Grossman Beginning
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS&WRITING Grossman Beginning By Stanley Edgar Hyman ALFRED GROSSMAN is a young American novelist who appears to be less well known here than in England, where he is taken to be a satirist...
...THE LANGUAGE of Grossman's novels is a cascade of rhetoric and mimicry, parody and wit...
...In one chapter of Acrobat Admits, drinking alone, George becomes a dozen different people, one of them a pioneer woman who has outlived three husbands...
...One of them, incidentally, is a gift for titles: "Many Slippery Errors," for example, is from Napier's Mirifici Logarithmorum Canon is Descriptio...
...in Marie Beginning, the scene in which Kennan brings home Chris, the priestess of sexual enlightenment...
...In short, Grossman's novels are not amusingly satiric, like Catch-Tl, but black, bitter, sick...
...One is her kid sister, a bony adolescent with romantic dreams of becoming a call girl, surely the funniest and cruelest portrait of the premature ripening of our young since Adore Loomis in West's The Day of the Locust...
...he is simply inadequate to a good woman, unable to accept the responsibilities of maturity...
...It is terribly funny, like so much of Alfred Grossman's imaginative vision, but it is surely no laughing matter...
...The two girls are his conventional wife Sally, and an office typist named Pia Cacherini, from the Brooklyn slums, with whom he has a kind of affair during one sultry New York summer...
...Stephanie's father in the same book is a classic stage Viennese, but Charles' colleague Lazlo in Many Slippery Errors is a Hungarian to make all other Hungarians superfluous, The two page introduction to Marie Beginning, Sheldon Friberg's rhetoric of catastrophe counterpointed by Kennan's deflations, is one of the funniest swatches of prose in recent fiction...
...WRITERS&WRITING Grossman Beginning By Stanley Edgar Hyman ALFRED GROSSMAN is a young American novelist who appears to be less well known here than in England, where he is taken to be a satirist of the American way of life...
...Marie, who has no more definable purpose for her blood money and new status than "to do good," admits at the end of the novel to Kennan's charge that she is a monster...
...There are so many scandalously funny scenes that I can do no more than point out one example from each novel: in Acrobat Admits, the conversation that George and Stephanie have with "a smooth young water-mouse" of a department store clerk when they go shopping for a marriage bed...
...George and Charles are sensitive to portents of American fascism, but Marie finds herself the ideologist of Alexander's Birchite society, The American Force...
...In this desert of anarchy and disillusionment, only slum girls-Pia, Marie-still have personal ambition, and even that is corrupted and ambivalent...
...In Acrobat Admits, the young man is George, the narrator, who hates his job in an advertising agency...
...With Grossman's third novel, Marie Beginning (Doubleday, 216 pp...
...There's this guy three houses down, he's a writer and you know how they are, home all day, fell by as per usual...
...He published Acrobat Admits in 1959 and Many Slippery Errors in 1963...
...The two earlier novels are full of wild imaginative and verbal fantasies, but in Marie Beginning (as in its model, West's A Cool Million) fantasy and reality have become indistinguishable...
...Marie promptly climbs to the position of administrative assistant by combining shrewd perception with blackmail...
...Charles admits that Pia's lower class status is much of her attraction, and he is powerfully drawn to (and powerfully repelled by) the mindlessness and brutality of the "gang" she has not quite outgrown in Brooklyn...
...The fate of this effort gives Many Slippery Errors more of a resolution than can be found in Grossman's other books, and the addition of the two younger sisters (Pia's a vulgar caricature of Sally's, like a Shakespearean subplot) turns Grossman's basic triangle into a mad pentangle...
...The book's protagonist is not Kennan but Marie, and for the first time the narrative is third-person...
...Shamelessly promising marriage to Cairo and love and security to Stephanie, George is the self-portrait of a heel, but he is a heel whose principal victim is himself...
...Turning down a job with the Department of Defense, Charles makes the most articulate statement of these non-values: "I'm for ,' he says, "good old non-radioactive chaos...
...the man is Francis Kennan, a Roman Catholic addicted to Jansenism and alcohol...
...soon she is the wife of the principal stockholder and not long after that, still not 21, she is his rich widow...
...Like Cairo Joy and Stephanie, Sally and Pia exist in different worlds and never meet, but Grossman varies his formula by having Charles end up married to Sally's younger sister Kate, who has not only met Pia but has walked in on Charles misbehaving with Pia...
...4.50), it becomes clear that his talents are considerable, if not conventionally novelistic...
...In its techniques and preoccupations, Grossman's work is typical of the New American Novel, while not quite resembling anyone else's...
...Grossman appears to see novelistic form as a string on which his sparkling comic and rhetorical beads can be strung...
...When Marie, with the ruthless frankness, if none of the innocence, of Lewis Carroll's Alice, asks a politician's wife, "You catch a couple of quick boffs behind the friendly neighborhood tavern today?," she is told, "Goodness, no, those loafers it's too much like work...
...When George tells Stephanie, "I haven't given you anything...
...Plot is not the area of Grossman's strength, and his novels, as Symonds said of Kipling, tend to go up like rockets but to come down like sticks...
...Abroad, all that can be seen of our civilization is the Bomb and occupation storm troopers...
...All three novels are variations on one basic story, a triangle of two girls and a young man...
...You don't even know my name," and rushes out of her apartment and out of her life, it is one of the representative denials of our new fiction, along with the yo-yoing of Pynchon's Benny Profane and the letting go of Roth's Gabe Wallach...
...The response of Grossman's protagonists is to retreat into a private realm of detachment from every interpersonal involvement other than the sexual...
...When they are not wordlessly engaged, George preaches detachment to Stephanie: "If nobody owes you anything you can't be cheated...
...Marie Beginning is less realistic, and its characters tend to broader caricature...
...Pia briefly escapes from the slum, but then flees back to it in a decision to marry one of the gang rather than Charles...
...Many Slippery Errors begins an engrossing story of a power struggle in Charles' UN office, then forgets about it...
...their humor is the humor of the abyss, in the line from Swift to Lenny Bruce...
...at home we see a business world where shoes are marketed by deforming the feet of children, a political world consisting only of the Fanny Birch Society, and a social world of Alexander Forbes' torture chamber...
...at the end Kennan proposes to Marie but is awarded Lydia...
...Many Slippery Errors, the novel of Grossman's that I think most successful, has as its narratorprotagonist a UN demographer named Charles Kraft...
...He does really love Stephanie, and he does feel shame for his acts...
...The two girls are now Marie Betty Svobodna, another young typist from the Brooklyn slums, and Lydia Ferrucci, a young woman remarkable chiefly for her chest measurement...
...The other is an old watchman named Dicherty who lends the gang a clubhouse for reasons that he readily admits are voyeuristic, talks in a superb parody of folk wisdom, and enlists Charles in his engaging project to blow up an East River power plant as a form of self-expression...
...The pattern is varied in that here the girls are friends, roommates, and (briefly) lovers...
...Two of Pia's Brooklyn associates are magnificent comic creations...
...Acrobat Admits ends in a contrived and melodramatic murder that resolves none of its questions...
...Marie Beginning is the story of Marie's meteoric rise (or, as the title ominously suggests, its initial stages): Lydia finds Marie's brashness engaging and hires her as a secretary, although she meets none of the requirements...
...This effervescence of language is at once funny and savage, brutal, in vicious bad taste...
...George and Charles are disturbed by images of sadism, but Marie marries a real live sadist, Alexander Forbes, who does nasty things to young women in a secret torture chamber, or did until Marie caught up with him...
...Because he is bored, and because New York is a place where "young women believe anything," he gets himself simultaneously involved in pseudonymous affairs with two girls: a middle class Jewish girl named Cairo Joy Kretschmer, whom he tells he is Willard, a physicist from Boston...
...One of George's comic personalities during his solitary drinking is a nostalgic American soldier recalling the occupation of some Asiatic country, and the comedy quickly turns nightmarish and revolting...
...When Charles and Pia succeed in getting a cab late one night in Brooklyn, it is already occupied by a conjoined couple, and the newcomers settle down quietly in the unoccupied corner...
...The world view of Grossman's fiction is the truly subversive one of the New American Novel...
...and a neurotic Viennese refugee named Stephanie, whom he tells he is Hugo, a hotel clerk from Cincinnati who aspires to write epic poetry...
...The climax of Marie Beginning, in which Marie addresses a great rally of The American Force, tells them that they are fools, and thereby drives Alexander to apoplectic death, is not just bad, it is awful...
...All three work for a giant shoe company called Superior Services...
...in Many Slippery Errors, Kate's reaction when she in trudes on Charles the second time, this time catching him with Pia and her kid sister...
...That said, it must then be added that these beads do truly sparkle...
...George is an inventor of comic fantasies, a kidder and leg-puller on the order of Amis' Lucky Jim, but beneath these surface bubbles he is a disquieting masker with no fixed identity, in the tradition of Melville's The Confidence-Man...
...when he has strung enough beads he ties a knot...
Vol. 48 • June 1965 • No. 12
