The Talkies
Stein, Benjamin
states which failed to participate. Senator Jackson and many others, however, favor the use of sanctions against states which fail to adopt state land use programs. Senator Jackson would use...
...It is quite )ossible that he would have said somehing similar to what Wordsworth once ;aid about him: "Where is the thing vhich now passes for philosophy in 3oston to stop...
...Nothing, however, is more important to the integrity of the hook than a factor one is not likely to be struck with in the writing of academic people: the presence of the author as style...
...Atherton was Tod Hackett, Meredith was Harry Greener...
...On his face is a look of terror at being so close to the temptations he has avoided all his life...
...22 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975 The movie does that for all the characters and for the whole story...
...Their anger, West believed, was the most destructive force in civilization...
...When the action does become dominant, it is the externalization of a seething fury which we had seen long before and could have told was coming...
...Their relationship involves no sex but is overpowered by the ever-present sexuality of his smothered volcano of desire and her taunting of him...
...The anger on that day will not only be against Dick Powell and Myrna Loy, but also against each other and society itself...
...In fact, some might say that in the anger of people at their institutions generated by the constant whipping up of false expectations by the media, we are already seeing a slow-motion day of the locust...
...Such sanctions, for example, might take the form of a loss of a part of a state's federal aid for highways, airports, etc...
...People become intensely ambitious, then frustrated, then angry...
...Author West tried to convey the look ofpinched bitterness and seething fury on the faces of people in Hollywood...
...If there are less gaudy hopes, there is less disappointment...
...I could never let myself be loved by anyone who wasn't rich, and I could never love anyone who wasn't criminally handsome," she says...
...why Williams when he called a poem a machine made out of words "was setting it in the field where America's prime energies have been expended since Henry Ford...
...Sorry...
...with the homemade deficiencies that so often make Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway "sententious to a boring degree...
...But since the book "neither a survey nor an honor roll" we pend no time at all with Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe, or E. E. Cummings...
...It is a film so good that after seeing it you have to check your memory to be sure that you really saw what you think you saw, and not just what you hoped you would see...
...For Kenner, certainly, the homemade vorld of American modernism does not top with the production of climactic nasterworks, but carries into the present ,ge of transition "when the very luestion gets raised, what the written vord may be good for...
...Then she moves in with Homer Simpson...
...And it is in the individual looks on the individual faces that the movie's power lies...
...He creeps into the house of a visiting Midwestern hotel clerk, Homer Simpson (played by Donald Sutherland...
...This inventiveness is why they were able to hammer out a poetic "as American as the Kitty Hawk plan...
...The final upshot, says West, is The Day of the Locust...
...When Faye comes to find her father, she runs into Homer, and Homer is simply knocked into outer space by her...
...They had worked hard all their lives to get enough money to come out to California...
...When I read the book after seeing the movie (I had also read it before, just to be safe), I could see the characters fitting perfectly into their roles...
...The Day of the Locust is a powerful social document as well as a personal and psychological statement...
...While Tod is frustrated by Faye and Faye is frustrated by being poor and unknown, Faye's father Harry (played, as if he had written the book, by Burgess Meredith) staggers around Hollywood trying to sell silver polish...
...On her face is a look of almost complete forlornness, as if she were thinking, "I cannot even get a strong response from this pathetic, lonely man...
...Originally, in fact, West had titled the novel The Cheated...
...He looks as if he doesn't know whether to flee or to crush her against him...
...to Yeats on the equation of the perfection of life with the perfection of style, and Pater on the maximization of special moments...
...It is a blockbuster...
...next to pertinent developments in the early cinema and to anticipations of the cinema in Flaubert...
...Benjamin by Stein Powerlessness and frustration, frustration and powerlessness...
...That's just the way I am...
...with the fact that in Stevens' world "there are no actions and no speeches, merely ways of looking at things," that Williams flounders about as he tries to explain imagination and his variable foot, and that Olson, in the process of graduating from amateur to impresario, "indulged in a rhetoric not easily distinguished from bluff...
...there is little reason to expect that the political process would work better than the market...
...It is our situation, by and large, in America, and it is dangerous...
...Still, the movie is not a preachy movie...
...He has implicitly said that he will no longer live in the land where dreams are sustenance...
...There is a difference between the actual and ideal working of the political process just as there is for the market...
...we will speak our own minds...
...More important, however, none of his knowledge is rattling around loose in his head...
...The definitive film on the critical problem of modern life is the new movie The Day of the Locust...
...It talks about what happens in a society which creates stars (in this case, movie stars), tells people that they should be stars too, and also tells them that they should worshipwhat they are not but "should" be...
...He waits on her hand and foot, and she despises him for it...
...Hackett falls madly in love with Faye but she spurns him...
...It seems ironic that a vastly greater degree of involvement in land use decisions by government at all levels is being urged at the same time that public satisfaction with the performance of the public sector is so low...
...Senator Jackson would use "crossover sanctions" to force the states to participate...
...People become corroded and full of hate from their frustrations...
...Atopical example is the granting of a license by the Federal Power Commission to dam the New River in western North Carolina...
...Both are lonely and despairing...
...West was not a powerful stylist of despair like Joan Didion...
...Until that day comes, the battle is fought within...
...Do we really see anything new this time out...
...It now appears that this action will be taken in spite of widespread opposition by the people in the area and by their elected representatives...
...But he tried over and over again to draw a portrait in words of the faces he was talking about...
...She not only became a literary figure, but she made the literary figure into flesh and blood so that I can now see Faye as people I have known...
...In -fffect, he is asking for the homemade norld that is Kenner's subject: the kmerican reaction to Modernism as seen n the writings of three overlapping gen.=.rations—those of William Carlos Wiliams, William Faulkner, and Louis 7_ukofsky—which resulted in "a fifty year eshaping of the American language.- -low Emerson himself would have -eacted to writing so strikingly and even ;hockingly homemade by his pre-Civil Vat- standards God only knows...
...It is the story of life among the powerless and dispossessed in Hollywood in the 1930s and it is a fine little book, but the movie has taken that book and raised its visions to the cosmic level...
...It shows us a desperation and anger which is so close to what we actually see around us that we recognize that this is what our world has come to...
...to the crippling simplicities of Sherwood Anderson...
...we will work with our own lands...
...The movie of West's book is a guidebook to understanding what people around us are feeling and, more important, what we are feeling ourselves...
...What may not be so clear is that use of land under federal dictates may bear little relationship to the desired pattern of land use as determined at the local level...
...We have listened too long to the courtly •-nuses of Europe,- Emerson says in the peroration of this essay...
...You never know what you are going to find...
...to the rhetoric of evasion in relation to the objective correlative...
...It just lays out the situation...
...But the inventiveness of American writers has also been connected with a vein of charlatanry that could be combined, as in Pound, with purity of heart...
...Book Review/John P. Sisk The Motherland of Invention • Perhaps the best approach to Hugh Kenner's new book would be that declaration of American literary indepenknee, Emerson's "American Scholar...
...Yet as the camera focuses in on them, we see that their arms are tense, holding them apart rather than pulling them together for solace and affection...
...We will walk on )ur own feet...
...Most important of all, the character whom I had difficulty visualizing, the central character, Faye Greener, was brought to life in an eerily perfect way...
...Director John Schlesinger has understood perfectly that it is nuance rather than plot which makes the novel a powerhouse...
...He lives in a cheap motel across from the beautiful The Day of the Locust Faye Greener (played with genius by Karen Black), star-crazed teenage daughter of a dying former clown turned door-to-door salesman...
...why Hemingway's fiction resembles the poems of Stevens and Moore, "who resemble one another in having invented new kinds of poems...
...They dance in the kitchen of a Hollywood cottage, in the dark, and as the scene fades, we see that both are crying silently—so that the other will not know...
...finally to the ultimate frustration of the one true sentence and the extent to which Hemingway's pursuit of it shares with Hugh Hefner's Playboy philosophy the terminal point of nada...
...why "the new language (new to each user) is like the new world...
...Demon-strating that comprehensive land use controls could improve land use is not the same as demonstrating that actual comprehensive land use controls would do so...
...Regardless of whether federal sanctions are employed against states which fail to adopt land use plans which meet federal guidelines, comprehensive land use controls represent an erosion of private property rights and offer little hope for improving the efficiency of land use...
...Nathanael West wrote the novel between 1936 and 1938, while he was working on "B" pictures in Hollywood...
...The focus is all richly under control, ultimately all about Hemingway, all preparatory to the discovery not only of a weakness in Hemingway's strength but to a flaw in his nurturing environment...
...In view of our recent experiences with government regulatory agencies (FAA, ICC, etc...
...Sinuous, tough, a nice combination of the formal and the colloquial, Kenner's style might suggest to the hasty reader a mind discursive to the point of being haphazard...
...In beween we spend time with Amy Lowell, 'itzgerald, Wallace Stevens, Williams, ,larianne Moore, Hemingway, Charles )lson, and Faulkner...
...A society which can make movies as splendid as The Day of the Locust is not beyond redemption...
...With or without the latter group of writers, the book goes over territory that since World War II has been beaten hard by the insistent feet of critics, and not a few of the footprints have been made by Kenner himself...
...However, his frustrations have become so much a part of his personality that he makes no attempt to be anything other than a servile and avuncular figure to her...
...If anyone has not read the book, I will spare him the pain of learning the ending...
...Tod Hackett (played by William Atherton) is a young artist fresh out of Yale who is working for a big Hollywood studio...
...Kenner is properly admired for knowing a great deal about a great number of subjects...
...The movie makes no overt statementabout how to improve the situation...
...The book was largely a visual book...
...It could bring down all order, he believed...
...A beautiful young girl dances in the arms of a frightened and repressed middle-aged man...
...In any event, we )egin his book in 1912 with Ezra Pound's :.mersonian declaration of belief "in the mminence of an American Risorginento" ; and we end it with the fiction of ,labokov, Barth, and Pynchon, struck /ith the oddity that "the American novel las been yielding to that sense of the aritrariness of language that provided the ,oets' opportunity of the 1920s...
...I think we do, not simply because of a splendidly A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers by Hugh Kenner Knopf $8.95 clarifying emphasis on the "homemade" quality of American modernism, but also because of Kenner's skill in relating this theme to his awareness that "American literature is tricky for the critic" since American writers "invent the criteria by which we must understand them...
...Once they got there, they realized they had been cheated, and they weren't happy about it...
...A great deal more happens, leading to ruin for all who were not already ruined...
...He will go to a place where expectations are more normal and down to earth...
...Someone named Marion Dougherty has cast the movie virtually perfectly...
...I think he would have been extremely happy with the movie...
...However,' there is hope...
...to role playing in Joyce, Yeats, and Eliot...
...The implications of federal sanctions for local control of land are clear...
...Tod Hackett shows what his solution is by simply leaving the scene...
...I am not as enthusiastic about he Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975 23...
...with the tendency of Hemingway's small fullwords "to contract and grow fewer and approximate to a grunt...
...When Harry Greener dies, Faye takes up prostitution to pay for the funeral...
...In the brilliant chapter "Small Ritual Truths," for instance, the focus begins on Hemingway but shifts quickly to Fitzgerald, Eliot, and the objective correlative...
...He is naive but hungry...
...In assessing efficiency, the present system of land use should be compared with an attainable alternative...
Vol. 8 • August 1975 • No. 10
