Fatal Sincerity
SAMUELS, CHARLES THOMAS
Fatal Sincerity THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH By Robert Shaw Harcourt, Brace & World 180 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by CHARLES THOMAS SAMUELS Assistant Professor of English, Williams College;...
...Apparently, the author believes that Hannah Arendt told only half the truth...
...Goldman?' " 'All!' said the old man...
...Was it not monstrous of you, Mr...
...But that coup de theatre (which most detective story addicts could have foreseen) merely shows that Goldman is no less ingeniously pedagogical than his creator...
...Goldman . . . Mr...
...Goldman's Jew-ishness is conveyed merely by a few sentences beginning with "So," and his other linguistic habits are even less authentic...
...He is then flown to Israel, installed in a glass booth (like Eichmann) and allowed to orate under state auspices...
...He spends the first chapters driving around Manhattan, making cryptic references to Judaism and guilt, and dropping hints that someone is after him...
...Jetzt spricht nicht mehr ein Fuehrer oder ein Mann, jetzt spricht das deulsche Volk: 'No longer speaks one man...
...contributor, "Kenyon Review," "Yale Review" An actor of some renown, Robert Shaw is also a novelist with a social conscience...
...Goldman?' "Silence...
...This cinematic vulgarity and a taste for rococo decor (like that in a horror film) dictate Shaw's main "bit": a secret room made by Goldman into a Nazi museum, in which (for the reader's benefit, since no one is present) he behaves as if he were a member of the Gestapo...
...But as Oscar Wilde said, "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal...
...Goldman, it is with you I am concerned . . . Mr...
...In a novel so dependent on speech pattern, the author is fatally inept at realizing Goldman's idiom...
...I saw the Pope on television . . . who did He sit between...
...So we are all so guilty, Mr...
...For what other audience could such speeches be convincing, with their foreign interpolations to indicate obscurity and their Manhattan argot when the moment of truth looms...
...Only in the theater can one imagine such dialogue being spoken, complete with its interior translation for the unsophisticated...
...it does so by imitating the tricks of cinema perspective: If outside the frame there is enlightening information, make sure the camera never reaches it...
...So let's cut out all this shtick...
...The book's hero, a fabulously rich builder named Arthur Goldman, is impelled to rhetoric by some dimly perceptible anguish...
...As for Shaw's plot, it is acceptable only within conventions of large gesture and gallery symbolism unsuitable to serious fiction...
...He congratulated in a light baritone, gave the Virgin Mary a new title...
...The Man in the Glass Booth is neither a novel nor a play, but a tricky piece a these...
...You could see it on the television...
...Its thesis, unfortunately, is much simpler than Shaw's dramatic methods...
...At his trial, Goldman is finally exposed as a Jew playing the Nazi role in order to publicize his version of the holocaust...
...Thus scenes are cut before they are comprehensibly concluded, and phone conversations remain puzzling because they are recorded at one end of the line...
...The Judge warns Goldman from time to time against histrionics, but we know from movie and television trials that such warnings are cues...
...One's first reaction is that such form and content are incompatible, and this reaction is right...
...Commend my courage.' " If not his courage, we can commend Shaw's sincerity...
...Shaw's gimmicks might prove effective on stage (they will be produced this season by the Royal Shakespeare Company), but only if a good actor (Shaw...
...gives life to the main role...
...He was not a cog in a torture wheel...
...in Berliner Sportpalast...
...Though The Man in the Glass Booth generates a certain nervous titilla-tion...
...But, Mr...
...Goldman, did you not become here more German than Jewish?' "Silence...
...Es darf nunmehr fur die Welt kein Zweifel mehr iibrigbleiben...
...Mon-signor Dante burst into tears and fumbled for his handkerchief...
...he liked killing Jews: " 'I understand,' said the Presiding Judge, 'your need to put a German in the dock—a true German—a Nazi who would state and not excuse—who would say what it is necessary to say . . . say what no German has ever said in the dock—I understand that...
...Here, for example, is one of Goldman's typically tough-guy lamentations: "The Fuehrer said, 'Give me a Turk...
...Having engaged war, Socialism and the colonial problem in three previous books, he now makes a thriller out of the extermination of six million Jews in The Man in the Glass Booth...
...Flamboyant in action and unreal in speech...
...but the German people.' The Arabs . . . must be...
...the Jews did connive in their destruction, but so did Eich-mann...
...Just as his lectures are about to come to a point, the man who has been following him enters to declare that Goldman is really an escaped SS officer...
...His senior cardinal deacons, Alfred Cardinal Ottaviani, seventy-four years old, and Alberto Cardinal de Jorio, eighty...
...He goes to a Turkish bath, where he orates, visits a tailor, where he orates, and gives a party, where he orates...
Vol. 50 • March 1967 • No. 7
