Rude Realities

...Readers were chronically left in the dark about the antecedents of gunmen and pronouns, but what was flawlessly caught, as never before, was the perfect congruence of the punks' vivid patois with their crooked temperaments and marginal lives...

...More to the point, Higgins' glib and smoothly cynical picture of post-Camelot Washington Democrats-which by implication means all of Washington ("It grows on you like any other malignancy") and all of American politics-is so smugly contemptuous and reductive that it finally seems as melodramatized as his impotent politicians...

...In A City on a Hill, however, the nonstop talkers are Congressmen, judges, lawyers, and educated, ferocious women...

...As Cavanaugh brutally ticks off his boss, "You haven't got anything to be against anymore that'll inflame people enough so that what they're for looks like it's feasible...

...Reality of a very different sort intrudes no less rudely and inimically in Eileen Simpson's first novel, The Maze (Simon & Schuster, 250 pp., $7.95...

...It was as if Higgins had come upon a latter-day Fagin and his den of thieves, and let their strangely affecting language speak for itself...

...Moreover, the fact that we are given nothing more than random jigsaw pieces-that frequently we don't know who or what in the hell the characters mean-is as fatal to this novel as it was remarkably effective for the books about the ethical morons in Boston...

...After two bewildered readings, this much is more or less clear: In the summer and fall of 1973, as the muck of Watergate slowly inches its way toward the top, Sam Barry, an antiwar Democratic Congressman from Cape Cod, tries to launch a Presidential candidate for 1976, in case Teddy means what he says about not running...

...With artful and sometimes maddening high-handedeness, he offered no causes or hints, no clarifying comments...

...None of Berryman's audacious wit and virtuosity, his intellectual ardor, his literary bravura and discipline, is drawn into the novel's recreated experience...

...Between flights and discouraging interviews, Cavanaugh is up to his handsome Irish neck in complicated women...

...For a psychologist who has made a professional study of creativity, Mrs...

...What you were not told about the petty thieves and blundering hooligans of Boston scarcely mattered: They were small-potato conspirators to whom bad things happened as they made bad things happen, as much victims of their own mean scheming as the banks they hit and the stool pigeons they knocked off...

...Simpson offers curiously scant insight into the way poets go about their business, seduce their words, ambush their metaphors, ravage their dreams...

...You'd never guess from the book's tough-talking operators that there was a Democratic politician left after Robert Kennedy's death, apart from his younger brother, possessing sufficient integrity and practical intelligence to do more than hit the bottle, fornicate and drive everyone up the wall with sodden laments for the lost days of glory...

...Barry's choice is a liberal but uncharismatic New England Senator who lost out to McGovem in 1972, and the Congressman sends his hard-nosed, sharpshooting aide Hank Cavanaugh on a fruitless expedition around the country to sound out rich contributors, jaded ex-New Frontiersmen and granitic Midwestern party bosses about their potential support...

...In a factual chronicle the poetry would be quoted, or we would at least be given some rough idea of its subject and form...

...Representative Barry may be an idealistic liberal desperately scratching around for a cause (now that we're out of Vietnam) and a candidate (now that we're out of Kennedys), yet nothing he says confirms his noble image...

...Blessed with an ultra-high-fidelity ear for the illiterate and foul-mouthed argot spoken in this combat zone, Higgins constructed these books almost entirely of dialogue-choked and elliptical grunts and snarls and side-of-the-mouth threats...

...They agree, but they're full of ennui...

...We feel we have been cheated...

...Just as much of a shambles are Cavanaugh's marriage, his commitment to Barry's liberalism, his faith in a glittering Washington career, and, alas, the novel he dominates...

...instead, the shrewd and gamy exchanges became a brilliant evocation of a shadowy netherworld, as pungent as the smell of stale beer in a decaying bar-and-grill or the stench of urine in a flophouse...

...Simpson has been able to make them yield only a thin and tidy little story of a disastrous marriage that anyone else could have written-and often has...

...I was distracted by the coy whimsy of Berryman's fictional name, Benjamin Bold (since the man in the novel is in fact a coward), and I became even more impatient here than I normally am with portraits a clef of the artist as insufferable husband in which there is not a scrap of evidence of the hero's artistry, though more than enough of his insufferable husbandry...

...Sitting around Barry's office, the pols drone on as though it were all going into the Congressional Record (expletives deleted...

...His wife leads a separate and kinky life in New York, where she has a high-powered job with a television producer (if that's what he is-Higgins provides meager information), while his sometime mistress keeps him on the phone half the night with hearteningly lewd mating cries...

...Nor does she reveal anything of what she must surely understand about the intricate connections and distinctions between psychopathology and art...

...For all we know from Benjamin's infantile, pompous, nasty, and banal remarks, he could have been doing crossword puzzles during those frenetically sleepless nights when inspiration supposedly had him by the throat...

...For a novelist whose forte is the way people really talk, Higgins has an oddly discreditable idea of the way politicians really function...

...Nonetheless, the women, although they gab as much as the men, are only X-rated window dressing in the story...

...Yet, because that muse's fruits are given such short shrift by Mrs...

...Indeed, I was not convinced for one minute that he was writing poetry...

...Simpson, we are faute de mieux forced to regard this man not as a genius but as a promiscuous, drunken, manically self-indulgent scoundrel, and a tedious one at that...

...We are asked to take it on faith alone that Benjamin is pushing his poor wife Rosy to the edge of breakdown out of loyalty to his muse...

...As they speak, we hear only the waffling platitudes, the pseudotough political catchwords, that are part of the hot air we breathe all the time, and rather than intriguing us, the palaver puts us to sleep...

...They want to go home...

...One trouble with Higgins' obsessive concentration on how these people talk is that his dialogue doesn't always ring true...

...Higgins' predatory, oversexed females, who make Edward Albee's termagants sound like a chorus of Shirley Temples, bear little resemblance to any women I've ever heard...

...Of the work that drives Benjamin to drink and destructive violence, however, we are told merely that it is about a woman who in the end has a baby...

...In his new offering, A City on a Hill (Knopf, 256 pp., $7.95), he has abandoned Boston lowlife for the more complex and intellectually treacherous milieu of Washington politics...

...Thus she lets it be known on the dust jacket that she was for a time married to the poet John Berryman and that, during their marriage, she made a study of creativity in poets which became her doctoral thesis...

...Beginning in 1972 with a sleeper, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and in each of the next two years, he pounded out a best-selling novel about the verminous underbelly of Boston crime, a crepuscular world of second-rate hoods, corrupt police detectives and aging floozies...

...Simpson, who is a practicing psychotherapist, seems to have timorously doubted the self-sufficiency of this tale about a destructive genius and his long-suffering wife...

...By the end of November, and the end of the book, Barry's quixotic effort to conjure up a candidate is a shambles...

...They don't want to listen anymore...

...With all the resources of memory, thought and feeling she brings to her subject, and her considerable stylistic grace, how sad it is that Mrs...

...we know too much to accept so little...

...One easily guesses that the long major poem Benjamin is toiling at in the novel is Berryman's Homage to Anne Bradstreet, but this simply aggravates the problem...

...They heard all the stuff that you're for...

...Unfortunately, he has imposed his familiar tape-recording technique on very different kinds of character and experience, and it boomerangs...

...Yet by the time he published his third novel, Cogan's Trade, Higgins had clearly mined all the gold this putrescent if slyly engaging subculture was likely to yield...

...More hobbled than helped by this information, I found it hard to read The Maze either as fiction or as autobiographical memoir-or, indeed, as a narrative meditation on creativity...