McCarthy and her friends.

McCarthy and Her Friends

HANOI--I re-read Mary McCarthy's book Hanoi in Hanoi. Miss McCarthy died while I was in Saigon, and her death was reported in the newspapers there, next to Rex Harrison's knighthood. Strangely enough, her 1968 book was not mentioned in the articles. Perhaps it was too embarrassing even for the Vietnamese.

For it was not sufficient that she considered America wrong; she was determined to find in North vietnam, as it was then, a revolutionary Arcadia. Of course, she did. At a school, "the boys were good-looking, some beautiful even, with lustrous hair, shining eyes, soft clear skin--no acne in North Vietnam."

No one can visit Vietnam without being impressed--even now--by the scale, perseverance, and ingenuity of the Vietnamese war effort. Like all visitors, I was taken to see the Cu Chi tunnel system not far from Saigon, over 150 miles long and built on three levels, from which the Americans were never able to dislodge their enemy. I crawled a few hundred feet along the easier tunnels and felt the effect for days afterward. The Vietcong lived in the tunnels for weeks, months, years.

Still, it is possible--though not for Miss McCarthy--to admire the Pyramids without subscribing to the religious beliefs of the Pharaohs. Her personal contribution to the Vietnamese war effort was an heroic resistance to the urgings of common sense. Followed every waking moment, even to the lavatory, by a minder, she was touched by the concern for her welfare and safety. Equating her note-taking with the secret-police report she thought the North Vietnamese were compiling about her, she remarked: "But their ethic is in the service of the state, society, and mine is more selfish." Noticing that the North Vietnamese press was drearily uniform, she commented, "the license to criticize [is] just another capitalist luxury, a waste product of the system . . . access to information that does not lead to action may actually be unhealthy." Finding all printed and broadcast matter couched in typical Communist wooden language, she lamented the tyranny that the imperative for originality exerted over Western writers. Fully obeying this imperative, she ascribed the somewhat robotic quality of the captured U.S. airmen she met in the North to their American schooling.

AN INTERESTING counterpoint to the book was provided by Binh, a chemical engineer I met in Hanoi. He had been ten years in the army, some of them spent guarding American prisoners in bamboo jails in the jungle. Recalling the war, he spoke almost with amusement, not with bitterness, and certainly without triumph. He remembered how badly the Americans had fought, a consequence of their high standard of living. Vietnamese soldiers survived on a handful of boiled rice; American soldiers were weighed down with supplies.

Why, I asked, did the Vietnamese fight so hard and so long?

"We believed," replied Binh. The leaders had told them that Vietman would be free, happy, and prosperous once both internal and external enemies had been defeated; and with no source of information about the outside world or about the history of the Soviet Union, the faith had been universal. So, now, was the disillusionment.

Binh and I walked together through the Revolutionary Museum, vast and echoing with the absence of visitors. Only tourists and schoolchildren on compulsory outings go there. We paused at an enlarged photograph of Ho Chi Minh's respectfully worded submission to the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919. He requested unrestricted freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom to travel, and the same legal guarantees for Vietnamese as for French citizens. These were arrogantly refused, of course. Seventy years later, I asked Binh how many of these desiderata had been achieved. He laughed, this time not without bitterness.

Binh had been sent to Belgium for three months' technical training. There, he concluded that there was but one kind of freedom and one kind of democracy, and Vietnam had neither.

Pausing in the Revolutionary Museum, and feeling rather as if I were questioning the existence of God before a Muslim in Mecca, I asked whether this meant he now believed Ho Chi Minh had deceived the people.

"Yes," he replied. And was this the opinion of many Vietnamese? "Many." Then the war was not worthwhile?

"No."

These conclusions by a man who had spent the best years of his life contributing to the success of a cause in which he had wholeheartedly believed were not without a certain impact.

Nevertheless, Vietnam has changed almost out of recognition in the last few months. No doubt under pressure from a bankrupt Soviet paymaster, Vietnam has enacted a foreign-investment code said to be the most generous in Asia, returned land to the peasants and freed the market in whatever they produce (transforming the country almost overnight into one of the biggest exporters of rice in the world, when previously people had been obliged to cross illegally into Thailand in search of rice), and countenanced a vast contraband trade with both Thailand and China that has resulted in the creation of myriad small businesses throughout the country, so that even Hanoi now throbs with the anarchic life of the marketplace. In this city of revolutionary virtue, there are now discos and dance halls with flashing lights and the latest decadent music. Pictures of Ho Chi Minh have been replaced on the walls of shops and offices with those of Japanese television stars. Lovers stroll hand in hand, oblivious of ideology. There are cafes again, and much of the city is given over to commercial activity.

How Mary McCarthy would have hated it! "Material scarcity," she wrote of wartime Hanoi, "is regarded as a piece of good luck." Then Prime Minister Pham Van Dong "spoke of our automobile-TV culture as of something distastefully gross and heavy. . . . With a full-lipped contempt . . . he rejected the notion of a socialist consumer society."

We are here near the very essence of socialism's intellectual snobbery and withering disdain for people as they actually are (hence the need to construct the New Man). When Pham Van Dong emphasized to her the need for strict control of the economy, Miss McCarthy had this to say:

In Vietnam I perceived--what doubtless I should have known before--that the fear of decentralization and local autonomy evinced by Communist leaders is not necessarily an abject solicitude for their own continuance in power; it is also a fear of human nature as found in their country-men.

Her prognostications could not have been more mistaken. "The wares of modern consumer society as displayed in the South" have not served, as she thought they might, "as a deterrent for their Northern brothers, like some dreadful emetic mixed with alcohol to cure a taste for drinking." The people are tired of compulsory virtue and heroism: they want to live, and life in the twentieth century implies consumption.

It also implies freedom. Here the reforms in Vietnam have been less than striking. Displaying something uncannily resembling "an abject solicitude for [his] own continuance in power" the general secretary of the party, Nguyen Van Linh, has warned against the poison of political pluralism and of the necessity to maintain democratic centralism. Referring to Lenin's New Economic Policy--not a comforting historical analogy--he said that the object of the economic reforms was ultimately to facilitate the "construction of large-scale socialist industry." Alarmed, if not terrified, by the events in Eastern Europe, Nguyen Van Linh took the ominous step of congratulating Rumania and Ceaucescu (then still fully in power) on their "achievements." What the party gives, the party can take back.

HOWEVER, THERE must exist a point of no return. This point might more readily be reached were the U.S. to allow investment in Vietnam, a land of nearly seventy million graceful, intelligent, but desperately poor people. It would then at last have won their hearts and minds, for as Miss McCarthy percipiently reflected: "What if the enemy, capitalism, repulsed by air and foiled by land . . . should creep in the back way . . .? Then all the sacrifices of the war would have been in vain."

The Communist sacrifices, perhaps; but not the American ones.

Mr. Daniels is a freelance writer whose books include Zanzibar to Timbuktu and Coups and Cocaine.