Evan Connell the Ironist

...Aside from being a hollow simpleton, almost a clown, Babbitt is a cheat and a fraud...

...Part of the reason for the darker tone is doubtless that Mr...

...The only times Isaacs succeeds in any fashion are when he purposely strives to lose...

...During that apprentice period he also spent two years in Europe...

...It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her...

...With all our modern conveniences, Connell implies, we have succeeded in making life well-nigh unbearable...

...Though the much younger Lambeth displays, indeed exudes, every quality that the staid Muhlbach might be expected to dismiss as contemptible—excepting only her blonde beauty, her youthfulness, and, finally, the mystery which her world-weary insouciance seems to suggest—he is interested, then desirous, and finally enthralled...

...ambitious and valuable experiments...

...he at least partially realizes the insipidity of his existence...

...Bridge (1969...

...Following The Patriot Connell wrote Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel (1963), a work that defies 14 The American Spectator November 1978 categorization...

...For example: What has grown up to the gates of the city...

...In The Diary of a Rapist (1966) Connell limits his point of view to the mind of a psychopath, a young man named Earl Summerfield, who is as convincingly real as he is frightening to behold...

...At night I have listened for Cathedral bells, remembering Saint-Etienne...

...In Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel (1963) and Paints for a Compass Rose (1973), Connell shored fragments of history and reflection against our ruin casting them in prose lines that rang with poetry...

...Ten years later, Connell returned to the theme and structure of Mrs...

...The speaker constantly reminds us of the reception given most of the great personages of the past who sought to break out of the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic delusions adhered to by the vast majority of mankind...

...Bridge, Connell published, ten years after Notes, a companion volume, entitled Points for a Compass Rose (1973), which was nominated for the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974...

...After receiving his wings, on VE Day, he served as a flight instructor until being discharged...

...Bridge is a more somber work, and the satire has a bite that makes one wince as well as laugh...

...that they have been so considered is doubtless attributable to the typographical arrangement of the prose on the pages...

...Although he had decided to become a writer by the time he left the Navy at the age of twenty-one, he also studied painting and sculpture...

...Bridge is more self-assured than his wife, and hence more unyielding in his prejudices...

...A bad story but nevertheless told well...

...Bridge in the companion volume, Mr...

...Some express an extreme solipsism, certainly not advocated by the author...

...The problem is pretty accurately summed up in the late Thurman Arnold's Corollary to Parkinson's Law: "No new government activity can possibly be effectively carried out by any established government organization...

...The fact that we no longer subscribe to this or that view, long since exploded, by no means protects us from believing today what is equally at odds with reason or common sense...

...The answer is twelve...

...Both books, and particularly Points, read like selections from an exotic, unexpurgated Encyclopaedia Britannica—writtenby a satanic historian-scholar-philosopher intent on reminding us that yesterday's follies are the news stories of today...

...Certainly Mrs...

...But not joy...

...some remind me of Robinson Jeffers' Inhumanist, like this one, which gives the lie to the flatulent optimism of Faulkner's famous Nobel Address: Again today, prescience and afterknowledge...

...He is, in short, a juiceless fellow, with no more sap to him than is contained in the legal documents that occupy his working hours...

...Or were they hoping for another sort of daughter...

...So far two volumes have been published, The Anatomy Lesson and Other Stories (1957) and At the Crossroads (1965...

...Bridge is surely a decent enough fellow when compared with other members of the species...

...Bridge could never conceive his way of life as being anything other than it is, and his life is barren of joy...

...No one would argue, for example, that his name is as readily recognizable as that of Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal or Truman Capote, men who have parlayed playing the fool for gossip columnists and writing pornography for the masses into gate receipts that would have pleased a Caligula, or a P.T...

...Government organization charts and policy directives were never my favorite subjects, even in the days when I had to read and sometimes write them myself, although Wilson probably interprets them as well as anyone could...

...Gladness, too, fullness of heart, appreciation, and many other emotions...

...Most have called it an epic poem, or have anyway referred to it as poetry...

...Near the end of the novel, for example, he concocts, as a joke and in defiance of the art school, a pile of junk as his entry for a sculpture contest, which, to his utter amazement, he wins...

...the accretions were devastating catalogues of anomie...

...He is the perfect, albeit exaggerated, modern romantic—introspective, self-pitying, misogynous, egotistic...

...I suspect that Professor Wilson found himself, like many professors, including me, with a stack of material accumulated in his consulting work, which he hated to waste...

...While Mrs...

...If we laugh at her we still must sympathize with her predicament...

...In The Connoisseur (1974) Connell again depicts the power of obsession —this time in the story of Karl Muhlbach, a middle-aged, conservative New York insurance executive, who, while on a brief business trip to New Mexico, purchases a small (presumably pre-Columbian) figurine...

...In all of them there is playful irony, as if the author were more concerned with proving to the reader that none of us fully understands either himself or those about him than with explaining or simply reporting human behavior...

...It is only left for the author to fill in the details, which he does with compassion and humor (only an utterly humorless reader could avoid laughing out loud several times while reading the book) and with an irony that makes us wonder uneasily if we are not really laughing at ourselves...

...In the course of the two-page vignette, she grows up, meets and marries a young lawyer named Walter Bridge, and moves with him to Kansas City...

...Paul Gray briefly described the two companion sets this way: "Mrs...

...Cheerfulness, yes, and joviality, and the brief gratification of sex...

...But it is not the love of one's country which so appalls Connell...

...Some bring to mind Nietzsche's Zarathustra...

...there ought to be a glossary...

...In the opening scene, by far the most vivid in the novel, he meets Lambeth Brett at a cocktail party which both have attended for lack of an excuse to remain away...

...Professor Wilson has a lucid style, but The Investigators is not easy reading...

...Unhappily married, bored with his job at a federal employment bureau, convinced that he has been badly treated by the fates, he becomes fascinated with newspaper accounts of violent crimes...

...the paucity of convictions is in large part attributable to legal and constitutional restraints on law enforcement...

...Connell drew heavily on his experience as a pilot to write The Patriot (1960), in which the central protagonist is a bumbling cadet named Melvin Isaacs, who washes out of flight school a week before he is to graduate...

...Of what value is life," the speaker asks in Points, "if it's not woven on history's loom into other lives...

...Himself a connoisseur of early Mexican art, Connell takes his reader on a guided tour of the literature, museums, art shops, and fakeries which now occupy his protagonist to the exclusion of everything else around him —his job, his children, his acquaintances...

...He is an object lesson in the dangers of self-delusion, the leading hallmark, Connell implies, of our species...

...During their courtship Walter talks to her about Ruskin and Robert Ingersoll and reads verses from the Rubiziyeit toher...

...Bridge is forever seeking, in her ineffectual way, something in which to believe, something that might give meaning to her admittedly meaningless life...

...They are, in effect, little lessons in our lack of understanding...

...He promises to take her one day to Europe, which in fact he does years later when both are pretty much beyond wanting to go...

...It is hard to keep straight the superabundance of acronymns like COINTELPRO and G-DEP and ODALE...

...Bridge wakes one warm, windy morning in June and listens to "the wind in the trees, to the scratching of the evergreen branches against the house, and wonders if she was about to die...

...Near the end of the novel, Mrs...

...it is their effect on the reader that counts...

...Moreover, Mr...

...we are not immortal...

...He makes some modest and cautious suggestions for administrative reforms—more selection and training of agents skilled in the development and use of informers, less emphasis onnumbers, less paperwork, and so forth...

...it is no less obvious that such a talent is essentially that of circus performers and voodoo dancers...

...The KGB could probably produce really dramatic and accurate statistics, if it had any need to make a favorable impression on public opinion...

...For the DEA, does one heroin dealer equal four marijuana smugglers, or maybe six or eight...

...Mixed in with the historical or ideological "facts" are comments that defy comprehension, little puzzles for the imagination...

...Bridge (1969) spun out a series of vignettes in the Midwestern lives of their protagonists...

...The most devastating notes concern religious beliefs and the brutality of religious fanatics...

...On returning to New York with his art object, he begins a search for the past which the figurine symbolizes...

...And if the stories baffle the reader, they also disturb him and reveal the limits of his vision...

...Muhlbach is again the central character of Double Honeymoon (1976...

...The derision can also be humorous: "How many churches count among their priceless relics/the prepuce of Jesus Christ...

...For example, when local police found a stolen car that had been transported across a state line, the FBI used to chalk it up as an "FBI recovery," though the agency had done little or nothing...

...A widower, Muhlbach pays the inevitable price for having taken as his "mistress" that which he can never fully understand, let alone possess...

...In his frequently amusing remarks, the speaker seldom offers an opinion himself...

...I think that if there had not been a second World War, I might have continued that direction for at least another year or so...

...Nowhere else in our literature has the boredom of the leisure class (in this case, the upper-middle class) been more vividly portrayed...

...I have no further doubt...

...The author of the Bridge novels and the two volumes of notes and vatic meditations can afford now and again to fall short of the high standard he has set—a standard that very few of his contemporaries have so much as approached...

...When in the end he decides to return home, we feel the same dismay felt by his friends, who without realizing it had "trusted him to keep [their] youth...

...In the opening chapter, entitled "Love and Marriage" (it quickly becomes apparent that the chapter titles nearly always express a muted irony), the author introduces Mrs...

...Gray's description is apt since only in the loosest sense of the word can either of the books be considered poetry...

...As Professor Wilson rightly remarks, it is better to have law enforcers who must respect the liberties of the citizen and public opinion...

...This does not in itself prove that the agencies are inefficient...

...If critical reception were the sole criterion for determining the reputation of a writer, Evan S. Connell, Jr., would certainly be better known than he is...

...He should have turned it into a longish article, not a book...

...Perhaps the DEA should make street peddlers its prime target, on the theory that the big boys are too hard to catch (cut off the French Connection, and the hydra grows a dozen Mexican and Hong Kong heads) and that if the retail distributors are put out of business the manufacturers and wholesalers will go hungry...

...If some of them fail, as one critic put it, "because of the heavy burden of private comment and extraneous detail carried by the stream of the narrative," his best stories stick in the memory like puzzles the reader dimly recalls having tried to solve before but never quite successfully...

...Although some of the same events are described in the novels, they might be read one after the other without any sense of repetition...

...It matters little, of course, what one calls the brief notes...

...In the simplicity of the account, almost shocking in its stark recording of a few important incidents, her whole life is outlined...

...Indeed, the novel is one of the very few written since World War II that clearly deserves to be called, as it has been, a masterpiece...

...In testifying to its "growing underground reputation" George Garrett called it a poem "of the size and scope of Pound's Cantos...

...The last lines of the novel underline the fact: "He remembered enthusiasm, hope, and a kind of jubilation or exultation...

...The book is too long and sometimes a trifle repetitious...

...One of the most memorable (and didactic) passages in the novel concerns Cole's debunking of Isaacs simpleminded patriotism, which, according to Cole/Connell, is no different from the patriotic fustian common to men everywhere...

...The current rage for black humor among the sophomores of both the student body and faculty has put wind in the sails of more fourth-raters than any fad since the halcyon days of the Freudian frauds and the proletarian poseurs...

...Years later he noted, "While at Dartmouth I was planning to become a doctor, as my father is, and as his father was...

...As he did with Mrs...

...The trouble is that, as many cabinet officers and even Presidents have learned, the ways and habits of bureaucracy are nearly immovable objects...

...The tale is as old as Adam and Eve and just as predictable, and were it told by a journeyman novelist we would throw it in the fire long before the final break-up when Muhlbach is forced to see Lambeth as she is rather than as his imagination has painted her...

...Repelled by what he reads and finally convinced of the depravity of man, the somewhat fastidious and moralistic Summerfield convinces himself that only through violence can he revolt against his essential helplessness...

...Then she grew cheerful because she recalled her husband had told her to get the Lincoln waxed and polished...

...Bridge is one of the most fully realized characters in American fiction...

...Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1924, Connell attended Southwest High School before going to Dartmouth College...

...The amazing thing about the novel is that we pity and censure the characters at the same time...

...Bridge...

...Bridge (1959), Connell carefully records the life of a middle-aged woman, a wife and mother puzzled by events around her, through a long series of episodic vignettes...

...But the fact is that though his books have been widely reviewed and highly praised, he has yet to be accorded the renown of some of his contemporaries—some of them unfit to punctuate his prose...

...She did not feel ill, but she had no confidence in her life...

...Bridge does have a set of values, albeit too stuffy and narrow to accommodate normal human failings, which sustain him after a fashion, whereas Mrs...

...Later he studied under such well-known teachers of writing as Wallace Stegner at Stanford, Helen Hull at Columbia, and finally Walter Van Tilburg Clark in San Francisco (where he lived until recently moving across the bay to Sausalito...

...Why should her heart keep beating...

...That such sleight-of-hand performers possess a talent of sorts is undeniable...

...Perhaps the two agencies should be merged...

...His stories have appeared in various magazines, textbooks, and anthologies, including Prize Stories of 1949 and 1951 and Best American Short Stories of 1955 and 1957...

...Isaacs is depicted as essentially an innocent and even likeable schlemiel, forever banging his shins against the hard rock of reality...

...In both Notes and Points Connell surveys the museums, archeological digs, civilizations, and assorted triumphs and despairs of the human animal with an eye for his more outrageous antics...

...The theme is found throughout Connell's opera—man's fondness for the unreal, his eternal quest for ignes fatui...

...The Palace of the Moorish Kings," for instance, is straightforward and accessible...

...In his best fiction Connell provides us with that shared experience so important to understanding, the sine qua non of all art...

...And the verse arrangement does add, at times, to that effect...

...While the identity of the notetaker in each volume changes from section to section, he is most prominently a combination of Magus and Wandering Jew, observing and collating ancient and modern thought and acts in order to show how repetitively absurd, in the main, are human beliefs and how tawdry are most human aspirations and deeds...

...Various critics have compared Mr...

...As a child she was often on the point of inquiring, but time passed, and she never did...

...In his first published novel, Mrs...

...Instead he joined the Navy as an aviation cadet...

...Bridge: "Her first name was India—she was never able to get used to it...

...But let it go...

...he once remarked that, given different circumstances earlier in his life, he probably would have become a sculptor...

...Bridge to Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, a comparison that is apposite only to a point...

...the statistics, although scarce and unreliable (the FBI does not even calculate rates of solution or conviction), suggest that the FBI's rate ranges between 7 and 15 percent, depending on the type of case, and that the DEA' s batting average is even lower...

...Bridge—although I think Connell exaggerated when he commented in an interview on Mr...

...He is so convinced that everything can be explained rationally, so insistent that he give and be given reasons for his and his loved ones' actions, that he seems enigmatic and even quixotic to those around him...

...In broadest outline, it is the story of a man, now in middle years, who lives the dreams that he and his friends back home cherish—of travelling up and down on the earth, of never settling in a rut...

...D The American Spectator November 1978 15...

...What was there to live for...

...Bridge (1959) and Mr...

...But Professor Wilson puts his finger on some genuine inefficiencies—e.g., too many reports, too much paper-shuffling, too many inspections of the troops in the line, too much weight attached to making statistics...

...Her three children grow up, make friends, get in the kind of trouble that children have, and finally move out from under the parental wings—just as in most families...

...William H. Nolte Evan Connell the Ironist Novelist Evan Connell has yet to be accorded the renown of some of his contemporaries, because unlike Gore Vidal or Truman Capote he is neither a charlatan nor a voodoo-dancer...

...Because of their structure and, more obviously, their content, such books will never enjoy a very wide appeal, but neither can they be disregarded by discerning readers...

...It reminds me of Joseph Conrad's best short fiction—a bit wistful, softly ironic, encapsulated in an aura of romance but at bottom no more romantic than a visit to the proctologist...

...He is one of the very few novelists whose books I purchase as a matter of course...

...Bridge is never dishonest, nor does he ever knowingly injure anyone...

...An owl has flown into the garden...

...rather, it is the hypocrisy which that patriotism invariably breeds...

...we will not endure, nor prevail...

...His sexual crimes emphasize his belief that man, including himself, deserves damnation...

...No, that belonged to simpler minds...

...On the other hand, Babbitt does experience moments of joy and has dreams of changing his life...

...indeed, he often expresses the views matter-of-factly...

...Neither agency has an impressive percentage of convictions in the cases they investigate...

...The executives of the agencies are aware of the need for at least some reforms...

...Unfortunately, he insists on fashioning life to fit a mold so narrow as to leave out of account all that resists regimentation or reduction to a few simple formulae...

...By novel's end he has succeeded in contracting a disastrous marriage —disastrous because it can only compound his sense of defeat and helplessness...

...Nevertheless, The Investigators is a sane and useful essay on law enforcement, of which there are far too few...

...But not quite...

...We are void of soul...

...On the other hand, most readers will reject the insular views of Mr...

...Bridge is at the center of the novel, never far removed from any scene in the book, Connell depicts the small world she inhabits in an unforgettable manner...

...Aside from the surface parallels (Isaacs is also from Kansas City), there is little resemblance between author and fictional character...

...Few novels cast such a spell...

...With all his shortcomings, Mr...

...I can stand criminals at large more easily than I could stand the KGB...

...We meet various family friends, most of them leading lives as essentially hollow and hopeless as the life of Mrs...

...If any character in The Patriot resembles Connell, it is Patrick Cole, an extremely skeptical and aloof young The American Spectator November 1978 13 man who has learned too much from his study of history and current events to be gulled by war effort propaganda—although I think it obvious that much of what Cole knows was learned a good deal later by the author...

...Bridge's "insane bigotry...

...Nor for that matter has Connell been so lovingly embraced by academics as have the likes of Thomas Pynchon and John Hawkes...

...Barnum...

...Neither a gifted charlatan, nor an exotic, nor an obscurantist, nor a black humorist, Connell is nonetheless, as one critic remarked, "a writer whose high professionalism has not kept him from a series of increasingly William H. Nolte is professor of English literature at the University of South Carolina and author of Rock and Hawk: Robinson Jeffers and the Romantic Agony (forthcoming from University of Georgia Press...

...One critic noted that in "the unraveling of a diseased mind capable of acts which are absolute in their extremity, Connell succeeds overpoweringly—his novel is a triumph of art over case history...

...In glistening prose the "I" paraphrases the more idiotic beliefs of the ancients—not so much to reveal the absurdity of the views as to remind us of our shaky hold on reality...

...Its total effect is somewhat less than its individual parts...

...Soon after, Connell took a degree in English at Kansas, where he studied fiction writing under Ray B. West...

...But not all of Connell's tales are puzzling...

...While Muhlbach thinks of her, after a time, as one of life's "unspeakable delights and...deludes himself into thinking their affair has more meaning and potential than is possible," the reader is never in any doubt as to the outcome...

...While the novel includes some excellent scenes, particularly those about flight training, and contains some deliciously satiric passages on modern art, it is somehow misshapen, lacking any single thread of meaning or unifying purpose...

...Connell's first published work was in the short-story form...