Sprints into Lunacy
NEWFIELD, JACK
Sprints into Lunacy BLACK ANGELS By Bruce Jay Friedman Simon & Schuster. 188 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by JACK NEWFIELD Author, "Prophetic Minority"; Staff Writer, "Village Voice" Lyndon Johnson...
...Pop and Op...
...So Stefano hires a quartet of Negro workmen to repair his house and make it the envy of his bigoted neighbors...
...The Negro took a sip of beer and rose to leave...
...But now a great big absurd, irrational bill is coming due for everyone of us, just as it was for Stefano...
...The architect of Apartheid is assassinated by a lunatic who thought him too generous to the blacks...
...The Hero" is a parody on America's insane thirst for national idols of no visible merit ? la Baby Jane Holzer, Officer Tippit of Dallas, Andy Warhol, Candy Mossier...
...Stefano protests...
...And he made me laugh...
...so brilliant you want to grab Friedman by the collar, jam him against a wall and scream into his face: "Moron...
...Suddenly, on the last page, Friedman makes his sprint into lunacy...
...Dadaist underground films...
...The hunchback has a classic Friedman monster-mother: vulgar, sadistic, a lush...
...Then we'll see about other times...
...Two years ago he bounced back with his second novel, A Mother's Kisses, which was as savagely comic as Stern, but revealed no great leap in vision or technique...
...Then Friedman mistakenly published a collection of stories called Far From the City of Class-mostly over-stylized misfires...
...Beginning from this position a dozen little cultural guerrilla movements have broken out...
...The best piece in the collection is the title story...
...To further "salve his conscience," Stefano offers his serfs free beer, old sports jackets "and books of fairly recent vintage on Nova Scotia tourism...
...SNCC calls integration irrelevant and a front for white supremacy...
...Danceman George Murphy is a United States Senator and Ronald Reagan could very well become Governor of the nation's largest state...
...But when the deformed teenager dies while apprehending the assassin of the President-by biting his socks-the monster-mother becomes one of the nation's absurd heroes...
...Go to your woodshed and write...
...The prolific Friedman published his first novel, Stern, in 1962...
...The Negroes do extraordinary work for extraordinarily low wages...
...Stefano "wanted to run out and tell them to do less work...
...He could take it all out of expense money, not even bother his regular free-lance payments...
...Lenny Bruce...
...John Cage...
...All right, wait a second,' said Stefano...
...Hold on a minute...
...Fo' hunnid,' said the Negro...
...The anti-hero of "The Humiliation" is a first cousin to Stern-an ineffectual schlemiel brooding for 15 years over an idiotic insult he suffered in the Army from a strong goyish type named Carroll...
...An hour...
...Stanley Kubrick...
...Go and write that big, slow, hard novel because you understand, in your own non-political way, this neurotic, pompous, hypocritical land as well as anybody...
...During a European vacation with his vulgar wife, Gribitz meets his nemesis and tries to re-enact the first humiliation, but is only humiliated a second time by Carroll...
...Two dozen postMcCarthy insurgents have been lumped under this pop culture contrivance...
...Forget about making the uptown scene...
...They are no better than second rate, homogenized for highpaying slick magazines...
...There are all kinds of quibbles one can have with Friedman: He is self-indulgent, his vision is too narrow, too bereft of humanism...
...Stern had the insights of Freud, the malice of Mary McCarthy and the craft of Truman Capote...
...Happenings...
...For three centuries Negroes have silently done America's dirty work, collected our garbage and picked our cotton for exploitive wages (or for nothing...
...Now comes Black Angels, 16 stories in large type, generous margins and a strained 188 pages...
...Staff Writer, "Village Voice" Lyndon Johnson runs for President on a peace platform, wins a record plurality, and then makes war...
...But, finally, Bruce Friedman is a stylist...
...Thomas Pynchon and Joseph Heller have been knighted the champions of the movement...
...Headlines outplay the parodist's fancy, paranoia becomes commonplace, absurdity increasingly becomes one of the creators'-especially the American creators'-most legitimate postures in the 20th century...
...William Burroughs...
...In the underdeveloped territory of fiction, the guerrilla revolt has been baptized as Black Humor by commercial journalists and professional fad chroniclers...
...Forget about keeping your name in print...
...This one doesn't count, does it...
...What segregates them from the rest of the literary inmates is their wounded Jewishness, and the fact they are often wildly funny...
...Bob Dylan...
...This is Friedman's Amen to Mailer's prophecy, "There's a shitstorm coming...
...At the neurotic, inter-personal level, Friedman has created a prophetic fable from America's dillemma...
...But three stories are brilliant...
...Just for fun, what would you charge me...
...Stefano starts pouring out his private sorrows to the leader of the work crew named Cotton...
...It was a perfectly crafted cameo (159 pages in paperback...
...It do,' said the Negro, sinking into the couch and snapping out a pad and pencil...
...Its leading spear carriers include Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Ken Kesey, Richard Stern, Evan S. Connell, Burt Blechman, Terry Southern, Alan Harrington, Walker Percy and even the early Philip Roth...
...Don't become the Nat Hentoff of fiction...
...Inside it toil satirists like Jules Feiffer and Shelley Berman, and writers like Irvin Faust, Wallace Markfield, Mordecai Richler, and the subject of this review, Bruce Jay Friedman...
...Yet, he loved the prices, too...
...It is the story of a young football player who gets kicked in the head, never recovers, and becomes a kind of Hunchback of Notre Dame, whose only interest is biting moving legs, the last thing he saw before his football accident...
...The Living Theatre and its progeny...
...Don't become absorbed by masscult and turned into a vaudvillian, like Tim Leary or Mark Lane...
...She is deluged with guilt-gifts, receives speaking invitations and ends up running for the United States Senate, presumably to join George Murphy...
...The rich, economical, writing gave me a twinge of envy, and the spiteful satire had the sting of English mustard...
...And parasitic, vaguely guilty white liberals like Stefano will be its first victims...
...he revels in the absurd where Camus struggled nobly against it...
...Let's just finish up this hour, all right...
...Write and sweat...
...He says: "This is going to sound crazy, but what if we talked this way, couple times a week...
...He is too lazy...
...Its anti-hero, Stefano, "smothered by debt, his wife and child in flight," is stuck with a fancy suburban home that has begun to decay...
...Read Ellison and Barth...
...premature ejaculations that give no satisfaction because the writer lacked the patience to let them ripen inside his brain...
...Some of the stories are labored one-line jokes...
...In this psychologically astute story the Jewish self-hatred, which almost ruined Stern, is annoying, but nevertheless an integral part of Friedman's poetry of psychosis...
...Forget about making easy money...
...A few never should have been anthologized...
...certainly not at those prices...
...But within this one jumping nuthouse, where surrealism, cruelty, nihilism and satire coalesce, is a separate ward called Jewish-UrbanHip-Neurotic...
Vol. 49 • October 1966 • No. 21
