Bad Days and Worse
WOLFF, GEOFFREY A.
Bad Days and Worse THE SADDEST SUMMER OF SAMUEL S By J. P. Donleavy Delacorte. 124 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by GEOFFREY A. WOLFF Book critic, Washington "Post"; lecturer, Maryland Institute of...
...It yields no solace...
...He is supported by money from Amsterdam from friends embarrassed to refuse him...
...Fine plays were made from the first two novels, The Ginger Man and A Singular Man, and little wonder...
...The thought chills: all the wives and bill collectors and employers wearing wooden, father-of-the-Prodigal smiles and Samuel S: Like A summer fly Waltzes out A nd wobbles In the winter...
...Chauffeured, the owner of a splendid mausoleum laid up against the bad day, he was unspeakably rich: God must have listened to Dangerfield's last plea: God's mercy On the wild Ginger Man...
...Because I'm not getting anywhere saying things...
...This novella exploits the eloquent man who won't play ball, a kind of Meursalt in the land of life...
...Thus does Samuel S' day begin: "He lived in a grey shadowy street in Vienna two flights up behind four dirt-stained never opened windows...
...There are no enduring beliefs or histories the heroes can batten upon, no objects they can shore against their ruin...
...Barefoot in the bathroom...
...Samuel S' nerves are raw...
...the Singular Man commanded like weapons to survive the assault of J.J.J., the unnamed predator who sent the warning from outside: "Dear Sir, Only for the moment are we saying nothing...
...Gee, its true," Abigail responds, "that's just, ha ha like they said you might say...
...As predators, they exercised mightily and spoke as they moved...
...Sebastian Dangerfield dreamt of money and the good green place...
...I mean look at the big international agency in this town...
...So too were Dangerfield and Smith...
...What is it Doc, no one will let me have the good jobs, the good women...
...Samuel says to his doctor: "I just want to sit here and say nothing...
...Abigail labels the hero a failure...
...Samuel S cries...
...the earlier novels were tales of hairbreadth escapes, from wives, children, creditors and circumstance...
...the hero is waiting, hungry, horny and, like Sebastian Dangerfield, squalid and poor...
...The Saddest Summer of Samuel S mines many of Donleavy's old quarries, but to a different end...
...I'm in business...
...There is the same punchy, urgent prose of the earlier novels, the same disdain for adjectival clauses and the passive voice...
...He has lingered five years in Vienna, trying to get himself straightened out by a psychiatrist who has a tic, has invested Samuel's fees in oral contraceptives and munitions and who, by book's end, announces to the hero that he can't see him anymore: "Herr S you are driving me nuts...
...The Ginger Man armed himself with wit, and a little hope, to fend off the world as Bill Collector...
...Aside from the mad doctor, there are no men in Donleavy's novella, none of the caricature buddies of the earlier books to loan to, steal from and get drunk with...
...For Samuel S, the imagination also has become inhospitable, intolerable...
...so he is...
...they shouted their accusers down...
...When Abigail, the American "bimbo," finds he is the famous Samuel S, expatriate on the lips of her compatriots like the Ginger Man is today, she says she was told he was "one of the points of interest in Europe.' "Despair is the word," Samuel S replies, and means it...
...For all of Donleavy's heroes the world is nothing other than the sum of the events and circumstances that brush their sensibilities...
...I get up on the right side of the bed every morning because I pushed the left to the wall...
...Yours etc., Present Associates" Samuel S is in flight from himself, and when laughter comes it is forced and shrill...
...His prose still describes better than that of his contemporaries the smell of dirty socks and the feel of an unmade bed...
...I mean to say, there is a big breast...
...After the opulent interlude of a New York cooperative apartment, Donleavy returns his hero to the dark world of rooming houses where the Ginger Man lived...
...Perhaps all the "theys" were, terrifyingly, right after all...
...Bare feet on a stained kitchen tablecloth, he read Fortune every month, picked his teeth and thought of $63,000 a year...
...George Smith, the Singular Man, was the Fortune fantasy realized...
...The Ginger Man, at the moment of orgasm, imagined that "the crops have stopped growing...
...Poverty was temporary, despair could be washed away with a threepenny bath and it was fun, anyway, to carry the Horatio Alger hero to his fulfillment as con man...
...lecturer, Maryland Institute of Art J. P. Donleavy's third novel is in, and the minted look has not yet rubbed off his coin...
...And after, "for the next silent minute he was the sanest man on earth, bled of his seed, rid of his mind...
...There is drunkenness in The Saddest Summer of Samuel S, but the author dwells now on the confined pain of the hangover, not the wild release of its cause...
...But the tone has shifted: Samuel S' awareness of absurdity is in jeopardy, his wild irony is beseiged: He is weary and a bit old...
...A Singular Man begins: "My name is George Smith...
...Dangerfield and George Smith were in retreat from the world...
...Samuel S stalks Vienna rather than Dublin, but the cities look the same, like Bridgeport, out where the tram makes a last stop...
...His drunkenness is an old man's...
...there is no resourcefulness in its getting, as there was in The Ginger Man, and no joy in its spending, as there was in A Singular Man...
...Donleavy has constructed a heavy story from the resources of the earlier abandoned tales...
...There is a landlady Samuel S beds, a Countess who offers him money to marry her, and a fresh American college girl he wants to marry...
...The only way out is back in...
...And these days always alone unless for accidental encounters...
...To live alone in the imagination is to be terribly vulnerable...
...He rose slowly mornings paddling off balance on bare feet to the dark stale air of his bathroom across the hall...
...he stands in the void, without past or future or planned intention, on the edge of madness...
...I sleep naked between the sheets...
...Sebastian Dangerfield and George Smith did not keep things to themselves...
...Sure 1 want to gnaw at it...
...Donleavy still knows, and can reproduce, what we hear when sounds are squeezed from the throat like pips from a grape: the staccato rattle of desperation...
...Sometimes pausing to watch the little red line of red ants disappearing down into the wall...
...He had arrived at an age when the flesh begins to go its own way and the spirit struggles to hold it back...
...The Ginger Man does not amuse him anymore, the perils of the Singular Man do not quicken his imagination...
...And there is the Donleavy drama, the sure sense of what can happen when two people are alone together in a room and they gnaw at one another with the question: Who is predator...
...Now they grow again...
...As victims, they wailed while they fled and squirmed when they were caught, retrieving madness from logic at the last possible second...
...Standing on the warm tiles where I had the management hire an artist to make a mosaic of a turkey cock with its feathers out...
...Samuel S wants to get married...
...Truth is, he wants to cop out...
...who is prey...
...it is peopled only by those they touch and those who are touched by them...
...Samuel S has lost the knack...
...This is the stuff of a good play: Extreme actions and full sentences on a stage that has no place for stillness, from men who have no patience with silence...
...Like Dangerfield and George Smith, too, Samuel S is in retreat...
...There is no refuge left in wit, nor laughter either...
Vol. 49 • March 1966 • No. 7
