Form of Our Times

...You Don't Say : studies of modern American inhibitions, by Benjamin DeMott...

...He calls his book "Studies of Modern American Inhibitions"—by which he vaguely means the substitution of a new language of values for the old, thus "inhibiting" us from using good old words like "love," "honor," "courage," and the like...

...Wakefield's book is by far the more interesting and important...

...Both Dan Wakefield and Benjamin DeMott find it necessary to bind up their magazine pieces in a more pretentious masquerade...

...DeMott invariably chooses the artifact of a social issue as his subject—greeting cards or alumni news notes—rather than the issue itself...

...But this aim is only partially carried through, as Wakefield candidly admits near the end...

...Reviewed by Robert Sklar The magazine article, some say, has entered its golden age...

...In the old days authors met the problem of rapid obsolescence by collecting their articles in books of essays...

...DeMott, a professor of English at Amherst, unifies his miscellany, You Don't Say, with a subtitle and a preface to give his articles a structure and coherence they do not possess...

...Since most of his pieces are long out of date, Wakefield presents his articles as an autobiography, on the model of Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself...

...If magazines articles are the great form of our age, perhaps those very qualities which make them great are the qualities which do not survive transplanting...

...Both Wakefield and DeMott, in their separate ways, make clear their feelings that magazine articles alone do not make a book...

...But their problems may also demonstrate the inherent limits of the article, the reason why it falls short of the greatness that drama and poetry and the novel—or biography or philosophy or criticism—can attain...

...That all these issues have developed far beyond the early stages discussed in this collection is a difficulty that shapes the form of Wakefield's book...

...The author of many of these essays hardly seems the same man who wrote the brilliant piece on Lee Harvey Oswald ("Character of the Assassin") included here which by simplicity and directness conveys far more profound and complex insights than he attained in the rest...

...Where in past eras drama or poetry or the novel dominated literature, today no form of expression so fills our cultural needs as the magazine piece—in its terseness and immediacy, its blending of factual and personal styles...

...He says he became dissatisfied with the conventions of objectivity in reporting — conventions which made him refer to himself in print as "the stranger"—and he intends to recover the personal element that he left out before...

...The form of the article, for Wakefield and DeMott, simply does not provide means to fulfill their literary and cultural aims...

...Yet his essays carry out this theme in a glancing rather than a direct way...

...As it stands, the articles are better written and more interesting than the frame that holds them, and with one or two exceptions—like the fine piece, "In Hazard," on the problems of a Kentucky mining town—the articles have crossed the river from which none can return...

...Between the Lines collects nearly a score of articles from a decade of free-lance writing, largely for liberal magazines...

...4.50...

...Harcourt, Brace & World...

...But this plain and simple strategem no longer suffices—at least not for these new collections by two experienced and representative magazine writers...

...How many read back-number magazines...

...Wakefield earned his reputation by his ability to take up major problems—civil rights in the South, the Northern ghettos, drug addiction—before they became national by-words...

...and he forces his effects with a flaccid, imprecise, and slangy style...

...More autobiography, more on the methods and problems of his craft than he succeeds in conveying, would have been welcome...

...If this argument holds true, the primary defect of articles is their early mortality...

...240 pp...

...This was a respectable answer, and few readers who picked up such collections were deceived as to their origins...