Editorial / Worst Book of the Year
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL - Robert Lowell Coover is a writer who, for a man of middle years, invests an unusual number of his waking hours thinking about underpants. And so very intellectual are the thoughts...
...For Teggart this called for eschewal of unilinear narrative, single time-frame, and the artificial forcing of the diverse and plural into the unitary...
...who, but the willing victims of faculty meetings and departmental cocktail parties, would gobble up his message that human existence is bizarre, ghastly, and absurd...
...He didn't say anything, but there was something suggesting itself to me that if I was going to continue reading such tripe, I had best leave it outside his office...
...Somewhere at this very hour Coover doubtless is dreaming up new philosophical metaphors—why not a U.S...
...In my own Social Change and History, dedicated to Teggart, I have, I think successfully, brought out the true presuppositions and assumptions of our social evolutionists, so-called, but my book would not have been possible without Teggart's powerful, but long-neglected, critical insights...
...more specifically, abandoning the conventional format of the writing of history—which he declared a form of art, like any narrative "story," irrespective of its claimed objectivity or its grounding in documents and observations—and using the empirical materials of history in ways akin to the operations of scientists...
...The first time I ever visited him in his office I had my week's Nation and New Republic in hand...
...Coover will receive Robbins' complete works in handsome, pre-owned, paperbound volumes...
...Doctorow become capable of believing almost any elaborate conspiracy so long as it is not directly connected with the John Birch Society...
...but they had a fearsome impact on me, causing great freshets of perspiration to run from my brow and putting an unexpected curl in my hair...
...In the New Republic a genuine teacher of contemporary fiction from the University of Cincinnati hailed it as "a major achievement of conscience and imagination...
...And finally, in a scene that bids fair to become one of the most pondered passages in American literature, Uncle Sam anoints Richard Nixon for the presidency by sodomizing him...
...But it is the art of a bygone era...
...Not only is such a thesis girlishly theatrical, it is unoriginal...
...This is art...
...The Public Burning is momentous in its failure...
...Perhaps a few personal notes on this remarkable mind are in order, by way of conclusion...
...The faithful did everything they could to salvage it...
...As winner of the coveted Harold Robbins Award for Worst Book of the Year, Mr...
...Radical though he was in the areas of theory and method in history and the social sciences, he was a full-blown conservative in ideological-political matters...
...Loose Change by Sara Davidson Prima facie evidence against ever sending the enduring flapper to college at the University of California, Berkeley...
...He was, as I trust I have made evident in this review, a great teacher in all respects...
...Oh yes, he liked what I brought to him of Mencken...
...EDITORIAL Robert Lowell Coover is a writer who, for a man of middle years, invests an unusual number of his waking hours thinking about underpants...
...Coover is—as Joseph Epstein recently noted—an ardent member of the adversary culture, and so his absorption with what admirers call "the cosmic questions" has about it a ludicrous predictability and an invincible ignorance...
...but this notwithstanding, he was among the very first at Berkeley to recognize the threat Hitler posed to Western freedom, and he used to rage at the Chamberlains and Daladiers in Europe for not sensing immediately what Hitler was actually about...
...More positively, it called, in his view, for history regarded as the comparative study of events, institutions, cultures, such study to be undertaken with a distinct question or problem in mind that permitted the kinds of answers which could be found in such disciplines as geology, biology, and other sciences...
...Teggart's passion was making a science of history...
...He voted regularly, but it was to vote against, not for, someone...
...How these scenes of what is real might affect other readers I cannot say...
...He feared the New Deal and its centralizing, monopolizing impact upon American society, and voted resolutely against FDR...
...The image of Nixon amorously fondling the Marxist-Leninist Beelzebub banished forever the lingering admiration I held for our 37th president...
...Thought-provoking is the scene in which Vice President Richard Nixon secretes himself in Ethel Rosenberg's cell for an amorous tryst shortly before 2,000 volts of electricity make her a saint...
...Some two thousand words are devoted to this metaphysical exchange, and from the finely-detailed sketch of the impaled Nixon one can only conclude that the scene is the product of years of firsthand research by the author...
...One of his obsessing interests was the far-flung eruptions, all in the sixth century B.C., of the religions associated with the names of Zoroaster in Persia, Lao-tze and Confucius in China, Mahavira (founder of Jainism) and Buddha in India, the prophets Ezekiel and Second Isaiah in Judea, Thales in Ionia, and Pythagoras in southern Italy...
...The reader will also find a much more compact and forthright statement of the differentiations among events, small and large, short and long, and their diverse impacts in Teggart's Theory of History, published half a century ago, than in the tortured, prolix passages which we find in Braudel and others of his French school...
...Coover's honor to be held at the Women's Christian Temperance Union drinking fountain on the west portico of the Monroe County Courthouse in Bloomington, Indiana...
...All the adversary culture's advanced values inhere throughout Coover's most recent book, The Public Burning, an unspeakably dreary 534-page scow of a novel that shudders along propelled by at least three inverted insights: a) the Rosenbergs were innocent of espionage and only guilty of being quite the nicest Americans since Sacco and Vanzetti...
...What of a Supreme Court Justice with incurable flatulence?—but he dreams in obscurity...
...He has dared to peer beyond, and as the Coover ouvre unfolds we see him assiduously weighing the meaning of armpits, halitosis, nocturnal emissions, and every imaginable aspect of the toilet stool—matters too long shunned by the nation's less sophisticated, less percipient writers...
...Professor Thomas R. Edwards hollered from the New York Times Book Review that the wreck was actually "an extraordinary act of moral passion...
...I am glad to say that I quit cold-turkey within the year...
...As with so many of the modern academic novelists Coover prides himself not only as a prober of the "cosmic questions," but also as a theoretician of the novel...
...namely: unreason, intolerance, coercion, and cultural primitivism, plus anti-antiCommunism and anti-Americanism...
...I had the sense that he regarded all politicians (and the overwhelming majority of university administrators, paid and unpaid) as fools...
...I think, though, that he despised liberals— the kind I was, I fear, when first I began to study and work under him—more than outandout radicals...
...He was not, however ideologically inclined, much less politically absorbed...
...q with the Greeks, received masterful statement by St...
...THE HAROLD ROBBINS AWARD The Public Burning by Robert Coover HONORABLE MENTION The Rage of Edmund Burke by Isaac Kramnick Edmund Burke made comprehensible for readers of Psychology Today and other collectors of arcane gossip...
...But the musky fragrance of moral passion, conscience, and imagination could not arouse the old clientele...
...Here, in areas once thought to be the special preserve of hospital orderlies and washroom attendants, Coover finds occasion for historical, philosophical, political, and even theological statement...
...Augustine, and succeeded in becoming the master-idea of the social sciences in the 19th and much of the 20th centuries...
...and c) Russian Communism in the early 1950s was harmless if indeed it even existed...
...This past summer, midst huge anticipation in the literary world, The Public Burning slid down the ways, steamed out into the channel, and sank...
...Coover is one of those academically inclined novelists who roost on or near college campuses, attentively gathering preposterous theories from crank pedants and transforming them into literature...from fiction to fiction, the lifecycle of an ideologue's truths...
...His search for an answer took him across Asia to China, its Great Wall and its changing political systems...
...Theory of History is an absorbing treatment of the theoretical foundations of conventional history on the one hand and, on the other, of the study of social change in the social sciences...
...Teggart's own effort at a scientific study of historical materials resulted in his notable Rome and China, a work that deals in comparative fashion, working from hypotheses to be tested, with the successive assaults upon and then invasions of Rome by the barbarian peoples...
...And so very intellectual are the thoughts underpants inspire in him that many prominent universities pay him hard cash to take up residence and think some more...
...After Solzhenitsyn and Cambodia, America-loathing and anti-Communist(continued on page 37) 4 The American Spectator January 1978 lades of such distinguished historians as Paxson, Shotwell, and Robinson...
...He had a genuine hatred of war and the military, believing them to be the most destructive forces, historically, upon civil society, especially family and local community...
...I am transformed...
...Explain that patterning in time over the whole Eurasian continent, he used to say, and you will have at long last THE WORST BOOK OF THE YEAR (continued from page 4) loathing are not such alluring literary props...
...His brilliant insights and conceptual uncoverings are as relevant today—and as badly needed—as when he first published them...
...Whole armies of hacks would have to be exterminated before readers would turn to him...
...His is a busy afflatus, and never could elucidating the significance of American underpants satisfy his genius...
...Isaac Kramnick is at one with Rona Barrett...
...What the Annales group in Paris today criticizes as l'histoire ivenementielle was dealt with critically by Teggart as early as 1910 in a fascinating article in the American Historical Review, and at greater length in the two works contained in this volume...
...Next to Miss Davidson, Jayne Mansfield was a suave genius...
...This is the stance that so idiotizes modern novelists that men like Coover and E.L...
...All the trendy moonshine born of the bogus learning of sociologists, psychologists, and other certified poseurs turns up in Coover...
...His special interest was the idea of progress, and I believe his course on the subject (commencing in 1919 in his own newly-created department) was the first in this country...
...Past Robbins Laureates Theodore White, Peter Schrag, and Lillian Hellman head the list of invited dignitaries...
...Hence the great emphasis in The Processes of History (the second of the two works in this volume) upon the necessary formulation of guiding problems and tentative hypotheses, upon the kinds of forces involved in the rise of political kingdoms and their conflicts with kinship systems (the historical struggle between family and state was a kind of paradigm in Teggart's comparative-institutional studies), and upon the great significance of migrations and invasions in creating the conditions under which old, rigid systems of thought were dissolved, making possible the rise of new ones...
...I saw more of him than anyone save members of his immediate family during the years 1936-43, and I can testify that he and Edmund Burke are, if there is a heaven, close by each other...
...Senator undone by bushy nose hair...
...Technically flawed, intellectually unserviceable, stupefyingly boring, it is prodigiously worthy of the 1977 Harold Robbins Award for the worst book of the year...
...b) the villainous United States government framed these two patriots as "expiatory victims of the cold war...
...Life with the profs and the collegians apparently appeals to Coover, for he has spent most of his adult years in such challenging environs as Wisconsin State University, in dynamic Superior, Wisconsin, where he served as writer in residence and, if I know my fish, kept the local juvenile authorities hopping...
...As his Theory of History in this volume demonstrates, he was at home in the history of ideas in Western civilization...
...For me Times Square will never seem quite the same...
...His complicated masterpieces are for progressives of a decidedly academic inclination...
...Coover depicts Russian Communism as "The Phantom," a gimcrack term evincing his artistic indebtedness to comic books and TV...
...Louis, Missouri, where he has reigned as brooder in residence...
...Teggart was much more than the comparative historian...
...The award will be presented at a ceremony in Mr...
...Wjhen something hits us strong enough,it means it's something real," he is quoted as having said in Critique magazine, and in The Public Burning he wallops his readers with one colossal reality after another...
...Once boomed as an intelligently critical stance toward western bourgeois society, the adversary culture has in recent decades settled into a smug orthodoxy celebrating values antithetical to bourgeois society, Worst Book of the Year R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Today the profit margins are down for 1960s barbarism and for that easy nihilism so frequently manufactured by holders of Guggenheim Fellowships and Rockefeller Foundation grants...
...Henceforth I shall furtively sniff every passing breeze for one last whiff of the noble Ethel, hoping always not to mistake her for that elephant manure...
...And, bearing in mind Coover's flapbrought the science, rather than the Thucydides-formed art, of history into being...
...q The American Spectator January 1978 37...
...Yet Coover spouts it bravely in books, in plays, and at places like Bard College and Washington University in St...
...Those who find themselves impressed by the recent renascence of evolutionary sociology, associated with the names of Talcott Parsons, Robert Bellah, and Gerhard Lenski, among others, owe it to themselves to read Teggart's chapters on the subject in his Theory of History...
...Socialism in any and all its forms, he used to assure me, was only absolute political power extended through handouts into every corner and crevice of society...
...Then, too, there is the dramatic moment when members of the Supreme Court struggle through voluptuous mounds of elephant droppings en route to the Times Square execution of Ethel and her mate...
...Finally, Teggart was, to my knowledge, the first to recognize that under the pretentious terminology of "social evolution" and "social development" in the 19th and 20th centuries lay nothing in fact derived from the scientific-biological study of evolution, but rather spin-offs of the idea, the philosophy, of progress that had begun doodle about Communism, I should like very much to have the award presented to him by Andrei Sakharov, if only we could spring him from The Phantom's maw...
...Thus Coover's audience is limited...
Vol. 11 • January 1978 • No. 3
