Paul Fussell has written an interesting entertainment that examines the American class structure. It is basically descriptive and impressionistic and espouses no cause. It is filled with keen insights and amusing anecdotes and is consequently a relaxing, nontaxing book. In essence, it meshes with a vast Western literature—both scholarly and pedestrian—that enthrones class as the object of study. Much of...
The Media as Fun-House Mirror
The publication of Russ Braley’s Bad News represents a landmark moment in the history of current affairs. No longer will it be possible for some enthusiastic and devoted reader of the New York Times to argue his position without recognizing the extent to which this newspaper has systematically colored the major events of this century. Bad News, a fine book,...
Historical Portraiture
Or the many reasons for reading about the past, perhaps the most natural and common one is curiosity and the love of a good story. Although it probably is the least philosophical approach, there always will be a place for the sliceof-life history because a well-written depiction of life in an ancient polis, a single battle in the midst of...
Ideologues in Search of a Faith
Most contemporary intellectuals reject Hilaire Belloc’s claim that the West must return to Christianity if it is to survive as a civilization. In their view, we live in an enlightened and disenchanted world that has left behind forever the integral but innocent and uncritical Age of Faith. And as if to lend support to their conviction, several spokesmen of the...
A Prudent Progressive
Do people still rely on the credibility of Prince Bakunin? If they do, this surely must attest to the incurability of the Western civilization’s decline, to its perennial susceptibility to decay through murky and invincible diseases of perception and intelligence. It somehow makes us incline toward a Darwinian concept of justice: a civilization that has become so cerebrally weak deserves...
Art: Balthus
Balthus: A Retrospective, an exhibition representing a half century (1930-1980) of the contemporary French artist Balthus (Balthazar Klossowski of Rola), closed in May at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It consisted of some 50 paintings and 60 drawings. Included in the show were illustrations for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1933), in which Balthus identified himself with Heathcliff. The first...
Polynesian Postcards from Dr. Freud
A number of people in the movie reviewing business are busy commenting on whether the team of Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson in 1984 measures up to Charles Laughton and Clark Gable in 1935 and/or Trevor Howard and Marlon Brando in 1962. This smacks of handicapping midget tag-team wrestling matches, so let’s ignore that whole issue. A more provocative matter...
Lightness & Lard
Perhaps it was in retaliation for those fried potatoes that are served up in little bags and cartons at McDonald’s that they did it, that they performed an act which is so horribly outlandish. The French, those in question, have always been a very proud people; nowadays, the word French in English seems to be nothing more than a prefix...
Journalism
These are conflicting notions: warm feelings, no matter from which spiritual or emotional fount they emanate, must end in a bit of unfairness. The only human construct that firmly believes in and widely proclaims its ability to be exempted from this rule is, of course, the New York Times. For many years, the Times succeeded in convincing America, and—what’s worse—the...
Wonder Woman?
Gloria Steinem tells a number of revealing anecdotes in this collection of essays. In one piece she describes how she and George McGovern drove to John Kenneth Galbraith’s home for a weekend of heavy political strategizing. After the weekend talks, during which Steinem was greatly impressed with McGovern’s brilliance, they got in the car and discovered that McGovern had left...
Comment
If familiarity were the same thing as understanding, it would be supererogatory to raise the question of what the media mean. Nothing is more generally familiar in our time, nothing deals more consistently with the familiar, and nothing familiarizes masses of men more rapidly with certain classes of events. Surely it should be enough for us to acknowledge that the...
Remembrance of Trivia Past
Surely the most significant text a man ever starts out to interpret is the compromise that is his own life. The events, ragged and serene, that tempt explanation were shared by others, and so it is with delicacy and humility that the autobiographer should seek to set the record straight—yet all too frequently the public demand urges on the writer...
Red Hot Harlequin Romances
Alice Walker: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. by Brian Murray Alice Walker, not yet 40, has been publishing poetry and prose since the late 1960’s. But only in recent years has her work been accorded the sort of fervid critical praise that the American literary establishment prefers to bestow on certifiable major American writers....
Liberal Worship and Conservative Judgment
Joyce Carol Oates: The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews; E. P. Dutton; New York. Kenneth S. Lynn: The Air-Line to Seattle: Studies in Literary and Historical Writing about America; The University of Chicago Press; Chicago. Beyond any reasonable doubt, Matthew Arnold knew far more than did Samuel Johnson. Curiously, however, he was far less confident about turning his knowledge into...
Playing by Perverted Rules
Lobbying for Freedom in the 1980’s: A Grass-Roots Guide to Protecting Your Rights; Edited by Kenneth P. Norwick; Wideview/Perigee; New York. Susan J. Tolchin and Martin Tolchin: Dismantling America: The Rush to Deregulate; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. What is freedom? To the ancient Greeks, freedom existed in the margins: it was that vacuum of authority between the just demands of religion...
The Joy of Cents
Keith Bradley and Alan Gelb: Worker Capitalism: The New Industrial Relations; Tue MIT Press; Cambridge, MA. Leonard M. Greene: Free Enterprise Without Poverty; W.W. Norton; New York. Wynne Godley and Francis Cripps: Macroeconomics; Oxford University Press; New York. As in almost any field, economics is dominated by a very few seminal works. Still there are those who must publish or...
Comment
The contemporary ideological debate on social issues sometimes resembles a squabble between two second-graders as to which has the tougher father. Common sense and principle fall victim to pride and enthusiasm. Conservative and liberal have too often become, in modern usage, handy but meaningless epithets tossed about by single-issue demagogues for their own political convenience, thus demonstrating the present aridity...
Accidents & Ignorance
A. J. P. Taylor: A Personal History; Atheneum; New York. With the exception of Edward Gibbon, there have been few great historians who have written their autobiographies. The reason for this should be fairly clear. While some historians, such as Macaulay or Mommsen, led interesting lives, and some, such as Lewis Namier, are interesting men, most serious historians do...
Screen: Zoology
Screen Zoology Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes; Directed by Hugh Hudson; Screenplay by P. H. Vazak and Michael Austin, based on Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Buroughs; Warner Brothers. Greystoke raises a large number of questions, most of which will not be addressed here. For example, there’s the question of cinematic fidelity to the...
Finer Fleet of Clay
Bernard Malamud: The Stories of Bernard Malamud; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York. Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Penitent; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York. Morality is religion’s province. Contemporary secularists do not see this, averting their eyes from the religious sources of their own moralities. Such aversion makes a kind of sense; deprived of any metaphysical foundation, secular morality can...
The American Proscenium
Representation Ms. Geraldine Ferraro, a Democratic party hack, a Catholic feminist (what a spiritual and spirited concoction, brewed according to the recipes of the Queens-Long Island bourbon culture!) whom the amalgamated USA womanists (the newest vocable) wished to see as the next vice president, said of late: “The only real threat to women in America is Reagan. . . .”...
Journalism
Ideology as Prognosis Village Voice, the chief organ of the radical-industrial complex (a multi-billion-dollar enterprise in left-wing snobbery whose chief products include: mattresses, vociferous anti-Americanism, mink coats, elitist social engineering, rock music, phony populism, instantly disposable footwear, recreational fornication, drugs, trendy political ardors for terrorist “underdogs” such as El Salvador guerillas, PLO, etc.), assessing Mr. Gray Hart’s chances in the...
In Focus
Of Careers, Criminals, and Creative Writers Theodore Dreiser: An Amateur Laborer; University of Pennsylvania Press; Philadelphia. Nelson Algren: The Devil’s Stocking;Arbor House; New York. By the time the average American child has reached adolescence, he has been asked hundreds of times by solicitous relatives and politely curious strangers, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” Though this...
Commendables
Of Isms and Idolatry The Economic System of Free Enterprise: Its Judeo-Christian Values and Philosophical Concepts; Edited by Paul C. Goelz; St. Mary’s University Press; San Antonio, TX. During their relatively short but incredibly bloody existence as a world historical force, Marxists have murdered millions of men, women, and children, largely without regret. Many Marxists, however, are having some second thoughts...
What Price Integrity?
Seth Cagin and Philip Dray: Hollywood Films of the Seventies: Sex, Drugs, Violence, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Politics; Harper & Row; New York. One of the big blows to the underground press in America in the 1960’s was an ad campaign staged by a major record company that used such toy-gun revolutionary slogans as “The Man can’t bust our music.”...
Art
Fluff John Bernard Myers: Tracking the Marvelous: A Life in the New York Art World; Random House, New York. Books — paper ones, not those cassettes that are now hanging on racks in bookstores for the busy executives who would like to listen to a paragraph or two while not making deals on their cars’ cellular telephones — are mute....
Notables
Building It’s always with pleasure that we come upon a volume by Saul Bellow, for he is a writer with talent and, more importantly, vision, a man who can meld the quotidian and the profound into a unified, intellectually compelling narrative. With the case of Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (Harper & Row; New York),...
Fleeting Truths
Cyndi Lauper, current clown princess of the new (or, given its nature, is that gnu?) rock scene, recently squeaked: It was all traditional: The church, the family, the government. Any you know what I learned? Those are the biggest oppressors of women that will ever come along. And girls just wanna have fun, right, Cyndi? cc
Liberal Culture
The End Nears . . . “The end nears when fools are hailed and the sages ignored —.” This bit of ancient wisdom came to our minds when we were going through Time magazine’s cover story on one Shirley MacLaine, a successful actress and a quasicultural emblem of the liberal America. The gist of Time‘s text is, as usual, an...
Perceptibles
George W. S. Trow: The City in the Mist; Little Brown; Boston. What’s in a name? Fair Juliet’s answer notwithstanding, we insist that there is something to it. Take the case of a relatively young author who places two initials between his given title and his surname. There’s something to that in the closing years of this century, though it...
Basking in the Afterglow
Richard Mayne: Postwar: The Dawn of Today’s Europe; Schocken Books; New York. It is common today to describe Western Europe as facing a crisis. Its physical problems are manifold: economic stagnation, high unemployment, political dissatisfaction, demo graphic decline, military flaccidity. It would appear, however, that these overt problems are surface manifestations of a deeper malaise-the loss of confidence in tl1e...
Waste of Money
Frustration Joyce Carol Oates: Mysteries of Winterthurn; E. P. Dutton; New York. When it’s literary gee-whiz time, people like Isaac Asimov — the man who produces books, stories, and essays the way that McDonald’s cranks out Big Macs, fries, and Cokes — are trotted out. In the face of Asimov, many literate persons, most of whom have trouble inventing and...
Little Brother & Kid Sister
Caroline Bird: The Good Years: Yours Life in the Twenty-First Century; E. P. Dutton; New York. Richard Louv: America II; Jeremy Tarcher/Houghton Mifflin; Los Angeles. There are some serious people in the United States today attempting to ensure that the next generation of Americans has a decent place to live. Unfortunately, none of their work is recounted in either of...
A Family Affair
One of the little-remarked phenomena of modern popular music is the fact that the familial tradition evident 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s (e.g. the Mills Brothers, the Andrews Sisters, Steve and Edie) continues on. Merciful impulses insist that the Partridge Family and Sonny and Cher are expunged from consideration. The Davies brothers, Ray and Dave, of the Kinks, are of marginal...
In Focus – Pieces
Max Apple: Free Agents; Harper & Row; New York. Picture a man. About fivc eight-and-a-half in height, wire rimmed glasses, curly hair, salt-and-pepper beard, blue brushed-cotton shirt, loose navy tie, khaki pants, and Top Siders. Picture him in two dimensions–as if he is a life-sized cartoon, like a Lichtenstein. Once the image is fixed, imagine it being torn vertically into...
In Focus – The Babes in Books
Reinhard Kuhn: Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature; Boston University Press/University Press of New England; Hanover, NH. Presumably, since every adult was once a child, all adults should understand childhood. Somehow, however, the child remains a profound mystery to anyone who has left childhood. Trying to wrest understanding and utilitarian control out of that mystery, sociologists, psychiatrists, and pedagogues...
Perceptibles (Part 1)
Cay Van Ash: Ten Years Beyond Baker Street; Harper & Row, New York. In 1929, when producer David O. Selznick was still young enough to be designated a “Wunderkind,” he came up with an idea for a story that could be a part of a movie revue called Paramount on Parade. As he wrote in a memo to a Paramount...
Perceptibles (part 2)
Richard Morris: Dismantling the Universe: The Nature of Scientific Discovery; Simon & Schuster; New York. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Eliot’s title character asks, or muses, at one point, “Do I dare/Disturb the universe?” That question is but one of many in the poem; it is not, then, unlike the two found in one line, “Shall I part my...
Waste of Money – On the Trail of E.T.
George A. Seielstad: Cosmic Ecology: The View from the Outside In; University of California Press, Berkeley. Gerald S. Hawkins: Mindsteps to the Cosmos; Harper & Row; New York. When astronaut Bruce McCandless moved outside of the space shuttle Challenger last February and slowly (relatively speaking, that is) moved away from the ship sans umbilical cord, it was a big day for mankind,...
Commendables – Strategies & Schemes
Peter Hutchinson: Games Authors Play; Methuen; New York. During a conversation with Jorge Luis Borges at the Ingersoll Prizes ceremony in Chicago last December, we were informed that, in his estimation, “Literature is supposed to be enjoyed.” He added, “It is fun, is it not?” There was what can only be described as a whimsical look on his face when...
Waste of Money – One Step Behind
George Johnson: Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics; Jeremy P. Tarcher; Los Angeles. Before the world became a smaller place as a result of communications and transportation webs, apocryphal tales about magical and mystical powers emanating from sages in Africa and the Orient permeated the nooks and crannies of civilized environments. Today, when virtually every space...
Waste of Money – Lower Life Forms
Joe Haldeman: Worlds Apart; Vikings Press; New York. It’s widely reported that in the event of a nuclear holocaust, the highly adaptive life form known by the sobriquet “cockroach” will inherit the remains. Joe Haldeman, in this science fiction sludge, posits a variation on this theme: the order Blattaria, in 2085, will include bipedal creatures that are now part of...
Journalism – A Siskel–of Sorts
Lest it seem that we pay undue attention to the Chicago Tribune’s man in the aisle seat and not enough to his Sun-Times competitor and At the Movies cohort, Roger Ebert, we would like to make amends by providing an example of Mr. Ebert’s deep erudition. Here is Under the Volcano as described by the movie maven: the classic novel about a day...
Confluences – Mysterious Activities
The Politics of Interpretation (University of Chicago Press; Chicago), edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, contains essays and responses to them by some of the leading literary theorists of our time–Booth, Bruns, Graff, Hirsch, Kristeva, Said, and others. One of the more lively controversies that emerge in the text has little to do with deconstructing, reconstructing, or similar critical activities....
Notables – Tenderhearted–and Headed
She is frail. The Avedon on the dust jacket shows a blond Shelley Duvall with a touch of anorexia. Is that important? Possibly. Just as a person wouldn’t be likely to say to an anorexigenic personality, “How’s it going–chubby?” it would be hard to say to Renata Adler, after looking into those eyes of a pained doe, “Why don’t you look for a...
Liberal Culture – Ethics & the Mystery of Meals
In Playboy, our time’s Vulgate of the congregation of the unwashed, we read a month’s sermon by one Exene, a female rock particle: I don’t believe in anything that’s morally right. My friend the poet Lydia Lunch said she believes in beauty, truth and filth. That about says it all. Our friend, Suzy Snack, a painter, told us that she’s familiar with...
Screen – Sharks
George Perry: The Life of Python; Little, Brown; Boston. Three-card monte is a game of chance that’s often dealt by those who leave absolutely nothing to chance. To play, the dealer takes three cards, shows their faces to the player, places them face down on the table, then shuffles their position. The player attempts to correctly identify the location of...
Screen – A Big Bonbon
Romancing the Stone; Directed by Robert Zemeckis; Written by Diane Thomas; Twentieth-Century Fox. Romancing the Stone is a cinematic Raisenette: sweet, chewy, and individually unsatisfying. It is, in design and execution, sort of a Raiders of the Lost Ark for that segment of The Big Chill generation that likes to think itself above such “childish amusements” (though that assessment...
Screen – Shaking a Money-Maker
Footloose; Directed by Herbert Ross; Written by Dern Pitchford; Paramount. Break dancers–those young people who go writhing, flipping, and spinning about like modern, urban, secular dervishes–probably do not think about sex once they’ve completed their bouts. Rather, they undoubtedly wonder whether there’s a chiropractor in the house. Television’s Dance Fever structurally emphasizes sex through the use of the over-endowed women who...
Post-Modern Muzak
One of the deleterious aspects of enclosed shopping malls is the audible environment–not the sounds of shoppers shouting, scuffling, and struggling about, around, and over imaginary bargains, but the ever-pervasive schmaltz that fills the air. There are the standard packaged long-playing tapes that the large department stores utilize; the always-too-loud FM radio that teen-oriented boutiques play; and, of course, the...