A Cowering Man of Sensibility

...Again, it is the sheer thoroughness that is uproarious in "The Metterling Lists" of the first book, an unkind assessment of Teutonic-style scholarship, with its large thematic deductions from infinitesimal clues and its presumptuous intimacy with the reader...

...There is, in fact, a procession of birds, fish and small animals through Without Feathers, and frequently dark hints are dropped about improper relations with them...

...There, browsing through an imaginary college bulletin for the summer session, he calls our attention to a course in the "History of European Civilization: Ever since the discovery of a fossilized eohippus in the men's washroom at Siddon's cafeteria in East Rutherford, New Jersey, it has been suspected that at one time Europe and America were connected by a strip of land that later sank or became East Rutherford, New Jersey...

...Indeed, starting with the title, lifted pessimistically from Emily Dickinson's line "Hope is the thing with feathers," this second collection of his writings has high intellectual pretensions...

...This throws a new perspective on the formation of European society and enables historians to conjecture about why it sprang up in an area that would have made a much better Asia...

...Their starting points have been exact perceptions of reality, of something intrinsically laughable not about man's creations but about man himself...

...Yet Woody Allen harbors neither the hostility of Lenny Bruce toward his fellow men nor the disdain of Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller toward themselves...

...In an age of brazen culture-vulturism, only a cowering man of sensibility, a secret sharer, could have written that...

...Perhaps first-class humorists like Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, Peter de Vries and, on a lower rung, Nichols and May and Mort Sahl, have all had a greater capacity than Woody Allen to be serious...

...The playwright creates a writer who invents an audience that stays to quarrel about the outcome of the play...

...For the benefit of these cognoscenti Allen volunteers "A Guide to Some of the Lesser Ballets," covering only scenes (dear to choreographers) that accentuate the moribund...

...Testifying to his inability to master women, combat, college courses, or a proper diet, he panders not to our meanness, but to our universal apprehensions...

...Zaniness certainly has a place in humor, yet Allen's latest fancies are so weird that we laugh shakily, reluctant to establish ourselves too definitively on his haphazard wavelength...

...The Predators" is about two insects who dance slowly to French horns and fall in love...

...If you could shut out the sense of his words, you would be sure you were actually reading Ibsen...

...For fifty bucks, I learned, you could 'relate without getting close.' For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack...

...The play God, one of the book's long segments not reprinted from the New Yorker, presupposes at least the approximation of a context for his jokes...

...Arthur Koestler believes that the emotions discharged in laughter always contain an element of aggressiveness...

...To see him is to believe he could train an ant and give it the command, "Kill...

...Similarly, when we see an Ibsen play, we don't, like Woody Allen in "Lovborg's Women," isolate out of the craft and astute characterizations the purely ludicrous aspects: the devastating disclosures, the gratuitous exhortations to courage, the sudden swerves from exaltation to gloom...

...Allen takes every advantage of his sorry physique and frail psyche, depending upon them to give comic solidity to his monologue...

...Laurel and Hardy are masters of this discipline within madness when they try to move a grand piano across a narrow suspension bridge slung over a chasm between two Alps...

...Humor has to set up its own logic, and then perpetrate the switch that undermines us...

...For three bills you got the works: A thin Jewish brunette would pretend to pick you up at the Museum of Modern Art, let you read her master's, get you involved in a screaming quarrel at Elaine's over Freud's conception of women, and then fake a suicide of your choosing...

...The shamus walks through the Hunter College bookstore where, behind a secret panel, "Pale nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively...

...the best we can manage is a slippery grasp of their elusive general contours...

...In Sleeper, there is actual pathos in those first floundering toddler-like motions of the defrosted hero as he wakes into a mechanized future and tries with feeble success to walk...

...He envisions neurotic and erotic attitudes toward food (cheese fondling or immersing an arm in custard...

...A Day in the Life of a Doe" is a model of poignant brevity: "Unbearably lovely music is heard as the curtain rises a faun dances and nibbles at some leaves...

...In "The Spell," a woman who is half swan enchants Sigmund...

...though he "is careful not to make any poultry jokes," the affair ends disastrously...

...Midway they meet a gorilla...

...He took more time for the objects of his scorn in Getting Even...

...It encompasses a vast panorama of inaction, giving us a capsule history of "new theater" from Pirandello to Beckett and Stoppard...

...It is true he keeps plying us with the self-portrait of his utter ineffectuality, but an accompanying owlish smirk complacently implies that a little ineffectuality would become us all...

...The funniest story in -the book is "The Whore of Mensa," in which a private eye tries to crack a call-girl racket for men who want a quickie intellectual experience...

...He had met Freud years before in Vienna, when they both attended a performance of Oedipus, from which Freud had to be carried out in a cold sweat...

...Homer was a symbol for T.S...

...In his new book, Woody Allen often lacks that strong center, that vital takeoff point, and his febrile imagination runs amok...

...Incorporating certain hollow pauses out of Waiting for Godot, the drama asks ultimate questions destined never to be answered, and one-ups the appearance of the nude girl on a swing in Stoppard's Jumpers by lowering Zeus onto the stage in a very suitable contraption, a deus ex machina (not unexpectedly, the god, on arrival, is dead...

...Going on the assumption that life is disorganized and irrational, the play holds a distorting mirror up to it and gets completely out of hand...

...he conjures up parrots who become Secretaries of Agriculture, woodchucks who try to claim his prize at a raffle, or beavers who take over Carnegie Hall and perform Wozzeck...

...After all, culture comedy, like caricature, must be based on a formidably precise understanding of attributes...

...Nice racket...

...Allen, pondering dance, drama, literary criticism, educational curricula, pursuing art rather than life, is often awkwardly suspended between the devils of comedy and the deep unnavigable sea of culture...

...Eliot a poet of immense scope but very little breadth...

...What really confounds us about God is why, with perfectly plausible material for ridicule and a theoretically sound comic strategy, it is not in the least funny...

...Allen has caught, through a trick of selective concentration, only the cadences, the exasperating high-mindedness, the peasoup of morality and moroseness...

...Taken mainly from his contributions to the New Yorker (as was the earlier Getting Even), it is meant for those who have read Mary McCarthy, seen Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, and are no strangers to veal cordon bleu...

...He lingers with allergic intensity over classic phrases out of the critical vocabulary-this obdurate and sparkling book," or "clearly the most fully realized woman in Lovborg's plays" -the baggage of trivia and excess that travels with a modern education...

...Reviewed by Isa Kapp Contemplating us with distraught brows and reproachful irises, nodding maniacally to assure us we are in his confidence, Woody Allen the stand-up comic embarks on a recitation of such failures, worries and ineptitudes that the most pusillanimous listener feels hale and charismatic by contrast...

...Two half-wit brothers who tried to get from Belfast to Scotland by mailing each other," or "Homer was blind...

...Soon he starts coughing and drops dead...

...Closer to the neurotic kink of Allen's mind is "The Irish Genius," a satire on annotation to a poem that struggles to evoke Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium," Sean O'Shawn's "Beyond Ichor...

...The notes, by a Columbia professor named Hyman "Bojangles" Lefkowitz, clear up esoteric references like: "The Beamish brothers...

...Nevertheless, it must be admitted that in his new collection he has lost some of his patience and more of his coherence...

...Still, Woody continues to be sharp, active and ingenious, a few paradoxes ahead of the audience that groans over his jokes...

...that he could not, as in the film Play It Again, Sam, weather the strains of mating without the ectoplasmic machismo of Humphrey Bogart egging him on to the style he craves...

...Unfortunately, the printed Woody Allen cannot cut the same mortified and vanquished figure as the corporeal one, and Without Feathers must proceed without benefit of the face or inferiority feelings we have grown accustomed to...

...he has persuaded us of the mystifying unmanageability even of our own bodies...

...If that does not vie with the higher moments of the golden age of comedy, it does share with silent film comedians the quality of persistence, of carrying a gag as long as possible...

...They plan a nuptial flight, but "the female changes her mind and devours him, preferring to move in with a roommate...

...Innocently divulging the contents of Metterling's laundry lists at various periods, it works its way up to authoritative pronouncements on the changing emotional state of that troubled genius of Prague: "Obviously, Metterling's personality had begun to fragment by 1894, if we can deduce anything from the sixth list: 5 hankerchiefs, 1 undershirt, 5 shorts, 1 sock, and it is not surprising to learn that it was at this time that he entered analysis with Freud...

...Always finely disattuned to the academic mind, Allen is fervently preoccupied with notes and critical introductions to literature-no doubt the main blocks he stumbled over in dropping out of City College and New York University...

...Also studied in the course is the decision to hold the Renaissance in Europe...

...Great town, New York...

...Most of us cannot, like David Levine, differentiate the fine lines that constitute hypocrisy or complacency...