Grooving the Symbol and others

...One book tells us that America is the most radical of all nations, and another (The Uses of the Present) that "America has been chosen as the place where the allegory of the present has been pushed to its defining crisis by way of instruction to the world...

...I sometimes think that the publishers are playing a practical joke on The Alternative June--September 1972 17 me alone - - Delmore Schwartz said even paranoids have enemies - - that only one of these things is ever printed...

...On the cover of The American Experience there is a multicolored clenched fist with shocking pink knuckles and pictures of famous revolutionaries and American flags inside of it...

...The Intellectual Establishmen.t (Arlington House, 1972...

...The Free Press...

...These are the seventies, so the subject of the readers is radicalism, contemporary America, contemporary living or any combination...

...The union members who make up most of the town's working population are in no mood to wait...

...I imagine that the anthologies would wish to be considered more dignified than the Superhowi because they are books, and have jackets and paper to prove it...

...Of course, he will not know how to persuade people with the force of his learning and personality, or to use words generally either to his or anyone else's advantage, but he will be able to say things like "each writer creates out of the ashes of his criticism a unique phoenix" (The Radical Vision) without smiling, which is no small feat...

...397 pp...

...We got a contract," says old Henry Stamper, the family patriarch (played superbly by Henry Fonda - - perhaps his finest rote in a long career), and as Henry sees it, a contract is sacred...

...EST, we'll still experience that quick pang of guilt, and the next morning we'll be back at our typewriters, the voice we'll always be able to hear in our minds encouraging us to give our very best...

...The allusion to Vietnam was certainly grotesque enough: an idiotic demonstration of fire power, the underlying assumption of which being that people who like contact sports like war...

...The Radical Vision has red and black cubes on a white background and Grooving the Symbol, a whirlpool of yellow, white, pink, blue and green...

...Edited by Leonard Wolf...

...But whenever the phone rings around 9-p.m...

...How much is a man's word worth to him...

...460 pp...

...So, these anthologies pack up our troubles in their peculiar kit bags, and their editors tell us that it is unpatriotic not to be revolutionary...

...In another ceremony, boys age 7-11 engaged in the finals of a national punt and pass competition, indicating by their presence that the show would always go on...

...Ten years ago the criterion was practical usefulness...

...The suicidal impulses of Lee Stamper, one of the main characters, as he grows from immaturity to manhood are barely emphasized...

...The covers are for pleasure, but the prefaces and introductions are meant to whip up our excitement...

...Nor was it the cheer leaders and children, who were harmless, nor even Carol Channing's tasteless ride in the name of Broadway, jazz and race relations...

...There is also the same intellectual fakery in the enterprise, the intimation that these anthologies represent what America means at the moment, and the same mural fakery, that they offer what the nation craves...

...The Greatest Show on Paper Grooving the Symbol Edited by Richard W. Lid...

...There was a time not long ago when anthologies were reserved for second rate poets...

...Not football...

...The Uses of the Present shows a red, white and blue montage of anti-war demonstrations, done in stripes, and Munching on Existence presents a psychedellc nightmare consisting of sphinxes, clocks, tops .arld naked people...

...The atmosphere was exhilarating, intellectual...

...Only one of the readers makes a bow to the past...

...Harper and Row...

...And when it came time to go off to college -- one to Columbia, the other to Princeton -- both boys, neither of whom had ever sat in a classroom, scored brilliantly on their entrance examinations...

...Now it may be that their places have been taken by second rate essayists, which would only be fair, but the difference is that the second rate poets were not deliberately held up by their editors (who were often the second rate poets themselves) as models of how to write poetry...

...Equipped with this sense, he may hecome, in terms of the publishers' expectations, an ideal reader, a man like the editors themselves, forever eager to jump to anybody's conclusions, and from conclusion to conclusion, and from anthology to anthology...

...What ought to be made clear is that Jerry Rubin is not going to teach anybody how to write well, that indeed, unless verve is your only standard, Jerry Rubin does not know how to write well himself...

...but most of the writers chosen both for this book and the others are ones you would expect...

...but inside, where it counts, there is much the same variety of acts, the same hodgepodge of material, even if some of it is good, the same hoopla and profR motive...

...In a country where every action is labeled a national tendency, every product is bound to be conceived of as an answer to national desires...

...It is silly...

...The kind of rugged individualist who can survive is a Stamper, whose family motto is straightforward: "Never give an inch...

...The decision to use these books is not entrusted to "youth," but to the instructors...

...It also devotes an entire paragraph to a defense of its selecting "The Dirty-Word Concept" by Lenny Bruce, a necessary defense, it suggests, because others may think the piece "'obscene...

...His family has suffered an immeasurable loss, as have his friends, his colleagues and the whole conservative movement...

...The preface to The American Experience reports that some of its contents include "'material previously deemed unsitable ---or at least unsuitable for college students," and reveals that a portion of the book has been "culled from "underground' publications...

...Most of all, there is the same end in view: the obliteration of our taste so that we will buy what we are told to by, namely the next anthology...

...as a director, Newman apparently doesn't give an inch either...

...It is that secret alone which keeps us safe from him, who, if we were to lower our defenses, would never give us an even break...

...Even when it is not cheap, their trumpeting makes it so...

...The Radical Vision: Essays for the Seventies...

...Rubin notwithstanding, the trouble with these books, it bears repeating, lies squarely with the publishers and editors, and not with the authors inside...

...How much is he willing to sacrifice to keep it...

...Yet you look at something called Grooving the Symbol or Munching on Existence, and you wonder if it isn't all a hoax...

...Edited by Robert Gliner and R.A...

...There simply is not a weak performance in the movie...

...I come to the matter at hand: five freshman readers, made up primarily of expository prose, largely indistinguishable from each other and from doze~s of such anthologies published every year...

...McGraw-Hill...

...Certainly little energy is required...

...The union is not run by a corrupt boss...

...But the Stampers are not the introspective existentialists of the modern film...

...He didn't always work, however, and conservatives, especially younger conservatives, looked forward to invitations to one of Frank's "evenings...

...In the immortal words of Ricky Nelson, they don't mess around, boy...

...These choices run in cycles...

...Frank had a way of coaxing the best out of you, so that at the end of the "evening," when the sun came up, you felt you never before had been quite so brilliant...

...l N A COUNTRY where every action is labeled a national tendency, every product ks bound to be conceived of as an answer to national desires...

...Grooving the Symbol offers Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell and Raymond Chandler...

...The program began with a military Honor Guard carrying a colossal American flag, flanked by little American flags, on to the field...

...For the moment I am thinking of last year's Superbowl -- the show more than the game -- and a national product of enormous proportions...

...Roger Rosenblatt Roger Rosenblatt is an assistant professor o] English and the Director ol the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University...

...Imagine my surprise when I read in the preface to The American Experience, "Why has such a method of compilation not been used before...

...The Meyers were an unusually close and happy family...

...Edited by Leo Hamalian and Frederick R. Karl...

...Their ways are prepared by trade book representatives who always seem to start out asking if you would like a free copy of their new text on how to write English with pinking shears and conclude by inviting you to become president of their company...

...The Cowboys won...

...For sheer appearances, these anthologies can only fairly compete with each other...

...John R. Coyne, Jr...

...He seeks to capture what life is like in an Oregon lumber town, what the incessant rain means to men living in it and what kind of people survive against the elements...

...The editor of The Uses of the Present suggests that since we have plumbed the depths of human degradation in the twentieth century, then it must be our, what, manifest destiny to lead the rest of the world out by exhibiting our wounds...

...Social ostracism, violence, threats: nothing that can be used as a weapon is avoided...

...The publishers hear "relevance," and out comes Jerry Rubin...

...This is what makes the film unique...

...When a composition program tires of using a text book on rhetoric, it abandons it, at least until things get out of hand...

...Here again, alleged wish fulfillment for the nation...

...The method behind this effort rested in the principle that if you assault the public taste with enough pizzazz enough of the time, you will eventually destroy it, after which people will buy what you tell them to buy...

...These books are gaudy and loud because they take it for granted that what we seek is glitter and noise...

...The Uses of the Present...

...625 pp...

...The Free Press...

...Munching on Existence: Contemporary American Society Through Literature...

...I would be happy to read essays by Irving Howe one after the other without a break, but not in these readers...

...they reduce it, just as I.~lis Armstrong's stature was reduced, by phony exaltation...

...Newman has made a business of playing the rugged individualist...

...I suppose one winds up saying the same thing here, because even in the places where these readers are vulgar, how long can one steam over such patent nonsense...

...It could only happen in America...

...The union will have to wait...

...There were girls galore...

...Keysey, before he went on his LSD trips, bought his flowerchild bus (not a VW, but a bus), assembled the "'merry pranksters," and roamed through the west like an encumbered Bronson, was a fine novelist...

...465 pp...

...Last week Frank Meyer died of lung cancer in his own bedroom at Woodstock, where he insisted on meeting death...

...But that wasn't it either...

...Michael Sarazin, who portrays young Lee Stamper, shows some capacity for subtlety something that he did not show in "The Flim Flam Man," when he served as George C. Scott's companion in "economic education...

...The American Communist Party in the '40s-was not the joke it is today, and defectors routinely met with fatal accidents...

...only one team was playing...

...Why, then, do the books keep coming...

...Either the publishers know these things already, in which case their violation of them is callous, or they do not know them, in which case, like other peddlars, they ought to be kept away from the school grounds...

...The American Experience: A Radical Reader...

...The setup is the thing...

...As a bonus, on its back cover The American Experience has printed photographs of its two editors, both of whom are heavily bearded to verify their contemporaneousness and one of whom is bare chested under the straps of what appears to be a weight lifter's jersey...

...Every age has its radicalism," as the man says, but not every age anthologizes it...

...If you hear a barker in all of this, so do I. There is bread in circuses, and the aim of these books, like the aim of the Superbowl, is simply to create as much razzle dazzle as possible, and fleece the customers...

...The permanent condition of American freshman English programs is chaos, and always has been, not because the subject cannot he taught, or because there are no people who are able to help someone learn to write effectively and with style, but because the frameworks of such instruction are continually shifting...

...These readers are the Superbowls of the industry...

...In The Uses o] the Present we have Lewis Mumford and Mario Savio...

...You arrived around 8 p.m., had drinks, ate a magnificent dinner, much of which was produced in Elsie Meyer's vegetable garden, and then drank and talked until the sun came up...

...Each of the anthologies contains at least some first rate pieces by first rate writers: Irving Howe, Baldwin, Pauline Kael and Tom Wolfe, as well as Cleaver and Mailer...

...Raines...

...Hurl," "Harper " and "Hombre" are obvious examples...

...Paul Newman, who directed the film, is very good as Hank Stamper, the second in command...

...The madness of the event rested in the indiscriminate and superficial lumping together of disparate items in an effort to stuff America into two hours of commercial television...

...A man's honor is bound up in it...

...I would be happy to watch Carol Channing do number after number, but not on a football field...

...What the publishers have in mind for these books is that they must vie with each other like fictional chorus girls for the one big break, which is adoption by a large, and preferably state university...

...It says, in effect, that there is nothing, including despair, which is not marketable, and nothing unavailable to jingoism, which is eminently marketable...

...Three cheers for radicalism in America (won't you buy some...

...HIS most recent book is The Impudent Snobs: Agnew vs...

...is an associate of The Alternative and is presently teaching mass communications at Arizona State University...

...But what exactly was crazy about it...

...Thomas Y. Crowell Company...

...If you teach freshman English or any college writing course, these books hit your desk on the average of two times a week...

...For every person who does something, anything, nowadays, there always seems to be another person (or the same one gone haywire) ready to package it...

...But it was a joyous intellectuality that springs from pure love of ideas, the sort of intellectuality that probably once characterized our best universities, before they became factories...

...We may be having a hell of a time, mister, but by gum, we're having it in the good old U.S.A...

...The drinks were good, the talk better...

...When it tires of using a massive anthology covering every theme and form in literature, it tries anthologies on special topics, or none at all...

...The American Experience makes a special appeal to the young on the grounds that "young people perceive differently because they have been nurtured by singular - - though sinister - - foster parents: nuclear energy, computerized technology and mass media...

...Cleaver and Mailer appear in four of the five...

...It seems silly, too, to have to tell someone that relevance does not mean topicality...

...This section goes back to Charles Chesnutt (18,511-1932...

...Today the idea is write what you care about...

...There were brass bands, and commercials for ecology and Fords...

...He allows himself to be overshadowed by the performances of Fonda and Richard Jaeckel, who plays his cousin Joe Ben (Jobie...

...If all goes as it should, the instructor will assign one of these readers, surrender his title, tear off his "strait jacket of Establishment status quo" (The Radical Vision), and groove on the symbol ad medicare...

...Everyone in town wants to see the Stampers break...

...Frank could talk about anything -war, peace, politics, Jane Austen, Dorothy Sayers (Frank was especially fond of Lord Peter Wimsey, Miss Sayers' detective, because Wimsey, like Frank, took his degree at Balliol College, Oxford), Plato, Gibbon, pro football, baseball...

...And there is something depressing and ominous in the practice of taking whatever is currently written or spoken, and turning it into an ad for itself...

...I suppose the editors suppose that if an instructor is old and ioolish enough, he will naturally wish to appear young, because "'young people perceive differently," and therefore regard these readers as a pair of bell bottoms...

...Before the Trip Sometimes a Great Notion ~# ~ OMETIMES A GREAT NOTION" is a stunning masterpiece of a film...

...The viewer will not grasp the significance of the title, however, which I assume is derived from Leadbelly's "Goodnight, Irene": "Sometimes I have a great notion to jump into the river and drown...

...Leroi Jones and Malcolm X appear in three...

...It was, of course, insanity of the most dazzling order and were it not for the diversion of the game, would have been recognized as one of the extravaganzas of the decade...

...Not patriotism, although the particular show of patriotism was garish and ridiculous...

...At half time there was a "tribute" to Louis Armstrong, with Carol Channing, bright as alahastor, riding a float which circled the playing area to the tune of "Hello Dolly," or as it was, "Hello Louis...

...But you find yourself cheering for the Stampers 18 The Alternative June--September 1972...

...I open all the packages, usually from the wrong end, because I cannot resist a gift...

...The Radical Vision presents Sartre and Leslie Fiedler...

...The family fights more than the Oregon landscape...

...Anyone who seriously believes that he should align his life with fresh ideas rather than wRh received tradition, or who thinks that he is going to learn to write by staring at Kenneth Patchen's picture-poem (Munching on Existence), deserves to be shilled...

...Every age has its radicalism," say the editors of The Radical Vision, "'yet, surely, ours is the most radical in recent times, and America is the most radical of all nations...

...Even if a teacher tries one of them once, the odds are that he will not do it again...

...It fights the lumber union...

...604 pp...

...If one has a thematic brainstorm, as is the case with our five books here, all one needs is an editor with a couple of months free time...

...The town is suffering from a crippling strike, but the Stampers are breaking it...

...But this time his individual_9 ism has something substantial as its opposition: a labor union...

...Grooving the Symbol adds an item on "Symbol and Myth," and Munching on Existence throws in "'Five Poems," but otherwise they all follow a practically identical organizational pattern...

...Wilde once said of a performance of Hamlet that it was funny without being vulgar...

...The trick is simply to remember to be new and first, as these books have, to claim relevance and urgency, as these books do, and to imply to the college freshman that without the fop lowing collection of essays and interviews, he will not only forfeit instruction in the written word, but that he will be out of things generally, a would-be suicide...

...A clever showman usually knows what it is we care about, but he rarely knows why or how we care...

...The movie, like the book, centers around this overriding theme: Will the Stampers finally yield that crucial inch...

...There's no radicalism like show radicalism...

...When the grey puffs of packing material clear, I hold in my hands the brightest colors and the catchiest titles in the western world, and a genuine United States phenomenon...

...They have as much to do with the teaching of writing as Fords have to do with national pride...

...The books keep coming because nobody tells them to stop...

...Elsie, one of the world's most gracious ladies, doubled as Frank's business manager and the teacher of their two sons, Gene and John, both of whom received their grammar school and high school educations at home...

...Still, as Melville and others have demonstrated, there is something scary about anything or anyone who is out to con you...

...It captures the spirR of Ken Keysey's massive novel without bogging down in the novel's numerous subplots and psychological ruminations...

...Frank slept by day and worked by night, a habit acquired during the years after his break with the Communist Party when he sat up all night with a gun...

...In The American Experience, Marshall McLuhan and Timothy ~ a r y . Every reader has its own section on the arts, on education (in Munching on Existence this is called _9 'The Zoo"), on minorities or specifically on blacks, on the environment, on the young, on identity (in Grooving the Symbol, called "The Gap") and on the population explosion...

...Edited by Harold Jaffe and John Tytell...

...Simultaneously a group of Phantom Jets boomed in formation over Tulane Stadium and viewers were asked to say a silent prayer for our P.O.W.s in Southeast Asia...

...The President phoned, offering congratulations, conuolences anO strategy for the future...

...But there is another element here which distinguishes these particular circuses from the run of the mill, and gives them a unique character...

...For all my personal antipathy to some of the notions presented in these books, both in terms of their interior worthlessness and as models of good writing, there is a great deal of value to many of them, value which is undermined by the style of these collections...

...In Grooving The Symbol there is a section covering "'Some Ancestors: "Old and New" so called because "'to speak of ancestors as both "old' and new' correctly suggests that the names have been chosen in terms of present relevance...

...it is made up of local folks who are very much like the fellow next door...

...To boast of such things is less absurd than it is cynical...

...When a student is told that what he is about to get is "uncompromisingly relevant" (The American Experience) he should know that all he is really going to get is a carnival sense of American culture, with footnotes for his sighs...

...It seems silly to have to say that the fact that a man may be brimming with indignation does not mean that he knows how to write, or to think, for that matter...

...And those of us who are procrastinators, as most writers tend to be, will continue to procrastinate...

...In a sense, this is what the Superbowl was saying with its Phamtom Jets and prayer for the P.O.W.s - - that we may not be having such a good war after all, but by gum, by jingo, it's all ours...

...These books do not merely simplify "the radical vision...

...they are one tough bunch of S.O.B.s...

...As for the appeal to youth, it is just as insincere...

...To package the product does not merely mean to prepare it for sale, but to get rid of it as well, which is what these readers do, whether they know it or not, and one suspects that they know it...

...Still, it is difficult to believe that anybody really uses or even reads these books...

...The Radical Vision is specifically intended "for students willing to align their lives with fresh ideas rather than with received tradition...

...Evidently the rewards in this system are so huge that it is worth the publishers' while to turn out fifty misses for a single hit...

...Despite their modernity, however, the books display a great variety of authors...

...Munching on Exstence, which announces that its pur16 The Alternative June--September 1972 pose is "to develop a sense of the quality of American life today," includes in its selections a play by Harold Pinter and an essay by Lionel Trilling written in 1943...

...The material is ready made, and so is the market...

...You know you are not a fool, yet there are those who would like to prove that you are, who will wave flags or burn them if they think that is what you want, or hold a parade, or cry "alienation," or display a pretty girl or mourn a dead one...