The Bombs of the Fathers

...It does not follow, however, that if I make myself a fool Christ will want me...

...Parktilden Village is confusing, even repulsive, until one recognizes that one is not meant to admire the protagonist, a smug sociologist having simultaneous affairs with a mother and her daughter, but to abhor him...

...Some of these preoccupations are familiar from Elliott's other writing...

...It is possible that if I confess what I know about myself," David says in a brief preface, "I shall have said more about you than if I had tried to say what I know about you—whoever I am, whoever you are...

...This purports to be the first-person autobiography of a young California photographer, son of a physics professor, taking him glumly through the deaths of his mother and father, his illness from radiation sickness, his failure to find faith and the break-up of his marriage...

...But as a failure it is more interesting and impressive than the last 10 small dishonest successes I have read...

...Like David, the anthropologist of "Among the Dangs" believes not in the truth of Christianity but in its emotional power...

...Elliott is a fantast, as these pieces and the stories show...

...And who can be certain of the canons of the novel, that curious form that includes Little Women and Finnegans Wake...

...His father was one of the makers of the Hiroshima bomb, thus David properly suffers radiation sickness...

...In the first chapter, the youthful David with his first camera is photographing a naked girl named Helena, who has designs on his virtue, and his sister Julia saves him...

...David fails in all of his human relations, as a son, a brother and a husband, and he avoids the risk of failing as a father by forcing his wife Carol to have an abortion...

...But in David Knudsen he restrains himself, clips the wings of his garish imagination, to produce an imperfect poem with a message, a truth about something that matters...

...The most moving parts of the book are the displays of human goodness that Elliott uses to contrast with the aura of bleakness radiating from David: a poem overflowing with love that a little girl named Katie prints in colored crayons...

...The strength of David Knudsen lies in its bitter honesty, a triumph of Elliott's insight and art...

...Judged by the canons of the novel, it is, I suppose, a failure...

...Science and the State happened to me," David cries in an Audenesque voice when the fallout particles descend on him...

...Perhaps, like the critical pieces, the book is an experiment with form, the essay-novel or sermon-novel...

...That great mushroom cloud shadows much of the book...

...In the last chapter, the mature David with an advanced camera is photographing a naked girl named Dorothy who has designs on his virtue, and his own immense superego saves him—from the love and happiness that Dorothy represents...

...In the hospital, David writes in his notebook: "They tell me I must make myself a fool for Christ...

...Then he and his wife use the dying Roger for "unassailable excuses to get out of any engagement we did not want to keep...

...Sometimes Elliott seems to be resisting the natural drama of the novel form as though it were a seductive naked girl...

...He is sick, not because he wants sickness, but because he is "afraid of being well...

...Sailor with the Japanese Skull," because "it has shown me a truth about something that matters," and confesses "my tolerance—indeed, my partiality—toward imperfect poems that contain a message...

...He helps to drive his father to suicide with bitter reproaches, and he drives his wife to an unwilling abortion by lying to her about the probability of deformity in the child, even taking her to see monstrous births in bottles in a laboratory...

...Two characters stand out from the rest because of their vitality and vigor: David's rebellious bohemian sister Julia, and vulgar, wise, booming "Butch" McKee...

...I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the bombs of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation...

...David pilfers from stores aimlessly, overflows with self-disgust and wishes he were dead...

...the better-defended kindness and warmth of Dorothy...

...David's father, James, suffers from insomnia and fear of the dark...

...In the religious vocabulary of an earlier time, David suffers from acedia, spiritual sloth, but in the vocabulary of our time, no word but "neurosis" will do...

...The only overall form that I can see is a curious framing of the book in the frustrations of nude photography...

...The intelligence and moral earnestness of George P. Elliott entitle him at least to a serious reading...

...It becomes acute at Los Alamos, later subsides, then worsens again when he learns of David's illness, and eventually contributes to his suicide...

...Maybe...

...Infuriatingly, Elliott introduces them early, then throws them away for the bulk of the book...

...In an odd symbolic subplot, David's boss "Butch" McKee is maimed and emasculated by an old-fashioned bomb thrown by an anarchist idealist, and that whimsical little bomb symbolizes the Bomb in another aspect...

...the defenseless and inarticulate love of Carol...

...I have cosmosis," he explains, "inflammation of the cosmos...

...If David Knudsen is a representative figure for our time, an image of us, he is a thoroughly unattractive one...

...Elliott has something of the tone of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in insisting on the typicality of his protagonist...

...Gene Adams in "Children of Ruth" recognizes that his mother suffers no more (and no less) from her son's leaving home in a fury than she did from the relocation of the JapaneseAmericans or the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti...

...I had lost my regulator—my restraining and directing will," he explains at another...

...The fathers have eaten sour bombs, and the children's teeth are set on edge...

...The theme of Parktilden Village is the sanctity of the human person, outraged by the sociologist, and perhaps David Knudsen is about the same thing...

...David is sick from the moral issues of our time, specifically from nuclear weapons...

...It is the key to his inadequacy, as it might be a fitting summary of David's...

...But they are never allowed to bring the novel to life because they cannot bring David to life, they are not powerful enough to overcome History or the Bomb...

...He fights in the Korean War, and is afterward haunted by the image of a North Korean soldier charred by a flame-thrower...

...Another piece, "Getting Away from the Chickens," in The Hudson Review, Autumn 1959, contains Elliott's admission to "being, as I have been ab ovo, a fantast...

...When Roger, another soldier caught in the fallout, develops cancer, David, "in the meanness of my soul," finds "hope of relief in prospects of damage...

...Similarly, we can see the themes of David Knudsen in Elliott's book of stories, Among the Dangs...

...He may leave me kneeling on my flagpole until the fog comes in...

...Elliott praises Winfield Townley Scott's poem, "The U.S...

...All through the book he flirts with the Roman Catholic Church as he had earlier flirted with the Communist party, and its priests are shown as tolerant and wise beyond human possibility...

...The book seems less an autobiography than a case history...

...In the last few years, Elliott has published some of the most exciting literary criticism printed, in a form of his own invention combining critical analysis with autobiography...

...Of the abortion, David writes, "We deluded ourselves that we were doing the right thing because we were doing the wrong thing well," and later: "I held it against Carol that she had allowed herself to have an abortion...

...Although Elliott satisfactorily explains his protagonist in both sets of terms, Christian and Freudian, he insistently adds a third vocabulary of motivation, the historical...

...One of these articles, "The Sky and a Goat," in Accent, Summer 1958, tells us a great deal about David Knudsen...

...I think I was not psychotic, or at least not for long," he says at one point...

...Magoo...

...In his more attractive aspects, David is a scapegoat bearing our collective guilt...

...The problem lies in the gap between those two remarks...

...Perhaps David is similarly to be abhorred, and his idea that he typifies us is only one of his neurotic delusions...

...the thoughtfulness of the dying McKee...

...When Bingham in "Miss Cudahy of Stowes Landing" is beaten on the neck by old Miss Cudahy and then kissed in the same place by her daughter Phoebe, we are told, "He did not know what to make of such strong experience...

...We leave him at the age of perhaps 30, a lonely photographer who uses only natural light...

...David is more believable as a pagan, spending leisurely Sunday mornings with his wife in Wallace Stevens' world of "complacencies of the peignoir," than he is either affirming his gratitude to God for his illness, or blasphemously picturing God as near-sighted Mr...

...Where David Knudsen is least representative, I prefer to believe, is in his quest for faith...

...If the ultimate evil is treating people as things, David, at least in his treatment of Carol and Dorothy, is ultimately evil...

...David bears the burden of Hiroshima, at one point writing his wife a long letter about the responsibility of being an American, and remarking of the Bomb: "My ignorance no more exempts me from the consequences of my involvement than his ignorance exempted Oedipus from the consequences of his sins...

...David is unloving, selfish, and gratuitously cruel to those closest to him...

...Later, discovering in himself "a deranged and stupefied citizenship," "a vocation for mediocrity," he writes: "In a low way I have never been more typical.' Case history, documentary, sermon—it is like a Beckett play where nothing but talk is possible because the characters are legless and live in ash cans...

...He carries even his white skin as a guilty burden, shouldering "the guilts of our society" for racism and injustice...

...It has now appeared, entitled David Knudsen (Random House, 339 pp., $4.95...