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Sunday. The Book Review goes out early to subscribers in the book trade.
    He begins to read. I hear phrases like “self-proclaimed Leninist,” and await paragraphs about my addiction to Stalin, my forgiving posture toward the Purges, my determination to evict all Jews in Israel into the sea. This is, after all, the New York Times .
    But no. It seems the reviewer, a fellow called Douglas Brinkley, billed as an historian at the University of New Orleans, actually likes my book, The Golden Age Is in Us .
    “Whether journeying to Key West, Fla., Humboldt County, Calif., Ireland or Istanbul, Mr. Cockburn is a warrior/freethinker, armed with courage and gifted prose to cut down the hypocrisies of tyrants. He is a Marxist Mencken—a composite of comic-poet Andrei Condrescu (minus the Transylvanian sarcasm), the erudite Christopher Hitchens (minus the radical chic impulse) and thegonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson (minus the drugs, guns and rock-and-roll).”
    The marketing director tells me this is worth 500 book sales. I think to myself maybe it’s worth another $5,000 on the next book contract.
    By the last paragraph the review is calling me “a life-loving anarchist,” presumably having abandoned the self-proclaimed Leninism of the reviewer’s beginning. I’m a quick learner! “Still,” the review concludes, “many readers will be astonished to discover that the ‘irrelevant’ left still has much to offer as we search for a utopian resolution to your tangled social problems. The Golden Age Is in Us is a delightful reminder that the New Left, which blossomed in the 1960s, has not completely withered and died.”
    Better than waking up in bed with a dead policeman or a wet umbrella, as my father used to say.
    July 26
    “When I began work on this biography, I intended it to be a very favorable portrait …” Thus Shelden, in the opening chapter of his new book, Graham Greene : The Enemy Within . Shelden goes on to say that examination of Greene disclosed unsavory aspects of his character. So he reversed track and wrote a character assassination.
    This is an old rhetorical trick, in which the biographer sadly announces that in mid-investigation the scales fell from his eyes. In Shelden’s case the truth is more likely that with Greene dead and thus incapable of suing for libel, the time was ripe for a demolition job running counter to the official biography being slowly released in three volumes by Norman Sherry.
    Shelden’s book is substantively thin and pretty silly. Poor Greene can’t do anything without being assailed for low motives and possible misbehavior. A trip to Africa in the company of his cousin Barbara adds up to inferences by Shelden about Greene’s conduct merely because the cousin wore shorts, thus displaying bare legs to her putatively ravenous relative who, as Shelden prissily emphasizes, had a wife and child back in England.
    I have an interest in all this because my father, Claud, was a lifelong pal of Greene’s, going to the same school (of which the headmaster was Greene’s father, Charles) and sharing in many escapades into their twenties and beyond. In his introduction to my father’s final collection of his memoirs, Claud Cockburn Sums Up , Greene wrote, “If I were asked who are the greatest journalists of the twentieth century, my answer would be G. K. Chesterton and Claud Cockburn. Both are more than journalists: both produced at least one novel which will be rediscovered with delight, I believe, in every generation: The Man Who Was Thursday and Ballantyne’s Folly .” Knowing of this friendship, biographers would beat a path to my father’s door. I once heard a television interviewer solemnly ask him about Greene’s assertion that he—Graham that is—had been “dead drunk every day” of his first term at Oxford.
    “Well, I didn’t notice,” my father replied.
    “You mean, he wasn’t?”
    “No, Greene is a very truthful man and if he said he was dead drunk every day,