BOOKS
Herman, Edward S. & Ripley, C. Peter & Neuhaus, Richard John & Kuehl, John & Weber, Carlo & Feo, Ronald De
Nightmare The Underside of the Nixon Years J. ANTHONY LUKAS Viking Press, $15 The Final Bays BOB WOODWARD & CARL BERNSTEIN Simon and Schuster, $10 The Time of Illusion JONATHAN SCHELL Alfred...
...Any or all those circumstances demands a return to the original research documents...
...The June 23 tape is the most obvious example in this context...
...With government dollars as the incentive, program promoters have vied with one another to invent eye-catching, identity-creating names, have clamored robustly, muscled a lot, lied a little, and brought the art of grantsmanship to new levels of street-learned sophistication...
...consort psychologist, Mimi Silbert, once J. P. Sartre's personal secretary...
...A critical link in the process is checking and retracing earlier work...
...Schell provides the why...
...No review, no books could capture the massive irony, the combination of intensity, devastation, wit, and solidly based philosophical genius of John Maher and Delancey Street...
...Each sleeping profile thrust upward carving out the wine-jelly Christmas sheen of the room...
...And as they intend to do, both succeed in getting the reader to want to know this den of thieves and its Robin Hood much better...
...whether of person or pride, his own or other's or others', or of talent or judgment, he cannot tell...
...Around him he sees friends and acquaintances growing old, learns of them making humiliating attempts to recapture the past the pathetic, aging Miriam, for example, who tries to move seductively and youthfully along the beach to attract men painting a • waterfront hotel...
...But for others the tape was less of a lethal weapon...
...J. A. O. Preiis, persist in saying No, and thus, from our perspective, make division near inevitable...
...John Maher, the King of Delancey Street in San Francisco, says of Chuck Dederich, the father of Synanon, that, "Dederich impressed me because he took no money...
...At Delancey, the "games" reach mammoth proportions in the marathon 48-hour sleepless weekend dissipations...
...Lawrence, there are numerous references to literary procedures like "Some compulsive neatness or need, some awareness of the circularity of events, perhaps, insists that I end this composition before the coda, as it began...
...Prominent among these thinkers was O. P. Kretzmann, who died in October of last year and was for almost thirty years president of Valparaiso University in Indiana...
...There was much work to be done in the shop...
...But it is a book for today, not for the ages, and it is vulnerable even within its own narrower framework...
...In the chilling little story, "Welcome, Bob," the failed narrator actually manages to derive some pleasure from the deteriorating process he sits back to watch the spectacle of an enemy aging and failing in much the same manner he already has...
...Passive and refined, middle-aged and bi-sexual, Protestant and southern, he periodically escapes the "prison of self" by loving or hating his alter ego, the aggressive and primitive, young and feminist, Jewish and northern Beatrix...
...Though the various identities Brausen devises enable him to temporarily remove himself from his own particular world and situation, they are all to some extent reflections, however distorted, of the being and the beings he has left behind...
...The only three organizations, says Maher, that have cured a significant number of drug addicts are, in order, Red China, the Black Muslims, and Synanon...
...Turner's is personal experience, with perhaps too much Turner...
...The journal entries are misleading, since at first glance they suggest a chronological continuity replete with Christmas, May Day and Memorial Day which closer scrutiny dismisses...
...In the glowing room, fire fallen to embers, the Dresdens looked like young dreamers in a ballet...
...He is only half joking, for Maher, at thirty-iive, a former addict and convict, is today the cutting edge of the most exciting social experiment in America...
...Prior to A Brief Life (first published in Spanish some twenty-five years ago), the only novel of his available in English was The Shipyard, a strange and haunting book hardly noticed by critics when it was published here in 1968...
...The descriptions of pathetic gestures, the record of sad, meditative conversations are fascinating up to a point, but then a sense of repetition, of a single note being struck begins to tire the reader...
...For example, the narrative voice of Island People alternates between two dominant storytellers, creating what the protagonist calls "collaboration...
...That is, the most thoughtful and "progressive" laity began to take seriously their "work in the world" and left their more parochial brethren to take care of the lay end of the ecclesiastical shop...
...There will be more contemporary books and articles on the Watergate Epic, and when that is done the traditional historians will take over...
...His landscapes are mental ones, and often we must follow nothing more than the progress of an obsession or the movement toward non-being...
...The consequences are sadly obvious...
...Jonathan Schell provides the framework to understand the events which were at first the underside of the Nixon years and which later consumed the Nixon years...
...If the premise is wrong, the short-run "practical" may in fact be a futile diversion...
...They still suffer however, from some very serious limi-' tations...
...And we are going to have problems with the corpus of Watergate literature...
...But these contrasts are at the heart of Delancey Street itself...
...like his play, Coursing, it is "static...
...Church work" was clearly more gratifying...
...To put it simply, John Maher is brilliant and convincing...
...Stone is overly sanguine as to the beneficial effects, on corporate behavior of getting the "bad' news" on social impact to the top management (although he does not rely exclusively on that for achieving corporate responsibility...
...He would define director liabilities, and, partly by these routes, assure that socially relevant' information was brought to, and made the responsibility of, .the board of directors...
...Larsen, the shadowy protagonist of The Shipyard, becomes general manager of a deserted, ruined shipyard, and spends his time examining files and records of the past...
...but Hampden-Turner appears to have an insatiable compulsion to explain...
...In truth, the clerical rigorists had little use for any lay role not clearly under clerical direction...
...Amid such conflicting claims few authors would write about that June 23 meeting from what others have said of the tape they would want to listen and judge for themselves...
...His characters, who are often so vague and alienated that they seem to be on the verge of fading away completely, are acutely aware of passing time...
...Though lacking the specific references provided by footnotes, the chapter notes will assist those who follow...
...The problem is partly one of definitions...
...The Final Days is based on interviews with 394 people, all conducted "on background" which means the information is usable but the source remains confidential...
...Some of us have argued all along, however, that" the central issue is the doctrine of the church...
...These and other proposals are discussed with a great richness of detail and intelligence, and these alone make the book worthwhile...
...When Larsen studies the pregnant wife of a fellow worker at the shipyard, he thinks: "She's finished, burnt and arid as a field after a summer fire, deader than my grandmother...
...Lukas' study is at once more troublesome because it is a nuts and bolts story of Watergate from 0rst to last the most detailed to date, filled with twists and turns and memos and conversations and conflicting stories...
...Appropriate behavior depends entirely upon the context in which a person is operating...
...Thus ELIM has become a gathering point for thousands of Missouri Lutherans fully prepared to be forced into exile...
...The difficulty comes not from blatant misuse of documents or information that is not the question rather, problems arise with differing interpretations of documents and information...
...One of lawyers, committees and judges jockeying for position over tapes and subpoenas and assorted Watergate paraphenalia...
...Having moved from 1968 realism through 1974 fantasy, Do well has produced fiction that most nearly resembles a modern "poetic sequence" or "architectonic novel...
...The lessons are much larger than that...
...The difficulty arises out of the corporate system's power, adaptability, and capacity for swallowing reforms and reformers without observable effect or trace...
...In other words, the field has become, in large part, a con...
...For one who is convinced of his nothingness, the howls of the "games" constitute in fact a birth cry enroute to a new life...
...But to Delancey Street itself...
...Sane Asylum: Inside The Delancey Street Foundation CHARLES HAMPDEN-TURNER San Francisco Book Company, Inc., $10 John Maher of Delancey Street GROVER SALES W. W. Norton & Company, $7.95 CARLO WEBER Since the late sixties, money has poured out of seemingly inexhaustible government springs to fund "rehabilitation" programs for drug addicts...
...Diaz Grey, a typically burnt-out Onetti case who is a central figure in some of the author's other fiction...
...October Was Here (1974 a satirical fantasy about revolution prepared the way for this brilliant contemporary allegory...
...Several of Stone's prd-posals, such as eliminating inside directors, and public direotors selected from the outside, could pose a modest threat to the control groups of large companies, yet would provide no assurance at all of any significant improvement in corporate behavior...
...Where the Law Ends is a valuable work, with many good things in it, done with care and sophistication...
...The obsessive focus on failure and deterioration throughout the novel often yields striking and powerful passages and images, but it does sometimes make for a monotony of tone...
...In Delancey's own rather strained pun, it is all the theater of the abhorred...
...The process will be smoother, surer, and more satisfying if each new piece could profit from those which preceded...
...Woodstein (nee Woodward and Bernstein) know as many facts as Lukas, but their purpose is different and their scope is narrower...
...This is not to say that "the moderates" lacked lay support...
...As noted earlier, Stone does not apply his analysis of political limits to these favored proposals, but they do not stand up well to such scrutiny...
...Throughout this rather long novel there is a concentration on things concluding jobs, marriages, relationships, lives...
...But these more sophisticated points are neither reconciled with the opening theme of the continuing force of obsolete legal concepts, nor...
...Where the Late Ends: The Social Control of Corporate Behavior CHRISTOPHER D. STONE Harper & Row, $12.95 EDWARD S. HERMAN It is difficult to write an attractive, credible, and yet "positive" book on the social control of corporate behavior...
...In both, long excerpts from the "games" appear to be literal, presumably unedited...
...imagination," and, in another, the protagonist regrets "romanticizing" Low's "Psyco-pathy" and reducing "my complex Indian to a single-strand nobility...
...Following charges of fiscal and erotic irregularities, Stephan was deposed and the stage seemed set for a laicized church body along the congregational-ist lines of American Protestantism...
...The wife's condition and the operation point to some of the dominant themes of the novel loss, decay, mortality...
...Among American church bodies, the Missouri Synod has more parallels with immigrant Catholicism than with most Protestant groupings...
...Lukas' Nightmare is the most factually complete study of Watergate defined in its broadest terms...
...But there are, in California at least, two noteworthy exceptions...
...Like the latter's stories, this "journeying" is "without endings...
...and thus conveys the "erratic journeying" of the "Saint of Wanderers, Christopher, or plain Chris...
...and what is a contemporary historian...
...In short, "practical" proposals for the social control of the corporation are likely to be quite ineffectual, while brutal realism gives satisfaction only to curmudgeons and nega-tivists...
...The encomium seems an awfully simple one...
...Written history emerges dialectically...
...Since in Island People reality is mental rather than physical, verbal rather than actual, the protagonist may also proclaim: "When I write 'he ran,' I see neither him nor running...
...but, even if we could pin the protean protagonist down, we would face an additional dilemma: "I have endowed the T of this book with total recall (though there will be a lot he will not want to recall, and will manage, sometimes, not to...
...He sometimes intellectualizes to such an extent that the material becomes too obscure and private to be interpreted...
...at work, good behavior is self-controlled, deferential, serious, authoritative, task-oriented, and hierarchical...
...How have they arrived at this point...
...Until the 1940s, lay organizations gravitated around money raising, beer socials and dart leagues...
...Graebner has written a fine book about one aspect of one relatively small and, to many people's thinking, bizarre part of the Church...
...They were perfectly strange to me, characterless as people sleeping on a stage when the curtain goes up...
...With expressed disdain for the academic pretensions of the soft social sciences, he nonetheless uses them artfully, aided by his Ph.D...
...It is narrative, descriptive, and factual...
...A detailed recounting of Watergate-type activities, when blended with a philosophical framework which leaves little doubt about the pervasiveness of the White House attitude which courted those activities, is sobering...
...Sales, on the other hand, is straight reporter...
...And Schell theorizes that the White House concept of actions and events and positions and statements as illusions not as self-suporting realities spilled over into domestic affairs and poisoned that well, too...
...Schell's book is most satisfying here: partly because of the type of study he has given us (it is more a "think piece" and less dependent upon the myriad of facts or the specific actions of the Watergate crew), and partly because he has taken all his information from available printed records, and lastly because he has included an annotated note on sources broken down by chapter which directs us to the materials used in each unit...
...By projecting himself into various roles he manages to shed his skin and lose himself in another, less directly threatening world...
...Nightmare The Underside of the Nixon Years J. ANTHONY LUKAS Viking Press, $15 The Final Bays BOB WOODWARD & CARL BERNSTEIN Simon and Schuster, $10 The Time of Illusion JONATHAN SCHELL Alfred A. Knopf, $10 C. PETER RIPLEY Reading Watergate is a melancholy affair...
...It was not until World War I that some more Americanized and more wealthy laymen began to sense their 'potential power in raising funds for a . rapidly growing, but badly managed, synodical program...
...So too with all other critical sources of information...
...When does a reporter doing a book become a contemporary historian...
...His first two books, One of the Children Is Crying (1968) a realistic novel about family life and Mrs...
...and they are absorbing...
...mainly literary...
...In The Shipyard, vagueness of character wasn't especially disturbing because there was a strong enough (and mysterious enough) dramatic structure to guide one along...
...A first wave of writing on a subject will frequently give way to a second or third or forth, each with its new or different analysis and interpretation...
...Starting with the Fall of 1973 with painstaking detail and a good many revelations they chronicle the events leading to Nixon's resignation in the late Summer of 1974...
...Delancey Street moves beyond that, continuing the developmental evolution through indoctrination, total dependency, and finally to a gradual and independent reinsertion into society at large...
...But they have done so only at the tremendous cost of imposing total conformity and extended dependency upon the members...
...But in A Brief Life, which is a much more open-ended and free book, there is frequently vagueness both of character and dramatic purpose...
...Of his short stories, only a few have been translated, and one must search rather hard to locate the anthologies in which those excellent pieces appear...
...Their view of the world they now live in is so colored by their obsessions and fears that everywhere they turn they see signs of decay...
...The resolute image we presented to Russia and China mattered...
...But they deprive authors who will follow of a vital link in the historical dialectic...
...It is a story of many levels...
...In a sense, however, Onetti is even more relentless than those authors, for his dark subject matter is rarely brightened by sparks of humor...
...it by no means catches the complexity of either of these now famed communities...
...One brief passage will illustrate Coleman Dowell's finely-wrought style: I turned on the Christmas lights...
...name-calling helps to make contact...
...Thus, says Graebner, the laity became the radio and television arm of the synod...
...This Chinese box method produces distortion, as when the protagonist claims "succubus" Beatrix has made him a queer anti-Semite...
...On the one hand, through "the act of creation, we 'forgive' the objects of our imagination...
...The result could be a more united American Lutheranism better prepared to play its part in uniting the Church in America...
...The obvious example is Vietnam which became a matter of "peace with honor," not peace for substantative reasons, but peace based on an understanding that the United States would stand by its commitments there...
...But it is that basic formula that sets the two essentially apart from all the rest, permitting them to attend religiously to the job at hand, and to it alone...
...If Missouri is divided within the next eighteen months, it might well lead to a major realignment of American Lutheranism, bringing together those exiled from Missouri with the Lutheran Church in America and the American Lutheran Church, the two other major bodies, each with approximately three million members...
...As for Missouri, there are some lessons that seem clear in retrospect...
...Fragmentation, the principal motif of Island People, dictates structure as well as focus...
...Many are apparently reluctant to do that...
...Modest reforms, such as increasing penalties for antitrust or EPA violations, have negligible, effects, and what impact they do have may be at the expense of the wrong people (the shareholders, workers, or consumers, rather than the controlling managements...
...Yet another more personal story is of Nixon and the first family, a story filled with anguish and pain and an apparent inability to comprehend what had brought them such despair...
...what happened in Vietnam aside from that image mattered little...
...He even speaks of responsibility "in a cognitive-sense," and asks, "is it not possible that the society can structure the organization's information net so the corporation will get feedback on the harm it is causing through pollution...
...according to their own unbiased report, no other program works...
...Stone's conception of corporate social responsibility includes adherence to the law plus- a consideration of the social impact of corporate actions and the making of an informed choice after reflection on that impact...
...Dowell's isolated and obsessed protagonist contends, "all there is, is fragments, because a man, even the lowliest of the species, is divided among several persons, animals, worlds...
...Image and substance became disjointed during The Time of Illusion...
...The conflict in the almost 3 million member body is usually depicted in" terms of a belated re-run of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of years ago...
...Most residents, at least in their early months, are consumed by self-hatred and deeply repressed guilt...
...But each successive wave builds upon the other...
...As Life becomes Art, Art becomes Game, so, besides several allusions to literary personages like D.H...
...This almost Hegelian thesis-antithesis produces finally a happy synthesis and celebration...
...Their wo & is based on extensive research in documents and public records as well as interviews, and their descriptive chapter notes suggest a blend of footnotes and annotated bibliographies...
...More than they know, or at least more than they like...
...In order to ensure that information is gotten to management, and to help its reflections swing more toward the public interest, Stone develops a series of packages for reform to cope with various levels of seriousness of need for social control or corporate behavior...
...This is apparent in his techniques, which, as in all skillful literary work, mirror the author's concerns...
...Another more political story of aides and public servants and friends who at first resisted the logic of events and tried to preserve the Nixon presidency and then .tried simply to save the presidency so that it might be handed to Gerald Ford after impeachment or resignation, whichever came first...
...It is some times an abrasive wedding of desperation, violence, philosophy, and hope...
...He warns of sources being self-seeking or unreliable and mentions which, if any, source dominated a chapter and pays particular attention to those documents which he felt shed new light...
...C. F. W. Walther, ihe second founder, so to speak, prevented this by an imaginative theological reconstruction that in fact, if not in theory, put the laity back in is place...
...A quietly desperate and hopeless tone is established at the beginning of the book when the narrator Juan Maria Brausen, a miserable, middle-aged advertising copywriter, reflects on his wife who is in a hospital having her cancerous breast removed...
...This happy thought cannot obliterate, however, reflection on what might have been had not the breathtaking piety, intelligence, and hard work of laypeople been alienated for so long from the church body's institutional decisions...
...and whatever it is they claim to do, no one has much evidence for it...
...It fashions a complete educational process, breaking down to build up, shaping behavior, rewarding, punishing...
...And Lukas hints with his subtitle The Underside of the Nixon Years how broad he feels that is...
...In later sections of his book Stone does come to grips with the difficulties of changing the law in a society where corporations are such important actors, molders of ideology, and wielders of influence in legislative and judicial processes...
...Those on "our side " called moderates,, answer Yes...
...And still beyond the development of community and family, Delancey Streeters, led by Maher, erupt into the body politic, using the system's own measures to jam it and challenge it in an approach that is almost Byzantine in complexity...
...Roman Catholic readers of Graebner will have no difficulty in relating the story to current movements among traditionalists as represented by, for example, The Wanderer...
...Despite these difficulties, Thurman Arnold produced a classic on this subject in 1937, The Folklore of Capitalism, by blending realism with a light and cynical portrayal of the imperatives of the system and the Quixotic character of reformism...
...The reader finds little of the color, that touch of the exotic, that is to be found in the work of other Latin American writers (in the books, say, of Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa or Guimaraes Rosa...
...Now Alan Graebner, an historian and scion of one of Missouri's dynastic families, throws new light on the coijr troversy with a masterful and unprecedented study of the role of the laity from Missouri's beginnings up to -the present crisis...
...A genuine theology of the laity should have been developed at least two decades earlier than it was...
...As one of the most raucous church battles of recent decades now seems likely to result in a major division, few people have had trouble in telling the good guys from the bad...
...This nameless figure finds bits and pieces of an elusive identity in characters from the nineteenth century past and the 20th century present...
...Though Island People is a brilliant contemporary allegory incorporating themes and techniques associated with achievements like T.S...
...Island People COLEMAN DOWELL New Directions, $12.50 JOHN KUEHL Island People is the most recent work of a truly gifted American writer, Coleman Dowell...
...Woodward and Bernstein consider themselves journalists, judging from the style and form of The Final Days...
...A systematic consideration of more drastic alternatives, or the more profound realism of a Veblen and an Arnold, seem to this reviewer more useful than efforts such as Stone's for...
...Here, in these two books, is the odyssey of John Maher from Bronx Irish ghetto, through parochial schools, where he was "class agitator," through streets and jails, to Synanon, and now to what may be a major political reformation...
...In the early 1840's, the synod began with a Saxon immigration under the leadership of Bishop Martin Stephan who laid claim to an authority that Innocent III might have envied...
...Woodstein concedes nothing in this matter...
...The volcanic eruptions in the "games" help them spew out the guilt...
...But it is this dialectical swing that makes Delancey Street unique, and it could only have been born of a mind as paradoxical as Maher's...
...It was, after all, their journalistic skills which broke the whole business open...
...That is, the history of this church body, like that of others, has been written by clerics...
...He would add public directors to large corporations...
...But the ELIM laity, having discovered authentic Christian mission outside ecclesial structures, have neither the access nor the inclination to recapture the synod-ical machinery...
...Readers (including historians) have to take the credibility of The Final Days on faith...
...and even from their initial position of weakness, and assuming that they were taken seriously in the first.place, they are likely to be sitting ducks for further legislative and court attrition...
...Pretty complete, or so it seems...
...In a somewhat accommodated sense, games are also played out in the social parodies that characterize so many of Maher's civic contracts...
...In terms of political cost-benefit analysis such' proposals would seem less promising an avenue to corporate responsibility than public ownership an option Stone doesn't even mention...
...yet, on the other, we erect a "word-jail," in which even the "personal desire for continuity is...
...This is in pursuit of the theme that our problems "are a legacy of the law's failure to search out and take into account" the' features of corporations that make them "distinct from individuals...
...But nothing in our recent history fascinated, beguiled, frustrated and shamed the nation the way Watergate did, and while those events have passed, the fascination remains...
...That dependency, for which Synanon has now been frequently criticized, creates, in Maher's mind, a limited experience that tends to alienate intelligent people...
...Like other Onetti protagonists, Brausen longs for a second chance, wishes he could break from the pattern of his unsuccessful life, find a new existence outside of time...
...When it came, it was responsive to laypeople wearied of being "pastor's helpers" and, for the most part, wearied of finding their legitimacy in terms of the institutional church...
...purposes of the long-term education and political mobilization that could provide the groundwork for significant change.' Uncertain Saints: The Laity of the Lutheran Church , Missouri Synod, 1900-1970 ALAN GRAEBNER Greenwood, $15 RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod has for the past seven years been good copy in the religious and secular press...
...There is little that is personal...
...Later the laymen were to carry their success into television with "This is the Life...
...Most fundamentally, they are "bark without bite," nibbling at the forms of corporate power without getting at the substance...
...We often feel that Onetti is working around his material rather than penetrating it...
...Still, in A Brief Life Onetti once again demonstrates his ability to capture the despair and anxiety of characters moving toward the brink of oblivion...
...The sense of parody is also played out in the very notion' of locating these ex-cons and ex-addicts, not south of Market Street, but in mansions in San Francisco's posh Pacific Heights...
...both do it from singularly different points of view...
...Schell and Lukas more easily fall into that nebulous group labeled contemporary historians...
...In the early pages, especially, there is a disconcerting tendency to personify the law and give it a life of its own...
...Like immigrant Roman Catholicism after the trusteeship controversy, Missouri established a clerical structure in which the laity seemed content to pray, pay and obey...
...From bis creation of Arce, the lover of the prostitute La Queca, he shifts easily to another creation, Dr...
...Reading him, one gets a rather bad case of psychic bends, moving abruptly from the "straight talk" of the "games" to condensed academic analyses...
...So a cadre of Delancey Streeters meets a convict, released to their custody, at the gates of San Quen-tin, in vintage black cars, pin-striped suits, smoke curling from cigars under wide-brimmed hats, and parade him off, Mafia style, extracting from the prison guards a deference they would never otherwise display...
...Combining Irish wit and Machiavellian intrigue, Maher refuses to confirm evil by taking it seriously...
...Time-past and time-present both fuse and separate in complex temporal patterns, as Island and City both fuse and separate in complex spatial patterns, to reveal how one affects the other, and to demonstrate that "Distance and time" are "the same," that "We exist simultaneously with ourselves...
...For instance, the entry marked "March 10" follows the entry marked "March 14...
...Dimly felt tendrils ran from my breast to summer and turned back and groped for the Dresdens but did not touch them, restrained by my desire...
...Stone's wpjrk rests on the premise ; that mild reformism directed to corporate power is both politically viable and likely to produce a substantial and positive impact on corporate behavior...
...Onetti has been producing fiction for many years, yet relatively few of his works have been translated into English...
...The sectional headings of Dowell's "the game," "caught," "trials," "the sentence" indicate the protagonist's nightmare world has moral continuity...
...On the contrary, his discussion of the political-sociological limits of the law is confined pretty much to strengthening criticisms of policies which Stone downgrades...
...He would eliminate "inside" directors in major corporations, requiring that all directors be unaffiliated- with management...
...Though Onetti has been compared to Faulkner because of his intricate style and bis creation of the mythical town of Santa Maria (his own Yoknapatawpha County), Onetti's thematic concerns recall the work of the two modern masters of decay, Svevo and Beckett...
...but even as this is written, I shudder to think what he would do with that stiff bit of flattery in one of his own "games...
...Few historians researching a subject would or could or should accept at face value everything that other historians have previously written on that topic...
...Yet he too attempted to guide interested readers to his source materials through annotated chapter notes...
...applied even:handedly to all policy options...
...Thurman Arnold.argued in 1937 that the social role of appeals for antitrust enforcement had been to keep reformers harmlessly occupied without posing, any serious threat of interference with the sweep of corporate growth and consolidation...
...As an historian, Graebner is keenly aware that, in writing a history of the laity, he must often rely, on "dead reckoning...
...It would seem that if a corporate management gets information on the effects of its pollution, thinks about it, and decides that on balance the corporate interest must prevail, a "responsible" decision has been made...
...Walter A. Maier, became the largest religious radio enterprise in the world...
...Both of these books make an attempt...
...In the 1930s, the Lutheran Laymen's League launched "The Lutheran Hour," which, under the leadership of Dr...
...Though we come away from this difficult novel feeling perplexed and somewhat dissatisfied, impressed more by certain sections of the book than by the book as a whole, we realize that we have been in the company of a unique and challenging artist who is intent on rendering nothing less than the terrors of existence...
...Christopher Stone is more positive than his great predecessors, but he lacks their wit and breadth of vision, and his analysis Is compromised, in part, perhaps, in the-interest of being "constructive...
...The alternative of "mission in the world" was fine, but it tended to diffuse the institutional influence of some of the most thoughtful and adventuresome laypeople, leaving churchbased lay influence largely in the hands of the more regressive spirits...
...Much of the action and drama in his work is of ar internal nature...
...Though written by a lawyer, there is a curious inconsistency in Where the Law Ends on the role of law in society...
...When he physically enters the apartment of the woman next door, he is fascinated by its effect on him: "I was moving into the atmosphere of a brief life in which there was not enough time to become involved, to repent or to age...
...Furthermore, as Tennessee Williams has observed, the "level of prose writing" resembles "a long, marvelously sustained narrative poem...
...Problems arise when, for whatever reasons, that cannot be done...
...and when is a contemporary historian not as responsible to the strictures of the profession as a traditional historian...
...In "games," good behavior is impulsive, irreverent, playful, rebellious, and egalitarian...
...Lukas provides the most detailed record of Nixon's abuse of presidential powers, with the break-in at the Watergate office of the Democratic National Committee simply appearing as a wide spot in the road...
...New research or a new viewpoint challenges accepted conclusions, and that provides the antithesis from which comes a new thesis...
...It is all there...
...A great deal of copy in both books is given to the playing of the "games...
...A Brief Life JUAN CARLOS ONETTI Translated by Hortense Carpentier Grossman, $10 RONALD DE FEO Though he is considered to be one of the most influential of contemporary Latin American authors, the Uruguayan novelist and short story writer Juan Carlos Onetti has received little attention in this country...
...Eliot's The Waste Land and William Gaddis's The Recognitions, it also excels at the older literary attributes...
...In my experience, these programs have had several things in common...
...They seemed to have moved uncdnsciously through life, but they now ask themselves, Where has all the time gone...
...A Brief Life, which some critics consider to be Onetti's finest book, is an especially grim work...
...and it's not impossible, I'll bet, that what she's carrying is dead, too...
...I failed as a bum, so I had no options...
...It is a cheeky reviewer who is critical of how books are documented...
...Onetti's world, then, is a particularly gray and grim one...
...In Island People the notion that "each man is an island" is dramatized through geographical juxtapositions, just as the notion that "One need not be a Chamber/to be Haunted" is projected through architectural symbols...
...Their opposition poses "bitch" against bitch...
...Since the future holds nothing but darkness, since they are too old to hope for change, they often retreat into the past, remembering and sometimes inflating moments of happiness...
...Then, in the forties and fifties, some theologians, taking their cue from the very influential work of Dutch theologian Henrik Kraemer began to expound a genuine -theology of the laity" tfiat went far beyond being "pastor's helper...
...Transcripts of their interviews are not available to researchers, nor could those efforts ever be satisfactorily duplicated...
...to admit, the clergy have been responding to changes in lay leadership...
...Prefaced with a discussion of the White House "us or them" attitude, Nightmare tells of leaks and tapes, plumbers, laundered money, dirty tricks, break-ins, cover-ups, shady real estate deals, presidential tapes, impeachment and the whole cast of characters...
...But the balance of the attacks of the "games" and the supporting concern of the "family" creates the combined world the addict never had...
...By their own humble admission, they all work...
...The Art-Game has both a positive and a negative side...
...Woven deeply into the fabric of the community program is a very dualistic point-counter point theme, which seems to irritate then fascinate Turner, who proceeds to dissect the dialectic...
...The existing printed literature may provide contradictions, ambiguities, voids, and more new questions than answers...
...Graebner's documentation on this point is devastating...
...The lay-people in charge of all this were little impressed by a theology of the laity that would impel and legitimate their vocations in the world...
...Still earlier, Thor-stein Veblen in his The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), combined a unique irony with a broad analysis that led him to the conclusion that "the exigencies of business enterprise" must prevail, and that "The question, therefore, remains, on the whole, a question of what the business man may be expected to do for cultural growth on the motive of profits...
...She represents allegorical "bad," while the protagonist's dachshund, Miss Gold "precious malleable strut of the earth" represents allegorical "good...
...For throughout his fiction Onetti deals with loss and decay...
...He confesses, "I invented an T who invented a 'Beatrix.' Which is to say that Beatrix may as easily have invented Chris" (his negative mask...
...Indeed the ouster of moderate Oliver Harms as synod president in 1969 and his replacement by Preus was largely the result of a lay revolt, although, to be sure, a revolt under the direction of clerical discontents...
...These two books are about Delancey Street, the San Francisco-based family of ex-addicts and ex-cons, or rather about the tough/tender, paradoxical son of Irish immigrants who created it and sent it mushrooming in four meteoric years...
...Without the support of the communities that both Synanon and Delancey create, the "games," however essential, could be destructive, leaving victims stripped and quivering...
...And that has no pejorative implication...
...Those in effective control of the synod, led by Dr...
...The "games," the work in the Delan-cey Street businesses, the politics, and the life in the club itself all pull in different directions...
...It was the illusion of what we were doing in Vietnam that became important to the Nixon presidency...
...Through the prism of professional history they are less so...
...In a few short years, attention has been focused on him because of his flair, his irreverence, his wit, and presumably at this point, his success...
...not more than 50 percent, however, appointed by a special commission or the SEC, but with a required approval by the corporation's own board...
...Occasionally, they try to give meaning and relevance to their present lives by engaging in ridiculous, but comforting, rituals...
...The law . .. . had very little occasion to consider whether, the rules it was...
...whether or not, acknowledging .our differences on scriptural authority and interpretation, we can continue to live and work together in one communion...
...More drastic changes that might begin to have a significant effect on corporate behavior, such as direct government intrusion into management, regulation, or outright nationalization, appear both politically unattainable and of doubtful desirability given the nature of government and regulation in our contemporary environment...
...We are given memorable individuals who participate in vivid scenes which range from the comic to the tragic...
...For the most part, they are middle-aged or old, and as they advance closer and closer to extinction, they are obsessed not only with their aging bodies but also with their failures in life, mistakes and missed opportunities, the absurd routines they have followed...
...The result is a tough-talking ex-con, ex-junkie, once a street-fighting hood, and a voracious reader and philosopher, who sprinted through Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Goethe, Rilke and Mann, and many others by the time he was in the seventh grade...
...Just because they write the history, -however, does not necessarily, mean that the clergy have been the victors...
...I see two words...
...With some effort we could retrace most, but certainly not all, of Schell's research...
...Metamorphoses of the narrative voice are accompanied by point of view shifts involving first, second and third person...
...But, even if under clerical leadership, taking over a church body is heady business and the Lutheran Laymen's League clearly enjoyed a new sense of importance...
...John Maher of Delancey Street Explanations of all this are less than adequate...
...In one instance, Christ admits "the facts given . . . by Victor over many a long afternoon had been distorted by...
...fashioning to control people might be inappropriate as applied to corporations...
...But, however short they both fall, both books are portraits of the Maher cult...
...Perhaps the neglect can be attributed, in part, to the themes and subject matter Onetti has chosen to explore, and to the uncompromising way in which he approaches his material...
...And then the process starts again...
...Taken almost unchanged from Synanon, they have been the focus and the most publicized element of community life, both at Synanon and Delancey...
...It is precisely in the nature of this community that Maher departs from Synanon...
...Kretzmann and others could not know that their dping their work so well would be their undoing...
...Indeed, he conducts "his own trial for the murder of a love nameless, undefined...
...the conversations, claimed Nixon partisans, were open to more than one interpretation, and they insisted on selecting one that was less damaging to the President...
...The book juxtaposes various genres journal entries, stories, essays, poems, etc...
...In barest outline, Schell proposes that the Nixon presidency was shaped by the diplomatic doctrine of credibility that is, the need to convince the world of America's willingness to fight limited wars as a substitute for nuclear face-offs...
...This point was developed by Thurman Arnold, but without the naive presumption that the legal personification of the corporation was an accidental holdover from the past, not explicable in terms of corporate power and needs...
...Brausen comes to believe that a person should not be condemned to a single life...
...When you're incompetent, and got no education," says John Maher, "you can be either one of two things: you can be a bum, or a great social leader...
...They would be furiously opposed by business, mainly for their nuisance qualities rather than substantive threat, and they would be unlikely to enlist the support of any substantial interest groups or broad range of citizens...
...To the contrary, the lay backing for the anti-administration ELIM (Evangelical Lutherans in Mission) has been extraordinarily strong...
...For most listeners that tape was the "smoking gun" which ended the Nixon presidency by linking the President to Watergate much earlier than he had previously admitted...
...The Final Days abounds with frustrating journeys into people's private thoughts and with tidbits and revelations from unidentified sources all mixed with an occasional detailed and private conversation between Nixon and one other person which leaves no doubt about the source (Nixon refused to be interviewed...
...Through the prism of contemporary observation these books are for the most part satisfying...
...It seems fitting that Dowell's dominant storytellers are a "failed playwright" (protagonist) and a "New Novelist" (Beatrix) because the inaccuracies both purvey characterize "the process of Art...
...and of the "Maher-ishi," as Turner dubs him...
...Lukas and Woodstein provide the who, what, when and where...
...In the early and mid sixties these were the laypeople recruited by right-wing clergy to lend aid in throwing out a leadership that had departed from the ways of "old Missouri...
...It is an inside view that provides better insight, though it is at times pedantic, especially in a laboriously rationalistic appendix...
Vol. 103 • September 1976 • No. 19
