Odyssey Through the Underground
CAPLAN, LINCOLN
Odyssey Through the Underground Ringolevio By Emmett Grogan Little, Brown. 498 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Lincoln Caplan Emmett Grogan, a ubiquitous and at times legendary counterculture figure,...
...an enforced six-year sojourn in Europe that brings Grogan to a rediscovery of his Irish heritage...
...There is petty thievery at age 12, leading to the bigger and more sophisticated deeds of the mature criminal...
...Yet despite his attempt to communicate his hard-won lessons about competition, defeat, survival, and friendship...
...The reader is left wondering, though, what Emmett Grogan has really learned...
...the events of his life—even the most private moments of pleasure and pain—are related in a dry, matter-of-fact tone that strips them of any real emotion...
...A few years later he had a hand in arranging the notorious Rolling Stones' concert at Altamont, where a man was murdered by the Hell's Angels...
...Not only do LSD trips come and go, but revenge killings as well occur with a kind of inevitable and unfelt regularity...
...Ringolevio, after the opening gang fight, lacks impact...
...The prose is straightforward, rarely pulsing...
...In San Francisco, for example, he worked with the Diggers—best described as a hippie charity group—and helped them set up free food services for the flower children of the mid-'60s...
...Ringolevio has been depicted by one of its "champions" as a contest that is fought rather than played, an appropriate description, the author feels, for his own brutal past...
...Grogan's knowledge that everything works out in the end seems to have drained him of energy, depriving his book of a necessary spontaneity...
...his has been "a life played for keeps...
...dodging military duty by freaking out on a bazooka range...
...heroin addiction and withdrawal...
...He has gambled, he tells us, for the highest stakes...
...Ironically, these "accomplishments" of the new sensibility, such as they are, bring to mind old-fashioned stories of upward mobility built upon self-reliance and resiliency—proving that with a rejuvenated kit of traditional tools one can still make it in this world, or in whatever world one may inhabit...
...revolutionary politics...
...Writing an autobiography is a particularly self-conscious undertaking, and Grogan's effort reflects the insistent introspection that is currently a feature of the youth culture...
...But self-consciousness does not by itself connote significance: While Grogan has recounted a series of unique and hazardous adventures, he nowhere indicates any authentic awareness of himself or what he has experienced...
...Through it all he exhibits the courage and tenacity he had to develop merely to survive...
...Grogan's intuition kept him in the center of an essentially off-center universe, and out of his rich experiences it is reasonable to expect an exciting, if not finely embroidered, tale...
...Reviewed by Lincoln Caplan Emmett Grogan, a ubiquitous and at times legendary counterculture figure, takes the title of his autobiographical work from a street game...
...Meeting the founders of the Black Panther party, he contributed his organizational skills to their cause...
...In addition to his outlaw's ingenuity, Grogan has a genuine talent for leadership and organization...
...The result is a book with a muddled sense of purpose...
...The book, written in the third person, begins with a compelling account of a showdown between two teenage gangs and goes on to chronicle the odyssey of one Kenny Wisdom, an alias for the 27-year-old author...
...Following 400 pages of accumulated incident the author returns to Brooklyn, the place he started out from, more mellow now and claiming new political and cultural insight...
...Intended as more than entertainment, Ringolevio is actually much less than personal revelation...
Vol. 55 • October 1972 • No. 19
