Mark Shechner

Gates of Eden

During the years roughly between 1960 and 1970 America experienced a radical insurgency of unprecedented intensity and strange, unconventional forms. It was a political movement that had all the trappings of a spiritual crusade, a blend of rebellion and revival, and though it eventually fell short of achieving anything like power or lasting institutional change it had deep and pervasive effects on the emotional tone of the country — the way people lived and felt about their lives. In our common language, that insurgency is the very definition of the era; it is what we mean when we say “the sixties,” just as the depression, the onslaught of Fascism, and the fellow-traveling of Western intellectuals are what we mean when we invoke “the thirties”. Though bound closely to the vicissitudes of American politics, the movement was by no means a uniquely domestic upheaval, for it drew upon international energies and had global reverberations: the Cuban revolution, the uprising of Parisian students in 1968, Czechoslovakia’s canceled experiment in socialism with a human face, the Chinese cultural revolution, and above all, the Vietnamese struggle for independence, which spanned the decade and was, more than anything else, the galvanic force behind the movement.

Where’s Papa

Not long before he died, Ernest Hemingway wrote to one of his literary executors, “It is my wish that none of the letters written by me during my lifetime shall be published. Accordingly, I hereby request and direct you not to publish or consent to the publication by others, of any such letters.” That should have been enough to stay the hand of those biographers and publishers avid, like fight promoters, to get one last payday out of the ex-champ, no matter what the cost. Mary Hemingway, to her credit, held out against Carlos Baker and the Scribner Hemingway industry for eighteen years after her husband’s death in 1961, only to cave in at last and authorize publication of a book that is both dishonorable and damaging. The dishonor lies in the violation of Hemingway’s wishes in the name of some higher claim, some fanciful version of the advancement of learning that Baker calls “the continuing investigation of the life and achievements of one of the giants of twentieth-century literature.” Yet to read these letters is to appreciate why Hemingway wanted them kept out of the marketplace, for they place on view in the most vivid fashion all that was most unsavory in the man’s private character.

Zuckerman's Travels

Psychoanalysis may be passing from the scene of American intellectual life as a reliable index to human behavior, but not before making a permanent contribution to our common understanding of how fiction is to be read. Among the ideas to survive the demise of the system are ambivalence, overdetermination and the belief that all expressions of human desire save the most basic and biological express a collision, rather than a harmony, of motives. Certainly, without such concepts at hand we are disarmed before anything as complex as contemporary literature, and without doubt we are disarmed before a writer as nimble and as mercurial as Philip Roth, who has made of ambivalence not only an art but a theory of art, producing out of his arguments with himself a literature as richly conceived and intricately designed as any in America. No longer “case histories,” however, as they once seemed to be, his books have lately evolved into theaters of uncertainty in which characters perform dramatic charades of ambivalence that in the past might have been interpreted as “acting out.” The Counterlife (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987) is the most recent and most impressive of Roth’s late theatrical novels, all the more impressive, I’d like to say, for possessing at once a theatrical lightness and a historical gravity. An elegant novel, it performs an elaborate counterpoint between the inertia of history and the agility of the imagination, and would appear to be evidence, if such were needed, that it is possible for a novel to contradict itself repeatedly and turn out all the more convincing for its contradictions.

Saul Bellow and Ghetto Cosmopolitanism

Consider Shapiro. “His nose was sharp and angry and his lips appeared to be smiling away their anger. His cheeks were white and plump, and his thin hair was combed straight back, glistening in the Rudolph Valentino or Ricardo Cortez style of the twenties.” That gigolo’s hair marks him as a dandy and a villain, while those lips, smiling through their anger, reveal him to be a man of mixed intentions. Like all the best people in Herzog, he is an uneasy composite, a walking (and talking) oxymoron, whose breeding is mobilized against his instincts. From all appearances, Shapiro is a man of manners, taste, and charm, and on this hot summer afternoon on the lawn in Ludeyville he clings obstinately to his professorial composure, refusing to even loosen his conservative necktie as he holds forth eloquently and flirtatiously with Madeleine Herzog on any subject under the hot sun: the Russian Church, Tikhon Zadonsky, Dostoevsky, Herzen, Soloviev, what have-you. He is a gentleman and a scholar until lunch is served, and then, under the spell of spice and vinegar, he is transformed.

The Survival of Allen Ginsberg

We have three new books from Allen Ginsberg: a selection of recent poems, a second transcription of entries from his vast archive of journals, and an exchange of letters with Neal Cassady, who was once the elusive object of his tumultuous affections. But there is little to catch the eye here; two of the books — the journals and the correspondence — are sentimental journeys to familiar terrain — the mind of Allen Ginsberg. For years, Ginsberg been the most accessible of our writers, conducting his affairs very much in the open, if remarkably beyond the reach of talk shows, bookchat, and general literary blather. Nor do the poems break any new ground, thematically or technically. They serve up the standard brew of homosexuality, metaphysics, pacifism, stirrring declamation, muddled prophecy, and home-cooked Buddhism that is as familiar now as the morning coffee and about as shocking.

A Portrait of Delmore

It is possible to feel overwhelmed by Delmore Schwartz in death as it was in life. Twenty years after his death on 11 July 1966, the movement to resurrect Schwartz has taken a serious turn. The publication of Schwartz’s journals is just a ripple in the tide of Schwartziana that has been swelling since 1975, when Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift brought Schwartz back into public consciousness as the kibitzer maudit and insomniac laureate of his age. That wave includes Robert Phillips’ edition of Schwartz’s Letters, published in 1984; Schwartz’s Last and Lost Poems (1979); the collection of “bagatelles,” The Ego is Always at the Wheel (1986); James Atlas’s Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977); the extended portrait of Schwartz in William Barrett’s The Truants (1982), and Bruce Bawer’s essay on Schwartz’s poetry in The Middle Generation: The Lives and Poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell (1986). Virtually forgotten after his death, Schwartz has now been brought back to life as a symbol of Jewish intellectual life and a small but vigorous cottage industry.

Jewish Comedy and the Contradictions of Culture

In a fantastical and funny story by Philip Roth entitled “On the Air,”2 Milton Lippman, a talent scout, writes to Albert Einstein to ask if Einstein would agree to star on a radio program that Lippman hopes to negotiate with the networks, “The Jewish Answer Man.” It will demonstrate to the world that “the Greatest Genius of all Time is a Jew.” When his first approach to Einstein goes unanswered, Lippman bravely writes again: Dear Mr. Einstein: I can understand how busy you must be thinking, and appreciate that you did not answer my letter suggesting that I try to get you on a radio program that would make “The Answer Man” look like the joke it is. Will you reconsider, if the silence means no? I realize that one of the reasons you don’t wear a tie or even bother to comb your hair is because you are as busy as you are, thinking new things. Well, don’t think that you would have to change your ways once you become a radio personality. Your hair is a great gimmick, and I wouldn’t change it for a second. It’s a great trademark. Without disrespect, it sticks in your mind the way Harpo Marx’s does. Which is excellent. (Now I wonder if you even have the time to know who The Marx Brothers are? They are four zany Jewish brothers, and you happen to look a little like one of them. You might get a kick out of catching one of their movies. Probably they don’t even show movies in Princeton, but maybe you could get somebody to drive you out of town. You can get the entire plot in about a minute, but the resemblance between you and Harpo and his hair and yours, might reassure you that you are a fine personality in terms of show business just as you are.)

Criticism and Culture

“As Charles Peguy said,” wrote Lionel Trilling in the preface to The Liberal Imagination in 1950, “‘Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique’ — everything begins in sentiment and assumption and finds its issue in political action and institutions. The converse is also true: just as sentiments become ideas, ideas eventually establish themselves as sentiments.” In Trilling’s case the converse became the rule: Tout commence en politique et finit en mystique. No intellectual of his generation was fonder of mystique than Trilling, none more guarded and elusive, cryptic and oracular. His prose was sinuous and elliptical, hinting at depths beyond words and while at the same time disclosing a mind ever attentive to the ballet of ideas, indeed, to its own pirouettes and plies. As Mark Krupnick’s Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism shows in detail, the favored choreography was one of balances and antitheses, of exquisite tensions and unresolved dialectics. Long before deconstruction became a fashion in the academy, Trilling was practicing it on himself, defending positions from one essay to the next that seemed to stand in opposition to each other, suggesting a turn of mind Krupnick characterized by Krupnick as an “allergy to closure.”

Bernard Malamud, or the Return of the Repressed

Our image of Bernard Malamud is so bound up with certain familiar sentiments concerning conscience and moral accountability that scarcely anyone writes about him without paying tribute to them. Malamud’s books we are repeatedly told, speak for “the possibility of man’s redemption through purgative suffering and selfless love,” or betray a concern with “Love, Mercy (Rachmones), Menschlechkeit” or “probe the animal nature of man, reveal a fearful mistrust of instinctual behavior, and struggle toward an answer in discipline and love.” With the prevailing consensus thus in favor of Malamud’s mission of moral improvement, readers might well wonder whether it would not be more direct to bypass him altogether and proceed directly to the synagogue for the original teachings. Not everyone would rush off to the library for a writer’s books after being told that, as one critic has put it, he “follows in the ancient tradition of the prophets, Amos, Jeremiah, the Second Isaiah who announce suffering to be the Jew’s special destiny, evidence of his unique covenant with God .…” Some might sensibly conclude from such praise that the writer in question was altogether too morally accomplished for them, or too gloomy, and turn instead to Dr. Brothers, who at least is cheerful and reassures us that we can get what we want out of life.

Ambition and the American Scholar

It was not so long ago that Jewish intellectuals in America carried on in public like exiled Russians, one minute exhorting the masses to revolt, the next issuing moody notes from the Dostoevskian underground. In those feverish days, revolutionism and alienation seemed like two sides of the same romantic coin. Now in the age of the Superbowl, Jewish intellectuals come on more like football coaches: upbeat, All-American, and avid for victory. There is still that quaver of fear in their exhortations; this is halftime and America is 24 points down. But in lieu of fiery denunciations of the dying order we now get pep talks. As if to rally our fallen spirits, they write books with decidedly boosterish titles: Making It, Breaking Ranks, Two Cheers for Capitalism, We Must March My Darlings, Free to Choose, and now, Ambition. They belabor us with positive thinking. One is a little astounded at how smooth the journey was from Trotskyism to Rockneism. There are even Jewish intellectuals today who will not rest easy until there is a quarterback in the White House. [Author’s note, 1988. That campaign has recently fall flat once again, but in politics as in sports, the Quarterback Club keeps its nose in there.]