Straws in the Wind: Collected Work Volume II: 1968-1995

STRAWS IN THE

WIND

COLLECTED WORK

JOHN THOMPSON

Volume II: 1968-1995

Copyright © 2018 Louise S. Thompson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-7606-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-7605-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017916363

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 08/28/2018

This book is

dedicated to the grandchildren of John Thompson: Peter Otis Thompson, Adeline Thompson, John A. Thompson III, Jacob Spaulding Miller, Earl Thompson, Anderson Keeler Miller, and Isaac Thompson.

ALSO BY JOHN THOMPSON

The Founding of English Metre

The Talking Girl and Other Poems

Things to Put Away

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the typists Sarah Sweeney and Chris Pomorski for typing the original printed manuscripts into Word documents, a lengthy task we could not have easily undertaken.

We would also like to thank Leo Kundas for creating the covers for both volumes and for putting the illustrations into the proper format.

Justin Scholfield of Lulu Publishing has given us invaluable support and assistance during the entire production process.

In addition we are grateful to the following publications for permission to reproduce material first published in their pages: The American Scholar, Commentary, Genesis, Harper’s, The Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus, Partisan Review, Poetry, The Reporter, Shenandoah, Simon and Schuster (Collier Books), Soundings, and Sumac.

Editors’ Introduction

John Thompson was part of the vibrant, post-modern, New York literary scene of the nineteen fifties, sixties, and seventies. That scene was famously fueled by love, liquor, food, and parties, but most of all by ideas, by words, serious and witty, spoken and written.

Thompson’s writing embodies the spirit of the times, and naturally so, as he was a close friend and colleague of many of the other prominent literary and publishing figures of the era, including John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, Randall Jarrell, Robie Macauley, Lionel Trilling, Norman Mailer, Jim Jones, Jim Harrison, Jean Stafford, Norman Podhoretz, Elizabeth Hardwick, Jason and Barbara Epstein, and John Hollander.

These two volumes of Thompson’s collected work include his essays, book reviews, and stories, as well as poems that do not appear in The Talking Girl and Other Poems (1968). The pieces are clever and beautifully written; many of them resonate with current issues of race, climate change, war, and economic disparity. The early stories are especially moving.

The works trace the development of Thompson’s thinking and are thus an important part of the post-war era. As critical commentary, they contain astute insights into the cultural movements and intellectual history of the time.

Thompson was a poet at heart. He began as a poet and story writer at Kenyon College in the thirties, studying under Ransom, the chief proponent of the new criticism, and living with Lowell, Taylor, Macauley, and Jarrell.

After the war, he studied English literature at Columbia University under Trilling and wrote his doctoral thesis on prosody, later published as The Founding of English Metre, in which he describes the development of sixteenth century poetry with reference to the conflict between metrical pattern and the sound in the language. The article included here, Sir Philip and the Forsaken Iamb, an excerpted chapter from The Founding, discusses this issue in detail. It is engrossing to the linguist and worth the attempt by the layman:

This is our English meter at last. And it is time to try to answer the question of what it is good for. One thing we know it can do, it can allow the metrical pattern to be sometimes used as a way of controlling the intonation of the language. The words have their own pattern, usually obvious enough; if the meter is to work in this way, the sentence must first of all appear to be something that might really be said. It had better be colloquial, that is, the full resources of our speech in indicating meaning ought to be in it. (Sir Phillip and the Sacred Iamb, 1958)

Thompson’s fascination with spoken language and the structure of sounds is evident in all his writing. In his review, The Function of Syntax (1959), he claims, this [the language of speech] is where we have to be if we are to share the kind of concern with language that poets have.

In his fictitious essay about language itself he says, I think of the actual sounds, the noises we make when we talk, and of how they get so little attention from us under ordinary circumstances. (The Sound of Voices, 1968) There he also discusses the mysterious process of translating from the spoken language to the written language and back again:

For even there, in writing, where we can take all the time in the world to it if we want to, trying over and over again, we might well suppose we could never succeed, just by the nature of things; because who is it really who is speaking, and to whom, whose words in what air, whose meanings, whose searchings and whose concealments, whose? It is your voice now that is saying what I have written, not mine.

Words themselves are primary to Thompson. In a review from 1959, he states, poems are made of one small word and phrase after another; they are very fragile and risky things; they go wrong much more often than they go right. (A Poetry Chronicle)

And in a review from 1968, A word is less than a breath; it can’t even blow out a candle, let alone keep one lit. Words are all the poets have left. But then, words are really all that we have ever had. (An Alphabet of Poets) Later in this review Thompson indicates his disillusionment with art and culture when he says, …those high offices which Sidney claimed for poets—and rightly claimed—no longer exist for any of the arts. Of all these poets [here reviewed], and they are among our best, only Berryman, I should say, … aspires to bring in civility, to make us honest men, to make us immortal. Without this aspiration, perhaps even words, which, as I said, are all we have ever had, are still not enough.

Thompson came to feel that while poetry and the other arts had been vital in all cultures in the past, consciousness and knowledge had somehow now destroyed the potency of art and culture to heal us and to bring us catharsis. And to Thompson it is language that is the vehicle and means of this catharsis in all cultural and artistic forms. In The End of Culture (1969) ideas from Freud’s Totem and Taboo and Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax are brought to bear in this hypothesis. There, Thompson offers an incisive assessment of the decline of the traditional arts beginning with epic Greek tragedy through the various high arts to a preference for movies, television, and popular music, [which] are something else, diversions like smoking cigarettes. He explores this idea in more detail in Catharsis, Linguistics, and All That (1970).

In a different vein, Thompson voices the then (1969) nascent worry over our planet:

There is another part of culture in addition to that which has to do with regulating the relations of human beings with one another, and that includes all those things we do to protect humanity against nature. Who would not smile to hear this today? We have been monstrously successful in subduing nature, so successful that we are now terrified of what we have done, and even fear our mortal end through this success, in the steady destruction of the oxygen and carbon dioxide balance of our air, in the poisoning of our lands and our seas. We hear the clamor and are unable to stop what we do. (The End of Culture)

Thompson incorporates his vision of contemporary culture into the book reviews, which are witty and fun to read. A review of a lengthy autobiography of Robert Moses, New York’s master builder, Mr. Moses’s Public Works (1970), begins,

He stands thus portrayed on the cover of the book, just as he stands in its nearly one thousand pages, posed masterfully (if in rather baggy pants) with a rolled blueprint like a scepter or fasces under one arm, fist on hip, one foot on a raw red girder. He glares down. Does the reader suppose that the glare is for him, where he sprawls or kneels in the dust, and that the foot would be, in all reality, on the reader’s neck? Perhaps.

He later suggests that the 1966 retirement of Moses happened to coincide with the end of an American era of expansion and the beginning of an unknowable decline:

Nobody knows what happens to a great juggernaut that is grinding to a halt, any more than anyone knew what would happen when the juggernaut started rolling, a generation ago, over land and sea, and some people thought they were steering it.

In Away From It All, from 1970, Thompson reviews Helen and Scott Nearing’s prescriptive book, Living the Good Life, How to Live Sanely in a Troubled World, along with a study of an Eskimo tribe by Asen Balicki, pointing out that while the detailed descriptions of stone house building and organic gardening and such make for charming armchair escapism, the Nearing’s move to an off the grid lifestyle in Vermont was not without conflict with their local community. In addition, Thompson mentions that Nearing, a socialist,

writes regularly for the independent Marxist journal, Monthly Review. In these pages this rugged individualist, tireless debater and speaker, full of his fruit and his nuts, his honey and turnips and figs, can blandly deem that civil liberties and freedom of speech are simply not necessary in the Socialist countries.

After a discussion of the brighter and darker sides of Eskimo life of yore, Thompson concludes,

Oh to break away from civilization and its complicated discontents! Power failures, transit strikes, epidemics of heroin overdoses, air pollution, crashing airplanes…. Yes, these we can escape from, but is it not the oldest knowledge of all, that we cannot escape from the human condition? Perhaps a quiet weekend is all we should really try for. It is possible that we could get too far away from the complications, could get deeper than we may care to venture into the condition itself.

Two later pieces from 1979, the futuristic dystopian screenplay, Sapicide, and Calling Them As You See Them: The Connoisseur’s Guide to Foul Language, co-authored with J.D. Reed, are also influenced by Thompson’s linguistic awareness and concern with the environment. In Sapicide, life on earth is coming to an end in 2040 after decades of environmental disasters, and finally the human race is almost destroyed by a Professor of Linguistics who gets his hands on and alters a fusion oscillator developed but abandoned by the linguist Chicomsksy at MIT:

Professor Hanson and Evangeline on his terrace.

"Yes, I could have put the Pill, as we used to call it, in the earth’s water; but of course that would have inhibited reproduction in all mammals, not only homo sapiens.

Then I thought of the Phonological Oscillations which Chicomsky discovered and was adapting to porpoises. He was about to teach animals to speak, you’ll remember, when he caught that overload from the fusion oscillator in Cambridge, and nobody wanted to mess with it after that…. So I put one in each satellite: they thought it was a simple amplitude modifier…. And every time we said a word, my dear, or sang a song, we destroyed the reproductive capacities of our spermatozoa and our ovaries…. All of us. Except, somewhere, you were born.

The lights of the fishing boat are still visible out at sea.

There will be fish for breakfast. …

Calling Them As You See Them is unique in tone. It is a humorous guide to the correct use of common current invectives in such phrases as, "The head dude over at the McManus agency is a mean son of a bitch, or He was a real bastard. He told Marge that I was married, [and he’s not]. Thompson and Reed state their aim as: to provide a guide by which you can identify a prick in everyday life and so label him, without confusing him with a cocksucker or an asshole." When defining a bastard, they write, for example:

The British have always been fond of this term, applying it to everything from horses and hunting dogs to engine parts and mustaches. And a true bastard does resemble one of the characters from English Victorian literature—the orphan. The bastard makes his way through life as a loner, and by taking advantage of others. He’s ruthless, usefully unprincipled and quick.

The piece ends with an amusing Character-Analysis Test.

In his review The Professionals (1967), a decade earlier than A Connoisseurs Guide, while writing of James Jones’s Go to the Widow-Maker, Thompson states, Jones’s language is quite conventional .… But his use of the proletarian dialect of obscenity allows him an entirely new accuracy of fact and of valuation in speaking of sexual experience. No other writer has ever done this so well. It’s more than a matter of using obscenities, as we call them, it is a profound honesty….

Thompson wrote several reviews of fiction set in Africa where he emphasizes not only the profound cultural and political transformations occurring there, but also the linguistic honesty that unites these authors with their counterparts elsewhere. In his review of Kofi Awoonor’s, This Earth, My Brother …An Allegorical Tale of Africa he states,

The narrative sections present the village, the mission school, Empire Day, the boys going off to be soldiers, London, and the Accra of a leading lawyer, his work, his marriage, his mistress, the politicians, and the bureaucrats. These scenes have the sudden microscopic accuracy of appearance and the perfect pitch of speech and dialect that have made reality for us in the prose art of this century. Accra is there as Joyce’s Dublin is there and Faulkner’s Jefferson is… (In Africa, 1971)

Thompson’s work presents a range of ideas on writers and writing, language, culture and civilization. And yet Thompson himself possessed a remarkable charm and humility both in his personality and in his very language. Many people gave his writing high praise. In a letter to him about his review in Parnassus (1977) of Lowell’s Selected Poems, Helen Vendler said,

It was so like you—clever, (in the good sense), full of wonderful phrases (by which I mean the phrases of a writer, not a critic) – the Aztec sight, the daemon, horrific and tutelary, the pure and innocent reader, … the over-pedigreed subspecies…. Opinions, insights, explanations, and judgments—even truths—are a dime a dozen; but words, now, that’s another matter.

We feel it is fitting to close our introduction to this collection with John Thompson’s own words from The End of Culture, which might well apply to all of his writing:

The quotations I have scattered about in this essay are only some signs of it, of what is in the air. They are not meant to be proofs of what is unprovable. They tend in their sources to the journalistic, they are not even appeals to authority: just straws in the wind. All I say here is speculative, imperfectly informed, and, I believe, true.

Louise Thompson and Ruth Losack

Daughter’s Note

As a girl, I read only a few of my father’s many published articles, stories and reviews. He would mention in passing, or my step-mother would, that he had a piece in, say, Commentary, or The New York Review, or any of the various important literary journals, and I would see the journal on the coffee table for a while.

I was of course given an inscribed copy of his volume of poetry, The Talking Girl and Other Poems, which I very much enjoyed (although I was embarrassed that one poem was titled Adultery at the Plaza), and of his important volume on prosody, which I found quite too dense for me at the time.

Growing up I was intimately familiar with his voluminous reading and note-taking, always with a yellow number 1 pencil on a yellow legal pad, and with his writing of long-hand drafts, also on the legal pads, of his correcting in margins, and with his typing on plain typing paper with an efficiently clacking old Royal. He had several typewriters, I supposed because his father had run a typewriter shop in Grand Rapids. I recall asking him, on a sunny weekend morning, as he read and took notes as usual in the Victorian chair he favored, how he chose what to note. I just write down what’s important or interesting, he said. Impertinently, I asked important and interesting to whom, and he replied, To me.

But my father’s behavior was what fathers did, I thought. The unique quality of being the daughter of a scholar and writer did not fully strike me until I was an adult.

I was aware of his frustration late in his life with his inability to find a publisher for his beautiful novel, Things to Put Away. And after he died in 2002 I formed a vague plan to try to have it published.

Contacting and enlisting the once again indispensable aid of my father’s amanuensis of his later years, Ruth Losack, I started going through the boxes and boxes of original periodicals and manuscripts. Fairly soon we realized that the collected work of fifty-some years was very worth reading, even the book reviews written decades ago. His astute critical mind and the power and beauty of his language are enduring, in spite of our title, Straws in the Wind.

Hence the volumes you hold in your hands, on paper or on screen. May you take pleasure in reading them, occasionally, or at once.

Louise Thompson

Notes on the Editing

We have chosen to arrange the contents of Straws in the Wind in chronological order of publication or time written in order to demonstrate the continuity of each era and Thompson’s development as a critic and author. The periodical in which it was published appears at the end of each piece. Previously unpublished pieces, including three stories and a dystopian screenplay, are noted as such.

Thompson’s deliberate preference for British spelling and usage has been maintained.

RL and LT

1968

Old Friends

The Nice and the Good

by Iris Murdoch,

Viking, 378 pp., $5.75

No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

Viking, 496 pp., $6.95

The Pyramid

by William Golding

Harcourt, Brace & World, 183 pp., $4.50

The Instrument

by John O’Hara

Random House, 297 pp., $5.95

Few events, save perhaps the absorption of one very good stiff drink, can make us feel so benign, so blessed and so willing to bless, as settling-in again for an evening with an old friend who’s been away for a time. After the first nervous words and the sidelong observations of time’s ravages, whole worlds come back; we mutually forgive and forget one another’s whorings after the new, who suddenly don’t count at all: too ignorant, too unconnected, too young. What does it matter if we haven’t kept up, haven’t written; it’s those things of years ago that count, those things that happened when things really did count. In those years people established themselves in that small pantheon of humanity which is the only genuine one we can have. The others who come later are only simulacra. Why, our old friends knew us when we were actually young ourselves; they actually knew our parents, our many abandoned hearths, they rode in our old forgotten automobiles to strange places that don’t even exist anymore; they knew our lost loves. They knew our other friends. Only with an old friend can we really talk about our other old friends, about their failures and successes, their old follies and their new compromises. And nothing strange can have as much meaning as does news of the recent and yet anciently characteristic acts of our friends. And so, blessed and willing to bless, we catch up.

As you see, I have fallen into a version of the familiar essay, like some old Bookman among his cherished Volumes. (I know I lack the furniture; a proper familiar essay would have more homely detail, more space, a tea cosy, and plenty of comfortable footstools.) But that is how I feel, for I have just realized that the novels I want to discuss this month all fall into this category. I have read many books by each of these four writers, but for the last few years I have been unfaithful, totally ignorant of some of the works that I now see in the proud lists conveniently printed on the verso of the half-title in these new books; guilty of deliberately ignoring others; and still others, worst of all, I have left standing unopened on the shelves. But we need not be scholars of our old friends or of our old authors, there is no obligation to keep up with every single thing they do. So I warn you, I am feeling benign, gossipy, and in no mood to attack fiercely or fiercely to defend. We need never do either with proven friends.

The Nice and the Good is Iris Murdoch’s eleventh novel. We’ve been out of touch, I haven’t read the last two or three; but I felt right at home with this one, from page one all the way to the end. She is still up to all the old tricks of the novelist’s trade, with her own special trickiness. Of plot, Iris Murdoch makes a good joke, of character something not quite a joke, of setting, something real. London, I take it, is London, the year is now, and this is what happens there but not really.

So it was with the best of her other novels. The plots were complicated, full of reversals and consequences and recognitions, the characters were like those we must imagine behind the mysterious events reported in newspapers. And yet not quite. In The Flight From the Enchanter, the mysterious Mischa Fox really was mysterious, he was always on the verge of magic. Her characters possessed the ability of characters in myths or fairy tales to charm one another, and to charm probably the reader as well; it worked, I thought, because this charm represented something like the aura that people really have for us as they gather to themselves, however temporarily, all the feelings we have about the key figures of life wherever we find them. If sometimes the characters in The Flight From the Enchanter seemed in danger of becoming symbolic, mere counters in a set of ideas, one could dodge a conclusion at last because it seemed there would be too much trouble in working it all out. And the characters didn’t wear tags, and their strange actions were more like magic than like symbolism, that is, they were marvelous and irrelevant rather than hopelessly and endlessly suitable. I remember that book now as it was when I read it, full of fantastic, sinister, luminous but unilluminating set-pieces of drama: Rosa in bed with both the two strange brothers and a sort of blinding explosion goes off in the air; Rosa suddenly smashes the great fish tank at Mischa’s party, in that place of his with the secret in-sides carved out of four adjoining Kensington houses; the wise man gone mad sitting in his room which is plastered all over except for the ceiling with papers and books and pictures and statues, trying to decipher an undecipherable ancient script. … Even though everything might be explained, as the story developed, the actions and scenes retained their power of strangeness.

So I felt reading The Nice and the Good, and so I had felt, some years ago, reading A Severed Head, with its rich, intelligent hero, its mysterious tawny-breasted witch who with a two-handed Samurai sword can clip in half a linen napkin tossed in the air, who magically changes people’s lives; in fact, exactly in so many words, I wrote about Iris Murdoch some years ago, and I see no reason now to change the words. London is London still, but the London of today, again with echoes of newspaper scandals, sex, and the security risk of a government office; there is another example of the new young, of the old and wise, of the sexually gifted and the perverted, and really odd charmers like a sort of Hobbit who’s a native dialect-speaker of any place you want him to be from; and again, strange powers move through the air around people, auras of good, auras of evil. Lurking in the minds of the wise are oracular suggestions of something like a system of thought, which begins as homemade psychology and morality and ends as a preposterously optimistic mixture of home-made psychology and mysticism.

What Ducane was experiencing, in this form peculiar to him of imagining himself as a judge, was, though this was not entirely clear in his mind, one of the great paradoxes of morality, namely, that in order to become good it may be necessary to imagine oneself good, and yet much imagining may also be the very thing which renders improvement impossible, either because of surreptitious complacency or because of some deeper blasphemous infection which is set up when goodness is thought about in the wrong way. To become good it may be necessary to think about virtue, although unreflective simple people may achieve a thoughtless excellence.

There are mysterious agencies of the human mind which, like roving gases, travel the world, causing pain and mutilation, without their owners’ having any full awareness, or even any awareness at all, of the strength and the whereabouts of these exhalations.

What can I say to him? That one must soon forget one’s sins in the claims of others. But how to forget. The point is that nothing matters except loving what is good. Not to look at evil but to look at good. Only this contemplation breaks the tyranny of the past, breaks the adherence of evil to the personality, breaks, in the end, the personality itself. In the light of the good, evil can be seen in its place, not owned, just existing, in its place. Could he explain all this to Willy? He would have to try.

The story itself, as usual in Iris Murdoch’s books, is too complicated to recite. It takes place in London, in offices, in the houses of the rich and of the poor, in an evil vault, and in one of those English country houses equipped, like all of those thousands of houses, with eccentric and glamorous parents, a quaint dialect-type (Cockney or country) servant, erotic visitors, and children who speak like the characters in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels in bright prattlings of altogether preternatural insight, aggression, and grammar. There is a set-piece for each occasion, including a very near thing in a horrid tide-drowned grotto, a blackmailing, many sudden encounters with seductive women, sometimes deliciously naked, a learned allegory of love mixed up with Bronzino’s famous London allegory of Cupid, Venus, Folly, and Time (with borrowings from Panofsky), lots of misunderstandings, terrible tensions of very near things between lovers; and in the end each pair is sorted out and more than suitably bedded down together—the rake, the virgin, the widow, the whore, the impotent, all of them.

You may, if you like, want to make something of it. I am content with what Iris Murdoch has made of it all. We do not ask our old friends to explain themselves, nor need we really bother to explain them to others, as we do not, when we send a note of introduction from one friend to another, include comments on the bearer’s character.

Should you not already know Iris Murdoch, and if she sounds at all like your sort of thing, then look up The Nice and the Good. Its first sentence is this: A head of department, working quietly in his room in Whitehall on a summer afternoon, is not accustomed to being disturbed by the near-by and indubitable sound of a revolver shot.

One of those English houses equipped, like all of those thousands of houses, with eccentric and glamorous parents, a quaint dialect-type servant (cockney or country), erotic visitors, and children who speak like the characters in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels, in bright prattlings of altogether preternatural insight, aggression, and grammar. (Old friends tend to resemble one another, and inevitably they repeat themselves; do we mind?) In Angus Wilson’s house the people even refer, from time to time, to Peter Pan and the household of Mr. and Mrs. Darling which all big English houses of course much resemble. No Laughing Matter is, like The Nice and the Good, a very witty comic novel. On the whole the wit is not so harsh as that of Wilson’s first two or three books, somewhat alloyed as it is here with the much more long-winded and sympathetic voice of his bigger and later novels, the most recent of which, again, I have missed out on. No Laughing Matter is a family chronicle, with a printed list of the cast divided into Principal Players, Supporting Roles, and Additional Cast. The five Books of the novel are dated for our convenience: Before the War; 1919; 1925, 1935, 1937-1938; 1946, 1956; and 1967. The Principal Players are the six Matthews children, three boys, three girls. In 1912, the eldest, Quentin, is fifteen, the youngest, Marcus, is eight. Their parents, struggling and cadging to remain middle class, are Billy Pop, a failing writer, and the Countess, a dashing beauty who will soon run through all her opportunities for promiscuity.

The first Book of the novel is a virtuoso performance by the author, puzzling, even dazzling to the reader in many ways. First, the flourishes of its style, from playfulness to eloquence to the bitterness of cruel dialogue may be disturbing. The boldness of the figure that the author dares to use as his presentation of a sense of family unity is rather dazzling in itself. The family has just been to a Wild West Show in London, 1912, and as they stroll homeward to Kensington they experience a kind of collective fantasy of themselves crossing the great American Desert in a covered wagon: Grandmother, Great Aunt, Father, Mother, and each of the six children, involved in a primitive dream that for some minutes gave to that volatile, edged, and edgy family a union of happy, carefree intimacy that it had scarcely known before and never knew again. Furthermore, although the reader is scarcely able to sort out the parts of their dream at the time of the first reading, each of their private fantasies, as it unrolls, is for each of them like a dream of his own character and thus of his own fate; and each of these dreams is brought down to earth by the sudden puncturing of the dreams of Father (Billy Pop) and Mother (the Countess), who then proceed to destroy the collective dream and to shoot down the children one by one with sadistic accuracy. It is a fantasia of ingenuity in introduction, exposition, and analysis; an exuberance of literary imagination; and it presents a long foreshadowing darkly, cruelly cast, of the fifty-five years to come.

The flourishes, the invention, the constant voluntary embellishments of standard novelist’s scenes go on through the book, never tiring, never teasing to be witty in themselves as devices and witty in substance, and dark in purpose. The Principal Players live on through the Great War, through the 20′s when they come to maturity, through the 30′s of political turmoil, through the Second World War, and on to 1967, when, of course, they are old men and old women.

Quentin, who in 1912 was fifteen and had been exiled from the Matthews’s scruffy house to Grandmother’s, is wounded in France, becomes a socialist, a leading political journalist, anti-Fascist and then, because he will not pretend that he does not miss his friends and acquaintances who have disappeared in Stalin’s Russia, and will not deny what he has seen in Spain, he becomes a premature anti-Communist. At the age of seventy he is a bitter, exhibitionistic, Muggeridge-like television figure, damning not both your houses but every house in sight. One of the daughters, Margaret, becomes first a brilliant writer of catty short stories (about the family), then a great literary figure, finally a rather forgotten old writer. Sukey and Gladys, dear and rather silly girls, in their different ways, accomplish their fates through love. Rupert, the beautiful Countess’s beautiful favorite, becomes a very successful actor, then at last a less successful one. The best end is made by Marcus, the youngest. Disappointed by Billy Pop, and cruelly hazed by the Princess, he becomes a homosexual with a genius for understanding painting. With his rich lover’s money, he makes them both a fortune out of art, and after a series of adventures in which he always comes out right, for no reason except his good instincts and his intelligence, he ends up in North Africa with some of the brothers and sisters around him, and with a grandchild visiting along with a flock of the strange new young of 1967; and he is a good man. His spirit is good—as we can see because the young understand and like him. And he has done good works. He has established a non-profit perfume factory, simply because so many were unemployed in his town, a factory his Berber former lover and soon-to-be beneficiary heartily wishes to model after those more energetic and less philanthropic enterprises he reads about in his favorite journal, Time magazine.

The ground of all this seems really England, as does the setting of Iris Murdoch’s novel. The movement of the story through our modern eras in one carefully evocative scene after another cannot fail to suggest to us that this is more than the chronicle of one family. Do not Billy Pop and the Countess represent the strangely charming and potent swank of the old privileged orders, and their gifts of crippled brilliance to the 20th century? But then, a leading political analyst, a leading actor, a leading writer, a leading impresario of art all in one family—are these representative figures? Something in the author’s manner itself seems to tell us to go no further. The story is almost such a chronicle. But would a proper representative chronicle include jokes on itself? In one episode, put in the form of a play, the characters turn Pirandello on us.

ALL TOGETHER: Whatever do you know about Bernard Shaw, Regan?

REGAN [The dialect-type servant]: Nix me dolly. But them’s the lines I was given.

QUENTIN: The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. I ought to know that title. When was it published? (He turns to title page). Nineteen-twenty-eight! … but, that’s not for three years yet. It must be some mistake.

So the novelist’s time is not real time, his carefully re-created eras are not to be mistaken for real eras, his family chronicle is not the same as a Chronicle. Thank you, dear friend, for not being too solemn. How well our old friends know that there’s a sort of joke behind it all, and a joke we don’t have to explain to one another—don’t even have to tell, after all these years.

William Golding, trailing clouds of glory, sometime with Lord of the Flies the Freshman’s vademecum and sole rival to Catcher in the Rye, old mystifier of Pincher Martin, and, in The Inheritors, the only writer who has ever really tried to imagine, really and truly, what that paleolithic Eden was that we had before we acquired language and became our clever and dreadful human selves. Free Fall I read and have quite forgotten, The Spire got past me. The Pyramid is in real England, modern England, from the 30′s to the 60′s. The place is a village, no great country house. The hero, Oliver, who grows from boyhood to middle age, is only the son of a dispensing chemist, but he gets to Oxford. The characters are local eccentrics; there are no members of the great world. Oliver loves a girl from a class above his own, seduces a girl from a class below his own; participates in a slapstick farce of a local Little Theater production, invincibly innocent and naive through all this, at eighteen; returns as a middle-aged man driving an impressive automobile, and remembers in detail his old music teacher, an eccentric lonely lady who loved an auto mechanic she allowed to prosper. She went mad once, walking out naked into the town to his garage. Then she got well again, and later she died. The place is called Stilbourne. Archly offstage, and why it is then I cannot imagine, is Trollope’s cathedral town of Barchester. William Golding is eloquent but uncommunicative here. I have not quite got on the old footing with him. Title and dust jacket suggest Ideas about the Pyramid of Life. Our old friend is full of something but we will have to take another evening or two before we find out what it is.

John O’Hara is O’Hara still, for about the thirtieth time. Long ago I lost track of how many O’Hara books I have read. The Instrument is about a young playwright, Yank Lucas, and how he drives to fame and fortune over the bodies—sometimes the dead bodies—of his women. There are scenes in cheap rooming houses, in luxury apartments, in theaters and theatrical offices, in country boarding houses and country mansions; in many many bedrooms. Most of the story is, in dialogue, the famous O’Hara dialogue. The tough lady literary agent to the hero, about the photographs on her wall:

"They weren’t all lovers of mine but I loved them all, and I think you belong up there. You’d be the first new face in ten years. Look at those collars and ties. How did they ever breathe?

Heavily, some of them I gather.

You son of a bitch. You’re so right, she said.

The classy rich lady, one of our old O’Hara friends, also speaks to Yank about her emotional career, as do so freely most O’Hara people.

Then you see why you’re wrong about me, Yank. At my age, after about thirty-five years of an active sex life, most of it but not all of it with two husbands, I have to have more than the quick lay. …

Sex, money, fame, society, and sex; it is wonderful how O’Hara has kept up his old interest in these things. Even these come in, however briefly: the obligatory reference to college fraternities; the know-how of motels, newspaper offices; the way a headwaiter works as arbiter of distinction. O’Hara’s people have taken over an entire landscape, right down to the newest kind of college girl. They have all read his books and know their lines and know exactly what is expected of them. If you have liked them before there is no reason why you should not like them again.

I have said that no decent fellow would include in his note of introduction a comment on his old friend’s character—and yet, being a cad at last, I must say this. Never have novelists been so skilled, so incredibly proficient, never so decent, never so—so unconvincing. Therefore I do not think I need warn you against letting them bring their trunks in with them, or against letting them cash their checks on the credit of your bank account. You’ll have seen that they’re engaged in some marvelous game of their own, an entertaining game at very small expense to you, and if you’re an addict of novels, it’s all very cheap at the price. Otherwise, if you are very earnest, if you ask too much, if you demand more of a view of the world than that given eloquently by these experienced, ever so experienced, old and wise friends, then these things are not at all for you. If you decide that they are not for you, then it would take too long to say why, but you would be the poorer for this decision.

Commentary, January 1968

Fantasy & Circumstance

The Answer

by Jeremy Larner

Macmillan, 216 pp., $4.95

Curling

by Robert Boles

Harcourt, Brace & World, 154 pp., $3.95

Mother is a Country

by Kathrin Perutz

Simon and Schuster, 252 pp., $3.50

Super-worm

by George Deaux

Houghton Mifflin, 259 pp., $4.50

The Three Suitors

by Richard Jones

Little, Brown and Company, 312 pp., $6.00

Reality, we often hear today, has become so fantastic that only an art of fantasy can hope to imitate it, just as we hear that if those who are running the affairs of this world are sane, then who would not choose madness? But real madness does not lie around to be chosen, perhaps not any more than does love, which we are also often urged to elect. And as for art, fantasy is not to be had so easily either. The Modern movement in poetry, drama, and painting exhausted itself in fantasy, using up in one or two generations all the supernatural creatures it had revived out of the unconscious where the 18th century had buried them.

Except in fiction: there the experimental, the fantastic, never became entirely dominant, and perhaps for that reason fantasy reasserts its power from time to time, as, say, the work of William Burroughs demonstrates. The basic conventions of fiction, though, are still those we recognize as being much like what we call reality. As Auden once said, even the apocalyptic Nathanael West in all his novels but one adopted the conventions of social narrative; his characters need real food, drink, and money, and live in recognizable places like New York or Hollywood.

But that was ten years ago, and I am not about to say that New York or Hollywood—or Washington, D.C.—are still recognizable by the conventions of social narrative. You can make up your own list of the hideous and the outlandish from the morning paper any day. The news we see and read every day may really give us the license to project in art the wildest absurdities we can. Yet I wonder, if we do agree that reality today is at least extreme, if not indeed beyond the extremities of past social conventions, even so, I wonder whether or not the novelists have been overconfident in assuming that they can match in the processes of their now unleashed imaginations all those weird events the social soul of America has finally manifested. It may take more than simply letting yourself go.

If the world is so unpredictably various, and if defensibly rational public acts can lead to such insane conclusions in action, how can mere imagination match that unpredictability, or mere madness the bizarre performances of our social engine?

These remarks are more directly relevant to the other books I shall discuss than they are to the new novel by Jeremy Larner, The Answer, but they have something to do with the assumptions of this book as well as with its manner; and the book deals directly with one of the most troubling of all current symptoms of dissatisfaction with the reality of our society, that of the new culture of drugs among the young. The answer of the title is the Answer Drug, an hallucinatory LSD-like potion that solves all problems for its users. The hero who seeks the answer is Alex Randall, twenty years old, son of a self-made Kansas businessman, and a student at an unnamed Harvard-like university. Most of the story takes place in a few days of February 1964. Randall has unsatisfactory encounters with his girl and with his father, smokes marijuana with his friends, discovers his roommate berserk under the influence of the answer drug, and rushes off to the mansion of Dr. Magus Tyrtan, prophet of spiritual salvation through drugs, seeking an antidote for the roommate. Instead of getting the antidote, Randall stays in the mansion for several days, and his adventures in this elaborate psychedelic castle make up most of the story. Finally, Randall takes the drug himself, experiences long hallucinations, then flees, to find that his roommate has hung himself. Thereupon, at last, Randall attacks Tyrtan, but ineffectually. A brief epilogue written as from 1980 disposes of the various characters, and of the drug itself; the young by this time have gone on to something new, and scorn their druggie parents.

The story, then, deals very much with current headlines, with the recognizable experience of one highly-publicized group of young people today. (Vietnam, the draft, peace movements, do not really figure in the story; in the epilogue, the war has simply disappeared.) Yet it is also clear that the story is meant to take on more general overtones: Harvard, but not exactly Harvard; LSD, but not exactly LSD; the acid guru, but not exactly he. There is indeed today an establishment presumably much like Dr. Magus’s Heavenly House; but in The Answer, this mansion is also the Castle of the Eternal Quest that young men have always undertaken. Randall is any knight who sets out to seek the Dragon, the King, the Maiden, the Grail, or whatever it is that holds salvation. For many readers, this dimension of myth, fable, or psychology may well enhance the story greatly. Certainly it serves the author by placing within the bounds of judgment an experience he seems otherwise to have some difficulties in estimating. Yet the manner of the story, presenting, as it seems to me, those difficulties, vibrates most uneasily within the limits of the fable about youth’s illusions.

It is the duty of Randall, the hero, to tell the story in the first person. At once, in the opening pages, he establishes himself as clever, perceptive, reflective, very gifted verbally, and at the same time he is so obsessed that he is subject to actual hallucinations. Making love, he suddenly sees a little man in a waistcoat standing in a dark corner near the kitchenette. This little man—some figure of the hero’s Oedipal conflict that causes him a sexual insufficiency?—appears again from time to time, a modest and scarcely examined bit of mental bizarrerie. The story goes on in brilliant patches of perception and reaction, very much in the modern manner of interior narrations that seems now to dominate American fiction: half-poetic, half-parodic, every verb and adjective charged with energy.

Renée came on so hip herself—if only she really were! If she were hard as a rubber ball, like the one and only Blonde Star! (And yet inside the Blonde Star quivers, quivers, for anything tasty and true.)

Relating the experiences he has had under the influence of marijuana, Randall seems to reproduce the effect of the drug as the language condenses and intensifies, dropping articles and connectives and logical syntax.

New snow feathers on the pocked ice shingles; up from the street-well comes honking of traffic slide over in the square. Below, prancing dappled through streetlights, a horse appears, mounted by blobular man with cap in the middle. … I bellyflop on the windowsill, in mellow jumpiness of elevation. …

Finally, after the full treatment of stroboscopic lights, mandalas, mirrored rooms, fried rice, entranced females, skull-splitting music, and the wisdom of Dr. Magus (Crumbling, the whole verbal edifice of Western history. … Forget your mind … merge and flow. …), Randall takes the drug, and for what seems much too long a time he presents the demented sights and sounds of his excursion. These are enough to discourage the use of aspirin.

In these passages, purposefully, the author displays the poverty of pure fantasy, the boring, repetitive emptiness of induced inspiration. At one high point, Randall reproduces in his ecstasy what he takes for a marvelous vision. It is an idiotic parody of half-remembered Shelley.

In the helpless sky of my brain there soared a little chocolate bird with dark glasses, looping high and wailing. … Soon the roof of Heaven was criss-crossed with the hard bright crystal tracing of one lone bird. … How 1 wondered what white thoughts were his as he shot like an arrow across the blue deep! … Teach me, I cried, half that gladness that your brain must know—let me hang it all together in a spaced-out, burning flow—then all these cats would listen—and everybody would know!

The Quest, then, is only a snipe hunt, the Dragon cowardly, Merlin a faker, the enchanted Maiden catatonic. Yet the Grail contains real poison. And what of the hero? How could he be such a fool as to embark on this journey? The myth, of course, requires no motive: this is what young knights do. But the settings, mythical only in their undenomination; the time, February 1964; the fierce perception and language of the narrator; these demand more. The young man is neither desperate enough, nor the tempter sufficiently