Talk of the Nation

By R.Z. Sheppard

U.S. JOURNAL by Calvin Trillin. 314 pages. Dutton. $6.50.

On Armed Forces Day 1959, Calvin Trillin and 20 other men of the First United States Army descended by helicopter on Governors Island, then an administrative Army base in New York harbor. In a mock assault they liberated an incinerator from a contingent of computer clerks. Practically under the skirts of the Statue of Liberty, and with the Lebanon crisis undoubtedly fresh in his memory, Trillin fired blanks from his machine gun for the entertainment of officers and visiting Boy Scouts.

Trillin relates his Army story as humorous counterpoint to his deadpan account of a violent peace demonstration that took place just outside Fort Dix, N.J., on Armed Forces Day 1970. Between the public relations game of a peacetime Army and the pitched battles of war-sick civilians, a decade of change is neatly revealed. Nothing cosmic, only a clear, courteous reminder of how much things have changed.

Throughout U.S. Journal, a collection of Trillin's New Yorker pieces, the author reportedly lands like a benign ordering presence--deus ex-machine gunner--amidst chaos, humbug and hoopla. Covering a great deal of ground, he is naturally sympathetic toward other traveling men. He writes about a Dow Chemical recruiter who in 1968 had to go from campus to campus, removing his shoes to step over antiwar demonstrators, and try to answer such polite undergraduate questions as, "I was wondering if a Dow employee could be prosecuted as a war criminal ten or 15 years from now?" Elsewhere, Trillin tags along on the exhibit and lecture circuit with 375-lb. Paul Anderson, the "world's strongest man," a Christian patriot who pulls off the highway now and then to write anti-Communist verse.

In New Orleans, Trillin probes anti-Semitism at the Mardi Gras, an event which, he also notes, is the homosexual's Harvard-Yale game. In Arkansas, he looks into aging Gerald L.K.. Smith's religious real-estate schemes that include an Oberammergau in the Ozarks. In Atlanta, examining Governor Lester Maddox's "New Morality." Trillin records a Maddox Christmas message in which the former restaurateur noted, "There will be more automobiles, more shoes, more record-players, more television sets, more ties, more shirts, more dresses, more cosmetics, more watches and diamonds sold in the name of Christ this year than any other name."

An equally strong interest in the less sacred aspects of American commerce takes Trillin to the Fifth Annual Paul Bunyan Snowmobile Derby in Brainerd, Minn., the auction stalls on Atlantic City's boardwalk, and a national U.S. Jaycee gathering in Phoenix, where the campaign for the presidency is only a little less elaborate than the Democratic and Republican conventions. (The successful candidate gets to spend a year living at the Jaycee's White House in Tulsa, and his wife is often referred to as the First Lady.)

Wherever he goes, Trillin resists the temptation to put his pulse on the finger of the nation. There is never any doubt about where his sympathies lie but, like his late colleague, The New Yorker's A.J. Liebling, Trillin exhibits great technical control and a quiet passion for fairness and precision. He is, to use a phrase that Liebling reserved for high praise, "a careful writer." . R.Z. Sheppard

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