Louise Bryant and William Bullitt

I just received my alumni magazine. Typically, I browse the alumni notes and toss it aside. Over the next few weeks I usually move it from surface to surface, pushing it aside to make room for books, CDs, my purse and other implements of day-to-day living. Eventually, I recycle it whole. If I am feeling aggressive in general or hostile towards my memories of Yale in particular, I shred it - not with my hands, I have a machine. Once in a while, I read it. Today is one of those days.

There's an article in there about Louise Bryant. Louise was a journalist and author, living in the 1920s and 1930s and covering the rise of the Bolsheviks, Mussolini's steady usurpation of Italian life and other dramas stemming from when fascism was the height of European style.

Louise married former secretary of state William Bullitt. It was her third marriage. At this point in the article, the author shared the following tidbit about William:

Bullitt had negotiated a peace proposal with Russia that Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George ignored; furious, he abandoned politics and resolved to return to writing - in some exotic locale where he could "lie on the sand and watch the world go to hell."

It's funny how a simple paragraph in an article that you almost didn't read can speak to you with such force. It sums up my feelings about politics, the burden of responsibility that I feel, quite inexplicably, on my shoulders and the inadequacy and paralysis that I feel when I think about solving such a holy mess, though it is not my sole responsibility.

I think that all writers feel this way - at least to a certain degree. We all see what is going on before our shocked and blinded eyes. We all struggle to make sense of the obvious threadbaredness with which certain representatives and assorted other visible figures are pursuing their anti-cooperative agendas. Yet, we cannot move. We wish we could run and hide with the full knowledge of what that option would entail - cowardice, a quality that no writer wishes to embody.

I don't know the specifics of the rest of William Bullitt's life, but I now know that Louise Bryant contracted a painful disease and self-medicated with alcohol. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1936. Yale University, not Harvard, has her papers, in case you care. That piece of information seemingly was emphasized by the author. Just in case you're looking for them.