Excising the Hurt

...But we come to accept the inevitable potency of parents, whether dangerous or benign...

...He told his adolescent son...

...Sarah talked, now more than I, more and more, it seemed to me...

...Sloan Wilson's self-revelations, if they were not balanced by worldly success and private satisfactions, would seem almost masochistic...

...The son of two psychiatrists, Brickner in the years after his injury nevertheless carried on a defiant mental argument with Freud: "You are wrong, there are accidents, pure and accidental...

...Take this exchange with the woman who is now Wilson's wife: "'Some romantic lover am I,'" I groaned...

...Wilson may not have known all he was telling—may not, in fact, have been "hurt terrible" enough to write with real seriousness—yet he has written about what matters...

...That last discovery is quite out of Sloan Wilson's reach, although he lived through its truth...

...With My Second Twenty Years Brickner lays aside satire (but not wit or imagination) and dares to be overtly serious...

...who had just given his all in a choir performance, that he had made a fool of himself...

...After coming back from death he had to start over, struggling to learn the skills of a two-year-old against the handicap of nerves so damaged that some of them, despite years of agonizing effort, would never work again...

...The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Twenty Years Before & After (Arbor House, 442 pp., $12.95...

...I was an incompetent with ridiculous dreams of glory "But his weeks of humiliation end in a moment whose splendor was never matched by the triumphs of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit...

...Although some readers may be shocked, even they will be exhilarated by a candor that in this area is essential and long overdue...

...Brickner finds sources of self-destruction in their relationship that may terrify readers who have children...

...Gently probing memories of his father...

...Wilson adds: "My problem was that something like 90 per cent of what he said was true...

...Perhaps the best last hope for any writer—it could help Wilson and might have saved Hemingway—is Brickner's interim conclusion, painfully limited and ruefully arrived at: "I have, for the most part, come to trust the value of what I give and what I accept, and to accept what I have cost...

...He rejected it with the same fury he put into his plans for finishing college and, once at Columbia, reaching top rank on Jester...

...You're a dandy representative of your profession.'" Compare Brickner's way of worrying out the truth: "I did not know how much of her I could take...

...You can't cheat or pretend...

...There is passion in his gravity, and wisdom?for example, about art and theater—that will shatter idols and shake deeply rooted attitudes...

...When he ran a borrowed sports car off the road and broke his neck, Brickner was still a sophomore at Middlebury College, barely beginning the difficult busi-nes of growing up...

...When I came into Sarah, I reached the true end of my physical return...

...From there by giant (if all too metaphoric) strides he became a Doubleday editor, opera buff, man about town, and triumphant teacher...

...When the playwright hero of Bringing Down the House tries to show culture-consumers what sheep they are, they blandly congratulate him...

...There could now be no more progress...

...As literature the two autobiographies are poles apart...

...That so many have tried to give it, often successfully, suggests how much Brickner has been able to offer in return...

...He "corrected" the accident by having Eric Green fall downstairs when trying to overtake his girl after a quarrel: Brickner wanted it to make more sense in his hero's life than it seemed to have made in his own...

...The perfect girl could not save him...

...Since then everyone, even President Ford, has learned to pay lip service to "the quality of life...

...I did not know how much of me she wanted...

...I was called, rather, 'zany.'" He is not the first revealer of truth to marvel at the apparent waste of effort...

...He gives the details of his most intimate bothers, from bathroom (or its substitute) to bed of love...

...Both Brickner and Wilson show themselves as the kind of faulty humans most of us try to forget we are...

...This may explain, if anything can, the shooting-star range of wit and imagination in his satiric masterpiece, Bringing Down the House...

...Still, he does recognize his deficiencies, and it is a rare autobiography that puts pride second to truth...

...When, afterward, I thanked her, she smiled sleepily, and said, 'The pleasure was mutual...

...The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, for all its sentimentality, is based on a truth he saw early...

...You're going to be fine.'" "Soon, miraculously, I was, so much so that I worried that I was being too rough, but her delicate little body seemed to be made of warm steel...

...Still, once I'd come that first day, there was, in one crucial sense, nothing more to do...

...A few of his poems had been published...

...Indeed, Wilson's vivid accounts of handling a vessel made topheavy by "icing-up," of forcing a path through icebergs that could crush the ship, are in fascinating contrast to the Time magazine-New Canaan life that followed...

...You have to excise the hurt honestly...

...He had a girl friend with whom he tried hard to "act married," yet sex had brought no tranquility...

...No critic called me so much as 'Swiftian,'" Brickner laments...

...While he never makes nor asks for excuses on the grounds of his suffering, it is clear that anyone?even he, so creatively perceptive about others—when subjected to brutal indignities and the torture of confinement, tends to want impossibly subtle, sometimes contradictory, kinds of consideration from friends and strangers...

...And reviewers of the novel were just as blandly pleased...

...A man in a wheelchair is forever conscious of certain questions in the minds of people around him...

...On a different level, Brickner has also suffered from life imitating his art...

...Once you get hurt and can handle it, consider yourself lucky—that is what there is to write about and you have to be as faithful to it as a scientist is to his laboratory...

...Wilson's book is virtually swamped in washes of the sentimentality that the author knows is a problem he has never been able to solve...

...It is a surprise to discover the same unflinching honesty in Sloan Wilson's What Shall We Wear to This Party...

...Brickner's purpose is just the opposite...

...But it was no cliche in 1955, when Wilson told the world the Madison Avenue-suburban rat race was not worth running...

...On his second try he treated the hurt with comic detachment, changing it to the temporary result, light-heartedly symbolic, of a near-murder, as part of the wild plot of Bringing Down the House...

...You are beyond question the worst officer I have ever seen, and one of the worst men," he quotes his captain as telling him when he had expected to take command of a wartime converted trawler on the Greenland run...

...Richard Brickner has done precisely that, counseled not by Hemingway but by his inner needs as man and artist...

...he was a promising actor...

...Like mam psychiatrists...

...Only one will he sometimes answer, tacitly, by having children...

...He has even made something "lucky" of the car crash that flung him to "the farthest rim of existence," leaving him mute and immobile at the age of 20...

...Brickner quotes a callow letter he wrote at 18 explaining why it was inconvenient for him to go to the bedside of his father, who had suffered a serious heart attack...

...That sly, pathetic best foot nearly always slips forward...

...Alcoholism took over, powered by rampant self-reproach...

...Reading Brickner, one gets the sense that his physical restriction holds him back only as an airplane is held back at the head of a runway, to build up power for taking off into the sky...

...as a rule, he tries his best to conceal the awkward contrivings that make his life different...

...Unfortunately, most of the rest of the book is not really written in the sense that Brickner's is...

...At the Rehabilitation Institute he was offered the hope of becoming a lens grinder...

...So many thousands welcomed the book, he fell prey to the very success he had seen as false...

...Of his maturity he reports, step by step, a series of what seem like gratuitous cruelties to women who loved him...

...Only now is he able to ask the big question: "Did I have the accident, or did it have me...

...His first attempt to excise the hurt, in his novel The Broken Year, was perhaps not honest enough...

...But my seizure of dismay that I might have fallen in love with a predatory gabber dissolved and spread in warm particles of anticipation...

...I had got there but could go no further, could only repeat, at another entrance, my arrival...

...Brickner was insensitive to human vulnerability...

...I always heard that writers are good in bed...

...In his autobiography, My Second Twenty Years: An Unexpected Life (Basic, 198 pp., $7.95), he finally confronts the disaster fully and searches for all its meanings...