seen and a kind of government he imagines, one that doesn’t lie to its citizens.
Francine thinks Tony likes her. Maybe he likes her. If he likes her, it’s not something we see in the pages of her book. She enters a relationship with Tony Russo that is basically a Bob Dylan song, where the girl arouses a set of needs or emotions in the singer—it could be sexual interest or scorn—but we don’t know anything about the girl because he’s not interested in her. He’s interested in her interest in him and what she makes him feel.
Tony drives Francine around San Francisco late at night at scary speeds in a car with a rusted hole in the floor. As he drives, he delivers a monologue without pause about his experiences, takes her to a diner where he eats disgusting food, and doesn’t touch her. There is night after night of this. They like the same movies. It takes forever for her to see where he lives because he doesn’t need her to see where he lives. He’s hoping, in some way that’s not quite stated, that she will scoop up the stories and show him how they can be a book. Or he’s hoping she’ll say they are enough, the way he tells them, to be a book.
She falls in love with his front seat in history. It’s a backstage pass. She falls in love with his wit and intelligence, and foremost with the courage he’s shown in trying to end the war in Vietnam. Nothing she or any of the rest of us who care about the crazy, senseless killing of Vietnamese people and the deaths of poor-schmuck soldiers, nothing any of us will do will come close to Tony’s act of courage, which is also an act of atonement, since he and Ellsberg leaked data they had helped gather when they worked for the RAND corporation, a private research organization hired by the government to justify its military goals.
Francine feels she’s sitting on the cliff of all that matters, dangling her legs over the edge, and for this privilege, surely she owes this guy whatever he asks for. Surely, something is happening between them. Surely, she must be of service to this man who has saved lives and has tried to wrest democracy from the greasy hands of profiteers. That’s what the girl in a Bob Dylan song would tell herself.
After months of these drives, Francine watches a videotape of Tony, shot for a documentary. In the clip, he tells the exact same stories on camera he’s told her in exactly the same way, his voice rising and falling, looking up, and crying, especially while recounting his meeting with a North Vietnamese prisoner of war who sang to him in a room used for torture and executions. It was the harrowing experience Tony credits with transforming his life. Seeing the clip, Francine feels a weird discomfort she can’t put her finger on.
What we feel—or I felt, anyway—is Francine discovering that to Tony she isn’t distinct. The monologue isn’t personally directed to her. He’s the talker and she’s the listener, and she suddenly feels instrumental. Oy, have I been there—from both sides, where you realize how much fantasy you’ve attached to an experience or how much fantasy the other person is attaching to you. When Francine tells Tony about seeing the tape, he says there’s always one best way to tell a story, and young Francine buys this explanation or tells us she bought it. Prose, the narrator in her seventies, says she buys it, too. She says that, as a writer, she knows there is a best way to tell a story. Personally, I don’t believe that, and I don’t believe it was why Tony performed his stories to everyone the same way.
The book doesn’t live or die by whether you think young Francine lived in a Bob Dylan song during her relationship with Tony Russo. What Prose captures brilliantly is the feeling of life in the early 1970s if you were young and thought you could remake the world. Every generation of young people wants to remake the world, right? Not quite. There was a collective bubble of belief we lived in, where you could breathe, but of course not altogether, because air was not evenly distributed, even in the bubble. The thing about the bubble was that it left you in a permanent state of understanding and lack of understanding that ordinary, passive acquiescence to whatever power is calling the shots is both shockingly reliable and dumbfoundingly unfathomable. What are you going to do? If you are Francine, you are not going to shrug.
Prose doesn’t care if you learn about her personally. That’s not why she wrote the book. Yet by looking back and wondering what she was up to in the past and wondering now, as she writes, we see how reflection works and how narrative builds into a piece of music from searching reflections. 1974 is about being twenty-six and wanting to attach your gorgeous, creative animal self to the grand, romantic project of social transformation. We all wanted to do that. When I say “all,” I mean everyone I knew, and if you were a girl, you didn’t know how to sort the romance of “I need to fuck people” (so I can discover how life works) from the romance of “I am part of a generation that is going to get this done, this end to official lies.” You didn’t need to sort out the two impulses. It was all sex and all please make life better for more people.
Prose doesn’t care if you learn about her personally. That’s not why she wrote the book.
Prose’s writing throughout is flinty and melting at the same time. It’s her particular flair, and there are some set pieces I won’t forget, including the time in the summer of 1974 when she’s invited to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She’s quickly bored by the solemn courting of well-regarded male fiction writers who hit on anything that moves, and she sets up shop offering tarot card readings for $5 apiece. When the conference director asks her to stop and calls what she’s doing “fortune-telling,” she says to him, knowing she won’t be invited back the next summer, “All these people paid eight hundred dollars for one opinion, why shouldn’t they pay five dollars for another?” She writes, “I kept on offering card readings until the demand ran out and I got tired and a scary guy who looked like Charlie Manson asked me to read his cards. . . . I made $500 reading tarot that summer, money I needed.”
Here is Prose on the significance of the Pentagon Papers:
The Pentagon Papers proved that millions had died and a country had been destroyed so that Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon wouldn’t look like losers. . . . What was in the report that we hadn’t known before? “The Gulf of Tonkin incident,” the attack on an American ship that was used to justify our intercession in Vietnam never happened. Bombing the north was accomplishing nothing except killing thousands of people, 80% of them civilians. The failure of the pacification program and the scorched-earth policy, the toxicity of Agent Orange—the government knew it all, and kept it secret. The Pentagon papers confirmed what the anti-war movement had never been able to prove: our presence in Vietnam was unwanted. We’d committed war crimes. . . . Despite the growing evidence that the release of the Pentagon Papers wouldn’t significantly alter the political landscape, Tony still believed, or tried to believe that the truth they revealed and the lies they exposed would blow the country apart.
Here is also what happened after the Pentagon Papers were published. On November 7, 1972, in a landslide victory, Nixon defeated George McGovern, who ran on an anti-war platform. On December 18, 1972, Nixon ordered the “Christmas bombing” of North Vietnam. (Bombing in Cambodia didn’t end until August 15, 1973, after twelve years of combat.) On December 23, 1972, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme compared the American bombing of North Vietnam to Nazi massacres, and the US broke diplomatic contact with Sweden. On September 11, 1973, a CIA-backed military coup in Chile began, aiming to oust democratically-elected Salvador Allende and install dictator Augusto Pinochet. On August 5, 1974, the “smoking gun” tape in the Watergate investigation revealed that Nixon and H. R. Haldeman had discussed using the CIA to block the FBI from inquiring into the Watergate break-in. Nixon’s support in Congress collapsed. (IMAGINE HOW MUCH SUPPORT NIXON WOULD HAVE RETAINED IN THE CURRENT CONGRESS!!!!) On August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned. Yeah!
Sorrow rises off the pages of 1974, sorrow that the findings of the Pentagon Papers and of the Watergate scandal several years later did nothing, really, to change government policy going forward. Nor did the revelations arouse the public to free themselves at last from governments that lie on behalf of profiteers. Looking back at this reckoning from the moment we’re in now, all you can do is remember the hope that wafted over an entire generation. I think of it as an entire generation. The air contained more than the word idealism conveys. That the things revealed in the Pentagon Papers and in the Watergate inquiry could happen had the opposite effect of what was hoped for. They undermined belief there could be any truth in government.
There’s no fathoming this stepping back from disclosures of deceit for profit and from expressions of hatred for people who are not you. There’s no fathoming the colossal stain of Trump. To me, part of the pain of our moment is its unfathomable nature, and I truly loathe those smug, hands-in-pockets and oily-smile theories of how it all happened and who is to blame. You do not know, those of you who claim to know. You probably don’t even really believe you know.
