In Our Time
Gavin, William F.
She is against them. Apparently she feels that women should have as little to do with men as with an)., other carcinogenic substance. Madame Abzug is one of those feminists whose apparent...
...But Hoffer knows what he is doing...
...Not bad for five senWilliam F. Gavin, author o f Street Corner Conservative, is a speechwriter for Senator James Buckley...
...It wasn't a very pleasant voice, but it was his own and he didn't use it to please us, either by fashionably-acceptable denunciation or by flag-waving...
...Chances are that had my work been of absorbing interest I could not have done any thinking and composing on the company's time or even on my own time after returning from work...
...He takes a commonplace of American, indeed, of modern, thought--dull work leads to dull minds...
...But during fifty years as a workingman, I have found dull routine compatible with an active mind...
...Fundamentally, Madame Abzug is a hater...
...The "aesthetic" approach is not possible...
...Moreover, Hoffer is a model of integrity, and, through the force of his character, he has made a great contribution to American intellectual life...
...An emanation of the spirit and of the miraculous...
...It's "composing sentences" that makes all the difference between daydreaming and philosophizing...
...It is a curious phenomenon that intellectuals--and surely Hoffer has earned that title, no mattei" how offensive he might find it--either praise workingmen too much or too little...
...He does not call for a federal program to eradicate boredom or ask that Nancy Hanks or Ronald Berman endow some yahoo with tax money in order to interpret or investigate the causes of creativity...
...All such rogues imperiled our liberties, and the pundits were quick to blow tile whistle on them...
...Have we a new version of' the Bible here--with God resurrected to become man, worshiping his own mortality in a chant of dreams...
...It is flatulent, shapeless, dead writing...
...This is the kind of thing a speechwriter might crank out for his boss to use when he addresses the Girl Scouts convention...
...Informed by the quackery of the more freakish areas of New York, inflamed by a hatred of reality, and yearning for the tidiness of some Marxist paradise, she is shouting her way into a uniqae respectability...
...He survived the praise of Dwight Eisenhower, the fatuous inanities of Sevareid, the adulation of conservatives who think that his hard line toward rioters makes him a charter member of the Right-Wing-Hit-'em-WhereIt-Hurts Society, and the admiration of those on the Left who feel that any man who is critical of religious belief (as Holler was in The True Believer) can't be all bad...
...It is literature in the grand tradition of Gogol, Babel, Kafka, Ionesco, a bold repudiation of the standard-plotted, sloganful fiction of Red Russia...
...It has been Hoffer's misfortune to have been admired by those incapable of The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 35 understanding him or who want him to fit into some category...
...But here all is directness...
...Here we have the Hoffer who became a celebrity in the 1960s after his television appearances with Eric Sevareid...
...He is attuned to the convolutions of grass, to falling snow ("the very nerves can feel it snowing"), the scintillating chords of a Mozart quintet, the mesmerizing suspense of a Matisse drawing left unfinished...
...Hoffer has even survived his own unfortunate tendencies to sound, at times, like everybody's favorite crank or a likeable eccentric and to exaggerate the virtues of the common man...
...Or: The good thing about this place is that a man feels he is nothing but a naked soul...
...BOOK REVIEW In Our Time by Eric Hoffer / Harper & Row / $7.95 William F. Gavin Perhaps the best way to show the difficulties Eric Hoffer's new book presents to a reviewer who admires his work is to quote two passages...
...A Voice from the Chorus applies this stylistic approach to the author's own experience in the camps...
...Yet mere art it is not...
...Against an antiphonal chant of prisoners' utterances--at times absurd, amusing, or grotesque, but always genuine--Sinyavsky's solo is both accompaniment and contrast...
...Thus Sinyavsky yearns "to be truthful with the aid of the absurd and the fantastic," ready to observe "the metamorphoses of God that take place before our very eyes, the miraculous transformations of His entrails and His cerebral convolutions...
...This is Hoffer at his best...
...In his essay on Socialist Realism published in the French magazine Esprit in 1959, Sinyavsky had outlined his credo: Right now I put my hope in a phantasmagoric art, with hypotheses instead of a Purpose, an art in which the grotesque will replace realistic descriptions of ordinary life...
...The man who wrote The True Believer had a voice...
...Instead of the thinker who stunned the intellectuals with his style and stoic indifference in The True Believer, we have the "personality," the "character," the Hoffer whose excited outbursts and facial contortions made him an instant (if short-lived) television celebrity...
...His style suggests that he wouldn't be offended if we reject his insights...
...Thinking isn't enough...
...The first passage appears in a chapter entitled "Dull Work": It may be true that work on the assembly line dulls the faculties and empties the mind, the cure only being fewer hours of work at higher pay...
...While sharing Solzhenitsyn's abhorrence of a Socialist fiction antithetic to sincerity and human experience, as well as his need for "literary experiments," Sinyavsky takes the option, of allegory...
...How can the same man have written both these passages...
...Describing women as wild mermaids, a dictator as a magician who transforms putrid water into vodka, one's true self as literally another person--such is the stuff of Sinyavsky's nightmare, true to the life of terrified citizens whose wives become dehumanized in crowded shared kitchens, whose leaders ask them to see luxury in misery, whose very selves become strangers...
...Theatre...
...What is needed is Eric Hoffer, the real Eric Hoffer, the lone gun of American intellectual life...
...What has this tough-minded old man, this classic loner to do with uplift or warnings...
...Sinyavsky's parables reveal the miraculous, the spirit in its magical nakedness laughing at its own naughty flights into truth parading as fantasy...
...In Conrad's famous phrase, Hoffer only wants to make us see...
...This is a typically Hoffer touch...
...Art is always secondary, allegorical...
...Here we have Foxy Grandpa telling us things are turning out all right, even if they seem to be wrong...
...Nowhere is the life of the spirit lived at such a pitch, with such zest, as here, on the edge of the world...
...I can still savor the joy I used to derive from the fact that while doing dull, repetitive work on the waterfront, I could talk with my partners and compose sentences in the back of my mind, all at the same time...
...There's no sign of the hard-edged Hoffer style or of the subtle mind behind that style...
...For Hoffer always whets his reader's curiosity, even when he dares to say the obvious...
...BOOK REVIEW A Voice from the Chorus by Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) / Farrar, Straus and Giroux / $10 Juliana G. Pilon It is tempting to descrtbe A Votcefrom the Chorus as pure art: this collection of aphorisms, selected from letters Andrei Sinyavsky wrote to his wife during his seven-year imprisonment in a Gulag camp, is a garden of exotic petals...
...He does not succumb to that most powerful temptat i o n - t o "offer solutions...
...Hoffer has attacked them quite effectively...
...After a!l, America is not new to beiiicose wowsei...
...And what are these metamorphoses if not irony, myth, satire...
...the aforementioned Padre Coughlin comes from a long line, and more recently we have witnessed the tirades of Governor Wallace...
...This comes as a surprise...
...36 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976...
...By the last sentence in the paragraph, he has taken away all of our certainties about the evil effects of dull work and has even hinted that leisure, that most sacred of American institutions, may not be all it's cracked up to be...
...That Madame Abzug has flourished and not even attracted a frail tweet is disquieting and renders her iess amusing than would otherwise have been the case...
...Life seemed glorious...
...America has a super-abundance of professional doom-shouters who rake in large sums for writing and lecturing about the depravity of the American life style, the decline of the West, and other subjects that the middle class loves to wallow in...
...Ideas are not culled from books, but grow out of a man's very bones...
...Revealing a profound understanding of literary criticism, of psychology and folklore, of man and death, these fragments come alive--and with a simplicity that infuses only the finest of man's gropings for the sublime...
...Throughout the book he is acutely aware of the sounds of words, the meanings of unusual syntactical constructions, the beauty of all language, the plasticity of camp slang...
...I don't know of another American writer who could pull it off...
...No, Hoffer merely strolls around the subject of dull work, and points out things that most of us have never seen...
...Surrealism alone and not literal photography of sentiment will capture such madness...
...Are American pundits so far gone in their selfloathing that they can no Ior.,ge_r iemonstrate against a hater who would repress their basic freedoms and extirpate their saucy way of life...
...Interesting," as every teacher of writing knows, is a weak word--but it is precisely the word for Hoffer...
...Madame Abzug is one of those feminists whose apparent enthusiasm for women derives from a basic hatred of mere, though from all the available evidence she does not like women all that much either...
...What Sinyavsky says of the Gospels (a book he kept hidden in his boot throughout his imprisonment, defying prohibitions against it) applies also to his own creation: Feeling is conveyed directly...
...The second quotation is taken from a chapter entitled "Rebirth": " I f we accept the challenge, the common effort and the common vision will unite us as never before, and America will again become a land of hope as a whole nation watches the gradual cleaning up of a continent and the progress made in the laboratories...
...He then turns the commonplace on its head and shows us that dull work can provide the opportunity to "compose sentences," i.e., not only to think, but to refine and cut and edit thoughts into sentences...
...In "Rebirth," however, Hoffer takes up the question of the state of the nation, a question that begs for an "answer...
...And so he is: Sinyavsky proves it...
...But we also have more than enough professional optimists who tell us either that things are good, or, if they are bad, that it's because of those other guys or because we' re not following good advice...
...tences...
...Most of us would settle (if we managed to gain insight in the first place) for writing "Opportunity to think...
...I am at a loss to conclude anything else...
...The book is itself a testimony, a plea of "guilty" to the charges that brought Sinyavsky to his fate in 1966: writing in a spirit alien to Soviet literature--desecrating, in short, the Idols of the Communist Juliana G. Pilon teaches philosophy at the University of Chicago and is a research assistant at Michael Reese Hospital...
...I think it might be explained by the fact that the first quotation, about work, appeared in a chapter in which Hoffer is analyzing, dissecting, brooding over his subject...
...It is easier to conceive the world as an allegory than this book...
...In Our Time is a collection of 32 brief essays (if three-page pieces can be called essays) dealing with a wide range of topics: the middle class and its strengths and weaknesses, the need for each human being to master a skill, the necessity for those without power to organize, the fallacy of black studies programs--on each, Hoffer has something interesting to say...
...The parables have only an auxiliary role-to help us in our lack of understanding...
...In colorful, coarse language, in metaphor and proverb, the prisoners convey their emotions most vividly: I have so much anger in me that if you were to lay me on some ice it would thaw to a depth of four feet...
...In Our Time, despite a few lapses into banality, bears the Hoffer imprint throughout and therefore deserves a wide audience...
...The prison camp is a training ground for the keenest perception and the highest vitality: Here people think and philosophize more intensely than in the world of scholarship and science...
...His books had been published in the West under the pseudonym "Tertz" for almost a decade, stunning the readership with wild, ironical, brilliant excursions into surrealism...
Vol. 10 • October 1976 • No. 1
