Review of Francine Prose’s memoir “1974”

In 1974, Prose, then 26, had left her husband, dropped out of Harvard and fled to San Francisco. She had already published her first novel when she met Russo, ten years her senior. She was immediately attracted to the man she considered “the anti-war king.” Russo, an economist and engineer, had gained a certain reputation not only for his role in the exposure, but also for spending 47 days in jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury.

“Tony was charismatic. He was brave. He had been in Vietnam,” Prose writes of his appeal. “He had interviewed prisoners, farmers and scooter riders. He had seen the horrors of war. He had helped steal the Pentagon Papers. He had ended up in prison. And now he wanted me to listen to him and hear what he had been through. He seemed to think I could help him. He had come to San Francisco to write a book, and I was a writer.”

The couple spent a lot of time driving around San Francisco in the middle of the night. The city, Prose writes, no longer basked in the “hippie misery” of Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” but had become truly grim: “On almost every corner there were resident meth junkies scratching themselves bloody.” Prose and Russo chain-smoked, talked, and cried together. Much later, Prose felt he had used her as a sounding board for the book he was about to write.

Russo comes across as smart and passionate, but also confused and deeply wounded. “Sometimes he told stories with confusing chronology or without the fluid transitions that would have made them possible to follow. Often it seemed as if the words were flowing through him, bubbling like drops from a fountain,” Prose writes. He was often paranoid about the FBI. “I knew something had happened to Tony, but I still tried to convince myself that I had misunderstood things,” she writes. It’s worth noting that this memoir comes a year after Ellsberg’s death. Neither he nor Russo, who died in 2008, can refute these accounts.

Prose’s book is promoted as the story of what it was like to be a young woman in the 1970s, and perhaps it reflects the experiences of many women coming of age on both the East and West Coasts. This is her version of 1974, but it’s not mine. I’m a decade younger, but it’s not. Our paths diverge over her descriptions of the home front during the Vietnam War.

Here I readily admit my bias. I grew up in a working-class Ohio district that lost 26 men in Vietnam. Countless others came home forever changed. They didn’t have college deferments like Prose’s friends or unethical psychiatrists like the one in Boston who “saw each patient a few times and wrote a letter declaring the patient unfit for military service.”

Prose writes, “It cannot be overstated how much public outrage over the Vietnam War was fueled by the drafting of middle-class white children, as opposed to today’s ‘volunteers’ who are selected from the poor and colored communities.” This is an insensitive interpretation. The majority of men who served in the war came from poor and working-class families.

Prose’s memoir is, of course, a reflection of her own experiences, but like all memoirs, it also offers a snapshot in time, in this case a turbulent period in U.S. history. And like all memoirs, we must ask ourselves: How much of this author’s memories can we believe?

It is helpful if the author can provide evidence for his notes and reports. This can be more difficult when a book is being written about events and conversations that took place a long time ago. In these circumstances, an author should offer direct quotations sparingly.

Prose says she was “too busy paying attention and concentrating on what Tony was telling me. Remembering it word for word. Not to write about it. At least not at the time.” But she does remember long conversations that took place 50 years ago. She quotes Russo’s alleged monologues, some of them pages long, that took place during those aimless nighttime drives. She wants us to believe that she remembers every word he said. Her book should have begun with a disclaimer that appears in the acknowledgments: “Any attempt to reproduce dialogue verbatim will be approximate at best, but I have tried to capture the voices of the people I knew and describe what they did and said.”

Prose ended the relationship with Russo abruptly, in a moment of deep embarrassment for him that Prose describes in painful detail. “I felt justified. I felt young. I felt free. I felt like a monster who would never be forgiven. I never saw Tony again.”

Prose illuminates her weaknesses through a sharp lens. “I always wanted to believe that I was a thoughtful, kindhearted, responsible person. One danger of writing about yourself is that you learn things about yourself that you don’t want to know.”

One of her more significant discoveries: “I guess there was a kind of instability that we would now call bipolarity. During those years I oscillated between periods of paralyzing fear and times of dangerous confidence and even indifference to danger… I worked toward that, hoping that my psyche would remain intact and could swing comfortably between recklessness and fear, between security and catastrophe.”

This is one of the many reasons why Prose is widely admired as a writer. She spares no one, including herself. Whether intentional or not, with this book she makes it clear that she was indeed destined to be a writer. We will always agree on that.

Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, is the author of the novel The Daughters of Erietown and, most recently, the children’s book Lola and the Troll.