Jewish, All Too Jewish
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Jewish, All Too Jewish By Stanley Edgar Hyman One of the reasons we read novels is to learn about the exotic world: how do Portuguese priests go about seducing their...
...Morroe is disturbed about not crying over Leslie's death because he had cried when the planes shot King Kong off the Empire State Building...
...In his criticism Weiner is fastidious and delicate, in reality he is a lecherous vulgarian, calling Morroe's attention to a girl walking by with the comment: "That little tochiss...
...Some of the funniest parts of To an Early Grave are the tribal lore...
...finally a mad old Jewish pretzel lady traps him into another fantastic romance...
...I could bite into it like a piece of hot pastrami...
...I do not recognize the four principal mourners, which is perhaps just as well...
...driving back from the funeral Morroe dreams of encountering Leslie in a second-run movie theater, where he betrays him in a showing of The Informer...
...Ottensteen is a refuser, but he is the most likable of Morroe's companions, he is the one most loyal to Leslie, and his rhetoric about Jewish woes is a relief from the general culture-faking...
...it is the only first novel I have found interesting enough to demand this space in more than a year, since Thomas Pynchon's V...
...One would have to include some anecdotes, particularly the two that broke me up...
...But this is less a serious development than Markfield's final irony: the tears come just as inappropriately as Morroe's earlier reaction did...
...The women in To an Early Grave are all minor...
...The other three mourners are broad caricatures...
...One is Weiner's tricking of an editor named Brucie Siskind by promising him the erotic delights of an Israeli amazon and giving him instead the phone number of Fat Gittel, Weiner's appetizing-store lady...
...The only art that truly interests Leslie's circle is popular culture...
...You could peel them off with the laths and tiles, they hung from the clothes dryer in the kitchen, they stuffed up the drains, they killed the plants, they brought in roaches...
...Another is a splendid pro forma fight between Levine and a Jewish cab driver who has dented his car...
...WRITERS & WRITING Jewish, All Too Jewish By Stanley Edgar Hyman One of the reasons we read novels is to learn about the exotic world: how do Portuguese priests go about seducing their parishioners, why are the Japanese forever injecting themselves with vitamins...
...everyone else cries at the funeral, but instead Morroe embarrassingly gets an erection at the sight of Sandra Luboff, Miss Social Welfare, and his memory of their dalliance...
...A third is Leslie's funeral ceremony, which is climaxed when a Negro folksinger sings a Scottish tribute to Bonnie Prince Charlie...
...As for the cemetery, "even the young maples that lined the street seemed trimmed and pruned to the shape of menorahs...
...Here is a remark overheard in the washroom: "He was never a normal personality...
...He was a small fat man who walked like "a little bubbe loaded down with shopping bags...
...In Leslie's apartment, "the very walls dripped troubles...
...The book deals with one Sunday in the life of Morroe Rieff, during which he and three other friends of Leslie Braverman...
...This would have to include at least three wonderfully funny scenes...
...Here is an unfriendly Gentile: "She had a narrow fur piece...
...In the romp with Sandra, on the roof during a Braverman party, Morroe could hardly wait to get her panties off before reciting Cummings...
...We first see Barnet Weiner, poet and critic of the arts, spending his Sunday morning in bed with a thin Bronx girl named Myra Mandelbaum, who had previously refused to stay the night, she explains, because her hair is oily and he has such hard water...
...A normal personality is not going to set fire to his mother's bathroom curtains when he's a big boy already...
...To an Early Grave is a roman à clef, and the originals of the dead genius and his wife Inez are people I knew slightly some years ago...
...Leslie was dirty, tirelessly promiscuous, and a shameless sponge...
...Then Levine demands that Weiner name fourteen movies in which Bogart was featured but not starred, nine books by Albert Payson Terhune, the original Dead End Kids, and so on...
...But mostly the richness of language amuses and delights...
...When we hear them mock him on the way back from the funeral, we realize that they do neither...
...a gifted writer dead at 41, attend Leslie's funeral in Brooklyn...
...he was a ruthless exploiter of his wife, who eventually evicted him...
...I do not think that To an Early Grave is a work of major importance or that Markfield intended it to be...
...To Leslie, as to Weiner, art is the dream of a graciousness not attainable in fife...
...When Morroe tries to take down the number of a policeman for beating up a bum, he can find nothing in his pockets but dental floss and salt tablets...
...Above all Leslie was a character: a lover of egg creams, the master of a revolting dog named Kaplan, the man who lectured on Lorna Doone at a writers" workshop...
...The book is broad satire, wonderfully funny and mean...
...Holly Levine, a most pretentious literary critic, owns the Volkswagen that takes the four to the funeral...
...grinning "his shy and goofy grin," is eternal and enduring, and ultimately he overcomes them with innocence, as Krazy overcomes Ignatz Mouse...
...The other is the story, unfortunately not synopsizable in this family magazine, of what Leslie did when Inez came home early and found him and Minerva Turtletaub not reading page proofs together...
...At times there is too much rhetoric, and the topical and popular culture references overpower...
...The most interesting character in To an Early Grave is of course the dead Leslie, who is endlessly resurrected for us...
...Wallace Markfield's first novel, To an Early Grave (Simon and Schuster, 255 pp., $4,50), is about a way of life just as exotic and glamorous as those, if one can stand away from it for a while: the life of New York Jewish intellectuals...
...finally, at the end of the long day, rubbing his wife Etta with insect repellent, Morroe is able to cry...
...In the car on the way to the cemetery, Morroe has a beautiful meditation about his own mediocrity and the world's dangers, punctuated by "a splash of heartburn...
...The book bubbles over with comic rhetoric...
...Markfield has clearly taken Joyce's Ulysses as his model, but instead of trying to duplicate that encyclopaedic masterpiece, he has aimed more modestly at writing just Mr...
...A sevenpage scene in which Levine tries to write a review should be enough to drive anyone of decent impulse, susceptible to shame, out of the profession...
...Levine's form of mourning for Leslie is to say to a friend at the funeral: "We must first determine whether we want memoir or critique...
...He has all the sweet unworldliness of Krazy Kat...
...To an Early Grave is enormously funnier than a review can convey, and perhaps the best review would be simply an anthology of quotations...
...Morroe's wife Etta comes through as a nagging voice and "absurdly large breasts...
...It is a small comic triumph, the sunniest novel about death that I know...
...he is then attacked by a squadron of geese...
...During the trip, Weiner challenges Levine to identify the nemesis of Bim Gump, the Green Hornet's driver, the words that Hop Harrigan radios to his announcer, and so on...
...its little beast jaws gaped open as though from great pain or rage...
...Levine's Volkswagen is introduced with a marvelous soliloquy that begins: "To own a car in Manhattan is like towing a camel across the Sargasso...
...This is accurate sociology: women are insignificant in the novel because they are insignificant, instrumental housekceper-bedmates, in the Jewish intellectual subculture—to its shame...
...He can compress all of Flatbush into a few words: "Kids gumming zwieback in wading pools...
...Leslie's widow, Inez, a Yiddish-speaking Gentile, is made "radiant, positively radiant" by her grief, and she is masterful at the funeral, inviting the mourners back to her apartment and instructing them to bring two large pizzas, "one all cheese, one cheese and anchovy...
...Sandra, Myra, the other girls described or mentioned, are interesting only in their ready horizontality...
...The fourth mourner, Felix Ottensteen, is an older man (the other three are about Leslie's age) who writes literary articles for a Yiddish daily and lectures to Hadassah groups...
...Bloom's Day in Brooklyn...
...Morroe thinks, of his companions: "They may not respect me, but they like me...
...Markfield's comic descriptions are marvels of economy...
...But Leslie was also a brilliant critic and fiction writer, a conscientious stylist and a man who saved his integrity for his work...
...Markfield makes only the most perfunctory effort to unify the incidents: Morroe finds that he cannot cry over Leslie's death...
...before his death he lived by writing pornography...
...Morroe is a City College graduate who writes promotion for a Jewish fund-raising agency...
...In the cemetery during the funeral, he sees the grave of one Goldie Bromberg and he fantasies a life with her...
...Weiner "used to correspond with Gide in French and call him Cher Maitre...
...Brucie's revenge is calling Weiner at four in the morning to stutter the names of various smoked fishes, accompanied by snatches of "Hatikvah...
...One is Morroe's childhood memory of the Jewish laundrymen outside the Norfolk naval base, forbidden to solicit the sailors, calling attention to themselves with costumes: Leo the Lumberman with an ax, Hershel the Hawaiian in a hula skirt, Moishe the Mexican in a Sam Browne belt and huaraches, Morroe's father Cowboy Joe in a Stetson hat...
...As such To an Early Grave is brilliantly successful, and if you have not laughed since Fred Allen went off the air, I prescribe this book...
...The cab driver's sermon on his religion of brotherhood, before his fight with Levine, is a comic masterpiece...
...Nevertheless Morroe...
...We first see Ottensteen refusing his son money, then we see him refusing to ride in the German automobile...
...Indeed, to paraphrase Stephen Dedalus, all too Jewish...
...The other women in the novel are ludicrous figures overheard in restaurants, or comic storeladies...
...So is a rabbi's sermon, about the recalcitrance of the body, that the four listen to until they discover that they are at the wrong funeral...
Vol. 47 • May 1964 • No. 11
