This Nether World
COWLEY, JOSEPH
This Nether World The Inhabitants. By Julius Horwitz. World. 286 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by Joseph Cowley Editor, Research Institute of America IN THIS NOVEL, Julius Horwitz takes a long,...
...Write to Dept...
...It doesn't come cheap...
...But now we know that some kind of balance has been struck in his soul...
...Conceived and edited by James Burnham, it is the most serious available examination of the relation between Moscow and Peking...
...Instead, they lease the buildings to landlords who...
...Garbage is dumped into the hallways in which the children play amidst the stench...
...You can call him a devirtued man, since this is an age of naming the name...
...Phillips takes us around with him as he makes his calls on the 85 families that make up his "load...
...WE PRESENT with great pride our supplement, BEAR AND DRAGON...
...They tomcat in at night or live briefly with a woman until pregnancy occurs...
...They lead in and out of filthy, rat-infested apartments in which as many as eight people may be living in a single room...
...Phillips is the welfare worker through whose eyes we view this hell...
...Eight formidable scholars examine that relation, each in the perspective of his own scholarly discipline: and the result is an absorbing analysis which is bound to be useful to the nation's top strategists and political leaders...
...There are more than 200,-000 of them, along with their variously spawned children, on the relief rolls of the city...
...Then rape, murder, incest—anything—becomes possible...
...It's the reader who reacts to the filth and corruption— which is as it should be...
...Horwitz does a good job of delineating them—men like Zeussa...
...But one thing is sure...
...For the most part his feelings of distaste are kept admirably under control...
...L-3, 150 E.35 St., New York 16, N. Y., for free copy...
...The landlords are people with stronger stomachs...
...And the children themselves most often go without food, clothes or proper care...
...We see the dead carted out in canvas sacks, the aged carted off, protesting, to the old-age homes when they can no longer care for themselves...
...But the fathers, alas, have abdicated, though they are very much in evidence...
...This may be due to the fact that it's a reality that comes directly from a case worker's notebook...
...They'd vomit if they did," as the author says...
...many will turn away, for here, among the recipients of city welfare, dope addiction, prostitution, homosexuality, filth, hunger and suffering are rife...
...Most readers will probably be shocked...
...Welfare pays up to $25 per week per room, and owners of these buildings make as much as $12,000 per year out of them...
...About fifteen years ago you would have called him a lousy bastard...
...A whole string of such apartments will share the same kitchen and overflowing toilet bowl...
...The fact that they do and retain their sanity and compassion is another wonder...
...in turn, rent out the rooms...
...Extra copies are available at $1...
...Through their inability to accept work and responsibility (though some are sick), they are curiously unmanlike...
...Reviewed by Joseph Cowley Editor, Research Institute of America IN THIS NOVEL, Julius Horwitz takes a long, unflinching look at the seamier—no, the seamiest—side of life on New York's West Side...
...About twenty-five years ago he would have been called a cold fish...
...They have no income beyond their welfare checks, "and they live from check to check until their bodies are gently dumped into a nameless grave on Hart's Island—a grave no one is ever permitted to visit...
...The wonder is that they can do the work at all— let alone on the pitifully low incomes they are paid...
...I see the aged and sick once every six months, the people out of work and the women with the cheerful little bastards every three months...
...He has a real compassion for all the sufferers and their twisted lives, and he brings a wholeness of soul, a very wide breadth of view, to his task...
...Their occupations are cheap wine, brawling and dope, and the hallways of the houses in which they live, respectable looking apartments from the outside, become bedlam on the 3rd and loth of the month when the relief checks become due...
...There is irony also in the high cost of such living...
...Next come the women, victims of their need for love and their inability to surmount background and environment...
...A harsh book, perhaps too harsh, too much a literal transcript of life, it has the feeling of a reality that hasn't yet been transmuted into art...
...From the current issue of NATIONAL REVIEW...
...The real tragedy of it all lies with the children and the aged, and tragedy is a small word to describe their sufferings and their futureless lives...
...Despite his strong feelings, the author does a very good job of making the people in this book come alive...
...What their motivation is beyond a strong desire to help suffering humanity is not apparent...
...He, and the others like him, are the real heroes of the book...
...Of course, they're not likely to look at what they're leasing out...
...Here is life at its worst...
...This does not include the men, for whom it is difficult to feel anything but contempt, Throughout the novel there rings the cry for a father, both for the women and for their illegitimate children...
...He is what he is because of what he is—a lousy bastard...
...The irony is that through the filthy, stained windows one can in many cases look out at the beauties of Central Park or the Hudson River...
...Going the rounds with Phillips, we get to know the varieties of welfare recipients...
...They are acting as buffers for all of us and deserve considerably more credit than they are currently receiving...
...To trace life in this nether world one has only to follow the trail of the thin white envelopes in which the heroin comes...
Vol. 43 • November 1960 • No. 45
