Breaking New Ground
SHAW, PETER
Breaking New Ground Golcz By William Herrick Columbia Publishing. 162 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Peter Shaw Associate Professor of English, State University of New York at Stony Brook; author, "The...
...Golcz is a kind of overground man...
...Like the rest of us, they tend to be doctrinaire, writing either celebrations or, more often, maledictions of the new...
...Nevertheless, since he has many other balls in the air as well, the technical mastery occasionally left me uneasy...
...While still together, Clotile and Golcz visit a commune...
...Each night he descends to the city dressed in mod "black trousers, black turtleneck sweater, black socks, black Frye boots with three-inch heels . . . hem-weighted black cape, orange silk-lined . . . black Texas Stetson...
...This thematic opposition is heightened by the device of making Golcz two characters, sometimes in his own imagination, and sometimes as if his double really existed...
...There he fights a band of women who subdue him with battery-driven vibrators carried in holsters (a seductio ad absurdum, if you will...
...That is a path-breaking achievement, and it should prove helpful to those who follow...
...Where most American heroes adventure to slough off their stale consciousness, Herrick's, though he thinks he is trying to do the same, is really laboring to reaffirm a few simple truths about mankind...
...Hence he is doomed to love foolishly and never satisfy his deepest romantic aspirations...
...No wonder Herrick's hero is 29 instead of 19...
...Instead, Golcz undergoes a much more vivid experience at the Freedom Institute, a feminist retreat from which he tries to rescue Clotile...
...Unwilling to take a "correct line," Herrick never preaches...
...In a short book Herrick gives us a picaresque adventure, a love story and a philosophical comedy about a sophisticated Candide...
...For the free-loving, free-living communards can neither work the farm machinery nor, despite their pretensions, fully suppress their retrograde instincts: When a young man's girlfriend goes off during a lunch break to make love to another member, he growls, "Aaa, shit...
...he dramatizes...
...It is in this situation that the author first reveals he is by no means the counterculture glorifier his tone might suggest...
...Golcz meets, wins and loses Clo-tile Gray, an impossibly alluring trapeze artist...
...The originality of William Herrick's Golcz is that it plunges into the times and swims along—without washing up onto the shores of certainty...
...Like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man he steals electricity, but not for revenge: Golcz does it for pleasure—to run his Waring blender...
...And he comes away from this very funny scene having learned the lesson that he cannot escape his manhood...
...He has sex in a Turko-Armenian meditation parlor, approves of Clotile's experiments in women's consciousness raising, and holds that Sergei Nechaiev's prophecy of all human passions extinguishing themselves in the "passion of the revolutionary cause" may render that theoretician (Dos-toevsky's model for The Possessed) "the most important persona in history...
...the action is youthful but the point of view is not...
...But where Augie and Henderson were prolix and literary, Golcz compresses as though he were writing a long and expensive cablegram...
...author, "The Character of John Adams" Novelists are generally unsuccessful in treating the cultural styles of our day...
...Nervous, choppy, exclamatory, and profane, Golcz is also—in keeping with the times—more weighed down by ideology than Bellow's early heroes...
...So it seemed to me anyway, just as I thought the author joined my support of Golcz's absurd-heroic rescue of Clotile at the end...
...These hark back, by way of Thomas Pynchon, to the exuberance of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King...
...Like those books, Golcz is narrated by the hero in a language of his own invention...
...After Clotile leaves him, an itinerant Golcz tries transforming himself into the sort of being called for by the most fashionable spiritualists and feminists: "a freeperson, true-person, progressive antiestablish-mentarian," not a man but a "huperson...
...But whatever stand Herrick takes is ultimately besides the point...
...The heel of Golcz's Frye boot should have sliced into one of these, for they represent the ineluctability of the human condition...
...Golcz, the hero, reflects in his tempestuous soul the contrasting attitudes toward our contemporary world...
...What is important is that William Herrick has had a comic-philosophical romp through the new consciousness without losing his bearings or intrusively stating them for the reader...
...He lives in a bright aerie at the top of a skyscraper...
...To get her back he undergoes a series of spiritually and intellectually purifying trials...
...Here, in a fantasy fulfillment reminiscent of the movie Death Wish, he trails muggers, beats them up when they attack old people, and takes their money...
...In a familiar split of identity, half of him lusts after the latest spiritual and sexual liberations while the other half dreams of older ideals, especially the possessive love between man and woman...
...But Her-rick remains in firm control, deriving undeniable advantages from his shifting techniques...
...This is perhaps the point of the striking descriptions of the New York city-scape, with everpresent "garbage sailing gracefully" on the river and dog turds shining in the streets...
...Yet Golcz can't escape his old-world sensibilities, romantic love chief among them...
Vol. 60 • February 1977 • No. 4
