Cerebral Folly
NEUFELD, ALICE
Cerebral Folly The Great Pretender By James Atlas Atheneum. 277pp. $15.95. Reviewed by Alice Neufeld Associate professor of humanities, Suffolk Community College In this first novel by the...
...Withme," hetellsus, "every ejaculation represented another point off my SATs...
...His confessions become solipsistic and never seriously advance an understanding of himself or his art...
...Is "the great pretender" pretending that his autobiography is a novel...
...recitations of...
...He meets the beautiful, kind-hearted, dopesmoking Lizzie Sherman, and their sexual adventures make Henry Miller seem like a pioneering New Journalist...
...Dinner resembles a game of Trivial Pursuit where "Art and Literature" is the only category...
...Perhaps, but competitive instincts have a way of spilling over into all areas of life...
...After graduation Eleanor follows Ben to Oxford...
...Ben's own sex life is "alitany of prohibitions: No Stop, You Can'tDoThat...
...Reviewed by Alice Neufeld Associate professor of humanities, Suffolk Community College In this first novel by the author of an esteemed biography of Delmore Schwartz, Ben Janis is a Janus-faced boy who can't tell his father the truth...
...What's it from...
...Lizzie is the more daring partner...
...At last, Ames comments on Ben's poetry: "Ican'ttell whether you miss your grandfather or whether you're just worried about getting older yourself...
...He must share the "mythic" poet Morgan Ames with 40 other students...
...Howcome she never felt guilty...
...rubbing shoulders with the jackets of their books is the only contact with them available to the fledgling poet...
...You are in the way...
...Amazed," Dr...
...Janis quotes the moderns with an urgency only someone like Matthew Arnold—someone who had the rug of religion and revolution pulled out from under him in one fell swoop-could truly understand...
...I suppressed the thought, but not before it had registered...
...Still, the mad poet has Ben's number: "The poem's all about you, a good subject—even if it's a you that's entirely made up...
...But 1 was oblivious of the impeccable service—the meals on the table, the 'after-school snack,' a glass of milk, already poured, that stood in the refrigerator beside a plate of Oreo cream cookies...
...he imagines "how the poem would have gone if Wallace Stevens or T.S...
...Men of letters don't hang out in Ev-anston, Illinois...
...Atlas doesn't try to disguise the fact that Ames' "marmorealforehead" and " fullback's body" are in reality Robert Lowell's...
...Gladly would he absolve his mother for never finishing Ulysses or beginning Heart of Darkness—if only she were penitent...
...Butit's 1964, and boys of Ben's generation don't lose much sleep over fears of dying a virgin...
...Poems or stories...
...The man has a responsibility to the intellectuals in this country...
...Eminence means power, and damning indictments "in print" represent, for dad at least, the utmost exercise of power...
...He feels dad's disappointment afresh: "How could I get him to love me for what I was...
...Ben never repudiates his father...
...In Ben's hierarchy, caring for others is not a matter of moral responsibility that each of us must invent and act upon in the face of "being and nothingness...
...Before long, in fact, he takes up the doctor's preoccupations "with the fervor of a Jehovah's Witness...
...Janis is an ace of a cook, but "Datta...
...We'll lose credibility," the good doctor said...
...Ben thinks: "So what else is new...
...She admires Ben and tells him: "I'm a writer too...
...Except for minuscule differences, the first chapter of The Great Pretender is identical to "Chicago Highbrow: A Boyhood in Letters," an autobiographical essay published in the A tlantic Monthly as part of a work in progress called The Early Years...
...In revolving-door fashion the novel concludes with Ben taking a job at Time magazine...
...Dad, a first-generation American of Russian Jewish parents, practices medicine for a living but banks his faith in the restorative powers of Culture, counting "himself among Stendhal's Happy Few...
...In bothforms the writermust invent a self, except the novelist has the freedom to transform the self in a way that the scrupulous autobiographer does not...
...Janis reads "polemics" and highly "opinionated" reviews with "nervous incredulity...
...I would hear Eleanor out in the back porch telling Bob about her book...
...Ames also has Lowell's characteristic "manic fantasies...
...Ben remains a static character...
...Don't let me get in the way," she tells him upon her arrival...
...Why didn't he understand our unappeasable hunger to discuss our own work...
...Who would have sorted out my laundry...
...Forawomanwho had a degree from the Medill School of Journalism, she was surprisingly unlettered...
...No one I would ever know...
...Flying toward New Yorkinhis "cozy berth" he is "haunted by the bleakness of the scene" below: "Who lived in those godforsaken towns...
...His own experience is best mirrored by Kafka...
...when I knew who Dobrolyubov was I would become a man...
...At 17 Ben scans Sexusfoi his favorite passages, where women beg: "Doit, do it, or I'll go mad...
...and wonder why I felt like hurling her over the rail.' She accuses Ben of "jumping all over" everything she writes, and he feels that she must "learn to accept criticism...
...She jumps ship and Ben returns home, alone...
...Who would have driven me to the Varsity Shop...
...Take your elbows off the table," she tells him, without a trace of contrition in her voice...
...Ben is indignant...
...Eliot had written it," and has "flecks of spittle ...at the corners of his mouth...
...dead poets...
...Come on, Mom...
...He says: "Oh, yeah...
...Damyata," is wasted on her...
...At Harvard, Ben confirms everyone's darkest suspicions about the niggling sort of creature that ambition breeds when it is untempered by love...
...Toward the end of the novel Ben loses another worthy girlfriend...
...I really haven't the faintest idea, dear...
...staring down guilt, Ben doesn't pass up a kinky opportunity until he is able to say: "I can't even buy a six-pack and I've done more than Baudelaire...
...Ben decides he wants to become a poet and achieve the "unreal eminence contemporary writers" hold in his father's eyes...
...No, it is at most a second-rate compromise, a booby prize women accept when the self-absorbed life of the intellectual is unavailable...
...How, on the one hand, can Ben masturbate "with the notorious Playboy spread of Marilyn open on my knee," and on the other, accept his father's rage at Arthur Miller for marrying that woman...
...In addition, "Ames had the infuriating habit of devoting hours and hours of our precious class time to...
...Dayadhvam...
...How can Ben confess that he would rather stay homeand watch?eove/r To Beaver than go out with Dad and bear witness to sweetness and light at a reading by W.H...
...reading Being and Nothingness at the kitchen table...
...Oppressed" by her"trivial demands," Ben finally goes for the jugular: "You're just a housewife, Mom...
...It never occurs to him to think that she might beinlove...
...Eleanor has a halo of "Botticelli ringlets" and a "wide pliant mouth and swanlike neck...
...In an expansive moment, Ben considers the trade-offs a son with an intellectual for a mother would have to tolerate: "What if I'd come home from school every afternoon to find her...
...Auden...
...If Ben gains sustenance from the idea that he's playing Edmund Wilson to Eleanor's Mary McCarthy ("D.H...
...Deadpan calling the kettle black...
...Ben kvetches...
...Lawrence and Frieda what's-her-name" come to his mind too), Eleanor needs more than a literary allusion to sustain her...
...In Great Expectation, Evanston's one literary bookstore, Ben is impressed by Rene Wellek's "erudition" and his obscure catalogue of Russian critics whose names are chock-full of consonants: "Some boys memorized the To-rah and had bar mitzvahs...
Vol. 69 • May 1986 • No. 8
