BOOKS
DiPiero, W. S. & Long, Robert Emmet & Sheerin, John B.
tween fraternity and death." Malraux vividly describes the attack upon Russian forces and the unexpected rescuing of Russian troops from the trenches by German infantrymen; in defiance...
...In his own language, he must suffer the wound for the sake of the blessing...
...Reading the book one moves through a sea of split infinitives, trite expressions (a television show "hit the mark"), and illogical metaphors ("religious aspects permeate many of his works...
...Congratulating itself on its "normalcy," the period today seems curiously aberrant and neurotic...
...Symbols need renewal, not obliteration...
...in a moment of pure illumination he arrives at a definition, an articulation, of his world...
...Though set in Texas and Mexico of the 1880's and peopled with outlaws, cowboys, and a vibrant heroine, the book certainly wasn't a Western in any conventional sense...
...ROBERT EMMET LONG h a s r e c e n t l y comp l e t e d a book on F. Scott Fitzgerald...
...Though I use words like "redeem" and "grace" I don't mean to suggest that Solitudes is a Christian parable...
...and can find no home in being "free...
...The severe suffering he endures in his journey is necessary if he is to arrive at that thing inside himself that will not lot him rest...
...At such times the authors seem as superficial as the waist-high culture they attack...
...The novel tracks his search for the woman Soledad, his discovery of her, and his final liberating confrontation with himsel~f--his reasons not only for shooting .the old man, but his very reasons for being...
...One of the strengths of their sociological study is its amplitude, its abundance...
...Not only the life he led, but the book he wrote, reveal Malraux's transformation of random events into organized life, life into art: life transformed into biography, reality transformed into a certain fiction...
...Some intuitive knowledge of truth is expressed in her person--perhaps the loving, merciful side of righteousness and the limitations of even the most successful revolution...
...They are products of the middle class, but are drop-outs of its dream...
...It will be a shame, and a loss, if it is allowed to pass unnoticed...
...He then moves on, to the M~dwest, where other isolates are encountered, has another transient relationship (another wounding), and the novel ends in Los Angeles, and its Venice suburb, a world of big rock promotions, artiness, group orgies, and spectacular, sickening fakery...
...the migrr.tion of the middle class from the cities to the suburbs...
...Even our best fiction is largely descriptive, a gloss on perceptions rather than an act of perceiving...
...The protagonist of the novel, Gene Barret, has dropped out of several colleges but is now finally finishing his degree...
...Christ, a body moves through this world, lays on his pallet, and stands hisself up, and he don't touch no more than a bull-thistle blowin' through air...
...The narrative moves briskly, sometimes by ellipsis, and Clabe's point of view, which governs the book, is so seamless that we are finally one with him when he roaches the luminous conclusion about himself: that his violence against others is an act of self-hatred .bred by unknowing...
...and he knew they were dead or going to die, and a terrible grief came upon him...
...By the late sixties, when Home Free begins, American impersonality has rapidly accelerated, and a search for identity through drugs and sex has created a new and acute form of loneliness...
...His vision is nearly impossible to reduce to paraphrase: And Clabe saw adl things, trees and bugs and critters and weeds, and his own kind, too, thicker than leaves, each alone, each in the onetime onlyness of his self...
...It's an existential novel in the most honorable s e n s e : To hell with the Lord God Almighty, fetch Him down here, let him walk in the brush, let Him see what it's like...
...Those that succeed each other here come p a t - - a biography as false as any other...
...but for the most part my sense of the fifties is closer to that of Miller and Nowak, who see it as a time of anxiety, oppressiveness, and eclipsed hope...
...For a long time Clabe refuses to refleet on his own actions...
...Come out of nowhere and goin' through nowheres...
...It tends, however, to be more of an indictment of the fifties than an "in-depth" study, which it claims to be at the beginning...
...The Vietnam war is still in progress, and it is one of the symptoms of the betrayal by their society which the young people feel...
...There is one Mary, I believe--just as the gospel of liberation and the gospel of love must be one...
...The novel opens in the historic city of Boston that is now a scene of singles bars, frequented by young people who often exclaim "man," "far out," "dig" --and "heavy" when Moby Dick i s mentioned, a book no one has ever read but which one of them has heard of...
...Wakefield has a very acute insight into the world he writes aboutmthe broken promises of the sixties society which lead to a rejection of everything but the personal and momentary, and then the betrayal of the momentary (the title Home Free is doubly ironic, since Gene has lost his "old" home...
...The book's title is a true emblem...
...To Miller and Nowak, in their book The Fi[ties, life in the Eisenhower years was a particular disaster...
...Its eccentricities are its strengths...
...Gene himself rarely rises above a yearning mindlessness as he moves, with twitched reflexes, from one experience to another...
...The F i f t i e s : The Way We R e a l l y Were DOUGLAS T. MILLER & MARION NOWAK Doubleday, $10.95 Home Free DAN WAKEFIELD Delacorte, $8.95 ROBERT EMMET LONG Perhaps the moral of The Fifties and Home Free is that there never was any ideal time to be young in post-World War II America...
...The fifties became an age of fear and cant...
...Clabe's life at that point becomes a journey into discovery, to understand 'why he killed and to seek out the young woman whose picture he finds on the body of the dead patrician...
...To the contrary, Vliet is a deeply pagan writer...
...help of Christians, pray for us...
...Another is the meaningless world of jobs, which are scarce, and in any case axe humanly unfulfilling...
...In Maine, Gene becomes involved with a hard-drinking giantess named Stella the Divorcee, who attempts to replace the belief in love she has lost with purely physical sex...
...dismisses Jacques Maritain and the religious existentialists for having the "wrong" preoccupations...
...We associate the novel with amplitude, sprawl, just as we (wrongfully and unfortunately) associate contemporary poetry with leanness and attenea~ion of experience...
...The Fifties also describes what the country looked like then, the changes that were reshaping the national l i f e - - the expansion of the automobile industry, and the construction of super~trighways (a 40,000-mile Interstate Highway System was built at the cost of over forty billion dollars...
...A man might's well not live if he's gonna think on it...
...Light crowded down around it as though to confirm its solitude, welled down onto the ranked orchard trees, every single one...
...He fears the cursed language of self-cons~iousness ,because it's what separates us so utterly from the rest of nature, that sheeted mass which is our primewal home and burial ground...
...Clabe is a man of pure instinct, and during his remarkable journey under the enormous sky he comes to seem one more brute creature of the plains and riverbeds...
...Nauseated, Gene begins taking heroin to find "peace of mind," even though he realizes that, sooner or later, in one way or another,~it will destroy him...
...It is a tale about grace hard won, and about how self-kno~vledge finally redeems a man from his own worst instincts...
...At the moment of death, the life we review can become our ultimate consolation if that life is transmuted by our creative vision...
...in defiance of militarism, an irrepressible human compassion...
...suggests that the fifties liberals made no contribution...
...Clabe doesn't know that he suffers from epilepsy, he knows only that he fears that sudden darkness inside himself...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 114 BRIEF THE RELmIOUS LWE TODAY, by Karl Rahner, Seabury, $5.95...
...It is this, rather than any ordinary "prettiness" of language, that makes Vliet's style poetic...
...converted the film industry into a propaganda machine, alerting the public to the danger of dissidents (who might even be their neighbors...
...Its silence and selfhood were terrible...
...I find myself agreeing with them that it was a cruel time...
...Commonweal: 825...
...Malraux's entire lifemliterary, political, and otherwise--seems devoted to that task...
...Disillusioned with their relationship, he indulges in an orgy of drunkenness, and afterward recuperates in Maine, where he meets two grotesques, called the Coaches, who have dropped out of the "system," and are now committed to nothing more than sharing a girl named Pal...
...It scores imaginative writing in the fifties for its sense of social conditions as being unalterable...
...False biography perhaps, but life thoughtfully orchestrated into wisdom, suffering recollected in charity...
...It don't fit the pieces back together: this whole damn world knocked apart like a busted bale...
...The unrelentingly manic pace of the novel leaves one feeling almost as numb as Gene Barret when, at the end, he is told that nothing is "free," and prepares to inject a needle into his vein...
...S o l i t u d e s R. G. VLIET Harcourt, Brace, $8.95 W. S. Di PIERO When R. G. Vliet's first novel, Rockspring, was published four years ago it received limited but enthusiastic attention...
...But his characters are monotonously two-dimensional, seem too much like parodic signs of their times, to engage Commonweal: 823 one's imagination fully...
...Even if they last for a while, they involve a great deal of drinking, and taking of hash, coke, and pills, part of a search for a permanent sunrise, underscored by a refrain from the Beatles--"Here Comes the Sun...
...and cowed liberals into ritualistic praise of America...
...While the writing embraced the physical realities of the period in almost numbing detail, it did not create an anachronistic, museum-piece world, as the novels of Frederick Manfred do...
...Solitudes suggests what might have happened to that reluctant American hero, Huck Finn, after he had lit out for the territory...
...the construction of giant Levittowns, with their acres of identical houses and totally standardized lives...
...His harsh, sun-bitten world turns not on the will of a benevolent godhead but on the will of one man to shape his own existence in a savage uncentered world...
...To turn from the fifties, as they have been recreated by Miller and Nowak, to the late sixties and early seventies, the setting of Dan Wakefield's novel Home Free, is to turn from nightmare to nightmare...
...Few novelists can write as vRally about nature: The sycamore went up, flaked and spotted, into the mass and separation of its leaves--w~t leaves that loosed thei~ drops to feed the root...
...Clabe's language, gently curbed by humor, is appropriate to the occasion: There ain't a man don't come out of that aloneness, don't live in it...
...Malraux's own autobiography is, I think, a demonstration of that proposition...
...the large expansion of advertising and public relations companies...
...When the farm workers first marched with Cesar Chavez they marched carrying the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe and singing her hymns...
...All this God stuff, 23 December 1977:824 al| this Sweet Jesus stuff, all them words...
...Vliet's new novel, Solitudes, is even richer, more carefully textured, and more coherent than his first...
...It fostered a heavy moralism and dubious religiosity in the Eisenhower administration (John Foster Dulles spoke of smiting the enemy "with the full force of Christianity") ; nurtured narrow prejudices (teachers were blacklisted and library books proscribed if they were suspected of "unAmericanism...
...Aside from its well-built narrative, it offers us again an eccentric and valuable poetic style...
...Rockspring was an eccentric book...
...Malraux also suggests, affirmatively, that, in the face of death's nothingness, we not only can discover but can help shape life's meaning...
...That's the hell of it," he says...
...13hat's the dark of it, the bruised black and blue of it: this damn knowin...
...Anxiety over an apparently impending nuclear war was traumatic in the fifties, and Miller and Nowak have demonstrated how this trauma affected both public and private life...
...In the clarity and decency of its vision, as well as in its precise, kinetic language, Solitudes is a special book...
...Their prose, too, is often tin-eared, and sometimes ungrammatical...
...They attempt to find meaning, instead, in personal relationships, which are casually sexual, and almost always brief...
...The few reviewers who wrote about it--Malcolm Cowley was its most outspoken supporter--all called attention to Vliet's "poetic prose," though all backed away from defining that toothy phrase...
...He has become a lonesome, red-haired dri, fter named Claiborne Sanderlin who, in a moment of pure unself-consciousness, shoots and kills an old Mexican rancher...
...Yet he doesn't know why he feels such need r find her...
...And for the man who lost his faith, as he tells us, after Confirmation what else to do but discover and create value in this world, this side of death, in this natural and earthly city...
...In the book's last moments, Clabe finally comes to reckon with the solitariness of all things...
...the widespread use of new tranquilizers, and the enlargement of the profession ot psychiatry...
...It is worth remembering that the virgin of Gaudalupe survived triljmphantly a bloody revolution which drove an established church underground for a generation and defrocked all priests and nuns...
...It is practically programmatic in finding nothing "right" about the fifties...
...One chapter, 'Whe Religious Life and Tomorrow," deals largely with the life-style of orders in general, addressing themes such as "Calling and Vocation," "Prayer and the Religious," '~rhe Challenge of Growing Old...
...rootless, they live in small, shabby, overpriced apartments that are compared to ~he compartments of a train...
...Vliet suddenly estab0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 REVIEWERS WINSTON WEATHERS is Graduate Professor of Modern Letters at the University of Tulsa...
...the emergence of television as a dominant and leveling force in American life...
...From dread and murder the novel moves convincingly toward compassion and mercy...
...Having been young in the fifties, I am sometimes still haunted by visions of the fifties as a verdant Eden now lost...
...W. S. DI PIERO is a p o e t and t r a n s l a t o r whose work has appeared in Hudson Review and The New Republic, among others...
...Rockspring was flawed in part by its melodramatic plotting, but the language was stunning', vital in its rendering of feeling and event...
...While he does, he works as a bartender at the Crossroads bar, and lives with his female history instructor, a few years older than he is, a "new" woman whose sexual relationship with him involves no commitments--either to fidelity or to any prospect of marriage and children...
...The book is useful in putting to rest an~( lingering illusions one may have about the fifties, but in allowing for no complication, for nothing redeeming, it leaves an impression of conclusions reached in advance, of an emphatic involvement never undertaken...
...Although she wore a robe sprinkled with stars, her foot was on the serpent ---a fact which the Indians of Mexico had long ago interpreted as a victory over the serpent god of human sacrifice...
...It'll kill him dead...
...The documentation of Miller and Nowak is detailed, and to read their book is virtually to relive the fifties, with its phobic obsessions and its dread of life...
...Wouldn't happen if a body didn't know it...
...His "Enthusiasm and the Religious" is warmly sympathetic to charismatic movements and surpasses most charismatic writings in depth and theological accuracy...
...JOHN B. SHEERIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Abigail MeCarthW (e~i't) forter of the afflicted, pray for us...
...And I would he tempted to call.his style mere magic were ir not for the radical questions his story raises about human solitude and its relationship to the huge and abundant out-thereness of the physical world...
...when Clabe finally encounters Soledad in the second hal,f, it's a powerful dramatization of Rilke's definition of love, the peculiar coming together of two solitudes in a wilderness...
...What distinguishes Vliet's prose style and places him in poetic kinship with novelists like William Gass and John Hawkes is his ability to animate reality, to enact rather than merely portray physical reality, and to do so with such urgency that the words on the page seem about to dissolve and be transformed into the things they signify--a kind of cabala of the imagination...
...Why should they be without the rise and fall of the rosary as they gather round the dead--"pray for us now and at the hour of o u r death...
...The longest chapter, "Obedience and Freedom," is a carefully worked-out study of a subiect of primary importance to most religious but Rahner's style here is painfully convoluted: is he or the translator responsible for diving into tangled abstractions and bringing up mud...
...FATHER JOHN B. SHEERIN, C.S.P., is with the Bishops' Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington...
...Most Christian cultures were preceded by a mythic and ancient expectation of the immaculate mother to come...
...You can sing your psalms across a dead horse, you can keep up your prayers until you got a mountain pile, and never get out of this hell...
...The world hurts indeed, but Clabe's recognition of the coming and going of all things--when the Greeks said "Know Thyself" they meant know your own mortality--turns this novel imo an act of ecstasy, a leap upon and into a world that is always "too close, too solid, too real...
...If Miller and Nowak have depicted an age in which there was a deep suspicion of the sensual and sexual, the odd or different, Wakefield has centered his work in the permissive culture which followed...
...Its assessments of the different phases of life during that time are like checklists, indicating how the fifties failed to live up to the current attitudes toward ethnicity, the environment, feminism, etc...
...One of the conventional strengths of prose fiction is to be found in its leisureliness, the way it relaxes into fictive reality...
...During 23 December 1977:822 this era of physical change, and of Cold War fright, the country turned away from a close examination of its domesitc problems to seek private escape, or embraced a selfish materialism, practicising Norman Vincent Peale's "religion" of success...
...This 88-page theological summary of basic Christian life in a religious order is no fervorino or primer for novices but a tightly compressed re,appraisal of religious life that is not one of his major achievements but shows flashes of genuine Ra~ner...
...In nearly 450 pages, the fifties is examined in its different aspects, from McCarthyism to the civil rights movement to rock music, and the book is filled with details which not only evoke the period but also reveal its stresses...
...lished himself as the poet of South Texas, a landscape of plentitude against which men's actions emerged with striking moral clarity...
...He says, "I have developed the habit over the past few years of seizing and storing up the images of the past...
Vol. 104 • December 1977 • No. 26
