Sometimes a Great Notion
North, Gary
me alone - - Delmore Schwartz said even paranoids have enemies - - that only one of these things is ever printed. Even if a teacher tries one of them once, the odds are that he will not do...
...An English teacher of my acquaintance regards them generously as heavily plot-oriented...
...How much is he willing to sacrifice to keep it...
...Both of these novels sold so well, received such publicity and were so original in concept that they may be considered, respectively, as archetypes of the two different kinds of political novels...
...The suicidal impulses of Lee Stamper, one of the main characters, as he grows from immaturity to manhood are barely emphasized...
...I would be happy to watch Carol Channing do number after number, but not on a football field...
...That is their virtue and their sin...
...When it finally comes, don't be surprised if the demure little grandmother seated behind you shouts, "Lay in on them, Hankus !" What amuses me most, however, is the genuine, authentic, rustic- cabin which serves as the Stampers' dwelling...
...When the entire book is based on a silly notion, the author must work hard to make it turn out to the reader's satisfaction...
...Gary North Gary North is on the staff of the Foundation for Economic Education...
...Other examples: The Last Hurrah (which discloses the machinations involved in holding on to public office), The Election, The 4S0, The Image Makers, and the other Aller Dmry novels in the A&C series...
...The Machiavellian novels have common characteristics, which is a euphemistic way of saying that they share common flaws...
...The novel as an art form, the novel as literature in the hristotelian sense, is in trouble, bat it always has been...
...Likewise: Vanished asks the reader to believe that a presidential adviser can disappear on the ninth hole of the Burning Tree Golf Course without the President, the FBI or the CIA knowing or being able to discover what happened to him...
...Still, as Melville and others have demonstrated, there is something scary about anything or anyone who is out to con you...
...These choices run in cycles...
...The union members who make up most of the town's working population are in no mood to wait...
...To start with, the conspiracy novels are on the whole pretty bad books...
...A man's honor is bound up in it...
...The books keep coming because nobody tells them to stop...
...The union will have to wait...
...It says, in short, that collective coercion is not preferable to family solidarity and hard work...
...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...
...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...
...The Jesus Factor, for example, is based on the idea that the atom bomb really doesn't work...
...Perhaps the population explosion applies as much to fictional characters as it does to human beings...
...It is not forced...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Yet new forms of fictional treatment are in constant development, regardless of their literary merit...
...The town is suffering from a crippling strike, but the Stampers are breaking it...
...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...
...Neat, huh...
...Of the latter group, one relatively recent arrival on the fictional scene has been the political novel...
...It seems silly, too, to have to tell someone that relevance does not mean topicality...
...It presents the case for the productive contract as against the contract to restrict production by violence...
...I would be happy to read essays by Irving Howe one after the other without a break, but not in these readers...
...A clever showman usually knows what it is we care about, but he rarely knows why or how we care...
...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...
...Ten years ago the criterion was practical usefulness...
...The founding father of this particular subspecies was Seven Days in May...
...Wilde once said of a performance of Hamlet that it was funny without being vulgar...
...Everyone in town wants to see the Stampers break...
...Personally, I am a fanatical follower of the political novel...
...The movie, like the book, centers around this overriding theme: Will the Stampers finally yield that crucial inch...
...they are one tough bunch of S.O.B.s...
...The second group, which intrigues me more, is the Machiavellian novel, in which a conspiracy is 'uncovered or unravelled or revealed, shocking us with the final relevation...
...Rubin notwithstanding, the trouble with these books, it bears repeating, lies squarely with the publishers and editors, and not with the authors inside...
...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...
...First, the story line is usually based on an improbable hypothesis...
...These readers are the Superbowls of the industry...
...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...
...It is silly...
...They have as much to do with the teaching of writing as Fords have to do with national pride...
...The kind of rugged individualist who can survive is a Stamper, whose family motto is straightforward: "Never give an inch...
...In the last thirty years we have seen only a few good novels emerge from the clutter of the best-seller lists, among them Ralph Ellisen's Invisible Man, Vladimir Nobkov's Lolita, and, perhaps, Saul Bellow's Mr...
...Others, operating under the imperative of Gresham's Law, have not been worth seriously bothering about...
...It cost well over $100,000 to build...
...There simply is not a weak performance in the movie...
...Paul Newman, who directed the film, is very good as Hank Stamper, the second in command...
...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...
...I Single Copy...
...25 I | ren copies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $2.00 i |Twenty-five copies . . . . i . . . . . . . . . $4.00 I [Fifty, copies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $7.00 i |Name | Address I ! IBox m, Bloomington, Indiana 474;1 I I - - - - - - _ _ _ _ _ _ _ l The Alternative June--September 1972 19...
...Second, the authors, having committed themselves to an absurd idea, depend Introduce Your Friends to The Alternative We have found that the best way to get subscribers is to give someone a sample copy of The Alternative, allow them to read it and then urge them to subscribe...
...Sammler's P/anet...
...The family fights more than the Oregon landscape...
...But the Stampers are not the introspective existentialists of the modern film...
...The publishers hear "relevance," and out comes Jerry Rubin...
...Ever since Advise and Consent hit the top of the charts, the political novel has become a familiar addition to the obligatory offerings of our larger publishing houses...
...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 setup is the thing...
...Most of these writers don't have that much energy...
...it is made up of local folks who are very much like the fellow next door...
...Advise and Consent represents the conflict class, in which the struggles and machinations involved in attaining higher public office are minutely described...
...Although it is fashionable to proclaim that the novel is in terrible straits, the observant critic cannot be so sure...
...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...
...And the final scene is the most delightfully obscene film footage in recent years...
...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...
...Roger Rosenblatt Roger Rosenblatt is an assistant professor o] English and the Director ol the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University...
...While the plots are often mildly interesting, they are just as often idiotic...
...The union is not run by a corrupt boss...
...It is a distinct genre within the general classification of the entertain-and-sell species...
...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...
...I'll also throw in Fail-Safe, although in that case the evil genius was a machine whose malfunction led to the accidental elimination of Moscow...
...But we have also seen a considerable increase in the publication of novels of all types, mostly designed to appeal to the mass market and produce a goodly income for the author (is there no doubt that Jacqueline Suzann and Erich Segal are the dirty and clean sides of the same sheet...
...Seven Days In May showed that the political novel was here to stay...
...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...
...This might be an awkward confession, to admit allegiance to a .school of writing which one critically dismisses- However, I recently read Jacques Barzun's excellent study of the detective novel and decided to cast pretension aside...
...Publishers and reviewers sometimes describe them as suspenseful but this is an opinion which is open to doubt...
...When it is set off automatically it will explode, but when dropped from an aircraft or delivered on a missile it won't, a phenomenon which Edwin Corley's fictional scientists blame on an unknown attribute of the atom bomb, hence the title of the book...
...This is what makes the film unique...
...It fights the lumber union...
...Why, then, do the books keep coming...
...The political novel is not even a poor cousin to the novel-as-art-form, but it is a direct and profitable heir to the novel-as-popular-amusement...
...Prejudices, First Series The Machiavellian Novelists I F THE AMERICAN novel is in immediate danger of extinction it may be a result of overproliferation...
...When a composition program tires of using a text book on rhetoric, it abandons it, at least until things get out of hand...
...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...
...I stayed up all night reading The Jesus Factor - - Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather...
...But you find yourself cheering for the Stampers 18 The Alternative June--September 1972 against the organized coercers...
...Just fill out the following coupon to order as many June Alternatives as you can use...
...Social ostracism, violence, threats: nothing that can be used as a weapon is avoided...
...Newman has made a business of playing the rugged individualist...
...Before the Trip Sometimes a Great Notion ~# ~ OMETIMES A GREAT NOTION" is a stunning masterpiece of a film...
...There was a time not long ago when anthologies were reserved for second rate poets...
...Even if a teacher tries one of them once, the odds are that he will not do it again...
...as a director, Newman apparently doesn't give an inch either...
...It fits in as well as the magnificent scenery does...
...Hurl," "Harper " and "Hombre" are obvious examples...
...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...
...Q.E.D., Mario Puzo is an incurable insomniac...
...The movie is a defense of a century-old creed, unapologetic, hardnosed...
...But this time his individual_9 ism has something substantial as its opposition: a labor union...
...it is part of the culture of the lumber town in Oregon...
...In the immortal words of Ricky Nelson, they don't mess around, boy...
...How much is a man's word worth to him...
...The language is earthy in places, in the same way that the language in "Patton" is earthy...
...In recent years it has been followed by such attempts as Night at Camp David, Vanished, The President's Plane is Missing, The Jesus Factor, and recently, Their Man in The White House...
...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...
...Perhaps I value the President, the FBI and the CIA too highly...
...You can help us to increase our readership and at the same time introduce your friends to one of the liveliest and most provocativeiournals in America...
...That is, they all rate high on the entertainment scale and at the very bottom of every other scale...
...Some, such as the contemporary naturalism displayed so beautifully in Joyce Carol Oates's Them, have been critically noted and acclaimed...
...i of the June, 1972 Alternative...
...You just can't get cheap rusticity these days...
...These books are gaudy and loud because they take it for granted that what we seek is glitter and noise...
...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...
...It makes you wonder how the rustics ever could afford it...
...He allows himself to be overshadowed by the performances of Fonda and Richard Jaeckel, who plays his cousin Joe Ben (Jobie...
...Today the idea is write what you care about...
...It captures the spirR of Ken Keysey's massive novel without bogging down in the novel's numerous subplots and psychological ruminations...
Vol. 5 • June 1972 • No. 9
