The Porn Is Green
BELL, PEARL K.
Writer & Writing THE PORN IS GREEN BY PEARL K. BELL From all the advance hoopla, it is clear that the Great American Novel of 1973 will be Alan Lel-chuk's American Mischief (Farrar, Straus &...
...This is followed by the astonishing sexual memoir of Bernard Kovell, a Cardozo professor of literature who is also the Dean of Humanities...
...It is the March Book-of-the-Month Club selection...
...I happen to know for a fact that Professor Bell would never write the logic-defying solecism "alienation with...
...But in the last third of the novel the mask of the author comes loose, the novelist's cool detachment hits the fan, and the book turns into a gleefully personal and infantile vision that mocks and degrades the establishment intellectuals...
...As a boy growing up in Brooklyn he was sexually and intellectually precocious...
...What better release for an insecure professor's resentment of his superiors than dragging a great man through the sewer of his fictional fantasies...
...The foreign rights have already been scooped up by British, French, Italian, German and Dutch publishers...
...Now, at 25, the ex-student is anxious to free his unfeeling political self from the debilitating vestiges of culture, emotion and morality...
...Lelchuk uses the cunning device of telling his story alternately in the voices of two narrators, making his own point of view difficult to ascertain at first...
...Yet when enough of them leap off the page, a reader begins to see them as symptoms of a larger mendacity and confusion of purpose...
...And by the end of the memoir it seems the only acts Kovell hasn't performed in the course of his Kinsey existence are those beyond physical possibility...
...The action is introduced by Lenny Pincus, a confused and dangerous student-radical leader who has recently graduated from "Cardozo" University...
...It may seem cranky and pedantic to seize on Lelchuk's trivial howlers...
...Despite the superhuman demands of his insatiable regular ladies, this formidable swordsman can still muster the strength for an occasional one-night stand with the odd graduate student...
...Finally, one comes to understand the spirit behind American Mischief with harsh lucidity: to make a hard-porn killing, to seduce the literati with a specious political plot, and to settle the score with the intellectual elite Lelchuk so bitterly envies and resents...
...distance would involve reflective judgment but since the more violent eruptions of campus rebellion had died of attrition long before last summer, his desperate updating merely increases the literal incredibility of the narrative...
...The reader reaching for his wallet had better be warned, though, that even at its lewdest, in the confession of the rakehell Dean Kovell, this money-tree of a book is a tedious bore...
...Whether Lelchuk is making a subtie point about their use of words, or naturally writes this graduate-student rhetoric, is a murky question, but I'm inclined not to give him the benefit of the doubt...
...the street is St...
...Lelchuk places the turbulent events of his book in the summer and fall of 1972?the obsession with spurious topicality is endemic in modish novelists today...
...And Norman Mailer's unsuccessful attempt last fall to suppress his ignominious murder in the plot only heightened the intensity of expectation...
...Everything, in short, is coming up bread and roses for Alan Lelchuk...
...Ushould be in line 13 carries out his concentration-camp "re-education" of the abducted intellectuals, Lelchuk's intellectual decoration for American Mischief is obvious: the exploration of the sexual and political chaos of our time, the collapse of reason and the abdication of honor...
...Reading American Mischief, one soon detects that Lelchuk's political fantasies are really window-dressing for a different intent: In essence, the novel is nasty, brutish, and overlong pornography...
...Lenny's prose is deplorably sententious, and so is Kovell's...
...In the third chapter, "Barricade Anxiety," Lenny once again takes over, giving his account of the student occupation of the Cardozo museum of art, and Kovell's long-winded speech to the jeering rebels, which not only fails to get them out of the museum but is supervened by an obscene orgy of devastation paintings slashed and burned, sculpture smashed to splinters...
...Family Talk," that privately Kovell is an Olympic champion of sex...
...Out of desperate need to prove his mettle...
...Less important than Lelchuk's Schadenfreude, although interesting for what it says about a reputable publisher's standards these days, is the author's talent for getting small things wrong...
...For the cognoscenti, however, he proceeds to identify some of them quite unmistakably by citing the subjects (and in one case the titles) of their best-known books...
...Of an imaginary sociological analysis that treats his notorious career, Lenny writes, "It was not my . . . 'deep-rooted alienation with the world of words' (Professor Daniel Bell) that led me to occasional moviemaking...
...Writer & Writing THE PORN IS GREEN BY PEARL K. BELL From all the advance hoopla, it is clear that the Great American Novel of 1973 will be Alan Lel-chuk's American Mischief (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 501 pp., $8.95...
...Lenny corners Norman Mailer in a Cambridge hotel suite and shoots him dead...
...We learn from his sexual reminiscence...
...It would seem that he is against both Kovell and Pincus, and he provides a clue in the epigraph from Goethe: "General ideas and great conceit tend always to create horrible mischief...
...And all this takes a mere 501 pages...
...His motive for revealing Kovell's sexual bookkeeping, he insists, is not prurient but politicalto expose the Dean's hypocrisy, the contradiction between his public lip service to order, reason and responsibility (translated by Lenny as "Victorian terminology, Jamesian feeling, pulpit morality") and his insanely chaotic male-chauvinist private fife...
...It is neither brilliant nor original, and its subject is the immediate past the student-radical revolutionary days that brought Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, and France temporarily to their knees in the 1960s...
...Did he think that writing about 1968 would class American Mischief as a historical novel...
...Yet Philip Roth couldn't have been more perfectly wrong when he hailed American Mischief in Esquire as "a brilliant and original comedy on the subject of the immediate present...
...Set against this mixed-up liberal academic with his frantically complicated secret life is Lenny Pincus, a former student and friend of Kovell's who now despises the Cambridge Casanova for his "remarkable ingenuousness regarding the logical political consequences of his personal dilemma...
...The Boston subway takes quarters, not tokens...
...Lelchuk has tried to make his liberal-buffoon professor into an academic Portnoy, but it doesn't work...
...Instead, Kovell emerges as the familiar nice-liberal victim of his own best and worst instincts, a shameless swinger who curries favor with his students by calling Chaucer "a kind of Philip Roth of the fourteenth century...
...Like all fanatics, Lenny is smug, dogmatic and humorless...
...Like a malevolent child dismembering a doll, Lelchuk then writes a scene in which an all-too-recognizable eminent scholar is forced to watch an unsavory performance of fellatio between Lenny and the 14-year-old runaway he has corrupted beyond recall...
...Imagine, to have a victim whose ethical credo sanctions and even proposes the very hideous act to be visited upon him...
...Botolph, not Bertolph...
...In the final and longest chapter, "Gorilla Talk" (why gorilla, not guerrilla, is anybody's guess) the revolutionary students carry out a carefully planned campaign of destruction against bourgeois America, vandalizing the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger Museums at Harvard and burning its Widener Library, bombing theaters and concert halls, and abducting the nation's 10 leading intellectuals in order to torture and brainwash them into becoming compliant puppets of the revolution...
...Why Mailer...
...Between Kovell's sanctimonious satyriasis-cum-liberal-ism and Lenny's enrage bombast and violence, our world is lost...
...It is clear that poor Lenny will always be incurably bookish...
...Instead of names, Lenny labels his captives A, B, C, and so on?To use real names here would, in my opinion, divert attention to personalities and away from method and purpose...
...To the extent that American Mischief pretends to be a political novel, Lenny is its stereotyped center...
...Especially if you're a professor and dean...
...Plagiarism (of Dostoevsky's Stavrogin) is not the worst of Lelchuk's felonies here...
...one reads in Widener, not the Widener...
...The paperback rights for this first work of fiction by a Brandeis University professor of English and associate editor of Philip Rahv's little magazine, Modern Occasions, came to a quarter of a million dollars...
...natives of Brownsville went to the Loew's Pitkin (or just Loew's), not to the "Pitkin Theatre...
...As he laments, "It's not easy having six mistresses...
...He struggles against their threatening emasculation of his commitment to revolutionary anarchy much as Lenin resisted the seductions of Beethoven...
...Though he starts off by playing the ventriloquist, in the end we know exactly what he really thinks, and the revelation is not pretty...
Vol. 56 • January 1973 • No. 2
