Alice-Leone Moats, RIP - obituary

BACK IN 1961, NATIONAL REVIEW carried a piece about a Communist Cuban rebel encampment in Mexico. It was by Alice-Leone Moats, who had been raised in Mexico and knew her way about as few other foreign correspondents stationed there. Fidel Castro had been given asylum in Mexico after serving time in Cuba, and there he recruited and trained the guerrillas-among them his brother Raul and Che Guevara-who would come out of the Sierra Maestre hills a year later to chase Batista out of Cuba and establish his Communist regime. The only reporter to trace- Castro's ties in those early days to the international Communist enterprise was Moatsie, an elegant and cosmopolitan writer with a well-honed nose for news, and the gall to go after it. It was years before Herbert Matthews, the New York Times's man on the beat, would learn that his gallant rebel reformer had been from the start, like Edgar Snow's agrarian reformer, a Communist ideologue.

Moatsie never received full credit for this scoop. Her best-known and probably her best book was Blind Date with Mars, a brilliant and colorful account of a journey through the Far East under wartime conditions in 1943. Her first book, No Nice Girl Swears, published in 1933, caused a splash, but her last one, about what she called "the Golden Gigolos"-the elegant European parasites who preyed on wealthy American women-failed to cause a ripple. The Society she was writing about in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties didn't survive the Sixties. And Alice-Leone Moats herself, reduced in later years to scratching out a living from a world that no longer recognized her zip and flair, faded away. She continued to contribute to NR episodically, but the day came when we gave her an assignment and she proved too weary to deliver on it. She left her beloved Paris in the Seventies, no longer able to sustain herself there, and returned home. Hard times ended her roving days, but they never tarnished her sense of elegance and style, her wit, or her values. She died in Philadelphia, aged 81, a fortnight ago.

Trying to gather and sort my recollections, I remember one festive evening in the Hall of Graduate Studies, Christmas or Easter, when the Gothic columns and vaults were tapestried with shadows cast by candles glowing on white tablecloths like coals in the snow. She had entered the great hall and taken a place in the line to the kitchen; as I walked up behind her, she started, and turned. An epiphany, which will be an emblem for me ftom now on-the small, blonde girl, thin-shouldered as a fawn, luminous as a wisp of smoke in the candlelight, the surprise of her elf-delicate face giving way to a timid and reassured smile, as though some presentiment of the enormity had fallen on her with my shadow. That astonishment, melting into that smile, makes me think of some lines ftom John Crowe Ransom:

Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;

And I will cry with my loud lips and publish

Beauty which all our power shall never establish

It is so frail.

Our mutual friends tell me that she used to jog, recklessly, around the Yale campus at night. I didn't know that; but she was slender to the point of unhealthiness. The nervous tension was apparent, the tension and ambition that sent her from the School of Organization and Management to Salomon Brothers and, worse than fatally, to Central Park. She comes from an affluent family; was-is? if she lives, she will be brain damaged-was a humanitarian liberal, with a faith in mankind which mankind, in the form of a pack of deracinated adolescents, proved if more proof was needed that it can never merit. A greyhound, set upon by hyenas.

"Many bulls encompass me, strong bulls of Bashan surround me; they open wide their mouths at me, like a ravening and roaring lion. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax, it is melted within my breast . . ." But enough. The words melt together on the page. After I learned of the victim's identity, I found the entire event in Psalm 22. Yea, dogs are round about me; a company of evildoers encircle me. My God, my God.

I said I was an imperfect Christian. The imperfection is not one of forgiveness. They know not what they do. No, what I don't understand is how to prevent each horror in my experience ftom polluting the rest of life, leaving a sediment of disgust that thickens, year after year, decade after decade, until all uncalculating trustand spontaneous pleasure in life die long before I do. How ta avoid a gradual, sap, ping, half-conscious weariness? After D-Day, I read once, many of the American paratroopers who had dropped behind German lines disentangled themselves from their chutes, stumbled into field or farmhouseand, exhausted by days of tension, fell asleep. I have just landed, as it were, to join the temporal struggle, the moment has arrived for which I have trained and fashioned myself And something like this happens to someone I know, and my political struggles, which sometimes seem quixotic but noble, become merely quixotic and petty. The energy will return-my energy is independent of my moods, to a degree that surprises me at times-but energy detached from a trusting engagement in life is not something to look forward to, even if it is a precondition for a continued persistent exertion in a brave new world that looks ever more like the hateful eon which is passing away. A Christian should be cheerful. Cheerfulness is a perfection. Be ye perfect. In the face of such enormities, I don't know how.