Out of the Ivory Tower

...Though essentially very different in purpose and tone, they have some oddly relevant things in common...

...Something Else is arduous reading-a gnarled, quirky, deeply personal examination of how the human mind and imagination make contact with the world...

...Partly a critical evaluation of the author's political and literary liberalism in the context of present-day revolutionary urgencies, it casts a very wide net to investigate "the consequences of political radicalism in nonpolitical areas of thought...

...Community and art are the means of perception and transcendence, of understanding how the world, in its givenness, is also the Kingdom of God...

...Bishop shows us how this works in his brilliantly fresh appraisals of The Ambassadors, Great Expectations, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," and the Gospel According to St...

...A familiar assignment-describe something"-to a class in freshman English yields the fundamental connection between seeing and saying: "the world was available for perception and comprehension in proportion to the number and relation of terms available...

...Jonathan Bishop's Something Else (Braziller, 264 pp., $8.95) and Martin Green's Cities of Light and Sons of the Morning (Little, Brown, 465 pp., $15.00) were published several months ago, yet despite the originality, intellectual ambition, and formidable erudition that distinguish them, neither work has been widely reviewed...

...He closes his book with a minutely detailed account of the rich Sparlings who dominated the life of the town, and the point of his rambling, dull social history emerges only toward the end, when we learn that the wealth of this smug Victorian family came originally from the slave trade of the 18th century...

...About Heberto Padilla, from whom Castro exacted an abject confession of imaginary sins against the state, in grim echo of the Moscow trials, Green curiously refuses te commit himself...

...In Cities of Light and Sons of the Morning Martin Green also uses autobiography in the cause of literary speculation, but beyond that his book is altogether different from Bishop's...

...As an organizing principle for the hundreds of writers he finds pertinent to the discussion, Green places them on a scale of psychological types: the Faustian, or fiery free spirit ready to sell his soul for demonic individual power...

...Metaphor proclaims the existence of the world, and enables both artist and reader to share it...

...From his beginnings as a Shropshire lad, of a lower-middle-class family, Green went on to study at Cambridge under the fierce, demanding tutelage of F. R. Leavis, and in 1952 came to teach in America, where he felt blessedly liberated from Leavis' and England's stern moralism...

...Lessons in the nature of perception are drawn from such diverse everyday activities as riding a bicycle, playing with one's children, walking in the country, preparing for courses in James Joyce...

...and the Calvinist, or self-elected saint, who through the ideological strength of the group becomes the advance guard of radical opposition and revolution...

...From this central imperative of our day Green derives his own irresolute mingling of positions?I would like to put the virtues of the liberal temperament really at the service of the radical passion"-and embarks on a long, intricate journey through space and time to cities that have been intellectual centers in revolutionary periods...

...the Erasmian, or liberal temperament, a bulwark of reason, civilization, and the superego...

...the equivalent for us is the Cuban Revolution, and the promise of something similar in the South American countries, and to some extent the Third World as a whole and the resistance of North Vietnam in particular...

...By this token, even tiny rural Weston "now stands in the shadow of history for me," and though Green quite rightly absolves himself of complicity-It wasn't his family, after all-he concludes on a note of perfect confusion that reveals how little he seriously chooses to teach us or himself from the huge accumulation of historical evidence in the previous 450 pages...

...Both Bishop and Green are professors of literature, the one at Cornell and the other at Tufts, and they both make perceptive use of their classroom experiences in elucidating their arguments, but neither book is addressed to narrowly specialized academics...

...Thus the section on Norman Mailer and New York is not only a remarkably sharp analysis of "a great egotist of the imagination" (though Green thinks Mailer, indefensibly, "the most important writer of his time") but also treats, at not always justifiable length, Leslie Fiedler, John Barth, Saul Bellow, Moses Mendelssohn, I. B. Singer, Kingsley Amis, and many others...

...Now a liberal-humanist professor in his 40s, succored until recently by the seemingly inviolate cloister of the university, he finds himself bereft of placidity...

...Bishop's argument and method do not lend themselves easily to the confinement of paraphrase, and at times his oracular tone makes for a kind of obscurity that works maddeningly against his intention of reaching " 'the poor student' Thoreau wished for...

...why not...

...For Bishop, the purpose of this attention is phenomeno-logical-the discovery of the living presence, free of preconceived judgments, in an immense variety of commonplace and literary materials, using the tools offered by philosophy, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, psy-chophysics, and theology...

...But even this is easier to cope with than the elephantiasis of the intellect that crams Cities of Light to the rafters with overdocumented biographies of minor figures, travel notes (Green visited each city he writes about to compare its contemporary face with that of the past), trick photographs (Norman Mailer leering over the smoggy skyline of New York), and wearying accounts of occultism, alchemy and Haitian history-to name only a few of the many digressions...

...In the effort to understand how the writers living through them were affected by tempestuous historical forces, he explores Norman Mailer's New York, Blake's London, Goethe's Weimar...

...It is an intellectually dazzling blueprint, indeed a Faustian scheme, Green's insistence on his Erasmianism notwithstanding...

...But in putting the building together he reaches for more, much more, than he grasps...

...late 18th-century Edinburgh, American cities between 1780-1820, Fidel's Havana...

...an age when the fact of revolution is so imaginatively present to all men of reflection that they must stand up and say that they are either for it or not, and if not...

...Green's intolerance of moderation or selectivity leads him to many a blowzy generalization, too, such as: "There was the intoxicating example of revolution in the air in 1790...

...What puts the book into a class by itself is the self-consciously anecdotal route Bishop takes to his ultimately religious destination...

...Green's sentimental enthusiasm for Castro's Havana makes it impossible to evaluate the soundness of his judgments concerning "the best" novelists in Cuba today...

...As the vocation of the prophet is to renew the community, so the artist renews the symbolic world," for "to the artist, the world is God...

...There is an uncontrolled bibliomaniacal frenzy at work in Cities of Light that finally, for all Green's shrewdness, brilliant syntheses and exhaustive research, buries more than it illuminates...

...But one is left in awe of his bold endeavor: to clear away the stereotypical baggage that obstructs both the way we see and the divine metamorphosis that conceptualizes and transforms the world into "something else...

...This is the stern lesson to be found in most of his indiscriminately amassed historical "parallels," yet Green, despite the enormous labor he put into their discovery, prefers to end where he began...

...We are living in an age of revolution...

...Most people, Bishop argues, take the reality that constitutes experience for granted, and have neither taste nor talent for "paying attention to the way we pay attention, as well as the sorts of things there are to pay attention to...

...John...

...He could never renounce rural Weston's quiet in the cause of revolution, but "one wants also to acquire the power to act, to take up a position, and to change some of those facts...

...In his earlier The Problem of Boston, Green argued for a similar compatibility between romantic modernism and social responsibility...

...as Richard Hofstadter pointed out, Green thinks the two "are more easily or more generally reconcilable than in fact they are...

...Green still wants it both ways: The fiery ardor of radicalism in balanced union with the cool head of liberalism...

...And the only position to take up these days . . . must be radical, no matter how Erasmian one's temperament...

...Beginning with the singular vision and intelligence of the individual, Bishop, in his stubbornly erratic rhythm, moves out to man as a social being, to the vital distinction between confrontation and encounter, and to the role of art, particularly imaginative literature, in man's discovery and comprehension of, in Robert Frost's beautiful phrase, "the figure the world makes...

...The mind boggles and the spirit limps...

...It is in the section about his childhood home, Weston, that Green's political fuzziness leads him most seriously astray...