The Legitimacy of Madness

...In Faust's novel, however, the sources of the protagonist's madness are specious...

...Weissburg's dreams have nothing whatever to do with a substantively Jewish ideal...

...Weissburg's personal crisis is not only mirrored in an impending public calamity-the Cuban Missile Crisis-but, the novel suggests, may be attributed to it...

...But that Weissburg should be a successful literary academic strains credulity...

...It has, in fact, only a slender relation to the content of Weissburg's dominant psychic reality...

...The archetypal Jew of American fiction is no longer the pathetic schlemiel of Yiddish folk narrative, of course...

...If he is an intellectual, he will probably be cultivating his Jewishness, as they say, like mad, for the Jew enjoys a peculiar though secure status in the intellectual community...

...Where each of the stories successfully explored only a segment of experience, the novel is an ambitious attempt to impart a vision of present-day life in America that proves more than Faust is able to cope with...

...Faust's is an afflicted prose which never quite rises from its intolerable freight of miscellaneous allusions...

...he is a central type, in many cases a norm to which others aspire...

...they seem more than ever aware of themselves as the playthines of the gods, perennially suspended over the brink of disaster, hopelessly pathetic in their ineffectuality...

...Only an extraordinary character like Moses Herzog, whose Jewish background is used as a reflector for measuring and judging his current experiences, can transcend the limitations inherent in the convention...

...Steagle" is a combination of "Steelers" and "Eagles," two football teams which were obliged to pool their talents during the years of World War II...

...Throughout the novel characters speak fearfully of the danger...

...His Jewishness, which is emphasized, is so much a matter of trite in-jokes and stereotypical intonations that it can be described as purely reflexive...

...They are toy soldiers running amuck in a dazzling nightmare world of derring-do and absolute Japanese evil, where the punch in the jaw is the surest response to any problem, and where complexity is tantamount to sinister obfuscation...

...When we meet Professor Weissburg, his imperturbable respectability is crumbling before his acknowledgement of impulses long repressed...

...Only when his father complains about his son's indifference to the fate of European Jewry during the 1930s ("while you're going to your feshtunkenah talkies, Hitler is kvelling and I'm supporting Sam Goldfish...

...The Steagle is built around its protagonist's nervous breakdown...

...As such, when it avoids the sentimentalism of ideology, it can constitute a moving, even unnerving phenomenon, and in the case of a play like Marat/ Sade it may also impress one as an element of historical necessity...

...Faust's protagonist, Harold Aaron Weissburg, is an associate professor of English...

...If the novel's positive aspects were integrated better, it might stand as a kind of period piece, a minor monument to the dreck of irrelevant detail which clutters the contemporary psyche...

...is Weissburg's past put in significant relation to his present disorder...

...It is a familiar novelistic pattern...

...Reviewed by ROBERT BOYERS Editor, "Salmagundi" Irvin Faust's disappointing first novel is a portrait of that Jewish sufferer who has become all too familiar...

...A more important problem than the gratuitous presentation of Weissburg as a literary man is his equally implausible breakdown, which passes wholly beyond the bounds of neurotic conflict and raises the question of the legitimacy of madness as the controlling element in a literary work...

...And iust as Weissburg's ideal image of himself is culled from the most easily accessible aspects of popular culture, he is given to neat categorizations of others which allow very little room for individual differences to emerge...

...The myths he labors to liberate from possession of his subconscious are American phenomena, presided over not by the Elders of Zion but by movie queens and baseball stars...

...Instead of enriching the novel's texture with the use of the public element, Faust's fictional context trivializes the essential seriousness of its material...

...The trouble with all this is not that Weissburg's problems lack universality (they are at least typical of a class...

...Many novels and plays today present madness as a kind of natural, if somewhat grotesque concomitant of modern life, evolving as a privileged manifestation of insight into human cruelty and greed, both on the private and public levels...

...The distance between his mature reality and the rea'ity of his more religious childhood is what motivates much of Herzog's nostalgic sadness...

...His cosmopolitan severity of intellect prevents his moving in the more significant but less fashionable context of ritual affirmation and Talmudic study...

...The jokes are no longer funny, and every possible variety of the American-Jewish intellectual type has long been exhausted...

...There he passes himself off as Andy Hardy, collars an old screen idol no less dumbly transfixed by his cinematic past, and together they wreck a movie set...

...As Robert Alter has pointed out, the Jewish protagonists of recent American fiction constitute an incorrieiblv sentimental indulgence which has provided writers with easy contours for their character delineation...

...Faust apparently intended this to symbolize the union of past and present, public and private, which he wanted to effect in Weissburg's consciousness...

...A Professor Payne is blithely characterized as the "Son of a DAR who flies fearlessly with that midwestern mindless disregard for all the obvious danger...

...Faust uses the Jewish veneer merely as a sort of exotic ambience that lends color to the character...

...Often, indeed, the Jewish intellectual is distinguished mainly by the way in which he studs his prose with yiddishisms, or by the conventionally Jewish nostalgia in which he bathes his reminiscence...

...The title of this novel suggests what the author had in mind when he conceived it...

...But the color has begun to fade a bit from perpetual exposure, and one is beginning to wish that novelists would stop playing with Jewishness...

...Where he demonstrated an uncanny brilliance in the stories collected in Roar Lion Roar, Faust is here uncomfortably groping for narrative continuities and a vital context which will lend significance to his broken train of associations...

...If he is educated, he may be a Unitarian, singing paeans of liberalism on Sundays, sublimely free of the parochialism of heritage...

...His imagination lies in thrall to such weighty matters as Frank Sinatra's sex-appeal and "Katie Hepburn's tiger stride...

...Within this context, which triggers rapid mechanical associations of a bewildering variety, Weissburg's past is rather whimsically evoked...

...Faust has wonderfully assimilated into his prose the satirical posture of a Mike Nichols and the caricaturism which we associate with Jules Feiffer...

...When he learns tq resist the inclination to see humor and originality as ends in themselves, his talents will undoubtedly subserve the more serious ends we know he admires...

...Herzog's orientation to his experience and to the experience of his contemporaries is clearly the product of a deeply Jewish heritage...

...Whatever union he effects, though, is willed rather than artistically achieved...

...But even in The Steagle, there are undeniable moments of virtuosity...

...Although it is no coincidence that he contemplates beginning a project on Marlowe's Tamburlaine, the grandiose visions of an anarchic Elizabethan are really quite a far cry from the banality to which Weissburg is so attracted...

...The trouble with this is that Weissburg's regressive infantilism is in most respects both idiotic and absurd, often blending into sheer farce...

...Weissburg achieves a kind of psychic release by screwing dour Professor Florence Maguire in the back seat of a Renault, goes on to memorialize Willie Mays in a lecture on the mystique of the Elizabethan hero, and finally escapes family and job for a madcap plunge into the patently unreal Hollywood universe which has for so long obsessed him...