The Fat Knight and the Thin Knight

...Holmes does not write well enough to bring off this complex and ambitious novel...

...May asleep is a "sorrowing Spanish madonna," and May and Dan hurting each other are "just two sick children...

...The second is the singer himself, an 18-yearold blind Negro named Orchid Small, called Little Orkie...

...A Charlie Parker record is "Bird's tumbling kinks of raw song...

...His speech is a gorgeous medley of cursing, ranting, boasting and blustering, with a shrewdness and wry wit just under the surface...

...Yet Get Home Free is a serious and in part quite successful novel, and it creates a superb Fat Knight, while boldly trying its hand at the Thin Knight too...

...There is a matchless description of "the heroic ordeal of his shaving" despite his morning shakes, carving "his face out of the lather, like a sculptor with the ague...

...These are Dan Verger and May Delano, a young couple living together in New York...

...In the book's first section, entitled "New York: The End,' we see their affair break up during a day filled with drunken hatefulness and spite, much of it involving May's frigidity...

...He gives him "a poetic evocation of the Grafton of his youth," a vision of freedom and joy...

...The jacket description makes sure that I will not read Holmes' earlier books: "In his first novel, Go (1952), he immortalized the Beats...

...Holmes is a master of the inept trope: an alcoholic's friends are "like beady-eyed carrion circling a mortally wounded animal...

...The jacket also prints a blurb by Jack Kerouac for this novel as "an existentialist volume...

...In the second section, "Old Man Molineaux," Dan goes back home to Old Grafton, and is transformed by a three-week sozzle with Will...

...in his second, The Horn (1958), the bop jazz world...

...For the most part, though, Holmes is romantic and sentimental, a cornball...

...Similarly, the Thin Knights are both an affirmation of value and a warning...

...He comes triumphantly alive, as full of the body's juices as his fat prototype...

...Hobbes is impotent, the O'Mearas are dejectedly promiscuous, and Jack's kick is taking amateurish pornographic photographs of Bett...

...Will had been a barge pilot on the river until the glazed moment, 20 years before, when "he adroitly piloted five barges so solidly aground on a shoal that one of them was still there.' He has deserted his wife and children and lives alone in a tarpaper shack outside of town...

...The fourth section, "Hobbes and Little Orkie," has May return to her home town, Alexandria, Louisiana, where a wild night with Hobbes, Orkie and the O'Mearas transforms her...

...Here is a sentence, not the worst in the book, about a racist Negro making a play for May: "His eyelids beaded with that cruel sweat which the neurotic subservience of rebellious white girls had demanded of him before, and that his rage had made easy all those times he had gotten his own back for all the things continual indignity could do to a human being, and the tossing hours of trying to fantasy it away each night...

...At a party, a man stares insolently at another's mouth, "as if noting traces of canapé— though in fact none had been served...

...Will's thematic question to Dan is: "But where in hell's wild America any more...

...May imagines herself kissing Orkie's cheek, "gruff as a young, worldly aunt with an infatuated nephew...

...As Holmes misconceived Old Man Molineaux as Lear, so he lets Hobbes quote Prospero renouncing his magic...

...Will's lifelong failure to leave Grafton is the precise encouragement Dan needs to go abroad...

...Some ambitious works of art attempt both types, as the Marx Brothers did (in fact, Don Quixote has a potential Fat Knight in Sancho Panza, Falstaff a curdled Thin Knight in Prince Hal...

...In the last section, "New York: The Beginning," Dan and May discover that they have come to similar realistic conclusions about the world, and they begin a new and less starry-eyed affair, in which we can assume that May will achieve orgasm...

...In addition to Old Man Molineaux, there are a number of fine comic touches: a drunken farewell party on a ship, in which Dan crowds past an open stateroom "to find himself staring directly into the impervious, parchmentcolored face of Somerset Maugham...

...As for Hobbes, he preaches truths to May: wild apocalyptic images of the sickness of American civilization, to which he opposes Orkie's intuitive wisdom, "simple love without thought," and a mysterious doctrine of "th' holy fruitcake's in th' holy oven...

...Their Negro friends can be as racist as May's white friends...

...In one aspect, Old Man Molineaux inspires Dan as an unkillable life force...

...The third is a red-haired Georgia "cracker" named Jack O'Meara, in whose house Hobbes and Orkie live...

...Bett is a vision of what May might have become in 30 years...

...Holmes' novel about bop must be a curiosity...

...he seems to have little comprehension of jazz or the blues...

...If one character regularly tries to give another money, it is always "over stale coffee in empty cafeterias...

...May's joke about two "fag" friends: "I was teaching them how to walk, in exchange for their teaching me how to—well, it's a controversial story...

...Little Orkie, who is innocent, is purely an affirmation...

...In a brave challenge to Ulysses, the second and fourth sections are subtitled "Verger—North—Day" and "May—South—Night...

...Dan tells May that Will could have been "me in thirty years, if I hadn't met him now...

...He is best when he is being funny...

...It is difficult to explain just how the Fat Knight and the Thin Knights redeem here, because the novel is contradictory and I think that Holmes himself is of two minds...

...She discovers that Hobbes is a heroin addict, and that the O'Mearas are marijuana smokers...

...The Fat Knight, Falstaff, is blustery, self-indulgent, cynical and wise...

...finding Hobbes in a Negro roadhouse is "rather like finding Hawthorne in a nudist colony...

...One is Paul Hobbes, a New York intellectual who has gone South and regenerated himself as the accompanist of a young blues singer...

...After a nasty quarrel with his married daughter, Will strips her bare to the narrator: "And even her goddamn night-crawlers are pretty near dead by the time she sells 'em.' (This daughter is later used to produce some King Lear echoes, surely a mistake...

...Holmes cannot bear to say "he said" or "she said" as backward old Tolstoi did, so it is "he grouched out," "Verger corrected petulantly," or "he gruffed out...

...As Will stumbles drunkenly through the town's backyards, he is "menaced by murderous washlines that Old Man Molineaux never seems to gauge right, always ducking his head while still four feet away, feinting and bobbing like a rheumy boxer, or coming up smack into them with a strangled curse, and almost beheading himself...

...I cannot imagine any context less promising...

...When Jack O'Meara first appears, with a funny drawl and "wacky, gasping laughter," roughhousing with his small son Jocko, teasing Orkie, embracing his wife Bett, he seems to May an embodiment of love and virtue...

...When first Bett and then Jack make passes at May, she thinks: "Christ, it'll be Jocko next...

...Will drunk, and beating his fat wife Bertha, is a savage caricature of Dan's verbal sadism toward May...

...May's visit to a friend who lives in a perfect replica of Tara, "except that it was only one-room deep and built on a two-acre lot in one of the newer residential sections...

...If he was smart he'd be off pulling his whistle in the damn woods somewheres, like I was at his age," would be Old Man Molineaux's comment...

...Holmes' Fat Knight is Will Molineaux, Old Man Molineaux, the 60-year-old town drunk of Old Grafton, Connecticut...

...The Thin Knight, Don Quixote, is soft-spoken, saintly, innocent and absurd...

...The book itself is pretentiously dedicated "to December 15, 1960...

...The third section, "New York: The Middle," describes a friendly encounter between May and the new Dan, on his way to Europe...

...In this mixed bundle of a novel, only Will Molineaux is an absolute success...

...Get Home Free is elaborately structured to make the Fat Knight and the Thin Knights redemptive for its hero and heroine...

...In another aspect, however, Old Man Molineaux saves because he is cautionary, a horrible example...

...Before the wild night is over, the O'Meara household turns into a squalid caution for May...

...The book's language is neither fresh nor sophisticated enough for its story...

...His mother compensated him for his blindness by telling him "that if I could hear summer and smell love that's all I need.' Orkie can, and he teaches May to hear and smell and feel (as well as to see) the beauty of nature, until she is transformed and at peace, redeemed by the grace of nature...

...The Thin Knight figure in Get Home Free is split into three Thin Knights...

...W. C. Fields was the classic Fat Knight of our time, as Charlie Chaplin was the classic Thin Knight...

...When he and Dan are hungover and thirsty on a Sunday, Will discovers some cans of beer he had hidden away, and the discovery is presented as a triumph of Eros over Thanatos: "He plunges an arm right down into the tub, grimy sleeve of long-johns and all, exultant there on his bony old knees, and then he is wildly flourishing something above his head like a bladeless sword handle, something that glitters in the sun...

...John Clellon Holmes' new novel Get Home Free (Dutton, 253 pp., $4.50) arrives, at least according to my prejudices, with everything against it...

...These figures need not be literally fat or thin: in the Marx Brothers, Groucho was the Fat Knight, Harpo the Thin Knight...