Culpability and the Culture

In her mid-twenties, as her first marriage was coming apart, Francine Prose spent a few winters with friends in San Francisco: a refuge from responsibility in a city in decline. Reading her memoir of this period, 1974: A Personal History—especially a section about her evolving interpretations of Hitchcock’s Vertigo—reminded me of a Joan Brown painting from that year titled Golden Gate Bridge, in which a simplified version of the north side of the bridge throws its warped shadow over Hawk Hill in the Marin Headlands, opposite Fort Point, where Vertigo’s drowning scene was filmed.¹ The contrast between the candy-orange bridge tower and its shadow splayed across the rocks like a jumper’s body captures the mood of the Bay Area at the time. “The Summer of Love was over, and no one had swept up after the party,” Prose writes with characteristic pith. Meth was on the rise. Police were struggling to solve the Zebra murders—stopping and questioning black men on the street after a string of terrifying, random, apparently racially motivated killings of white people.

Having exemplified freedom, experiment, and excess for decades, San Francisco had further to fall than most cities, but the slump was everywhere. “If the late ’60s were about believing in the possibility of fundamental change,” Prose writes, “the 1970s were about the dawning realization that the changes we’d wanted weren’t going to happen.” Disappointment is a difficult feeling to convey over the course of a book-length memoir, a vapor that can condense and sink the narrative. Prose counters this with close focus—we always want to look where she directs us—and an intimate type of insouciance: think of Patti Smith in her white shirt, photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, or Dick Cavett crossing his legs and nodding.

In the city, Prose relished her friends’ company and the artists and musicians who dropped by their bright second-floor flat on Parnassus Avenue, not far from the gritty allure of the Haight:

Behind our backyard a lushly forested hill rose up to the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute. I liked telling people that I lived on the grounds of a mental asylum, especially after I felt sane enough so that it seemed like a joke and not a disguised cry for help.

In Cambridge, while still living with her husband, she had suffered from bouts of agoraphobia so severe that she could hardly leave her apartment without consulting the I Ching. Her life felt unreal: “I veered between periods of paralyzing dread and times of being dangerously trusting and even indifferent to danger.”

So through the summer of 1972 she had quietly packed her belongings and stored them with her parents in New York. She walked away from her husband and her graduate fellowship at Harvard and got a ride with friends who were driving across the country. Her second night in San Francisco, Prose happened on some members of the drag troupe the Cockettes shopping for groceries in costume. Ball-gowned, bearded emissaries of promise, they looked like angels to her, a sign that she had “traded the darkness for the light.”

On her next extended stay in the city the following year, during months ostensibly devoted to writing her third novel (she was surviving mostly on food stamps and her dwindling book advance), Prose met and became involved with Tony Russo, “the semi-famous, possibly unbalanced friend of a friend.” She recognized him immediately. In 1971 he had conspired with Daniel Ellsberg in the leak of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan and others. Russo was an antiwar hero, the scruffy, bespectacled guy standing just behind Ellsberg at press conferences. So what if he was paranoid? The weirdness of her relationship with him—conducted largely in Russo’s run-down Buick while he sped through the Outer Sunset and the Richmond late at night, telling stories and evading perhaps imaginary government agents—has a comic aspect that she fully exploits in this memoir of youth. Even when Russo fell miserably silent or dissolved in tears, the classic questions arose for her: Is this a date? Does he even like me?

Due to the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989, many federal agencies now have Web pages for potential whistleblowers featuring advice about whether and how to come forward with proof of wrongdoing. These seem calculated to dissuade. The House of Representatives offers a page called “Whistleblower Survival Tips,” which urges caution (“Seek legal and other expert advice early”) and underscores the likelihood that whistleblowers who try to remain incognito will be identified one way or another:

To the extent possible, discuss the decision with your loved ones in advance, including the risks and benefits of reporting the misconduct and options for how to safely proceed. They also must live with the consequences.

None of these warnings was available to Russo and Ellsberg, who acted on the assumption that the revelations they shared with members of Congress, The New York Times, and other newspapers would end the Vietnam War. “I didn’t care what they did to me,” Russo recalls in a filmed interview quoted by Prose. “They could send me to jail. I could thumb my nose at them. There was no way they could undo the Pentagon Papers.” Extrajudicial consequences seem not to have occurred to him.

He and Ellsberg met in the mid-Sixties in Saigon. At the time Ellsberg was a Defense Department analyst and Russo worked for the RAND Corporation, a global policy think tank closely connected to the US government. An aeronautical engineer who had previously worked at NASA, Russo had ignored his friends’ advice not to take a job at RAND. “Tony knew about RAND’s role in perpetuating the war,” Prose writes, “to which he was becoming opposed. But at that time, it was believed that powerful institutions could be transformed from within by infiltrating the establishment.”

1974 is about evenly divided between a vivid account of Prose’s early life and first marriage and a postmortem of her brief, intense relationship with Russo. She tells Russo’s backstory through exposition but also through long conversations—loosely reconstructed from memory, as she concedes in her acknowledgments. This allows her to shape scenes with him as she would in a novel, dropping readers into the moment but adding later realizations and reflections. She leaves a few of these where they cannot yet make sense for us but can only foreshadow trouble. This example occurs early: “Only later, after the way that things ended with Tony, did I begin to think there was anything irresponsible or unkind about my not having told my husband that I was leaving for good.”

In her review of Three Light-Years, a novel by the Italian writer Andrea Canobbio, in these pages ten years ago, Prose described the author as “unusually adept at depicting the ways in which people can hold two disparate subjects in mind, more or less at once…and simultaneously inhabit the present and the past.”² 1974 shows the same qualities, employing a temporal layering that mimics thought. Long, largely chronological sections loop effortlessly back or forward, like an angler’s line, as associations occur to her.

Throughout, she presents a nuanced account of the cultural crosscurrents that shuttled her between the certainties of the Fifties mores she grew up with and the sexual ethos of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Prose was born in 1947 to a Jewish family in Brooklyn and attended the Brooklyn Friends School. Her parents were both doctors. One can gauge the period by Prose’s quip that they “wanted me to be a successful doctor married to a more successful doctor.” An omnivorous reader—happy, while growing up, for the isolation bubble that a book provides—she majored in English at Radcliffe and married her college boyfriend in her senior year.

Among the questions driving this memoir is how she could possibly have committed to monogamy in such a freewheeling era:

The culture encouraged, expected, and all but insisted on erotic restlessness. Sex was free; sex was everywhere, a source of wonder, pleasure, and heat without the chilling effect of familiarity and repetition.

Why had she gotten married? “For the same reasons that, over time, have guided many of my wrong decisions,” she writes. “Because agreeing is easier than refusing, because saying yes makes everyone happier than saying no.” And there remain, as we know, profound rewards for the conventional feminine achievements—and punishments for not hitting the mark.

Graduate school, too, was a mistake. There to study medieval English literature, she succumbed to “bouts of what the early desert saints called the pain of the distance from God. The fogginess, the loneliness, the lack of direction or purpose.” Her sense of alienation was compounded by a failure to persuade any of her classmates to read Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, then newly translated. She saw the novel

as a damning critique of them and everything they stood for: García Márquez’s delight in storytelling was so much juicier and more alive than the pretentious seminars designed (I thought) to make literature seem competitive, arid, and joyless.

This disillusionment with academia inspired aspects of Prose’s magic-realist first novel, Judah the Pious (1973), written in India, where she and her husband had fled (they chose it at random on a spinning globe) after a near breakdown on her part. Her main character refuses conventional schooling and takes himself off to the forest to learn about nature. When he does seek out scholars, it suddenly strikes him that they know nothing about science. He had wasted years “among posturers and pretenders, who had spouted their half-truths and fancies, and had made him doubt the facts that he had observed with his own eyes.”

In a 2014 interview, Prose confessed that she used to sing country-and-western tunes in her head in her Harvard classes to keep herself sane. Some of her agony in Cambridge was about youth, she sees now: “I was in my twenties. A friend says, It’s a time of suffering.”

In this memoir—and throughout Prose’s work—her bibliophilia recalls the joy Borges captured in “The Library of Babel” before the drawbacks of an infinite library appear:

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure.

For Prose, the treasure must be shared. Everywhere, she describes connecting—or failing to connect—through books. Transferring to Brooklyn Friends in the fourth grade, for example, she bonded with her new classmates over a shared love of Little Women. She and Russo talked about Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, with its most-quoted line, “We are what we pretend to be.” Another touchstone was Gravity’s Rainbow: “In 1974, fans of Thomas Pynchon’s dense, confusing seven-hundred-page conspiracy novel felt as if we’d found one another, recognized fellow…what? A group of people who distrusted groups.”

Over his three years in Vietnam, Russo grew sympathetic to the Viet Cong and incensed by chemical crop destruction, one of many cruelties toward the civilian population. He was the first to report the routine torture of the VC in captivity—a brave step in itself—but his report was suppressed by RAND. Prose remarks:

Only an idealist—or an egomaniac—would have imagined that an institution working for the Defense Department could be turned around by the force of his personal righteousness and charisma, by his dedication to truth and to the Constitution.

Now openly opposed to the war, Russo was fired not long after his return to the States.

When Ellsberg, similarly disenchanted with the war, mentioned his plan to smuggle out batches of a Defense Department report from RAND’s Santa Monica offices, Russo was eager to help. Russo’s girlfriend at the time, Lynda Sinay, had a Xerox machine at her office. In October 1969 the three of them photocopied all seven thousand top secret pages of the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force. (Prose describes the surprising later career of Sinay, who was charged but never convicted for those hours of copying: she and her husband “started a succession of lucrative businesses that now include Fiji Water, Pom (the pomegranate drink), and Halos, the mandarin oranges that are on my kitchen table now.”)

Commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1967, what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers provided evidence to support allegations that peace activists had been making for years: most notably, that President Johnson had lied to Congress and the American public, denying that he had expanded US military involvement in Vietnam and ordered the bombing of North Vietnam.³ After the partial publication of the papers, Henry Kissinger called Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America.” Both whistleblowers faced charges under the Espionage Act, but Russo was the only one to serve time—forty-seven days for defying a federal grand jury summons, afraid, he said, that testifying might mean incriminating Ellsberg. The judge declared a mistrial in the espionage case after it came out that government agents had broken into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, looking for dirt on him. These were Nixon’s “White House Plumbers,” soon assigned to special duty at the Watergate complex.

Whistleblower trauma—and PTSD associated with retaliation against whistleblowers—is now widely recognized. After his release Russo was harassed by the police for a time and remained virtually unemployable. Prose remembered him having two license plates, which he switched out to confuse anyone tailing him.

A sensitive and principled man, Russo felt haunted by what he had seen in the South Vietnamese interrogation cells and by his sense of complicity in the bombings. No one thought Prose’s relationship with him was a good idea. A friend laid out a spread of tarot cards for her: swords, the Hanged Man, the Tower. This could not end well.

“He wasn’t conventionally handsome,” Prose recalls,

but he was interesting-looking. He had the slightly pudgy, appealing face of a good-tempered hypermasculine baby. He chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes and didn’t look entirely healthy, yet there was something radiant about him: the inner light of a zealot.

She admired and cared about him, and when they finally had awkward sex together, she second-guessed herself at first (was she not his type?) and then settled into the realization that their connection had never been about sex. Much of it had been about her listening to him, occasionally shaking her head no to a rhetorical question, “if only to remind him that I was there.”

“Four years after the last time I saw Tony,” Prose writes,

I had my first child, and from the moment my son was born, I was no longer the same person who thought it was interesting and fun to speed around San Francisco in the middle of the night with a stranger chain-smoking Camels, alternating stretches of silence with long bouts of storytelling and weeping.

For progressives of almost every stripe, the early Seventies were depressing. Punch had gotten hold of the baton. The Patty Hearst kidnapping, the murders and racism, and, Prose continues,

the thickening atmosphere of chaos and violence and dread were catnip to the industrialists and right-wing ideologues who had already begun strategizing their long game for the economy and the planet.

Russo and Ellsberg had been convinced that “Americans would be so horrified to hear that a president lied that the entire population would rise up and demand an end to the fighting in Asia.” They had to accept the reality of a nation’s weary indifference. “It had been cool to want to change the world,” Prose writes, but by 1974 “it began to seem embarrassing.”⁴

Yet Russo also felt betrayed by Ellsberg, who seemed to step with ease into a starring role in American history. Russo is sometimes referred to as the “forgotten conspirator” or the “other conspirator.” In 1974 Esquire published a photo of the two men in which Ellsberg playfully—or not so playfully—covers Russo’s face with his hand.

Russo never contacted Prose again after their painful last meeting in New York, a few weeks after she left San Francisco to promote her second novel, The Glorious Ones. He had followed her east on business of his own: a meeting with his literary agent about a prospective book. “I wrote all the time in jail, when I could,” he told Prose, “until the guards took my journal away, and then beat me up for objecting. After that I wrote in my head.” He also held a press conference, with disastrous consequences. Although his name and reputation drew many reporters to the event, the new revelations he’d promised turned out to be only a dream—some scratches on the photocopies he manically distributed to his audience.

His silence afterward “meant something,” Prose knew. She, too, had betrayed him, in ways that I won’t divulge here. As much as her memoir is an exploration of how she became the young woman who drove around at night with Tony Russo, it is also an attempt to grasp how she could let her friend down when he was most at risk. “It occurred to me that I’d been starstruck by a star that was burning out even as I watched,” she writes.

Her unsparing account of the press conference and its aftermath has a nightmarish, slightly psychedelic quality and recalls Annie Ernaux’s work in its insistent honesty. Clearly the question of culpability lingers for Prose, as it did for Russo. This is among the most memorable passages in a book studded with skillful and penetrating set pieces. If the phrase “casual elegance” had not been co-opted for cardigans, it could be applied to Prose’s nonfiction style. She sometimes builds the emotional energy of a scene to the brink—the place at which a less confident writer might stop, content with the mic drop—but goes further, pushing past it with a breezy comment, a subtle undercut. She knocks herself down a peg.

In another remarkable section, she describes the ecstatic months she spent living in Colaba in South Bombay with her husband, in an apartment overlooking a fishing village on the Arabian Sea: her first escape from Cambridge, when she still believed she might remain married. Here she secured a library card for the Bombay University Library and immersed herself in a rich collection of Asian and European literature in translation that stopped abruptly in 1947, at Partition. Reading became

joyous in a way that it hadn’t been since high school, since the summer happiness of returning from the public library with an armload of books, settling into the hammock on the side porch, becoming Jane Eyre or David Copperfield, forgetting who and where I was.

They traveled back overland for part of the way, including a stay in Kabul—one of the reasons she is able to write with such emotion and authority about places Americans tend not to travel. (An example is her 1993 essay “Remembering a Different Sarajevo,” which draws affectingly on her memories of Afghanistan.)

Prose went on to write over twenty novels, including Household Saints (1981), whose 1993 film adaptation by Nancy Savoca was recently rereleased; Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (2014), inspired by Brassaï’s mesmerizing photograph Fat Claude and her Girlfriend at Le Monocle; and the academic satire Blue Angel (2000), a finalist for the National Book Award. She often writes on the arts: The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired (2002) remains a standout among feminist resurrections of forgotten women. Her nonfiction includes a reading guide to Mrs. Dalloway and two further love letters to literature, the essay collection What to Read and Why (2018) and its precursor, Reading Like a Writer (2006)—essentially a guide to close reading, like George Saunders’s study of the Russians, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021).

Russo died in 2008 of heart disease. Prose knew little of his life after their relationship ended, but she began to piece together a few impressions from Ellsberg’s talk at Russo’s memorial. (The men had clearly reconciled to some extent.) From this distance, she was able to turn with interest toward her lost friend. Searching for him online, she found a clip included in a Zoom panel on the fiftieth anniversary of the Pentagon Papers leak:

It’s strange, sitting at my desk, staring at my laptop, at Tony, who in the film appears to be around the age that he was when I knew him. He’s sweeter-looking and more handsome than I remember. His hands are delicate and beautiful. His smile is warm, appealing, and his charm is turned on in full force. It is, as he would have said, very moving.

Prose is a past president of PEN America, and signed the protest letter against the organization’s 2015 award to Charlie Hebdo. The letter argued that the magazine’s cartoons—while protected as free speech—intensified “the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.” In a Facebook exchange with Salman Rushdie, who had supported the award, Prose added, “Provocation is simply not the same as heroism.” Prose had known a hero and been thinking about him for years.