Jumping Smooth Is Only Practical

...No pets nor interest in animals...

...His religious experience is quite conventional...

...But let us consider the earlier transition, from troubled childhood to the gang...

...His first bull-session, he tells us, was with the librarian-counsellor in the reform school, and he very hastily passes it by...

...Frenchy's own theory of himself is that he has to be one up, he can't wait to be grown-up because children are underdogs...

...When he is telling of his family, his loves, his crimes or his morals, there is usually cliche, sentimentality, conventional defiance, censorship or other marks of embarrassment...

...It is hard to know in this book what is Freeman's own habit of thought, what belongs to the fictional hero and what to the boy as he experienced himself...

...I was convinced," says Frenchy, "that jumping smooth was the practical thing to do...

...The superintendent had shown me that crime would not pay me as well as a legitimate racket...

...Gang fighting is the achieved identity of these boys...

...like his, conformity is the way to get by), or criminality, addiction or other marginal existence...

...Except in the fighting scenes, there is something missing in Frenchy...

...There is little sense to the rage of that New York magistrate last year, fuming at having to deal with petty suzerains and their war counsellors...

...Some legal historian ought to trace for us how much of this code has been inherited in the folk wisdom, and how much springs up again, as if by nature, once the centralized state is abrogated...

...This makes for a kind of vividness but it has fatal defects...

...But let us try to interpret what we here have...

...But one does not get the impression that our society has in any way unblocked the potentiality and humanity of such a bright and spirited lad...

...The question that arises, however, is: To what is he now loyal, as he goes on his way through Brooklyn College and toward a Ph.D...

...that's why it can be told straight...

...in fact, of course, it enhances the probability of getting caught and punished, though not in disgrace but as a martyr...

...What Frenchy never seems to experience, however, is confusion, shame, impotence...

...He seems to share exactly the prejudices of his below-average pals...

...In more harmonious primitive cultures, the youth have their youth-houses...

...for though we are not their society, they are part of ours...

...If the world is not important, at least he and his friends' opinion of him must be important...

...The life demands of the late 'teens force either a modus vivendi with the big society (Frenchy's theory is that for a high I.Q...

...The etiology sketched in the background is a rather virulent Oedipus complex (he is quite unable to admit his father's sexuality), plus the insults of poverty and family bad luck...

...The classical civilized solution has been to enclose the Indians in reservations...

...I am afraid that this method of the true confession magazines cannot convey anything but local color and rationalizations...

...There is evident censoring of homosexuality, certainly by the author, but probably also by the actual Frenchy...

...He has no original thoughts or vaulting ambitions...

...there is nothing to be either ashamed of or defiant about...

...To my mind, the chief drive of the child pursuing his punishable delinquencies is fatalism: the need to be caught, punished, at last taken seriously and attended to, and relieved of the anxiety of his ever more extreme misdeeds...

...This is a frank and fair estimate—of one bound for success in the organized system...

...It is wise to regard the gang fighting in this light—that we have lost the allegiance of these boys and must go on from there—rather than to think always of punishment, reform or cure...

...But the boy is really in the bopping, autonomous in decision and technically knowing...

...The kids have withdrawn from the social compact of the big society, not into lawlessness, but into allegiance to another code, a feuding code of about the vintage of Alfred the Great, grounded in territorial defense and personal fealty...

...On the other hand, the boy's "own" story, with its perhaps revealing embarrassment and confusion, is spoiled by being rigidly structured by the author's journalism, which is of course just what the real boy would take as his own truth...

...Perhaps in the future Frenchy will again find an area for his military genius, like some Toussaint l'Ouverture...

...he thinks that he is again "bopping and balling with the club," but indeed he has already betraved his allegiance to his friends, for he is no longer fatalistic about getting caught...

...This applies identically to our shenanigans with Soviet Russia, or a rumble between the Bishops and Sovereign Lords...

...Naturally, from our point of view, we cannot permit their piracy, nor wipe them out with superior firepower, nor allow them to damage one another...

...These are the missing middle-terms...

...If the fatal drive to disaster loses energy, the gang spirit becomes less necessary...

...The method of punishment and reform that we pursue at present has the effect, as the youth gets a few years older, of changing most of the kids from innocent aliens outside of society into criminal outlaws against society...

...This is said by Frenchy when he is home on leave from the reform school where he has been given privileges as an honor student...

...We are convinced that Frenchy was a blight boy, yet he apparently gets nothing from it except keeping ahead in school and winning the approval he craves...

...I believe that this is accurate reporting of Frenchy's self-image and what he chooses to have "experienced," for my hunch is that more warmly sexual boys are more likely to be loners, less masochistically fatalistic and certainly less narcissistic...

...Nothing about the reform school therefore rings true...

...he has reached a modus vivendi with the big society...

...The happy outcome is believable, but it is not interesting...

...There is a lot of glib sex talk ("banging bams"), but almost nothing of Frenchy's own sexual behavior— e.g., he never seems to have started masturbating—and characteristically, whenever he feels real desire and affection, nothing much comes of it...

...By being tough he wards off the anxiety of ever feeling confused, weak or alive, and he makes this conceited image of himself stick through thick and thin...

...Since his aim is quick summary reporting of the actual and "newsworthy," it is impossible for Freeman to construct the child's sensibility like a novelist, so that finally nothing is probable or universally explained...

...In Freeman's book the key sentence is: "I realized what would happen if I got caught, but what the hell, I took care not to get caught...

...What they told the meat-heads who could never make as much by working as they could by hustling, I do not know...

...Reviewed by Paul Goodman Author, "Our Visit to Niagara," "Growing Up Absurd" FOR THIS REPORTAGE of a boy gang leader, New York Times reporter Ira Freeman has chosen the technique of a fictional autobiography by the boy...

...All this adds up, indeed, to the plot of this book: When there are no objective interests and no real spiritual or animal satisfactions, a lively boy has to live by one-upping and manufactured challenges...

...Yet it requires more detailed and sensitive writing than Ira Freeman gives us to show how it is possible for a bright child to be so circumscribed and unimaginative, so conformist in his misbehavior...

...Color, by the way, is so frequently explicitly excluded that one becomes suspicious that it is a big deal...

...He has no interest in sports, except to be applauded...

...It is not delinquent at all and not criminal at all, but simply warfare for territorial and dynastic aggrandizement...

...This makes a tough situation...

...Freeman seems to think that snatching this brand out of the burning was a great coup of the reform school and its wise director, and indeed it is better not to be headed toward sudden death or utter waste in a jail...

...The gang in principle alleviates this fatalism and anxiety, by providing a power structure, a loyalty, a style...

...he is not fired by high music or art, natural science, politics...

...What are we to conclude from: "When I went to the John to cop a smoke, I found some bops from other clubs there," or, "Having taken part in a club clash and been 'worked over' by bulls started my rep...

...In this warfare, incidental acts against the big society, such as commandeering weapons or money, can no longer be considered delinquencies, for they are equivalent to living off the countryside...

...To my ear, the liveliest and most genuinely told episodes are the gang fights in which young Frenchy mar-shalls his lucky find of artillery like a Napolean and vanquishes superior ages and numbers...

...Assuming that Freeman's reportage is accurate journalism— that is, the kind of writing that shares the general embarrassment and records accurately the general superficial notion of what is being experienced—what is missing is not felt by the actual Frenchy either...

...The warriors have their mores of sex and other kicks, to which we adults are irrelevant...

...He certainly does not take the big society seriously, for he thinks it is no better than when he first foreswore it...

...To put it another way, the fatal defect is one of style: The book consists of sentences whose vocabulary draws heavily on jive and jargon, but whose syntax and paragraphing come right from the Times...

...Youthful gang fighter is a transitory identity, between childhood and later adolescence...