The Writer in Isolation
BRICKNER, RICHARD P.
The Writer In Isolation FIRST PERSON SINGULAR: ESSAYS FOR THE SIXTIES Edited by Herbert Gold Dial. 254 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by RICHARD P. BRICKNER Author, "The Broken Year" This anthology...
...Emphasizing our vital obligation to face crisis, he urges that "the theater learn again to contend with the world out of which history is made, men creating events, events determining men...
...He surely need not fear the finality of adjustment...
...He does not rest with the expression of his displeasure...
...He is trying to tell us of the Decline of the West as seen by him while poking among the garbage of Miami Beach...
...In "The Devolution of Democracy" he seems to suggest he could be cured of his disgust if he could only be in a position of power himself...
...Taking a clue from the title, I sought humor in the piece...
...The accumulation of trivia or of random rottenness for ad hoc proof of decay is a technique which Paul Goodman, in his "The Devolution of Democracy," manages to bring to a high point of refinement...
...Gold is trying to tell us something...
...Poking among garbage he fails, not surprisingly, to find decent food...
...Machine is trying to tell us something...
...Gold "grants" that he had no "proper business" visiting the turtle slaughterhouse...
...Saul Bellow's "Literary Notes on Khrushchev" succeeds in vividly isolating suggestive differences between a real Them and a real Us...
...A George Orwell notably aside, and maybe, for different reasons, a James Baldwin, the modern literary intelligence dealing with social problems is likely to function most happily when working through an agency—through satire, parody, story, novel...
...Algren thus jocularly establishes a pattern: A self-conscious stalking of the revolting object—in this case, first-class passage on a luxury liner —followed by wretching (with the door wide open...
...He dwells on a turtle slaughterhouse at Key West: "Visitors take their kiddies by the hand and lead them to see the nice turtles...
...Only, in the case of the serious writer, his position is an opportunity for true art and its benefits, if he uses it creatively...
...If some of the random phenomena he cites are serious (a California sporting goods store advertises: "As an extra precaution for Civil Defense we would recommend that you investigate a .22 cal...
...In a grand symbolic act tourist Algren, brave Meyer-Davis-baiter that he is, plugs his electric typewriter into the wall of his first-class cabin and blows a fuse...
...hand gun as a potential survival weapon"), the hurried parade of impressions that make up the essay finally means no more than the title originally implies: The parade is truly driving the viewer crazy...
...Directions on package...
...If nothing else, First Person Singular makes clear that the writer who takes issue with society, in whatever literary form or manner, must try to create out of the friction between himself and his milieu a change in that milieu...
...Reviewed by RICHARD P. BRICKNER Author, "The Broken Year" This anthology of essays by American writers on contemporary subjects is virtually an intellectual's non-book...
...And in dreams begin responsibilities, certainly for writers if not for ciphers...
...He would like to be more crucially engaged...
...These share an exploitation, more or less explicit, of the literary intellectual's classical isolation from his surroundings...
...Elliott's question, though, turns out to be a bluntly sober one...
...But it is a group of four essays which, accidentally, tends to unify First Person Singular...
...Not necessarily...
...Its best pieces—propulsive or original, or both,—are by James Baldwin on race, Saul Bellow on Khrushchev, Mary McCarthy on America's non-materialism, and Herbert Blau on the imperative goals of the theater...
...Mary McCarthy's "The Humanist in the Bathtub" is fresh and convincing on America's lack of true materialism—we do not enjoy what we buy—up to its forced conclusion that we will probably one day have to use the Bomb because, having paid for it, we really won't know what else to do with it...
...Yet its statements confront head-on the social externals they challenge...
...But it suffers from a personally persecuted tone, from buckshot aim, and from the method Goodman employs of seeming to illuminate dangers simply by listing institutions: "the Pentagon, the Treasury, the FBI, the Civil Service, the Scientific Corporations, a large part of Congress...
...The initials CIA and FBI reappear frequently—automatic danger signals...
...Machine does not give change.' Machine makes comment, however...
...There are also a mildly mocking interview of Senator Goldwater by Gore Vidal, a clumsily ironic review of Beverly Aadland's mother's memoirs by William Styron, a somewhat overheated analysis of the Chessman case by Elizabeth Hardwick, and contributions widely varying in quality and subject matter by Seymour Krim, Arthur Miller, Warren Miller, William Saroyan, and Harvey Swados...
...Blau is not grinding an axe in his essay...
...Gold's own contribution, an essay entitled "Death in Miami Beach," is melancholy with a vengeance...
...His examination of the Kennedy Administration and its alleged failure to alter the status quo, due to its lack of true daring, contains some accurate hits...
...And they lead one to the suspicion that, gratuitiously enough, their authors half wish to perpetuate the conditions they loathingly embrace...
...Easy to apply...
...It just wasn't a friendly ship, that was all there was to it...
...Stainless...
...Safe...
...At one point, Gold steps on a significant cockroach...
...He need fear only the social and personal stasis that self-indulgence breeds...
...Stood against Herbert Gold's clever editorial observation, "the writer . . . is a man looking for ways to frustrate his natural melancholia," the plain indulgence in frustration evident in these essays becomes tinged with pathetic humor...
...Later, he remarks of the Negro girl who cleans his room, and who "gets yelled at all morning .. . 'stupid, stupid, stupid,' " that "she smiles slyly to herself, as if she knows where the manager's de-la is hidden...
...They appear to have been written not for the sake of ameliorating the crucial or trivial or paranoically magnified threats seen to be imbedded in our society, but as if merely to confirm their authors' isolation on the one hand, and the threats on the other...
...In "Down with all Hands," Nelson Algren facetiously recounts his trip to Europe, first class, aboard the "SS Meyer Davis...
...In the meantime, he takes persecuted pot-shots for all of us...
...But his irrelevant confession, it turns out, is set-up for an invidious gesture of self-congratulation: "I should be judged for vulgarity by the man who chooses out of purity not to follow me, not by the man I saw lurking outside, with a face ravaged by the horrified fascination which makes it impossible for him to visit his dreams...
...he ground one to write it...
...Odorless...
...50¢ coins only...
...Serious writers, it seems to me, stand in relation to human evil rather as certain of our intellectual critics stand in relation to fraudulent or inferior art: They cannot live without it...
...The essays I have described are essentially the social equivalent of art for art's sake...
...The reader is left with the unchallenging picture of the writer beating his head against hostile California earth...
...No...
...George P. Elliott calls his essay on California mores, "Why are they Driving me Crazy...
...This is not to say that creating literature is necessarily a cure for the literary man's susceptibility to self-indulgence, or that such susceptibility is universal among his kind, or that observation or the presentation of ideas cannot be creative...
...They are a cul-de-sac of complaint, of passive protest...
...Goodman is a special case...
...Perhaps Goodman feels his glib hostility is justified by having "been urged, by one who has access, to continue my indispensable 'role of dissent.' That is, we are the jester...
...In style, Herbert Blau's "The Public Art of Crisis in the Suburbs of Hell," is whimsically elliptical, conversationally personal...
...More than half the pieces have already appeared in their author's own collections, and all have been published previously...
...in short, through the image, which is the artist's unique way to truth with effective power...
...He believes strongly in himself and his own profusion of ideas...
...He attempts to embody in his writings a kind of civic intellectual, perhaps a philosopherprince...
...It is as if he would rather be President than write...
...de-la, incidentally, is " 'a light lubricating ointment designed to aid in the prevention of premature climax...
...But the collection's outstanding contribution is distinguished by its coupling of personality and progressiveness...
...The essay's blurry focus sharpens onto the author himself—not on the problems, not on their causes, not on the range of their possible effects, not on the opportunities there may be for their mitigation...
Vol. 46 • July 1963 • No. 15
