Good Movies and Bad Marriages

...His story proves to be an improbable immersion of Iris Murdoch's mythic fantasy in John O'Hara's suburb of depressed status-seekers...

...Historic movement is observed, comprehended, and discounted-a market trend upon whose correct prediction economic success depends...

...Today's avant-garde, as he contends, "brings the work of art into the market place...

...Our young or youngish writers have grown up, it seems, become bitter and disillusioned, and seek refuge from the harshness of life-that "useless nagging terror which distinguished a mind trapped in America in the fifties," as one critic described it-in open or disguised cinematic dreams...

...He also demolishes quite definitively the "futurist" and "experimental" pretensions that cluster around this catchword...

...If one intends, as Spielberg obviously does, to stick to the grimy, obsessive surface of urban life, one will naturally get the dry bones of movie-shot description enlivened by a Beckett-like but melodramatic background of compulsive tics and cloacal routine...

...We ourselves can come down to earth by examining the various contributions to the arts Rahv has managed to cull...

...and our poetry, except in the hands of masters like Lowell, seems desperately thin and second-rate...

...Miss Selz is intermittently witty, but her subject-a Bohemian love affair and its faint or furious repercussions in a closed environmenthas unfortunate women's magazine overtones...

...One of the main reasons seems to be that the author's ideational approach precludes it...

...Juvenal's fury and Lowell's own combine to produce lines that out-Beat the Beats and yet have a rigor and intensity that are beyond the uncontrolled reach of poets like Ginsberg and Creeley: Chase the iron foot of Mars, who stumbled in the cripple's net, risk the worst punishments the laws allow an injured husband-often the revenge outdoes the law: The cuckold kills the lover, chops off his balls, or jams a mullet up his arse...

...What can Catulla, what can Chloris deny your greasy prick-sad sacks in heat, their conscience washing out between their legs...

...The force of its contemporary application is clear: What is the last day of this mighty spirit whose valor turned the kingdom on its head...

...Although he is very acute about the maneuvers of this phoney avant-garde, seeing them as "suppliers" of an on-going business who must "keep in step with the times" and beat their competitors to the market with the latest gadgets, he fails to connect these activities with the larger cultural environment...

...Semantic discussions of the avantgarde, such as Herr Enzensberger proves to be expert in, can only help to disencumber the ground of debris and set the stage for the real discussion...

...March, madman, cross the Alps, the Tiber-be a purple patch for schoolboys, and a theme for declamation...

...For the most part our fiction trails wanly in the wake of the mass media, our criticism is good but essentially didactic-for instance, Sartre's private acrobatics are interesting to dissect, but in the long or short run what relevance do they really have...

...soon you'll have her money, all her unloved body has to give...

...It is not clear, however, whether Rahv is speaking only of American creative energy or whether his dictum has an international scope and embraces such figures as Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and the other members of the "new" creative putsch in France, Germany and Italy...

...Enzensberger, therefore, sees the avant-garde as one of the offshoots of the mass media, desperately in competition not with the great works of the past but with the sleazy works of the present...

...On the other hand, Jascha Kessler's slow-motion farce, "Perfect Days," has the decor of Tati's movie, Mon Oncle, and almost the same cast, but the satiric edge is dulled by the solemn, staccato grind of his pretentious rhetoric...

...After such magnificence, the dreary or feverish investigations of bad marriages-the movie-goers may dream but they usually end up in a matrimonial incarceration-to which we are treated by Peter Spielberg and Paul West constitute a tremendous let-down...

...I should imagine that this is what Enzensberger is referring to when he attacks the present-day avant-garde for playing it safe...

...The anticipatory moment of art is cut down to a mere speculation...

...Happily, the critical essays and the poetry he includes provide a respite...

...Philip Rahv's anthology at least has the merit of making such questions terribly real...

...Maurice Cranston is brilliant on the subject of Sartre's clever attempts to square his latterday Marxism with his Existentialism, while Stephen Donadio and Robert Brustein offer us, respectively, hasty guides to the current poetry and drama scenes...

...the literary energy now being expended is mostly directed towards incorporating in imaginative forms types of experience and attitudes towards experience as yet unavailable to writers before the Second World War...

...And though Paul West tries to thrust into new regions, something in his ideological baggage renders most of his discoveries flimsy and false...

...And although he is brilliantly corrosive about the state-controlled art on the other side of the Iron Curtain, he is rather wary and oblique about the avant-garde that operates in West Germany and almost all of Europe with the paternal aid and comfort of government funds...

...Yet Enzensberger has some valuable things to say...

...These variously digestible pieces of tyro fiction may be regarded, I suppose, as evidence of the editor's notquite-dead avant-garde pretensions...

...Can it be true that our artists are being suffocated by the larger cultural environment...

...The avant-garde, he asserts, has become an ambiguous group, "a veritable academy, and a ruling academy at that, fawned upon in the most respectable quarters even as it turns out art-objects as consumer goods...

...In one sense they are a tribute to his "experimental" response to creative endeavor, in another a glaring exhibit of his faulty taste...

...That "culture industry" El??mire Zolla has analyzed so brilliantly figures prominently-above all, in its movie aspect-in almost all of the stories and plays that appear in this collection...

...Why, we ask, echoing and inverting an illustrious maker of literature, cannot our prose be as well written as our poetry...

...WRITERS & WRITING Good Movies and Bad Marriages By Raymond Rosenthal The new anthology of fiction, drama, poetry and criticism, Modern Occasions (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 369 pp., $6.95), edited Philip Rahv, provides a useful signpost, telling us where we are, artistically speaking, and where we are going...

...His reprinting of an essay by the German critic, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, does little to clarify the matter...

...In Irvin Faust's sparkling excerpt from his novel, The Steagle, the dream is utterly open and therefore perfectly palatable...

...Not swords, or pikes, or legions-no, not these, his crown for Cannae and those seas of blood is poison in a ring...

...Faust, in fact, is for me the gift of the season, witty, incisive, mining a section of the American consciousness which has never before been dragged into the light of day with such energy and gusto...

...According to the editor, we are standing quite still, marking time, since, in his own words, experimentation "with verbal and structural forms" is dead and it is only "in the area of subject matter that innovations are noticeable...

...Then choose a widow...

...Among such easily traceable literary exercises, Stephen T. Somer's tense little tale of a crazy wife and a superscientific husband has qualities of style, insight, and movement that elevate it a notch above the common run...

...its future is charted like that of stocks and bonds...

...For example, on the government-controlled radio and television systems in Western Europe a composer of good but "traditional" music goes begging while the frauds who perpetrate "electronic" music are given handsome subsidies...

...Robert Lowell's version of luvenal's Tenth Satire is evidently intended as a portrait of Lyndon Johnson's America...

...Midway between these two movieinspired offerings stands a long short story by Thalia Selz about a young woman who is studying the cinema at an experimental school...

...but in these matters one can never be too explicit and down-to-earth...

...Can El??mire Zolla's contention that the "culture industry" is taking over and that art is either imitating its rival or drying up in despair be the true state of affairs...

...He isolates quite effectively the political connotations of the term, showing how the avant-garde movements of the pasi gravitated naturally either to Fascism or Bolshevism...

...Brustein is more magisterial than Donadio, however, conveying a rather disagreeable proprietary impression as he chops away at his cowering subjects...

...Yet, he is not half so explicit about this idea as the Italian critic, El??mire Zolla, and the concept he employs-the "consciousness industry"-seems to me a pale and confusing substitute for Zona's all-inclusive idea of "a culture industry...

...So where are we...