Knight Errant of the '30s
ROIPHE, ANNE RICHARDSON
Knight Errant of the '30s THE ITINERANT By William Herrick McGraw-Hill. 228 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by ANNE RICHARDSON ROIPHE Author, "Digging Out" Most of us today have given up the brave...
...She has one arm and an attenuated stump that she uses to take good care of herself, hitting on the head with great force anyone who gets in her way...
...rather like a good piece of church architecture from the 11 th century, it makes one hunger to belong to the crusade that built it...
...The boy moves into the world of young politicians?Trotskyites, Stalinists and idealists of all stripes...
...It is of the lusty, knocking-over-women variety that some find appealing and others boorish...
...Even when it is temporary—a one-night release from war or a several months' stay at a desert gas station —there is the sense of human encounter between two exposed bodies...
...She fails to achieve as a woman as they have failed to achieve as men, yet we cannot help but admire her efforts...
...But that is not Her-rick's fault...
...Zeke goes through one disastrous marriage, finally finds a perfect mate in the daughter of an Italian Wobbly, and becomes a union organizer working in an office and supporting his children...
...Yet at times he is a real hero...
...She is as indifferent to the needs of her first child as she is concerned about the suffering of the proletarian millions...
...Zeke the boy and Zeke the man cannot sit still...
...She, like Zeke's universe, is crippled, distorted, mutilated by natural and human cruelty...
...he rushes about enthusiastically, endlessly renewed after each exhausting encounter with the brutal realities of poverty, police, Southern Whites, impossible Utopian dreamers...
...Zeke at 13 cuts loose from his family, after his father has fallen to his death while painting a toothpaste billboard...
...Zeke's childhood love is a girl named Miriam...
...This novel is not a search for identity...
...Then, when you believe he must be depleted beyond caring or coping, he joins the battle again in World War II...
...Zeke is not neurotic...
...The Dragons, of course, are never slain...
...The sex in the book is special...
...If Holden Caulfield had had friends and political convictions and an external enemy, he might have become like Zeke...
...I believe it reflects the kind of virility that Hemingway hoped to have, Jones looks for at the bottom of the sea, and Norman Mailer perverts by turning sex into murder...
...Here the book loses some of its tightness, and the episodic structure is less effective...
...It is the story of the relationship between the solid rock of Zeke and the unreliable, indifferent external world...
...he is merely heady with freedom, appetite and an excess of alternatives...
...Like a tornado tearing across the plains, he rushes from one adventure to another: He plunges in to help the Negro and clashes with the Party's indifference to individual suffering...
...Zeke loves her because he cannot help it, and she does not return his intense affection because the world simply does not...
...Zeke always finds someone to adore, and he always survives...
...She is fierce, determined, still vulnerable and as yet undefeated...
...Reviewed by ANNE RICHARDSON ROIPHE Author, "Digging Out" Most of us today have given up the brave assumption that man will soon win a social victory over his own indecencies...
...She is a charming radical camp follower, but after the war her life turns bitter when her husband betrays her and the solutions she has accepted prove as false as her lovers' ideals...
...They meet when he is still a boy and she is living with a dying fake of a social philosopher...
...The author seems a little weary of his subject, for after all, everything following the wars, everything after the cremation of that kind of youth must be anti-climactic...
...In this sense he is a hero...
...We no longer believe that the key to human progress lies in uncovering, through argument or brute force, the correct method for the required radical surgery...
...Time is a shared reality, and subjective concerns of a psychological sort are kept within a social framework...
...An itinerant, Zeke is neither an introvert nor a brooding intellectual, and never does his homeless-ness become the cliche alienation that is so much in style...
...his survival in the world, spirit intact, becomes a kind of reward, a kind of justification of the hopes that have themselves not survived the two wars...
...he survives a comic escapade in a Utopian colony, where the sewage system fails and the Builders-of-the-New-World are nearly overcome by their own waste...
...He finally fights, as such a man must, in the Spanish Civil War...
...She is a lady who keeps candlesticks in old wine bottles and insists on her freedom...
...Yes, this is a fairy tale of sorts, a myth of the 1930s told with humor by a troubadour of the times...
...The novelist has created a fable of the good Knight Errant, whose heart remains stout, despite the fact that his King and court prove themselves false...
...There is definable good and bad, the lines between outside and inside are sharply maintained...
...On the contrary, it reflects a distinct and very personal manner, a style that has a rough, even primitive, quality...
...She marries someone else before Zeke is old enough to claim her...
...But Herrick employs all the sophisticated tools of a writer to shape his reality...
...For Zeke Gurevich there is always affection mingled with the instinctual drive...
...From the distance of the '60s, Zeke seems a comic hero: a pitiful Don Quixote...
...He is too stubborn to give in and go back, and out of the fire comes a man refusing to be completely disillusioned and refusing to totally quit...
...William Herrick is not an ordinary chronicler, and this is not a conventional novel...
...Through all his journeys and sexual encounters Zeke maintains his love for a woman named Rachel...
...Because Herrick is a writer of talent the technique does not become one-dimensional...
...After the section on World War II, the pace of the book slows...
...The battle sections of the book cover familiar ground, but Zeke experiences war in his own electric way...
...And thanks to our more cautious attitudes we have also lost faith in a certain kind of romantic hero, the belligerent innocent...
Vol. 50 • June 1967 • No. 12
