Clancy Sigal Goes Away

...The thirties had been my time," he reminisces as he stands on the ship's deck at the end of the book...

...A reading of Sigal's first book, Weekend in Dinlock (recently reissued as an Anchor paperback), suggests that he has...

...On the way, there are numerous encounters, mild adventures and acerbic observations, all done in a style that ranges from Whitmanesque to terse and witty character-sketching in the British style, buttressed by a penchant for sociologizing that reveals the author's literary talent at its best...

...for others, the link must be established by a variation on the Orwellian descent pattern...

...He is heading for New York, where he is to board a boat bound for Europe...

...A morally apathetic country," the narrator says of the America that he is re-examining from his automobile, "determined to indulge in no experiments and bent on a personalized, not to say privatized, existence...

...But has he found in England what he could not find in America...

...In the second part of The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell undertook a devastating critique of the fashionable Socialists of his day, which, in effect, accused them of being too middle-class...

...The passion for trivia had overleapt itself...

...Sigal wants class distinctions to remain clear, at least until a Socialist society has been achieved...

...Only in England, it seems, could Sigal undergo such an experience...

...Both cultures are threatened by the mass culture emerging out of the decline of "intermediate institutions" and, above all, through the medium of television...

...Dinlock helps explain why in several invidious comparisons between American workers and Yorkshire miners...

...The fictional thread is the story of the narrator's friendship with Davie, a still-young miner who, despite the burden of supporting his wife, children and two unmarried sisters, hopes to become a painter...

...the writer must seek out a special form of communion with the working class itself...

...Progress, as we call it, will change all this...

...What emerges is certainly not a novel...

...personally and through the union branch there is an opportunity to immediately and effectively answer back...

...The novelist and playwright Doris Lessing recently condemned the whole idea in the New Statesman, asking: "Why should the monster always be wooing Socialists when, once it has got them, it tries to muzzle them, or provides a climate where they muzzle themselves...

...Radicalism," one man tells him, "has vanished from the union movement...

...it is his version of the artist's traditional descent into hell, out of which he forms his sensibility...

...Like Going Away, Dinlock is a fictionalized narrative, though, again, hardly a novel...

...Ronald Sanders, who teaches history at Queens College, spent last year in Europe as a Fulbright scholar...

...And his book is nothing less than a farewell to the United States, or an attempt, in his words, "to figure out why it wasn't my country anymore...

...Actually, it is a fact of the history of Socialism that a gap generally exists between the aspirations of the Socialist intelligentsia and those of the workers themselves...

...If growing numbers of British working-class families are finding relaxation by spending many hours each week in front of the "telly," does the intellectual really have a moral right to object...

...He can thus achieve a kind of identification between himself and the working class which is extremely difficult in the U.S.—almost impossible, in fact, since in this country it is also much harder to define the working class...

...The answer is that television is part of the machinery this system uses to capture or tame its critics...

...Expressed in British Socialist terms, the view is that there is a proletarian culture which is equally as distinct and valid in its traditions as the culture of the highbrows...

...The narrator himself is a disillusioned Leftist, 29 years old, a Jew, a jack-of-all-trades, an aspiring writer who once worked as a labor organizer, but who finds himself, at the beginning of the book, caught up in the Hollywood game...

...But the problem remains: In order to make the trip back, there must be a distinct working class to which one can go...

...But it is precisely in the nature of the British literary Socialist tradition to be sentimental about the working class...

...All the guys talk about is sex, baseball and cars...

...But even if I cannot prove, I suspect that Dinlock, as public, will turn out a hardier organism than the rootless communities of my own country...

...As a rule, the Marxists did not worry about this...

...It is not enough to be a Socialist...

...True, many intellectuals, notably Wesker, Sigal and John Osborne, are of working-class background...

...Still others, particularly Wesker and Sigal, are trying to form their art on the basis of both experiences...

...In this case, it is also an experience of the social conscience, similar to Orwell's descent into poverty in Down and Out...

...His search is for a continuity and rootedness in life that America no longer seems able to yield: "Wherever it was I came to rest, if I crossed an ocean I knew it would have to be in a country gentle and formal, if such a country existed.' The loss the narrator has suffered reappears throughout the book in terms of one theme: the collapse of the American Left...

...Mass culture and affluence have eaten away at the separate existence of this class in the United States...

...It is this sort of clarity, among other things, that Clancy Sigal has sought, and found, in England...

...yet the work is straight reportage, stripped of the inconvenience of naming actual names, and improved by the artistic ordering of events...

...Lenin opposed labor unions as concessions to the capitalist system, and never sentimentalized about how his attitude affected the workers...

...Recently, a revival of the Orwellian spirit has taken place in England, resulting in a new game of Socialist one-upmanship...

...Virtually as many villagers," the narrator says of his fictitious community, "express opinions as receive them (thus far...

...Going Away takes on the form of a transcontinental automobile ride by an unnamed first-person narrator who has quit a job in a Hollywood agency...

...a considerable amount of colloquial conversation, sometimes the bulk of it, was connected with last night's television show...

...Isn't it all rather a matter of literary sensibility...

...From one town to another he visits old friends, usually old Leftists, and finds them in various stages of disillusionment or decay...

...For Sigal, clearly, the joy that has been lost is the joy of old Socialist beliefs...

...In form, however, it is more like another Orwell book, Down and Out in Paris and London...

...Sigal, for his part, has been regularly condemning TV in the New Statesman...

...The visit to the mine, which takes place at the end of the book, becomes a kind of transcendent experience for the narrator...

...but so are many of the hired personnel of the Establishment...

...In one sense, the book is simply a report on life in the Yorkshire mining villages, reminiscent in theme and purpose of George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier...

...After all, America may be disappointing, but it does represent a social revolution which, with mass-culture as one of its major components, is now being exported to various parts of the world...

...Unlike his American counterpart, the British intellectual can, if he wishes, readily define his opposition to mass culture as a Socialist view...

...The narrator, the characters and even the locale, all are fictitious...

...they are beginning to have the same effect in England...

...This same idea has been expressed by Arnold Wesker, who, in response to the challenge of mass culture, has been trying to organize a working-class theater in England...

...But surely no Socialist can legitimately take a moral stand against a process which, no matter how esthetically objectionable, is bringing about real improvements in the living conditions of the workers...

...It can perhaps be best described as a long dithyramb of the generation of automobiles and sociology, a kind of "Song of Myself" reuttered for Partisan Review and Encounter...

...Sigal and other writers of the new British Left deplore the disappearance of workingclass culture on Socialist grounds...

...The narrator this time is a young American writer up from London who wants to know at first-hand how the miners live and work...

...The language, too, is a blend of razor-sharp New Statesmanese and sprawling American hip-talk ("I had lost my taste even for bush league vindictiveness...

...Orwell looked at things differently from his colleagues of the 1930s because he had undergone the experience of poverty and destitution described in Down and Out...

...But for the time being at least, he has settled in England and become a full-fledged member of the "new Left...

...A distinct working class may provide the opportunity for the redemption of an individual Socialist writer's soul, but is his desire to maintain one a morally tenable position...

...It comes as no surprise that he has sought to regain that feeling in a country in which many members of his generation are themselves seeking to revive precisely the same joy...

...Should he not accept the phenomenon as here to stay, and try to turn it to some advantage...

...Compare this with Sigal's discussion of America as a "mass" society in Going Away: "A mass society is where the top dogs and the bottom dogs, I beg your pardon, 'the people,' subscribe to the same bottom-dog (or possibly middledog) values...

...Some British Left-wing intellectuals have tried to do precisely that, but more controversy than constructive activity has resulted...

...There is some question, though, whether the British Left's anti-television campaign really represents working-class needs and aspirations, or whether it reflects a natural attitude that Middle-class intellectuals have hopefully transferred to their dream of what the working class should be...

...opinion finds ready outlet in action and authoritative institutions have not (yet) destroyed the autonomy of the village...

...For all its literary advantages, however, the position leads to certain paradoxes...

...Clancy Sigal, born in Chicago in 1929, has won this year's Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award for his second book, Going Away (513 pp., $5.75...

...For some, like Osborne, it is sufficient to have had a working-class background...

...In different ways, both have become middle-class, and are no longer speaking precisely the same language as the factory worker...