INFORMATION TO USERS

This material was produced from a microfilm copy of the original document. While the most advanced technological means to photograph and reproduce this document have been used, the quality is heavily dependent upon the quality of the original s u b m itte d .

The following explanation of techniques is provided to help you understand markings or patterns which may appear on this reproduction.

1. The sign or "target” for pages apparently lacking from the document photographed is "Missing Page(s)". If it was possible to obtain the missing page(s) or section, they are spliced into the film along with adjacent pages. This may have necessitated cutting thru an image and duplicating adjacent pages to insure you complete continuity.

2. When an image on the film is obliterated with a large round black mark, it is an indication that the photographer suspected that the copy may have moved during exposure and thus cause a blurred image. You will find a good image of the page in the adjacent frame.

3. When a map, drawing or chart, etc., was part of the material being photographed the photographer followed a definite method in "sectioning" the material. It is customary to begin photoing at the upper left hand corner of a large sheet and to continue photoing from left to right in equal sections with a small overlap. If necessary, sectioning is continued again - beginning below the first row and continuing on until c o m p le te .

4. The majority of users indicate that the textual content is of greatest value, however, a somewhat higher quality reproduction could be made from "photographs" if essential to the understanding of the dissertation. Silver prints of "photographs" may be ordered at additional charge by writing the Order Department, giving the catalog number, title, author and specific pages you wish reproduced.

5. PLEASE NOTE: Some pages may have indistinct print. Filmed as received.

University Microfilms International 30C Norm .'e e u Roaa Ann Aroor Micinyan 48106 USA

Si Jonns Road Tyler s Green HiCjn WycomDe Bucks England tiPlO bnf-i 7« l9b 07

HANELINE# 0 011G L A S LAT hAM THE SWING HF THE P E N f 1U L U M I NATURALISE CONTFHPHRARV AMERICAN LITERATURE,

THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, PH.D., 197R

© Copyright by Douglas Latham Haneline 1978 THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM: NATURALISM IN CONTEMPORARY

AMERICAN LITERATURE

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Douglas Latham Haneline, A.B., M.A.

A * * * *

The Ohio State University

1978

Reading Committee: Approved By

Thomas W. Cooley

Richard M. Weatherford

John M. Muste Adviser Department of English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due to the following: Georges Borchardt, Inc., for permission to quote from The Warriors, Copyright 1965 by Sol Yurick, Per tig, Copyright 1966 by Sol Yurick, The Bag, Copyright 1968 by Sol Yurick, Someone Just Like You, Copyright 1972 by Sol Yurick, and An Island Death, Copyright 1975 by Sol Yurick; Grove Press, Inc., Tor- per­ mission to quote from Last Exit to Brooklyn, Copyright 1957, 1960, 1961, 1964 by Hubert Selby, Jr. and The Room, Copyright 1971 by Hubert Selby, Jr.; Vanguard Press, Inc., for permission to quote from A Garden of Earthly Delights, copyright 1966, 1967 by Joyce Carol Oates and them, Copy­ right 1969 by Joyce Carol Oates; James R. Giles^ Tor per­ mission to quote from his unpublished "Naturalism and Ex­ perimentation: The First Five Novels of Joyce Carol Oates"; D. B. Graham, for materials, suggestions, and encouragement

Thanks of another sort are due to Howard M. Munford, Professor Emeritus of American Literature at Middlebury Col lege, whose teaching first inspired my interest in the study of literature, and to John M. Muste, Professor of English at Ohio State University, whose encouragement, sug­ gestions, and patience have helped me at every stage in the completion of this work. VITA

September 14, 1948. . . . Born--Greenwich, Connecticut

19 70 ...... A.B., Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont

1971-1972 ...... Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of English, Univer­ sity of Delaware, Newark, Dc1 aware

19 72 ...... M.A., University of Delaware, New ark, lie 1 a wa r e

1972-197S ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

Eli;EDS OE STUDY

Major field: Twentieth Century British and American Liter­ ature. Professor John M. Muste

Minor fields: American Literature to 1900. Professor Richard M. Weatherford

Biography and Autobiography. Professor Thomas W'. Cooley

Nineteenth Century British Literature.Profes- sor Richard D. Altick

i i i TABLE OT CONTENTS

Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... ii

VITA ...... iii

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION...... 1

CHAPTER TWO: JOYCE CAROL OATES ...... 4 5

CHAPTER THREE: SOL YURICK...... 91

CHAPTER POUR: HUBERT SELBY, J P ...... 154

CONCLUSION ...... 212

LIST OP R E F E R E N C E S ...... 215

IV CHAPTER ONE,

INTRODUCTION

It is true, as psychoanalysts con­ tinually point out, that people do often have "the increasing sense of being moved by obscure forces within them--selves which they are unable to define." But it is not true, as Ernest Jones asserted, that "man's chief enemy and danger is his own unruly nature and dark forces pent up within him." On the contrary: "Man's chief danger" today lies in the unruly forces of contemporary society itself, with its alienating methods of production, its enveloping techniques of political domination, its international anarchy-- in a word, its pervasive transformations of the very "nature" of man and the con­ ditions and aims of life.

- -C. Wright Mills, The Soc i ological Imag ination

For thirty years, we have been told that American li­ terature has turned inward to gaze upon the psyche, and left to the social sciences the contemplation of the out­ side world. Though reaction to this turn has varied from resignation to relief, its reality and persistence have gone largely unquestioned. Most critics have echoed the sentiments of Nona Balakian and Charles Simmons, who tell us that it is "no wonder 'the novel of manners'--and by ex­ tension, the novel of social criticism--is dying, as was demonstrated some time ago. And not only because in our fluid, diversified society the writer has no base from which to view the human comedy. It is dying chiefly because the writer has ceased to believe that the social world can 2 reveal the direction of man's soul.""

The inutility of examining the social world has been exaggerated by the enemies of literary realism, just as its friends have mourned its death with too hasty a certainty.

In fact, as Edmund Wilson remarked nearly fifty years ago, literary history is never so neat as its analysts present it to be; "what really happens, of course, is that one set of methods and ideas is not completely superseded by anoth­ er; but that, on the contrary, it thrives in its teeth.

American fiction of the past fifteen years suggests tJmt realism remains vigorous in this country; in this study 1 want to suggest that contemporary writers have turned to what we call literary naturalism to express what they wished to say in literature, and that their choice of nat­ uralism has helped to clarify our ideas of what that phe­ nomenon is .

To Joyce Carol Oates' A Garden of Earthly Delights

(1967) and them (1969), Sol Yurick's The Warriors (1965),

Fert ig (1966), and The Bag (1968), and Hubert Selby's

Last Ex it to Brooklyn (1964) and The Room (1971), I have devoted closer attention in the body of this study, but first it is necessary to discuss something of the nature and history of literary realism and its offspring, literary

naturali sm .

In his exhaustive and valuable Documents of Modern

L i t c r a r v Realism (1 965), George Becker suggests that the

various meanings we have attached to the word "reality" may be grouped in four basic categories: (1) absolute

es sence (what Plato meant in his use of the term; something

perfect, unchanging, and eternal, that in the next world

of which things in this world are imperfect and temporary

imitations), ( 2)that which is "unique in ind ividual exper­

ience and has its essential being out of time" (the reality

Proust recovers/creates in Remembrance of Things Past) ,

(5) "that which inheres in external phenomena," and (4),

"that which has its being in some k ind of relation between external reality and perceiving consciousness." Three and

four, Becker tells us, are the sources of what is called

literary realism, though (4) tends to find its expression 4 in "psychological realism."

In a sense, of course, as Erich Auerbach and others have demonstrated, the representation of reality has been present in Western literature since the Old Testament, but literary realism, as we commonly use the term, is a phenome­ non that appears first in French literature in the time of

Stendhal and Balzac. Auerbach tells us that when these two 4

took random individuals from daily life in their dependence on current historical circumstances and made them the subjects of serious, problematic, and even tragic representation, they broke with the classical rule of distinct levels of style, for according to this rule, everyday practical reality could find a place in literature only within the frame of a low or intermediate kind of style, that is to say, as either gro­ tesquely comic or pleasant, light, col­ orful, and elegant entertainment.

Several accounts of this change in aesthetic practice have been advanced; most of them, Marxist or otherwise, em­ phasize the realization by artists that "the social base

. . . is not constant for a moment but is perpetually changing through convulsions of the most various kinds.

Peter Demetz suggests that the historical reasons for this new phenomenon originate during the French Revolution, after which "... private destinies came to depend more visibly than ever before on all-encompassing public events."

He continues:

The [post-Napoleonic] restoration at­ tempted in vain to put an end to the continuing unrest. [Metternich and the great powers] . . . were unable to ex­ tinguish the fires that continued to smolder under the surface. Although the restoration tried to discourage general political interest, the result was, par­ adoxically, that the spheres of life that up to then had been self-contained now became increasingly involved with politics.

This politicization of life, and the awareness of social change that accompanied it, produced art that, as George

Lukacs has put it, "assumed change and development to be 5

the proper subject of literature."

Since this social change is constant, realism, its

literary expression, has therefore a dynamic quality. "It

registers," Harry Levin remarks, "the impact of social

changes upon artistic institutions, brings about tire break­

down of old conventions and the emergence of new techniques,

and accelerates the momentum of the novel toward an increas- q ing scope and flexibility." Moreover, as Levin,quoting

Proust, tells us elsewhere, it "is born from age to age in

reaction against an outmoded art, which was considered

realistic in its heyday.

It is proper to suggest, therefore, that the develop­

ment of realistic prose fiction accompanies the moderni­

zation of Western societies: the increase in the pace and

complexity of life, the growth of cities and industries,

the greater awareness outside of village or county, the

spread of literacy, the rapid advance of technolog)’: all

of these factors created conditions under which certain

kinds of art flourished, and others declined. "Epic, ro­

mance, and novel," Levin suggests, "are the representatives

of the three successive estates and styles of life: mili­

tary, courtly, and mercantile."^

The nature of any literary movement is affected by a

variety of factors, however; Edmund Wilson remarks in

Axe1' s Castle that since the seventeenth century there has

has been a constant swing back and forth in predominance between mechanistic and romantic ideas about man and nature, a cycle that manifests itself in the succession of Neo-Classicism, Romanticism, Naturalism, and Symbol- 1 ^ ism. In the same passage Wilson notes the fascination of the contemporaries of Tope with the laws of physics and astronomy developed by Newton, and that of the nine­ teenth century with the discoveries in biology from the

18 4 0 ' s on.

These ideas, whose implications often did not mani­ fest themselves in intellectual and literary life for a generation after the scientific work had been accomplished,

C. Wright Mills calls "styles of reflection," and he sug­ gests that the most important of them have become "common denominators of cultural life." "One meaning of an intel­ lectual common denominator [is]," Mills continues, " [that] men can state their strongest convictions in its terms; other terms and other styles of reflection seem mere v e ­ hicles of escape and obscurity." Mills suggests, develop­ ing an idea to which we shall return, that in our day it is the ideas of social science that have seized the public mind, and that our intellectual common denominator is "the 1 3 sociological imagination."

Levin, Wilson, and Auerbach tell us that the meta­ morphosis of literary realism in France is traceable quite clearly in the writings of a succession of novelists of the nineteenth century. Stendhal, oppressed by the spectacle of a society in which change was occurring at an acceler­

ating rate, but whose official ideology denied all that

had happened since 1789, wrote the first novels in which

"contemporary political and social conditions [were] woven 1 4 into the action" with real thoroughness; on the other

hand, Auerbach observes, "his representation of events is

oriented, wholly in the spirit of classical psychology,

upon an analyse du coeur humain, not upon discover}’ or

premonitions of historical forces.

Balcac, Stendhal's junior by some twenty years, was

greatly influenced by the methods and discoveries of nine­

teenth century biology; not only has he literal'}' ambitions

that express themselves in taxonomic metaphors, but he

moves further along the path Stendhal was first to tread:

Me not only, like Stendhal, places the human beings whose destiny he is serious­ ly relating, in their precisely defined historical and social setting, but also conceives this connection as a necessary one: to him every milieu becomes a moral and physical atmosphere which impregnates the landscape, the dwelling, furniture, implements, clothing, physique, charac­ ter, surroundings, ideas, activities, and fates of men. . . . b

Life science had hitherto taught that the living and

non-living, being essentially different, operated under

different sets of laws; Magendie, Claude Bernard's mentor,

and Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire revealed to Balcac and his con­

temporaries that "living organisms were . . . subject to

the same laws or to the same methods of investigation as 1 n non-living. . . ." Yet .it is by contrast with Flaubert, some twenty years

his junior, that we see the element of romanticism in Bal­

zac's temperament, an element that tended "to sense hidden

demonic forces everywhere and to exaggerate expression to

the point of melodrama." Auerbach continues: "In Flaubert 1 8 realism becomes impartial, impersonal, and objective."

His prose, Wilson observes, "has learned to hear, see, and

feel with the delicate senses of Romanticism at the same

time [he] is disciplining and criticizing the Romantic 1 D temperament." ‘ This objective and impartial means of pre­ sentation, which Auerbach characterizes as narrow, 2 () aesthetic, and unworldly, the Goncourts presently applied to the lower classes in Germinie Lacerteux (1864). Despite the polemical tone of their famous preface to that novel,

Auerbach suggests that their motives in choosing the lower classes as the subject of their fiction were more artistic than humanitarian:

They were professional discoverers, or rediscoverers of aesthetic, and particu­ larly of morbidly aesthetic, experiences suited to satisfy an exacting taste sur­ feited with the usual . ^

Their interest in the lower classes, in other words, had as its source the same impulse as their antiquarianism.

The same cannot be said of Zola, who combined their interest in the objective presentation of the masses with

Balzac's breadth of ambition in the analysis of society.

And as Balzac had learned from Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, so Zola learned from Claude Bernard. Though it has been

noted many times, it is not in the long run important that

what Zola thought he had learned from Bernard's An Intro-

duct ion to the Study of Experimenta1 Medicine (186 5) is

simplistic and less logical than analogical. Reacting to

the conflicting theories of medicine of his time--vital ism,

homeopathy, etc.--Bernard suggested simply that practition­

ers of medicine should treat it as science rather than doc­

trine; instead of treating the patient according to prin­

ciples deduced from theories, doctors should use scienti­

fically and experimentally induced practices. "Experimental medicine," says Bernard, "is not a new system, but the nega- 22 tion of all systems."

In The Experimental Novel (1880), Zola draws an analogy between the experimental scientist and the experimental novelist. Balzac's Cousin Betty (1847), he tells us,

is simply the record of the experi­ ment which the novelist repeats be­ fore the eyes of the public. In short, the whole operation consists of taking facts from nature, then studying the mechanism of the data by acting on them through a modification of circum­ stances and environment without ever departing from the laws of nature. At the end, there is knowledge, scien­ tific knowledge, of man in his indi­ vidual and social action.

Zola's imagination was seized by the spectacle of

the Second Empire (1852-70), dramatically destroyed by the reverses of the franco-Prussian War. Like many of his con­ temporaries, Zola had seen the social problems and 1 0

discontent that underlay the capita 1ist-aristocratic

structure of mid-century France; in his twenty-volume

Le s Rougon -Macquar t : 111 s to i re na tur e 11 e et soc ia 1 e d ' une

fami 11e sous 1c Second Umpire (1 871 - 95), using what Ber­ nard's book had crystallized in his mind, he anatomized and dramatized the social life of Napoleon Ill's empire.

Zola was attacked by most of his French, English, and American contemporaries for his philosophy, style, and choice of subject matter, but what is most noticeable

in his novels is his belief in his enterprise. "Almost every line he wrote," Auerbach remarks in a comment on a passage from bermina1 ( 1 885), "showed that all of this was meant in the highest degree seriously and morally; that the sum total of it was not a pastime or an artistic parlor game but the true portrait of contemporary society as he--

Zola--saw it and the public was being urged in his works to 7 4 see it too."

What is often forgotten in reading the succession of unhappy endings and chronicles of life in decline that are a large proportion of Les Rougon-Macquart is that Zola was philosophically optimistic, which accounted for the eager­ ness with which he adopted the ideas of Bernard. The physi­ ologist tells us, for example, that ] ]

wc must remember that the one unchangeable scientific principle, in medicine a s v c 11 as in the other experimental sciences, is the absolute determinism of phenomena. We never act on the essence of natural phe­ nomena, but only on their determining causes, and because we act thus, deter­ minism is different from fatalism, on which wc cannot act. fatalism assumes that the manifestation of any phenomen­ on as necessary and independent of its conditions, while determinism is the condition necessary to a phe^gmenon, whose manifestation is free.*'*’

Discussing this matter, Zola confidently announces

that this then is the goal, this is the morality of physiology and experimen­ tal medicine: to master life in order to direct it. . . . This dream of the physiologist and the experimental doc­ tor of medicine is also that of the novelist who applies the experimental method to the natural and social study of man. . . . When time shall have passed, when we shall have the laws [of human behavior"] , we shall have only to act on imTivTcTual s anil tlic mi 1 i eux iT ~ w e w T s h to reach better social con- 3Tt ions .

Both such optimism and this conception of literary realism reach their peak in Zola; no french novelist after him is willing to make such claims for literature, and his successor Proust turned the focus of fiction inward and evolved a different conception of realism (and reality) altogether.

I have traced the development of literary realism in

France for several reasons. First, it demonstrates the evo­ lution of a literary form in the country of its origin,an evolution affected by current events and non-literary ideas as well as more strictly literary phenomena. Second, since

American literature is increasingly affected by that of the

French after the Civil War, this sketch provides both a foreground for and contrast to the evolution of American realism. Third, this discussion will help us understand more clearly the meaning of certain terms used in this study .

Realism is the term generally applied to modern lit­ erature that deals with cither external phenomena or that which has its origin in the relation between individual per­ ception and the external. But realism, used in concert with and contrasted with naturalism, is also used in a more re­ stricted sense. "Natura 1isme," Harry Levin explains

has always belonged to the vocabulary of French philosophy, designating any system of thought which accounts for the human condition without recourse to the supernatural and with a conse­ quent emphasis on material factors. Where r6a1isme, borrowed from the fine arts, need imply no more than detailed visualization, the philosophical catchword brings with it a further and more limiting implication: the con­ ditioning effect c)£ men's backgrounds upon their lives.

The words have been transferred in exactly this sense

from French aesthetics to the two phases of American fiction

between the Civil War and World War I. Howells is called a

realist; Crane, Norris, and Dreiser are called naturalists.

To distinguish between the generation of American novelists

whose ideas were formed before the Civil War, and those 1 is

whose ideas were formed after it, is appropriate, hut

the terminology commonly used is misleading. In the

sense in which Auerbach and Levin use the term realism,

that is, a literary phenomenon characteristic of a

developed bourgeois capitalist society, American real­

ism does not come into its own (with the exception of

Henry James) until the generation of Stephen Crane.

The domestic uses of the terms realism and natur­

alism may be illustrated by the progress from Edward

Eggleston ' s The H o o s i e r Schoolmas ter (18 71) to K . D .

Howells' The Rise of Silas Lapham (1 885) to Theodore

Dreiser's Sister C a r r i e (1900). Eggleston, who in his preface complains of the neglect in American fiction dealing with common life of any region but New England, sets his novel in rural Indiana, and has his figures speak in Hoosier dialect, but his notions of plot and characterization are completely conventional and senti­ mental. The sights and sounds of southern Indiana are a veneer. Howells, whose eye for detail and ear for dia­ lect are keener than Eggleston's, chooses to dramatize the adventure of the rich but vulgar manufacturer among the urbane patricians of Boston. To be sure, Howells is not content with a completely contrived happy ending to the conflict he develops, but his anachronism is revealed in the way that Laphain at the end chooses virtuous rural 1 4

poverty over corrupt urban wealth. Carrie Meebcr lives

in another world; she meets the city on its terms, and

without reluctance accepts them, rising by doing what she

must rather than what she should. The conformity between

surface and substance is complete.

Eggleston has never left the world of pre-Civil War

America, and Howells, though he makes excursions from it,

always returns in search of values; Dreiser is completely

at home in the urbanizing, industrializing, and increasing­

ly impersonal world of post-Civil War America. Howells'

principal attempt to deal with this world, A H a z a r d o f New

Fortunes (1890), is the answer to Henry Adams' famous

quest ion--"What could become of such a child of the seven­

teenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should find him- 28 self required to play the game of the twentieth?"

It is not possible, and in any case would not be

convenient, to banish the terms (in their present usage)

realism and naturalism from our literary taxonomy. I want

to suggest, however, that the absence of the conditions of

civilization to which Henry James alludes in his Hawthorne

(1879) from American life until well after the Civil War is,

if Levin's and Auerbach's notions of the connection between modern capitalist society and literary realism are correct, one of the principal reasons that realism matures in Amer­

ica only around the turn of the century and in the work of

those born after the Civil War. When it did mature, seizing a Mi 1.1 si an "style of reflection" in which to express

itself, it found in Social Darwinism the set of ideas in

whose terms ethical, literary, and intellectual controver­

sies were expressed , and, following so closely in time the

work of Zola, came to be known as naturalism.

*****

The fortunes of literary realism in America are the

product of a number of interacting forces and conditions,

hirst, American society has changed demographically not

once but twice since the turn of the century. In 1900, though

all the growth was occurring in the cities, most Americans

still lived on farms and in small towns. As a group, Ameri­

can cities continued to grow until about 1950, after which,

particularly in the Northeast and the Middle West, their

populations stabilized or declined, and their suburbs

began a growth so rapid that by 1970 it was calculated

that more Americans were suburban than either rural/small

town or urban. Malcolm Cowley has observed that these

demographic changes have been accompanied by shifts in the

figures, settings, and values of American fiction, moving, 29 as it were, from Concord to New York to Westport.

Second, the social fluidity that has always been characteristic of American society has meant that, in com­ parison to their counterparts in more class-conscious

European cultures, American writers have come from a wide spectrum of backgrounds, educations, and experiences. The very size of the country, and its tradition of regionalism 1 6

and decentralized authority,have meant also that no Amer­

ican city has ever occupied alone the place in the intel­

lectual and social life of America that London and Paris

always have in English and French life.

Third, the advance of knowledge has produced new

styles of reflection. If we may be said to have begun the

century thinking in the language of Social Darwinism, then

the styles that have since arisen may be said to have their origin in Freud, Marx, and modern social science.

Fourth, the similarities in the concerns of American

fiction of the nineties, thirties, and sixties, and its differences from that of the twenties and fifties arise from what Wilson calls the swing back and forth between mechanistic and romantic ideas about man and nature,-5^ or, more generally, alternation between interest in the social or "outward," and the personal or "inward."

Four times since the turn of the century these inter­ acting forces have produced a definable shift in the direc­ tion and emphasis of our literature: after World War I, after 1929, after World War II, and after 196 0. It is, of course, impossible to say that one phase ended and another began exactly, say, in 1917 or 1929, but it is possible to say that after 1917 or 1929 the new emphasis became notice­ able and eventually predominant.

America entered the twentieth century with a popular literature that glorified romance, chivalry, and 1 7

.imperialism, and a serious literature that examined with increasing severity and closeness the social, economic, and political problems of the time. Both arose in reaction to u realism that was perceived tu he at once too dull and too genteel, or perhaps, too honest and too evasive. Most of the generation that followed Howells went either the way of f. Marion Crawford or frank Norris.

Socially and politically, the century began with the successful conclusion of an expansionist war, and (in most quarters) the glad assumption of the White Man's Burden. At home, a still largely rural America had become the world's leading industrial power, and most of its still-rapid growth, native and immigrant, went to the cities, which were opu­ lent and miserably poor, reform-minded and corrupt. The century began with the conservative Republicanism of Mc­

Kinley, and witnessed the increasingly progressive admin­ istrations of Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson, during the last of which we entered the War To fnd All Wars. Trusts achieved their peak of concentration and power early in the century, and their taming, and the rise, at least among skilled workers, of powerful labor unions were two manifestations of what we have come to call Progressivism.

Social Darwinism, with its unDarwinian catch-phrase

"Survival of the Fittest," had been in the consciousness of intellectuals and writers for a generation, and it has been calculated that Herbert Spencer, its prophet, was 18 one of the best-selling philosophers ever to be published in America. Richard Hofstader has explained admirably how this offshoot in popular philosophy of certain develop­ ments in nineteenth century biology came, over a period of two generations, to be used first by conservatives who up­ held the status quo, and later by reformers who challenged i t. As we have seen, Zola had learned from Bernard that determinism meant that to change conditions was to change men. In contrast, Spencer taught, by a succession of false analogies, that conditions were unchanging, that men in the social world lived in conditions almost exactly analogous to those under which animals lived in the natural world.

Thus, as both Spencer and his first American disciple, Wil­ liam Graham Sumner, believed, to contemplate the reform of capitalist institutions was foolish, since institutions developed naturally only very slowly, and local problems did not justify interrupting a natural (and beneficial) 3? evolut ion.

The novelists of the generation of Howells did not gladly accept the grim conclusions of Social Darwinism.

Though they struggled with it, they either turned with

Howells (as in Silas Lapham, the Hazard, and The Landlord at Lion1s Head[1896]) to an Emersonian idealism to solve the problem of the amorality of institutions and the immor­ ality of men, or with Twain (in the Connecticut Yankee

[1889] and after) to a kind of bleak and almost Calvinistic ] 9 pessimism about "the damned human race."

Of course, even among Sumner’s contemporaries, there was already dissent about the conclusions so confidently announced by Spencer. Lester Kara, often considered the father of American sociology, granted that "physical" evolution might indeed be "purposeless," but that "mental" or human evolution was "decisively modified by progres- 33 sive action.” And in the next generation, Americans who read their Darwin closely discovered that (in The

Descent of Man) he emphasized the "sociality" of man, and that cooperation, not competition, was a survival value in nature. Ultimately this line of reasoning was to culminate in John Dewey's rejection even of Ward's dualism, and his contention that "there is no bifurcation between the ethi- cal process and the cosmic process."""’

Of course, Social Darwinism was certainly not the only idea contributing to literary realism in America. Another, as we have seen, was the example of Zola, though Zola's leading exponent in America, Frank Norris, to the extent that he was a philosopher at all, was more of a Spencerian than a Bernardian. But to assume in America the close con­ nection of ideas and literature that marked the progress of

French realism is to oversimplify; "while in Europe realism and naturalism grew out of the positivism of Continental thought and the conviction that one literary movement had subsided and another was needed," Alfred Kazin reminds us, "real ism in America grew out of the bewilderment, and

thrived on the simple grimness, of a generation suddenly

brought face to face with the pervasive materialism of 7 7 industrial capital ism. °

In other words, realism in America had more exclu-

sivel) a moral than aesthetic origin than in France. "In

the ways of causes and movements in the United States,"

Warner Berthoff explains, "the cause of realism appears more exclusively a summons to some broad preliminary moral reformation than, as in French realism in Flaubert and after, not only this but also a systematic searching out, reasoned and progressive, of fundamental issues of expression and form. . .

The fiction of both Henry James and Stephen Crane suggests that this point is easily overemphasized, but

Howells, Hamlin Garland, and Dreiser, as well as the vast number of novelists discussed in Walter Fuller Taylor's

The lie on 0111 ic Xove 1 in Am erica, certainly were more inter­ ested in the moral-social-political than in the aesthetic

It was the temper of the times: the world desired to know about rural life in the Middle West, and it received Main

Travelled Roads (1891); it asked about the conditions in the cities, and received Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

(1893), McTeague (1899), Sister Carrie (1900), and Jennie

Gerhardt (1911); it asked about wealth and power, and re­ ceived The Octopus (1902), The Pit (1903), The Financier 21

(1912), and The T itan (1914). In addition to a huge number

of muckraking and "problem" novels, the era also produced

the first great outburst of American literary naturalism.

Literary naturalism, in its most general sense, is the

expression in literature of the conclusions of determinism

about the relation between men and their environment. A

romantic - individualistic view of this relation emphasizes

the importance and uniqueness of the individual, and his

ability to transcend circumstances in becoming whoever and

doing whatever he desires. The conditions under which Amer­

ica grew throughout most of the nineteenth century en­

couraged this view of life, and it is easy to understand the

contemporaneous popularity of Emerson's ideas about self-

reliance even among those who had no clear notion of the re­

lation between their activities and a higher good. The universality of this view also explains why the entrepre­

neur was perceived not as an exploiter, but as a public

benefactor.

The discovery that this progress had a dark side, that poverty could and did exist here, that philosophy and sci­

ence were both reducing man's place in the universe while extending his reach here on earth, and that art should pay closer attention to common life and do so in a more truth­

ful fashion, all coalesced to produce, starting in the nineties, a succession of works that dramatized the strug­

gle between man and environment in terms that many readers 22 found ugly and pessimistic.

Literary naturalism is commonly accused of being re­ ductive, of making man no more than the creature of his background and current conditions. Randall Stewart, in his famous anti-naturalistic polemic, defines it in this manner so that he can go on to say that "if man is a pup­ pet, he is clearly not a moral agent, lie is relieved of moral responsibility, he deserves neither blame nor praise, he is always doing the best--or the worst--he can. Amoral- 8 8 ism is the inevitable corollary of naturalism."'

In fact, very little of what we call naturalism was ever written on this plan. Ait American Tragedy (1925 ) and

Therese Racquin (1868) are often singled out (by both the friends and enemies of naturalism) as novels in which en­ vironment and heredity do absolutely determine action, but, as Lillian Furst lias demonstrated, both Dreiser's and

Zola's protagonists make a succession of free choices. In both cases, circumstances combine to make these choices fatal, but the determinism of forces is by no means abso- 39 lute .

In any case, as Sydney J. Krause reminds us, the ap­ prehension felt by many naturalists has its correspondent in pre-realistic literature. "The sense of human grandeur attained in traditionalist literature," he says, "is often proportioned to the determinism it opposes." He continues: 2 3

. . . historical])7 the fears of supcr- natura.li.sts like Donne and Pascal over the encroachment of the natural upon the human have had more in common with the despondency of literary naturalists than have the views of naturalistic scien­ tists like Bacon, Newton, or Darwin. '

Naturalism’s distinction, from this point of view, is its use of dynamic social and environmental forces to repre­ sent the encroaching elements.

Krause's implied definition of naturalism is applicable equally to Hurstwood and Carrie, to Maggie and Curtis Jadwin, to McTeague and Prank Cowperwood. Our first naturalists wrote of high society and entrepreneurial capitalism as well as of slum dwellers and isolated farmers. Dreiser's super­ man, transfixed by the sight of fighting fish in the Phila­ delphia market, concludes that life is struggle in which only the strongest triumph. Yet Prank Cowperwood, with his street railways and mansions and mistresses, having con­ quered Chicago and New York, has no more attained what he would regard as a satisfactory triumph at the end of The

Titan than has Carrie in her rocker at the end of Sister

Carrie.

"The primary goal of the late nineteenth-century Amer­ ican naturalists," Donald Pizer tells us in a more satisfac­ tory discussion of the subject than Stewart's, "was not to demonstrate the overwhelming and oppressive reality of the material forces present in our lives. Their attempt, rather, was to represent the intermingling in life of controlling force and individual worth.Elsewhere, Finer deals with a related issue, the question of the subject matter of naturalism. Ke have seen that French realism became increas­ ingly willing to treat truthfully the life of the lower classes. In Mad ame Rova ry (1857), suggests Erich Auerbach,

Flaubert successfully brings off the sense of bourgeois life as having a dull and unvaried surface, underlaid by "another movement, almost imperceptible, but universal and unceasing, so that the political, economic, and social subsoil appears comparatively stable and at the same time intolerably charged 4 7 with tension." “ Zola, of course, goes much further in this direct ion .

The varied class backgrounds of American naturalists meant that, in the words of Alfred Kazin, American natural­ ists could be "divided between those who know its drab en­ vironment from personal experience, for whom writing is al­ ways a form of autobiographical discourse, and those who 4 3 employ it as a literary idea." Garland and Norris might serve as opposing examples, with Dreiser a mixture of the two. But merely to note the progress from Eggleston to

Dreiser is to see that American literature during and after the nineties did seriously treat the life of the lower classes. And what did this treatment reveal? That (quoting

Pizer)the naturalistic novel involves a belief that life on its lowest levels is not so simple as it appears to be from the higher levels. It suggests that even the least sig­ nificant human being can feel and strive powerfully and can suffer the extraordinary consequences of his emo­ tions, and that no range of human ex­ perience is free of the moral complex­ ities and ambiguities which Milton^ set his fallen angels tc debating.

This twenty-vear outpouring, distinguished by its habit of expression in the metaphors of biology, its in­ terest in social, political, and economic phenomena, and its willingness and ability to treat seriously all classes of society, has been called, by Malcolm Cowley, for exam­ ple, the only truly naturalistic period of American liter- 45 ature. In fact, this is not the case; naturalism's strong non-literary impulse rises again after 1929, and expresses its sense of the drama of man against environment in another set of terms.

Except for An American Tragedv, hardly a work of natur­ alism that is remembered today was produced bwtween 1914 and

1929. A long and fairly steady prosperity, only helped by a war that stimulated but did not sap America, a turning away from Europe not unlike that which followed the Civil War, and a combination of apathy about and disgust with politics, produced an America in the twenties in which business and finance seemed more glamorous than threatening. Nevertheless, much more than their immediate predecessors, novelists like

Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald found wanting in America those things that

a sensitive and intelligent person would wish to have. It was

not a question of lack of money, but absence of values that

set their protagonists in revolt or sent them into self-im­ posed exile.

As events and ideas had brought about the rise of naturalism around the turn of the century, so they brought about its revival in the thirties. Dominating the scene,

and providing sharp contrast to the prosperous twenties, was a Depression that affected virtually everyone and threatened to destroy the capitalist system. The bankruptcy of capital­ ism, and the helplessness it exhibited as millions endured unemployment and ruin, reduced the prestige of its repre­ sentative figures and its view of the world. The example of the Soviet Union, alone unaffected by what was dragging down the rest of the world, and the intellectual attraction that

Marxism offered to Americans disgusted with the built-in inequalities of capitalism, gave shape to a new interest in society, politics, and economics, w'hether in depicting the collapse of the old order or sifting the ashes for evi­ dence of the new.

It is a measure of the universality of the revived interest in the "outward" that so many diverse writers at­ tempted to deal with it. Of those writers who had risen to prominence in the twenties, Fitzgerald alone did not write in the new way. Hemingway produced To Have and Have Not in 27

1977, and Kith U. (1950-6) John Dos Passos completed

an evolution begun with Three Soldiers (1921), an evolution

that began with depicting the defeat of the young idealist,

and concluded with depicting on a vast canvas thirty years

of social change, in which society itself became protagonist

rather than background.

What we have said about American naturalism and its place in the context of social protest and reform at the

turn of the century may, with some qualification, be repeated.

The naturalistic revival was not, at its inception, pri­ marily a literary movement. Dos Passos, James T. Farrell,

Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, and Erskine Caldwell were all politically active, and most used their journalistic

skills to muckrake or spotlight a particularly oppressive case (the Scottsboro Boys) or cause (the Harlan County

Miners' Strike).(If anything, the principal literary figures of the naturalistic revival were much more politically oriented than their predecessors. Norris' ambitions were almost completely literary, and Crane's ,Dreiser's , and

Garland's largely so; the best politically-oriented writing of the time was that of Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and

David Graham Philips.) At the same time, their political

interests never permanently bound them ideologically to a

"party line"--Farrell, who read Marx as attentively as any

ideologue, challenged the Communist Party on its own ground 28

A No tc on Li tera ry Cr i t i c i sm (1956); Wright remained with the Party the longest, hut when he broke, he wrote

of it in Richard Crossman's The God That. Pa i 1 ed (1949).

Marxism and social science (which really developed

in the United States in this decade) played the intellect­ ual role in the naturalistic revival that Darwinism had played earlier, although the party nature of Marxism made

its influence different in nature and shorter in duration.

What Marx had to say about the evolution of societies through and after capitalism appealed to those who, in the words of John Muste, wished "to comprehend the violent nature of the modern world in terms of a political ideology," and its hope and demand for a more equal distribution of the world's goods and power appealed to those who believed in 4 C) democracy and equality. Living in a time when we have been taught that Communism is evil, and have had its shortcomings so irrefutably revealed, it is difficult to recover the sense our grandparents and parents must have had when they encountered an ideology that offered both an attractive value system and a sound explanation of how those values would inevitably triumph.

That Marxism was the official ideology of a state ini­ tially made it attractive, for Westerners > particularly those who had seen or read about Russia under the Czars, when they saw or read about Soviet Russia in the twenties and early thirties, and particularly when they compared 2 9 its vigorous, organized, and equa 1 i ta r i a n progrcs s wi t h the privilege-ridden chaos of their own countries, could not help but agree with Lincoln Steffens' famous pronouncement about having seen the future and that it worked. Unfortunately, the connection that Stalin made between Communism and his own version of Russian nationalism meant that it assumed all the more odious qualities of a state religion, and that be­ lievers in other countries, of course, had to worship in the approved manner or be excommunicated.

The problems created by this transformation of Commu­ nism for those who believed in the freedom of the mind and the integrity of the artist first surfaced when internal power struggles in Russia (between Stalin and Trotsky, for example) produced sudden changes in party doctrine, changes loyal artists in America were supposed to follow, since art was only a weapon in the class struggle. The purges of

1937 and 1938, and the stage-plavs of the Moscow trials shook more believers, but the knock-out was dealt by the double blow of the Spanish Civil War and the Ribbentrop-

Molotov Pact. Speaking of the effect of the first, Muste observes:

The literature of the Spanish War is important because it reflects both the idealism and the disillusion of the writers who had seen it as a holy war. The encounter with violence, whether at first or second hand, was to change drastically not only the attitude of British and American writers toward ideology but their understanding of the 3 0

nature of violence in the modern world. The results of this encounter arc blind­ ingly clear in the literature of the Second World War and the Korean conflict, which is so obviously apolitical and whose writers seem to have gone beyond disillusion to a desperate and consuming nihilism. If the writers of World War II cannot in any exact sense be called disillusioned, it is because they had been divested of their illusions before the great war had even begun. And the Spanish Civil War had a great deal to do with the destruction of the political dreams of the thirties, a destruction which left many writers without the props of dogma or ideology when they were almost immediately confronted by a far more widespread and devastating war. 4 8

This disillusion is observable in the difference be­ tween, say, To Have and Have Not (1937) and For Whom the

Bell Tol1s (1940), or between The Big Money (1936) and

Adventures of a Young Man (1939). Nevertheless, the influ­ ence of Marxist insights is to be found in the works of virtually every important writer of the thirties, save only

Wolfe and Faulkner, from Studs Lonigan (1929- 35) to Native

Son (194 0).

If we recall Alfred Kazin's distinction between those who employ naturalism as an idea and those for whom it is a form of autobiographical discourse, another line of commentary on the sources of the naturalistic revival appears. Kazin calls Dos Passos "perhaps the last natur­ alist in American prose who had a conception of naturalism as a philosophy of life," and if we add to him in that 3]

category Steinbeck, whose naturalism has a biological and

transcendental quality unusual in the naturalism of the

thirties, we arc left on the other side with (for example)

Farrell, Caldwell, and Wright, for whom the attraction of

naturalism lay not only in its satisfactoriness as an ac­

count of how life was really lived, but also in its fascin­

ation with brutality and violence. In Farrell, this violence

takes on a repetitive character, while Caldwell's tends to become macabre and comic in a way not wholly redeemed by

the conclusions of the novels, and Wright's is almost gothic.

Their use of violence, however, is to be contrasted with that of John O'Hara or James M. Cain, in whom the story

(Local Automobile Dealer Commits Suicide or Itinerant

Conspires With Wife To Kill Husband) is a mere pretext

for presenting a succession of stimulating but causeless bits of sex and violence. In Studs Lonigan, where upbring­ ing and environment destroy Studs, or in the Danny O'Neill tetralogy, where Danny escapes the fate of Studs in the same milieu, or in Native Son, where Bigger Thomas kills out of fear and is liberated into full knowledge of the exact nature of his position as a black American, mere violence is never the point. What is the point, and what links them as naturalists to Dos Passos and Steinbeck (and

Norris and Dreiser) is the awareness they impart to the reader of the power of environment to direct the lives of men, and their feeling for the importance of individuals. 3 2

For this reason, critics like Randall Stewart and

Philip Rahv miss the point in announcing that the natural­

ist's creed is that human behavior is no more than the

function of the social environment.^ Though Dos Passos,

Farrell, and Steinbeck all approach this position, all turn

away from it, and even Bigger Thomas at the end of Native

Son is much more than the unconscious prisoner of forces

that have shaped his life. In talking of Native Son, Wright

tells us that

I don't mean to say that I think environ­ ment makes consciousness. . . , but I do say that I felt and still feel that the environment supplies the instrumental­ ities through which the organism expres­ ses itself, and if that environment is warped or tranquil, the mode and manner of behavior will be affected toward deadlocking tensions or orderly fulfill­ ment and satisfaction.

The verification of the falsity of this credo as a state­ ment of the beliefs of the literary naturalist is that by

its test only the more comic-macabre puppets of Caldwell, the doomed but sentimentally-viewed down - and - outers of

Algren, and, in another generation, Lily Bart in Edith

Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905), are therefore natur­ alistic figures. In the thirties, as in the nineties, naturalism is an attempt to represent "the intermingling

in life of controlling force and individual worth.

The late forties are commonly given as the death-date of naturalism in America. And to contemplate the literary decline of its most faithful representatives-- Dos Passos,

Farrell, Algren--and the turning away from it, after The

Naked and the Dead (1948) of Norman Mailer, certainly would suggest the accuracy of that death-date. Many of the phenomena that accompanied the subsiding of the first outburst of naturalism now again occurred. The country embarked on a long period of enormous prosperity (which may be said to have lasted until 1970), and the prestige of both business and the military rose, particularly after 1950.

Twenty years of activist Democratic administrations ended in 1952, to be replaced by the moderate conservatism of

Dwight Eisenhower. The attention of the nation was forcibly directed internationally by the sudden accession of the

United States as the most powerful nation in the world, and the mutual suspicion and hostility of the Cold War. American anti-Communism, fed on but not created by Joseph McCarthy, arose during this time.

In an age of economic expansion, when, for a whole generation, income, educational levels, and opportunity were greater for most people every year, when those raised during the Depression discovered that they had not only secure and well-paying jobs, but could also offer their children-oppor­ tunities hitherto unavailable except to the wealthy, and when internationally the United States seemed threatened by a force as odious as Fascism, and much more powerful, demand for social change virtually disappeared. Noting these trends 54

in 1965, Jerry Bryant remarked that "social protest, like

the powerful early novels of the Second World War, is out 5 2 of date." In literature, the influence of Nov Criticism, which valued text to tire exclusion of context, reached its

zenith. Mourned by such scholars as Charles Child Walcutt and dismissed by heon b.dcl, American naturalism seemed completely exhausted as a literary movement.

Speaking of the origins of American realism in the late nineteenth century, Warner Berthoff observes that

The irritation out of which literary realism developed in the United States was as much with prevailing conditions of social and economic life, with the latest forms of disorder and ingenuity (however they might masquerade as pro­ gress), as with the insipidness of other, feebler literary methods. . . . But life and history do not give way easily to books and words. The same protest has to be made again and again; the underlying conditions seem unaffected, perhaps grow worse; the new generation, inheriting both its predecessor's work and the reg­ ular failure of that work to transform the conditions that prompted it, is sum­ moned, if only to keep its self-respect, to a new and more resolute, though prob­ ably more desperate effort.

This insight suggests the reasons for the longevity and recurrence of American naturalism. It fits neatly in with Harry Levin's remark about the connection between our national hunger for facts and the persistence of our natur­ alism, and with the significance of the brevity of natur- 5 4 alisin in France compared to its phoenix-like quality here. Naturalism in trance was strangled by theory; the relative poverty of theory in American naturalism, Lillian Furst 5 5 suggests, "proved largely to its advantage." Naturalism in America is always a part of, and reaches its height in the midst of, eras of social unrest and protest. The terms in which the relationship of man and environment was expressed changed from Darwinism to Marxism, and it is this change that has confused those who seek a theoretical connection between, say, Norris and Dos Passos. In fact, the link is the commonly held view of the relation itself; the metaphor changed, but the message remained the same.

No comparable period in our history since the Civil

War has been more turbulent than the eleven years from the assasination of John Kenned}- to the resignation of Richard

Nixon. Abroad, the United States fought the most expensive undeclared war it ever undertook, and, after the expenditure of many lives and much money, lost it. Simultaneously, the

United States sought domestically to eliminate racism and poverty, and despite an expense rivalling that in Vietnam, similarly failed. Dissatisfaction among the young and old, black and white, left and right, produced riots and strikes, campus disruptions and mass demonstrations, polarisation and alienation on a scale that drove two presidents from office, disrupted both political parties, and stretched the

American social fabric more than at any time since 1861. Nb

It is a curiosity of this time of turbulence that it

should have occurred during the longest sustained period of

prosperity in our history, that at the very moment the coun­

try peaked in income, education, and opportunity, in all of

these areas it was found wanting. Political movements arose

on the Left, but most had little in common with their counter­

parts in the thirties, and so were called the New Left. At

the time, Daniel Aaron remarked that "the crucial difference

between the Thirties and the Sixties is the economic one:

the former was depressed, the latter affluent."'^

It is beyond the scope of this study to analyze the

protest movements of the sixties, but two facts afford keys

to virtually all of them: (1) they were characteristically

American, abstract and pragmatic, and (2) they were composed

to an unparalleled degree of the children of the middle

class. The American working class remained relatively quiet

during the sixties. It is true that Maoism seemed to be the

guide of extremists like the Weathermen (who as a group, in­

cidentally, came from wealthier families than their less radical counterparts), but the ideals and goals of virtually all the others were contained in abstractions like Peace,

Love, and Equality. The millenium was not to be attained by violence and class struggle, but by changes in attitudes and progressive legislation. The symbolic importance attached to an event like Woodstock only emphasizes the distinctive character of this radicalism. .*) /

The civil rights and anti-poverty movements were both

sparks and consequences of this idealism, and it is remark­

able how many Americans crossed racial and class lines to

become involved in them. When expectations exceeded progress,

years of frustration produced riots in a hundred cities and

on as many campuses. The military and business again declined

in prestige; to be a dropout or a conscientious objector

or a VISTA volunteer became the goal of thousands.

And what of the literature of this time of personal

revolt and social reform? At the onset of the period Harvey

Swados declared that

the basic trutli about our time is not, it seems to me, that it is one of op­ pressive stagnation so hopeless that a corrosive nihilism is a civilized and reasonable reaction on the part of a sensitive man. It is rather that this is a time of explosive change without parallel in human history.

Swados argued that anti-novels and black humor were fads,

and that a literature more reflective of the times would 57 soon reveal itself.

Part of that literature, I believe, constitutes the

third outburst of literary naturalism in the United States.

In the novels of Joyce Carol Oates, Sol Yurick, and Hubert

Selby, Jr., social protest adopts, in various guises, the naturalistic themes it had previously. Each of these writers

brings different equipment to the task: Oates and Yurick are

university professors, while Selby worked at various laboring 58

occupations until the publication of La st Ex 11 t o Brooklyn

freed him to become a writer full-time. Oates, a native of

western New York, locates her fiction there and in the De­

troit area, while New Yorkers Selby and Yurick confine

their fiction to their native city. Oates has published

over twenty volumes; Yurick six, Selby three. Each may be

said to have appropriated naturalism for a time in a dis­

tinctive way, and then to have dropped it.

Selby approached naturalism, as it were, as a form of

autobiographical discourse, as had Garland in Main-Travel led

Roads and Farrell in Studs Lonigan. His sense of the op­

pressiveness of upbringing and social environment is com­ municated in Last Ex i t and The Room, in which he introduces a succession of protagonists either sufficiently numbed not

to notice their degradation, or sensitive enough to be de­

stroyed by their attempts to transcend it. Selby's sense of place and time, as long as he confines his fiction to lower- class New York life, is faultless; the forties and fifties

in Brooklyn are recreated by a thousand touches of speech, thought, sight, and smell, and he is equally adept at repro­ ducing the inner rage and agony of those stunted by the con­ ditions of their lives.

Though he is completely apolitical, and describes him­ self primarily as a moralist interested in the destructive­ ness of the modern urban ethos, Selby has been interpreted 5 9 by a number of critics, most extensively Sol Yurick, as practically the prophet of the revolution. Yurick, in

The Wa rrior s, f c r t i g , and The Ra g, has written fiction

that shows the influence of Marxism updated by social anthropology. In these novels, deliberately connected by reappearing characters and cross-references, the New York of the sixties appears in a recreation of the attempt and

failure of an enormously complex social organism to deal with racism, poverty, corruption, collapsing systems of order, and discontent threatening to become revolution.

With a Zolacsque industry, and the precision of Dos Passos,

Yurick evokes the sixties in song, slogan, style, and event.

And like the figures of Dos Passos, Yurick's are always portrayed as parts of the vast mechanism that is in fact the protagonist of the novels. Yurick preaches the necessity of the violence with which he is obsessed, always aware of the conflict between power structure and underclass.

Joyce Carol Oates, who now proclaims her literary am­ bition to be to chronicle the ways in which those trapped in a destructive and oppressive life find their way out of their nightmares, established her reputation writing about the power of those nightmares. In A Garden of Earthly De-

1ights and them, she wrote novels of the twisted childhood environments of the Depression, and their consequences in adulthood in the sixties. As interested in ethos as Selby, 40 she is less adept than either him or Yurick in recreating a specific time or place, but her literary gifts permit he r to dramatize the crises of i n d i ir i d u a 1 consciousnesses as they struggle with forces whose nature they only dimly recognize. Like Dreiser, to whom she has been justly com­ pared, Oates writes movingly of the traps the spirit of man is unable to cope with as he gropes for a place in the universe. NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

The Sociologi cal Imagination (New York: Oxford Uni­ versity Press', T9591, p. 17. 2 The Creative Present: No tes_ on Contemporary American I: i c t i on iNew York: Doubleday, 1965), p. xiv.

^ Axel's Castle (New York: Scribners, 1951), pp. 10-11 A Document s o f Modern Li terary Realism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 56.

^ Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 1968), p. 554.

^ Auerbach, p. 4 59.

Marx, Enge1s , and the Poets , rev., enl . , ed. and trans. J. L. Sammons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 1-2.

g Reali sm in Our T ime, trans. J. and N. Mander (New York: Harper and- Row, 1964 ), p. 55.

C) The Gates of Horn (New York: Oxford University Press 196 5), p . 50.

^ "On the Dissemination of Realism," Tri-Quarterly, No. 11 (Winter 1968), p. 170.

Levin, The Gates of Horn, p. 51.

Wilson, p. 5 ff.

Mills, pp. 15-14. 14 Auerbach, p. 4 57.

^ Auerbach, p. 465.

Auerbach, p. 4 73. 1 7 Courbet and the Na tura1i s t ic Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938), p. vii. 41 ^ Auerbach, p. 48 2. 1 9 Wilson, p. 11.

7n Auerbach, p. 503.

9 1 Auerbach, p. 4 98. 22 An Introduction to the Study of Experimenta 1 Medi- cine, trans. H. C. Greene "(New York: Henry Schuman, 1949), p. 218.

9 7, Emile Zola, "The Experimental Novel," in Documents of Modern Literary Realism, ed. George Becker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 166-167. 24 Auerbach, p. 510.

“^ Bernard, p . 219. 9 6 Zola, in Becker, pp. 176-177. Emphasis mine.

9 7 Levin, p. 3 07. 7 o The Educat ion of Henry Adams (1918, rpt . Boston: Houghton-MifTlin, 1961), p. 4. 29 "Three Cycles of Myth in American Writing," in A Many-Windowed House, ed. Henry Dan Piper (Carbondale: South ern Illinois University Press, 1969), pp. 229-243.

Wilson, p . 5 f f.

Social^ Darwinism in American Thought , 1 8 6 0-1915 (New York: Bra oilier, 1959), pp. 6-8.

Hofstader, p. 60-65.

Hofstader, p. 68. 34 Hofstader, pp. 92 and 139-140.

On Native Grounds (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 12

The Ferment of Realism (New York: Free Press, 1965), pp. 1-2.

^ The Economic Novel in America (1942, rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1964). 4 3

•“>8 "Dreiser and the Naturalistic Heresy," Virginia Quarterly Revi ew, 54 (19 5 8), 100. 39 "A Question of Choice in the Naturalistic Novel: Zola 's Therese Raquin and Dreiser's American Tragedy," in Proceedings of the Comparative Literature Symposium, 5: Modern American Fict ion) Insights and Foreign Lights, e d. W. T. Zyla and W. M. Aycock ("Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1972), pp. 39-55. 40 Es says on Determinism in American Literature (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1964), p. 4. 41 Realism and Natura1ism in Nineteenth Century American Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966) , p~! 31. 42 Auerbach, pp. 480-4 81.

43 Kazin, p. 66. 4 4 P i z e r , pp. 15-14. 45 "A Natural Historv of American Naturalism," in Cowley, pp. 116-152.

4(^ Say That We Saw Spa in Die (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), p. 194. 47 Muste, pp. 10-11.

48 Kazin, p . 291. 4 9 "Notes on the Decline of Naturalism," P a r t i s a n Review, 9 (1942), 483-4 95.

3(^ "How 'Bigger' Was Born," introduction to Native Son (1940, rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. xvi.

Pi zer, p . 31. 52 "The Last of the Social Protest Writers," Arizona Quarterly, 19 (1963), 325.

53 Berthoff, p. 4.

84 Levin, pp. 457-459.

^ Lillian Furst and Peter Skrine, Naturalism (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 36. 44

^ "The American Left: Some Ruins and Monuments," University of Denver Quarterly, 1 (19 66), 5-23. 5 7 "The Coming Revolution in American Literature," Saturday Review, 21 August 1965, pp. 14-17. CHAPTER TWO

JOYCE CAROL OATES

I still feel my own place is to dra­ matize the nightmares of my time, and (hopefully) to show how some individuals find a way out, awaken, come alive, move into the future. I think that art, espe­ cially prose fiction, is directly con­ cerned with culture, with society; that there is no "art for art's sake" and never was, but only art as a more con­ scious, formal expression of a human communal need, in which individuals seem to speak individually but are, in real­ ity, only giving voice and form to the intangible that is in the air around them . . . Surely the whole era partici­ pates in every creative act, an isolated individual's statement of hopelessness, voiced to no one at all, or a writer's published, distributed, and advertised books. It is really all one event, with a multitude of aspects.

--Joyce Carol Oates to the Editors of Saturday Review, from a letter published No- vember 4, 19 7 2

In the fifteen years since the appearance of Bv the

North Gate (1963), her first collection of short stories,

Joyce Carol Oates has published, on an average, a new book about once every eight months. Her novels, stories, poetry, drama, and criticism fill an increasingly large shelf; her uncollected articles and reviews, in both special and

45 4 6 general interest publications, might fill another two volumes. To the critic fond of labels and classifications, anxious to make of Oates an --ist of some sort, masochis­ tic tendencies might well be ascribed.

liven confining one's attention to her fiction, by far the greatest proportion of her work, one is struck by her remarkable technical virtuosity and variety. Her fictions are told from almost every conceivable point of view, in many prose styles, using diary, epistolary, strearn - of - con- sciousness, and other narrative forms. "Experimental" is the adjective most frequently applied to her, and perhaps no other label is equally appropriate.

1 want to discuss Joyce Carol Oates as a naturalist, but it is idle to pretend that she is totally, or even primarily, a naturalist; after reading some of her essays, one might well call her a Transcendentalist. The faith­ ful reader of her work must conclude that she is only now revealing the character of her thought, a set of still- developing ideas that must be seen in its entirety to be unders tood.

Two novels, A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) and them (1969), best represent Oates' naturalistic phase. She writes in the Preface to Where Are You Going, Where Have

You Been: Stories of Young America (1974) that "the mode in which I write is, if it must be given a name, that of 47 psychological realism."'*' This term fails to do justice to the variety of techniques she often employs in combination with psychological realism, but it is useful in that it suggests how she sees herself.

Garden is the last of her fictions of the country (the others are Bv_ the North Gate, With Shuddering Fa 11 [1964 ] , and Upon the Sweeping Flood [1966]); it and the three no­ vels that followed it - - Expens ive People (1968), them, and

Wonderland (1971)--represent Oates' vision at its darkest.

She tells us that "with Wonderland I came to the end of a phase in my life, though I didn't know it. I wanted to move toward a more articulate moral position, not just drama­ tizing nightmarish problems but trying to show possible 2 ways of transcending them."

How might we characterize this phase? Garden, the story of a Kentucky farmer turned migrant worker, his daughter, and his grandson, presents a somber view of

American rural life between the late twenties and the fifties. Expensive People, narrated by an eighteen year old youth who wishes to explain how at eleven he murdered his mother and was not believed when he confessed, is the author's first' Detroit novel, and set in an upper-class suburb, them follows in detail the fortunes of a lower- class Detroit family for two generations. In her Preface to the novel, Oates remarks that 4 8

Nothing in the novel has been exag­ gerated in order to increase the pos­ sibility of drama--indeed , the various sordid and shocking events of slum life, detailed in other naturalistic works, have been understated here, mainly be cause of my fear that too much reality would become unbearable.'

Wonder1 and, the story of an orphaned boy's development into a skilled but cold physician, spans like them the era be­ tween the Depression and the sixties, begins like Garden in a rural setting, and concludes like Expensive People in a suburban setting.

Our sense of these novels as distinct from Oates' sub­ sequent work is sharpened when we contrast their defeated or misdirected protagonists with that of Do W it h Me Wha t You

Wi 11 (1 975), Elena Ross/Howe. Following Oates' usage, we might say that Elena, in her growth from girl to criminal lawyer Marvin Howe's wife to idealistic lawyer Jack Morri- sey's lover, gradually finds herself as a person and a woman; she indeed transcends her problems. Only Karen H e n in With Shuddering Fall, of all of Oates' protagonists who precede Elena, similarly finds her way out of the maze of conflicts of her life.

In focusing on Garden and them, I have chosen to dis­ cuss, of the four novels of Oates' darkest phase, her pre­ eminent novel of the country and her preeminent novel of the city. Expensive People, narrow in social focus, slight in time span, and experimental in narrative 49

technique, is naturalistic neither in conception nor execu­

tion. Interesting as it is because of its long time span

and deterministic theme, Wonderland is omitted from close

examination here because so much of what might be said oi

it as naturalism will have been said of them.

* * ft A *

Let us begin with A Garden of Earthlv Delights. "It

was with this novel," says James R. Giles, "that Oates'

reputation as a follower of the Lire i ser - Nor ri s - Ste i nbeck 4 school really began." Focusing successively on Carleton

Walpole, a Kentucky farmer turned migrant worker, his

favorite daughter Clara (Walpole/Revere) , who makes a

Carrie-esquc rise in the world, and her son Swan (Steven)

whose distinctive mixture of timidity, intelligence, and

ambition ends in destructive and self-destructive violence,

Garden spans roughly a forty-year period beginning in the

late twenties, and takes place in a succession of rural and

small-town settings, largely in Eden County, Oates' favor­

ite location for her early stories and novels.

Garden was Oates' second novel, her fourth book-length work. It was noticed and appreciated on a moderate scale upon publication, though re-issuing in paperback did not occur until the more substantial success of them. For the reader

of Oates unacquainted with her pre-Detroit work, Garden and

its predecessors must at first seem the work of a different

author. Were Garden the last or only work of fiction produced by Oates, our ideas of her as a writer would be quite dif­

ferent from what they are now. The novel's painfully som­ ber effect is the product of a very unsentimental jour­ ney through the rural America of the second quarter of the

twentieth century, and from a careful examination of the novel we can form an estimate of that effect.

bdith Wharton once remarked that "it is always a ne­ cessity to me that the note of inevitableness should be

sounded at the very beginning of my talc, and that my char­ acters should go forward to their ineluctable doom. . .

What we are told of Carleton Walpole in the first paragraph of Garden forecasts the doom of the man and hints at that of his family:

Carleton Walpole was a man who looked as if he had forgotten his age. At times he looked young, at other times the dirt-ridden creases in his forehead grew sharper until he looked like an ag­ ing man or one weakened by sickness. Seen alone in one of the small towns they passed through, staggering drunkenly back to the labor camp or sitting by the side of the road tossing pebbles at cars, he seemed an ordinary young man of his type; from Kentucky, maybe, driven out of his home by complex facts he had never under­ stood, maybe under thirty but getting too old for this anonymous shiftless role. But seen with his famil)— he had two children already and another on the way-- there was something that must have ached in his backbone, forcing it up straight, and the sides of his eyes, too, ached with some forlorn, inexpressible anger he could not get into focus and so could not exorcise. He had a long, narrow face, handsome at times but rather ugly at other times when his aching, creasing doubt overtook him, light hair that had been almost white when he'd been a child, and empty blue eyes in which the sky was reflected endlessly. When he moved quick­ ly and jerkily his face seemed almost too narrow, sharp as a knifeblade, and one's muscles stiffened involuntarily against the violence this man hinted at, without knowing. But he could move slow­ ly too; he had inherited someone's grace--though in him it was simply an opaque resistance, like someone moving with effort through water.

The hundred pages devoted to Carleton detail his life, but all that we learn (save his first fawning over and later obsession with his third child Clara) can be inferred from this description. From the beginning, Carleton is portrayed as an angry but only half-aware victim of circumstances beyond his knowledge, and Oates shows unhesitatingly his gradual degeneration from stoic family man and farmer to violent, cynical, and irresponsible drifter.

In the early pages of the novel, Carleton still thinks longingly of the home from which he has been driven by debt.

Recalling it, lie thinks:

Everything changed. It was like the earth turning to sand and falling away beneath your feet, something dazzling and clamorous. You could get your bal­ ance back but you could never get used to it because nothing was the way it should be, nothing came along right, everything was changed, (p. 22)

At this time, his frustration arises from his simul­ taneous desire to return home and knowledge that he never will. But he is already acquiring the habits and attitudes of the drifting and dispossessed. In the aftermath of the

minor accident that opens the novel "he felt cheated be­

cause everyone was still moving, no one was dead, nothing

ever happened" (p. II). for his daughter, bruised in the

accident, he has no sympathy; "something in him recoiled

from the thought of children --his own or anyone's" (p. 13).

As for the damaged truck or its unsafe brakes, well,

"someone always took care of those things" (p. 12).

Of course, Carleton can be made temporarily to be­

lieve that they will return to Kentucky. The accident pre­

cipitates his pregnant wife Pearl into a fit of causeless

and aimless anger, and the resulting strain induces Clara's birth. An open field in Arkansas supplies no anesthetics or amenities, and Pearl screams and suffers fearfully. Carle­

ton, unable to look ("He was afraid of throwing up in front of everyone. If that happened to him everyone would remem­ ber it and laugh at him." [p. 19]), first wishes she would die, and then resolves "to leave this life and take his

family back home, . . . he would do anything, he would get them all back home before it was too late and they forgot where they really belonged" (p. 20).

Five years more on the road complete the metamorphosis of Carleton Walpole. He rarely thinks or speaks of Kentucky the one person who might have helped him remember, Pearl, is now hardly human, for each of the childbirths she regu­ larly undergoes makes her more moronic. The outstanding debt on the farm is forgotten; Carleton saves only for

drinking and whoring. "There was no point in preparing

for trouble," he reflects, "because it might not come,

or another kind of trouble might come instead. People like

Pearl got along best in this life because they did not have to think at all” (p. 24). Since (save for Clara) he regards his family as little more than a burden and dis­

likes his work, Carleton needs more than ever the escape of the local tavern. But one such trip into a Florida town provides Oates with the opportunity to demonstrate how self- and mutua1 ly-destruetive the migrants are made by their life. Incited by alcohol, the taunting and admir­ ation of some local teenage girls, and a self-hatred remin­ iscent of the contempt Harriette Arnow's transplanted

Detroit Kentuckians develop for "hillbillies," Carleton kills his best friend Rafe. Of this incident, and Pearl's subsequent death in and from childbirth, Carleton can only say that they "just happened" (p. 51).

But Carleton is sufficiently impressive to attract

Nancy, a small-town Floridian anxious to escape what she finds a dull life, to run off with him and his children.

He seeks work outside the camps, but no one will hire him; in 1933, strangers are not hired when even local people are unemployed. In any case, as they are constantly remin­ ded, a migrant is only "white trash." By Clara's thirteenth year, Carleton is more frustrated and morose than ever, and 5 4

his motto is simply "don't never count on nothin' " (p. 5 9").

Nancy's disillusionment with him and her quick meta­ morphosis into a migrant worker once again suggest the destructiveness of such a life. But pregnancy and mother­ hood keep her by his side when love and passion have dis­ appeared. Her initial warmth toward Carleton's children cools and is replaced by indifference, except in the case of Clara, of whom she becomes increasingly resentful be­ cause of the favoritism Carleton now so openly displays toward her.

Clara, in fact, is the one thing in his life that

Carleton values above all else. When in the South he real­ izes that he is losing his hold on her and beats her, she is provoked to run away. The measure of Carleton's attach­ ment may be gauged by his response--he immediately sets out after her, deserting camp and family, and follows her, though he has no real idea of where she has gone. He buys a car and drives as far as Savannah, where the recurrent pain in his stomach and the knowledge that he will never find Clara make him "let go." Alone, in pain, reeling men­ tally in a strange church in a strange city, he sees his life pass before him and submits, asking only a respite to sort things out. Two months later, silent and mindless, he dies anonymously in the charity ward of a hospital.

The reader familiar with John Steinbeck will note that

Oates is treating the same material he does in The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Her vision is considerably more realistic, however; she avoids his sentimentalizing tendencies. The inarticulate but omnipresent warmth, that, even after the experience of the camps, holds the Joads together, is from the beginning absent here. And, as Giles remarks, "there 7 is no Ma Joad in Oates' novel"; no one possesses either the desire or the power. Carleton is revealed to us in all his meanness, and our awareness of his plight and the reasons for his degeneration never permit us to sentimen­ talize or patronize him. Though we know how he becomes a monster, we are always aware that he is a monster.

Clara (with whose birth the novel begins and with whose mental vegetation in a nursing home it ends) is a figure much more likely to win our sympathy for a variety of reasons, but that she does not is the result of the same objectivity that characterizes the portrait of Carleton.

From the beginning, we see Clara simultaneously as a vic­ tim of circumstances and as a cold-blooded and ambitious schemer. Her scheming is almost instinctive; as early as her fifth year she is able to make good use of Carleton's favoring of her. Her mother's increasing vacuity permits her to exploit her situation and escape the consequences of her actions; at the same time, she is never shown a role model of love and caring, and she grows up believing, like her father, that she is "the center of the world" (p. 25). 5 6

Carleton, however, once had roots and a sense of place.

Clara, born and bred up on the road, quickly learns that she

is "white trash" and an object of fear, contempt, and patron­

izing. Thus selfish and deprived, the daily more beautiful

Clara passes into her adolescence, when two incidents alter the course of her life.

While in New Jersey, at about thirteen, Clara and her friend Rosalie (whose father is shortly beaten to death by the enraged citizens of a nearby town for getting her pregnant) go into town on the occasion of the latter's birthday. Though still children, both are old enough to arouse sexual interest in men. The middle-aged man who of­ fers them a ride into town is at first only mildly inter­ ested, though both girls interpret his offer of a soda-pop as a sexual advance. When he leaves his truck for a moment, they steal his keys from the .glove compartment--" ' Never can tell what keys might open,' " says Rosalie (p. 6 2)— and when lie invites them home they quickly pile out of the truck.

In town, the>’ wander through the streets; Rosalie, an experienced thief, steals junk toys from a five-and-dime. As they pass an ordinary middle-class home, Clara is suddenly overcome by the realization of how miserably little she possesses, how insecure and rude her life is by comparison with those of the owners of this home. Her desire and envy 57 produce bitterness; " ' I could break that window if I want­ ed to,' " she exclaims (p . 72). Instead she steals an Amer­ ican flap - -though she does not know it to be an American flag--from the front porch. Giles rightly calls this exper- iencc "the catalyst of her flight from poverty."1

Henceforth she hangs the flag wherever they live. In

Florida, it attracts the attention of two local churchwomen who have come out to the camp to "help the migrants." In an amazing sequence, one of the few that suggest that Oates has a gift for comedy, Clara is invited to attend church by the women, whose ever}' action betrays their fear, prudishness, and ignorance of migrant life. At one point, casually be­ lieving the worst, they ask Clara if Nancy's baby is hers.

Clara, equally ignorant of them, is unaware that she has been insulted. Attending and left puzzled by the fundamentalist service that evening, she afterwards goes to a local tavern, where she sees Lowry, the whiskey runner who completes the changes of her life. Though but thirteen, she responds to him immediately, and goes with him to his room.

Lowry soon realizes how young she is, and when instead of making love to her he gives her a sponge bath, she responds like the child she is, first petulantly, then obe­ diently. She wants to see him again, and the beating she re­ ceives from Carleton makes her decide to run away with him.

" 'I don't know what it is [I want] but I want it,' " she 5 8

says to Lowry. " 'I'm go in' to pet it, too' " (p. 124).

Lowry takes her to Tintern a small Eden County town where the remainder of the novel takes place. At first, he

is a fathcr/brothcr figure to Leri he finds her a job and visits her periodically, and though she claims she loves him and constantly offers herself to him, he never takes her up. Several years pass. Clara works in a dime store and

lives in a single room--which she regards as the height of luxury--; though she is a minor and without family, she is never caught by the county's primitive social services. She makes friends of girls like herself and lives for Lowry's visits. She is noticed one day by Curt Revere, a wealthy local landowner, but since her head is still full of Lowry, nothing happens, though she understands that he is attracted to her. On one of his visits, Lowry finally makes love to her; in the days that follow they have their first and only love-idyll. Believing and hoping that she is pregnant, she now awaits Lowry more eagerly than ever, but on his next visit he returns only to tell her good-bye, for he has stolen his whiskey-money and must flee to Mexico. Feeling deserted and knowing what will happen to her should she become obviously pregnant without husband or lover, she sees

"Revere's car parked and [understands] what she [has] been planning for nearly four weeks" (p. 192). Revere, burdened

(as he might put it) with an older and ill wife, (thinks he) seduces Clara and sets her up in an abandoned farmhouse S 9 when she announces her pregnancy.

Clara and Revere now await Mrs. Revere's death (which doesn't occur for seven years). Clara doesn't love Revere; she "was learning to play games," says Oates, "to take the place of the passion she had felt for Lowry" (p. 20S).

Though she remains bitter because she understands increasing­ ly how deprived her childhood was, even compared to those of most Tinterners, she acquires, along with son, house, and lover, an increasing (and increasingly middle-class) sense of respectability. She is reluctant to bear (her son) Swan in town; later, when he sickens, she is unwilling even to go to the druggist. All her apprehensions are justified; she is shunned or taunted by the townspeople as Revere's woman, but unlike Hawthorne's Hester Prvnne, who remained silent and declined only to pray for her enemies "lest the words of the blessing should stubbornly twist themselves into a q curse," Clara finally turns on the most obnoxious of her tormentors, cursing him and beating him into silence in public. Eventually, of course, the arrangement becomes ac­ cepted, and "after four years, she was almost as good as

Revere's wife, and they did not bother her" (p. 229).

Clara never feels for Revere what she felt for Lowry.

Throughout her life she treasures (and later conceals) the knowledge that Swan is Lowry's son, not Revere's. That Revere does not supply what Clara wants on several levels is bO suggested in a number of ways; on one occasion, for example, provoked by the violent death of a Tintern friend, Clara drives aimlessly into the country and, while stopped at a gas station, sees a man who reminds.her of Lowry. In a mat­ ter of moments they arc making love in the woods; afterwards, she thinks that "her body had not been like this since those days with Lowry" (p. 221).

But by the time Lowry does return, Clara has lived as

Revere's mistress for nearly six years, and though he tells her that he has never forgotten her and wants her and Swan to go to Canada with him, her prudence and avarice triumph over her instincts and love. Clara's choice of Revere over

Lowry is decisive, and with it she accepts the moral chaos

Giles so perceptively notes is implicit in such a choice.

Clara is by no means firmly decided; even late during their final meeting "Lowry. . . might have changed her life"

(p. 247); she is disposed to go with him. But, suddenly giving up, he takes Swan by the chin and tells him that he "can see . . . all the things you're going to kill and step on and walk over" (p. 249).

Swan now begins to emerge as a protagonist in his own right. In the last third of the novel, with but rare excur­ sions into other minds, all our attention is focused on

Clara and Swan. At seven, on the day he and Clara achieve respectability and Revere-hood, he is portrayed as timid, 61

withdrawn, sensitive, and Intelligent, already aware of

his mother's limits, but emotionally dependent on her. He

often wishes they had never left the solitude of the farm­

house, and is made uncomfortable by Revere and his three

sons (Clark, Jonathan, and Robert). Clara has never told

him who Lowry is, and she cautions him never to allude to

his visit, but in a scene just prior to her marriage to

Revere, she tells him: " 'You're going to take everything

away from them someday'.' "

"That was going to happen, yes," he thinks. "He would

make it happen. . . . Because he would know all along what

he had to do while his 'brothers' would know nothing. He

would wait and he would grow up soon--in his brain he was

already older than Clark, even. Nothing could stop him."

Only lines later, he consciously realizes that "Revere was

going to be his father, but his real father was someone

else. . . .the adult he would grow into" (p. 266).

Lowry's words prove to be prophetic; Swan, descended

from Carleton and raised by Clara, is confirmed in his ways by the hostility or indifference of the Revere family, whose name he now bears. By his father he is loved (though not un­ derstood; at sixteen, Swan is told by Revere to "avoid temp­ tation" and that "when he was old enough, Revere would ex­ plain . . . the complexities of his own body." Clara, of course, "had told him all about it" at twelve [p. 339].), by Clark and most of his adult relatives he is ignored, and by Jonathan and Robert he is maltreated. Ironically, it is Robert, the Revere closest to his own age, who when alone with Swan can be friendly, whom Swan accidentally kills in a hunting accident. Henceforth, the family's atti­ tude toward him is tinged writh fear.

But his academic success and the fact that he is his mother's child, combined with Jonathan's running away and

Clark's making what his father regards as an unfortunate marriage, leave him as the inheritor of Revere's regard and his business successor. Clara's words have also been pro­ phetic. Unfortunately, he is unable to form emotional at­ tachments; in school he is solitary, friendly onlywith his cousin Deborah, with whom--after her marriage--he has an affair. Ignoring a teacher's pleading to the contrary, he declines after high school to go on to college and instead enters the family business, whose affairs he prosecutes vigorously, (as it were) out-Revering Revere. Consider his opinions of la i s family:

'The only one of them I respect is Uncle Judd,' Swan said, speaking not loudly but clearly, very clearly, into his fa­ ther's ear. His father leaned forward greedily to hear what he had to say. 'The rest of them I ignore. I can't talk with them. It took me five years to under­ stand that you hate them all but you never got rid of them--why not? . . . We'll buy them out and the hell with them.' (p. 363) Only twenty-two, Swan is "drunk with all he had inher­

ited." But lie remain? cold; he always pays prostitutes

more money than they asked, because money was the means by which he kept them from him. . . . he was afraid that . . . he might confess to them that he did not know what he was doing or where he had come from , or why his brain pounded with desires lie could not understand. He might confess to them the thought that he had to put out of his mind continuously, that lie was a killer who had not finished with hi? work yet but was waiting for his deed to rise up in him. (p. 363-365)

Clara, in the meantime, evolves into a caricature of respectability. At the time of her marriage, though she has no love for Revere, she is openly exultant now that all will at last have to openly acknowledge her. Revere's love she pays court to by pleasing him, but to satisfy herself she schemes for and exercises power in minor ways. Her tastes gradually change; one of Oates' most ironic touches is the evolution of Clara's tastes to the point where she recog­ nizes that the furnishings she had at her marriage found so dreary and banished to the attic are actually in the best of taste. But she remains essentially ignorant, and jealously guards the fact that she reads and writes only haltingly.

She remains on polite terms only with her new cousins. Con­ tent with her lot, she cannot understand why Swan one night shoots Revere and himself, though only her taunting pre­ vents him from shooting her first. A few years later she enters a nursing home because of a nerve complaint; like 6 4 her mother's, though not for the same reason, her minds vegetates and gradually fades away. Her great preoccu­ pation is watching television, and she resents visitors whose talking interferes with her viewing. "She seemed to like best," Oates concludes,

programs that showed men fighting, swinging from ropes, shooting guns and driving fast cars, killing the enemy again and again until the dying gasps of evil men were only a certain fa­ miliar rhythm away from the opening blasts of the commercials, which changed only gradually over the years, (p. 384)

This perhaps wearisome exposition of the novel reveals its somber quality. Oates professes little interest in veri­ similitude, and in this novel, as in others, she renders states of mind much better than sense of time and place.

From obligation to excel at the latter she is exempted to a certain extent, for her three protagonists are remarkably limited in outlook and seem utterly unaware of events in the world. The Depression is alluded to, as is World War II, but only the reading of Oates' earlier fiction and the know­ ledge that she grew up in Lockport, New York, might lead the curious reader to conclude that Eden County bears a gen­ eral resemblance to western New York. Tintern could be any small town in the vicinity of Buffalo (Hamilton in the novel) .

Most of those who have written of this novel agree that the first third is naturalistic; the already-cited parallel 6 S

with The Grape5 of Wrath springs to mind. Of the remainder,

differing views have been suggested. Giles, heeding the work,

of Alice Martin and Rose Marie Burwell, suggests that the

novel is inspired by Hieronymous Bosch's tryptich "The

Garden of Earthly Delights," that it is (quoting Burwell)

"an allegory of the innate human tendencies which perpetu­

ate the fall of man, a lesson in the hollowness and

fragility of transient achievements and human aspirations."^

On the other hand, Garden provoked from Elizabeth

Janeway the epithet"Dreiserian." "Oates is as absorbed," she

remarks, "in the interaction between individual Americans

and the society they live in as he wasAt Revere's death,

Janeway notes that

here again are Dreiserian echoes. The human being bends to the forces of fate, but there is nothing mystical or super­ natural about this destiny; . . . Neither self-knowledge nor will can defeat the grubby gods of the everyday world where weakness, ignorance, and failure wait for everyone.

The prophecies and parallels found throughout the novel, combined with an apparently deliberate vagueness of

time and place, suggest that Garden's naturalism is combined with allegory. An American Tragedy, Studs Lonigan, and

U. S. A., by contrast, are set in distinct times and places by the exacting reproduction of dialect and current events, and multiple allusions to popular culture. Also, as Janeway observes, Clara's doom is too obvious; one feels that Oates 6 6

limits Clara’s opportunities too much, that the social

world in which she moves, particularly after her marriage,

is too deliberately narrow.^ This quality of limitation is

not offensive in Carleton's story, for his background has

not prepared him to recognize or fight effectively the econ­

omic and social forces that oppress him, and his circumstan­

ces, plausibly, we feel, never let him so much as "get his

balance back." Sister Carrie, with fewer advantages, at least

seeks self-transcendence and self-improvement; Clara settles

only slightly restlessly into her doom.

*****

Of all of Joyce Carol Oates' novels, them is singly most responsible for her being labelled as a naturalist. Published

in 1969, them was a popular and critical success, and for

Oates it won the National Book Award for fiction. Chances are, those who have read only a single Oates novel have probably read them. Like Garden in tone, it is quite dif­ ferent in setting and ambition of scale.

them focuses on three members of the Wendall family in the thirty-year span between 1937 and 1967. Except for a brief and rather fanciful excursion in Arkansas and Texas, one that suffers from all the vices of Oates' evocations of time and place, it takes place entirely in the Middle West, and, except for a brief opening in an unnamed city and a longer time on a Michigan farm, it takes place entirely in and around Detroit, the scene of virtually all Oates' fiction 6 7

from Expens i ve People to Do With Me What You Will.

them is almost impossible to summarize, for it com­

bines a lonp sweep of time with frequent changes of nar­

rative voice. "Too much happens," remarks Alfred Kazin, 14 and incident fades quickly into impression. Beginning on

the day of the conception of her first child, the novel

first deals with protagonist Loretta (Botsford/Wendall/

Furlong), and concerns itself later with two of her four

children, Jules and Maureen Wendall.

The reader discerns in Loretta and her family five

related personal and social characteristics--silence, inarti­

culateness, yearning, violence, and inability to learn from

experience. These characteristics, which can be ascribed as

accurately to Carleton, Clara, and Swan as to the Wendalls,

are responsible for the unhappy state of society, and so­

ciety perpetuates them in individuals, them demonstrates much more convincingly than does Garden their transmission

in families; likewise, the Wendalls, much more than the

Reveres, are the microcosm of and the mirror to American

society. Even in the context of the novel, the Wendalls

are typical in a way the Reveres never are. The houses

they inhabit are surrounded by houses whose inhabitants are just like them.

At first glance, many of the characters and actions of them seem to defy explanation. After Loretta's brother 6 8

Brock kills Bernie Mai in (the boy he finds in her bed), she

thinks that "Brock had been a killer, and had needed someone

to kill, but she hadn't known that."^ Years later, when

Brock finds Loretta, now in Detroit, there is no barrier, no resentment, and hardly a mention of the incident.

One of them's most distinctive qualities (distinctive

even to the reader of naturalistic novels) is the absence

of someone who seems to embody the positive values of the

author. It is true that Jules Wendall vaguely perceives and

gropingly advances in what Oates might call the right direc­

tion, but, as we shall see, his advancement is not steady nor is his attainment sure. In fact, the only such figure

in them is the author herself; Joyce Carol Oates first con­ ceived of this novel as a result of a series of letters she

received from "Maureen Wendall," a former student, and she reprints two of the letters in the text of the novel. Maureen

sees her former English teacher as confident and fulfilled, and at peace in her world; "we," she writes of herself,

are the ones who leaf through magazines with colored pictures and spend long heavy hours sunk in our bodies, think­ ing, remembering, dreaming, waiting for something to come to us and give shape to so much pain. (p. 320)

Nothing in them, however, offers much hope of such an even­ tuality for any of the protagonists.

The other prominent characters resemble the protagon­

ists; Oates' upper-class characters are as haunted as her 6 9 lower-class ones. One hears an echo of Loretta and Jules in Bernard Geffcn's " 'I'm fifty-five years old and if I don't begin now, when will I begin' " (p. 241). After

Bernard's death (which, like Bernie Mai in's murder and the institutionalization of Loretta's father, is simply covered up and forgotten), Jules discovers himself mi­ micking liis perpetually optimistic speech. Likewise, the affinity between Maureen and Jim Randolph, the junior col­ lege instructor she will marry, is made plain in Jim's quick understanding of and sympathy with Maureen's confes­ sion that she thinks " 'nothing will ever change, my life will go on like this forever' " (p. 495).

The plot movement in them is circular. After marrying

Howard Wendall, Loretta "felt she was entering a new life.

She was finished with her old life--taking care of her father and Brock, living in that dump, unmarried, on the loose. She was going to have a baby. She was a different person" (pp. 42-45). A generation later, Maureen exclaims to her brother Jules, who is about to leave for California,

" 'I'm going to forget everything and everybody. I'm going to have a baby. I'm a different person' " (p. 478). Alfred

Kazin sees in this novel "the real tragedy of so many Amer­ icans today, unable to find a language for what is happen­ ing to them."1() This generalization is least applicable to

Maureen, whose tragedy is at least as much perceptual as commun i ca t i ve . 7 0

Life with Loretta, to be sure, is not calculated to bring out the best in anyone. The L'endalls change domicile frequently, but make few friends. Loretta's reaction to these changes is almost always a variation of "now that they had left the city and were on their way to a new life-- her idea of a new life--she was rather pleased" (p. 55).

Loretta is never attached to one place more than any other, except to dislike the present and dream of the future. Her children are as rootless as she; no place has any intrinsic value for any of them.

Loretta is a Catholic, but her religion is empty, with­ out even that devotion to outward form and pious sayings that characterized the religion of that other famous fic­ tional Catholic family, the Lonigans. Her greatest outburst of religious feeling occurs when Maureen announces that she's marrying a divorcee, and Loretta, moved by envy, slaps her and calls her a whore.

Positive family feeling hardly exists. After a brief period of harmony following their wedding, Howard and Lor­ etta settle into mutual indifference. "Howard's silence ex­ panded weekly, daily," Oates tells us;

he seemed to be sinking into middle age, and whatever life he had by him­ self on those occasional days when he didn't come home from the mine Loretta knew nothing about, (p. 55)

The children quickly perceive the nature of their parents' relationship. Jules notices after their removal 71 to Detroit that

his mother no longer bothered to cry. For years she had cried; now she had stopped. His father was like a great wall leaning inward, about to collapse on top of them, but since he had never quite collapsed they gave up fearing him and crying about him. (p. 7b)

Maureen thinks to herself that"it could be shouted

out loud that Loretta was a bitch or Howard was a lacy bas­

tard, anything might be shouted that had to do with people,

but nothing about money--the facts of money--could be men­

tio n e d out loud" (p. 127). Naturally, their mother's con­

stant bickering and alcoholism and their father's silence

punctuated by violence produce continual insecurity.

Jules, upon being called to dinner, thinks that "he was

hungry, but he went out with dread. Anything might happen

out there in the kitchen" (p. 102).

As might be expected, virtually all the haunting char­

acteristics that pervade Jules and Maureen are born in this

unhealthy atmosphere. Howard is alternately silent and sav­

age. Loretta, unable to articulate her desires, perpetually

awaits that wonderful day tomorrow or next week, and is un ­

able to learn from experience. These characteristics are

transmitted, in strange combinations, to the children.

Jules, whom Loretta favors over all her other child­

ren, is from the first possessed of a fierce energy that

makes him anxious to have new experiences and attract attention, and also gives him the appearance of ambition.

He runs away several times a year until he is fifteen--

after which he essentially stays away--, takes odd jobs,

supplements his income by petty theft , and acquires sex­

ual experience early. Thinking of the oppressiveness of his

home, he decides that

the future was important, not the pre­ sent . These minutes spent around the dinner table . . . were not important except as they were a part of a process leading to the future, a future that would be a good surprise, he felt sure. (p. 1 0 2 )

And in a passage reminiscent of Clyde Griffiths' first impressions of the Green-Davidson, he reflects while parking cars that

the smell of such cars' insides stirred [his] lust in a mystical way, and the smell of ladies' perfume, sometimes lin­ gering with the cold leather or borne lightly on the air as they passed in their furs and immaculate hairdos, made his brain burst into fragments of wild hope. Such cars'. Such women'. Such men, in their excellent coats and gloves, their shoes excellent, their faces cleanly shaved and their hair newly cut, everything perfect. These people were headed for the two or three good restau­ rants nearby, or across the way into the Sheraton-Cadi 1lac, where things were going on not just on Saturday nights, but forever, endlessly, (p. 109)

This lust only half-articulates itself in Jules, who has the instincts but not the equipment of greatness. He is perpetually beginning projects, but he never completes them; he runs, as it were, only in place. Both Bernard Geffen, the 7 3 mysterious gangs ter-magnate, and his uncle Samson

Wendall pick him to be their "rising young man," but

Jules is energetically immobile. His only real success is in seduction and copulation, and even this gives him cause for reflection:

The night before, lying in the arms of a woman who was married to an acquaintance of his, he had a terrible thought: the entrance to all these w o ­ men was the same, and yet he had never really entered, was always rejected. He was left outside, dismissed. He had ne­ ver completed anything, (p. 328)

His affair with Nadine Greene, which culminates in her attempt to kill him, changes him, but his self-image, conceived before he had ever met her, still fits him per­ fectly:

Wasn't he Jules Wendall, knocked down and kicked around, but not counted out? Hadn't he always escaped from danger all his life? Hadn't his luck always bounced him back up to the top, as if he were a rubber ball, all one texture, one foamy, happy, invulnerable, rubbery texture that nothing could kill? (p. 24 8 )

A rubber ball--Jules Wendall, living in a dark pre­ sent, on his way to a bright future. Nadine kills the

"love” (to use Jules' own expression) in him, but she fails to stop the motion. Later in the novel, to the college dropout he has just raped and whom he will prostitute, he says: 74

Once I thought it wouldn't be possible to live without love , but it is possi­ ble, you keep on living. You always keep on living, (p. 443)

Maureen is hurt by her mother's disfavor. Aware of the hysteria around her, Maureen seeks to transcend it by apply­ ing herself to schoolwork, and to conquer it by performing the household chores left undone by her mother. Since Mau­ reen does well in school, her mother expresses no interest in it. Since Maureen is innocent and pretty, her mother treats her as if she were a slut. Since Maureen is open, her mother constantly accuses her of selfishness and pet­ tiness. As if to fulfill her mother's wishes, Maureen be­ gins to do poorly in school, gives herself to dozens of men, and hoards the money they give her. After her step­ father, provoked by Loretta's encouragement, beats her, she goes into a thirteen-month stance. During this time, as

Maureen grows fat and ugly, and is completely silent and passive, Loretta is very happy. Maureen's degradation puts her at ease.

After Maureen recovers, she completes high school, takes a job, attends (and flunks out of) the University of

Detroit, and later attends a community college where she meets and snares one of the instructors, whom she later marries. As we have seen, Loretta is content to ignore her until she announces her marriage. But her mother has made her into something like herself; like her mother, Maureen believes that marriage, motherhood, and living in the suburbs Kill wipe out the past.

Jules, energy -without direction, is caught in the 196

Detroit riots. The riots are the necessary thematic and dramatic climax of this novel of building tension, for one of Oates' themes is that the inarticulateness , awkward­ ness, and helplessness of those like the Wendalls produces great social violence. Jules and his fellows are the prey of radical professor of sociology Mort Piercey, who tells

Jules that

'the fact is that you have nowhere to go, like me, and that's exactly what we all want to change--our not having any­ where to go. Oh, I don't mean love or anything, because we're all in love, more or less. . . . 1 mean something more permanent, something transcendent.' (P. 4 21)

Believing that the coalition of street gangs and rad­ icals he has brought together can be controlled, Mort ap­ plauds the beginning of the riot, for he believes that the building of a new society requires the destruction of the old (oppressive) one. Loretta's victim's perspective and

Jules' participant's perspective reveal just how quickly the riot passes out of control. By a queer irony, however,

Mort--perceived as an expert in community relations--is made director of a new anti-poverty program, and when he needs an assistant, he picks Jules, whose luck has once again turned for the better. He goes off to California ~b

(in the new air-conditioned car he buys Kith his first

salary a vance), Loretta remains in Detroit, and Maureen,

now "heavy with pregnancy, but sure-footed, pretty, clean,

married," moves to Dearborn (p. 4 78).

What are we to make of this long and detailed novel

spanning thirty years? Like Ga rd en , it is built around the

experiences of a single family, but the world of them is

both more densely populated and more minutely recreated

than the world of Garden. In that sense, them1s concerns

are widely social in a way that only the first third of

Garden is. Garden depicts a terrible world, and asks: "What

would happen to a young woman brought up here who attempted

to escape?" them remains focused perpetually on the terri­

ble world, and the implication of Maureen's unknowing but

almost exact repetition of Loretta's belief that marriage

has permitted her to start a new life is that one never

escapes the terrible world; as Jules says to Maureen in

the concluding scene of them:

'don't forget that this place here can burn down too. Men can come back in your life, Maureen, they can beat you up again and force your knees apart, why not? . . . Can't it happen? Won't it happen? Wouldn't you really want it to happen?' (p. 478)

As Pogo might have said, we have met them and they are us.

Of course, this sense of one's inability to trans­ cend one's origins or "them" is found in Garden, too; not

only does Clara vegetate mentally as had her mother, but Swan, grandson of sharecropper-migrant worker Carleton

Walpole, kills his "father" Curt Revere, landlord and

forecloser of small-farm mortgages. But, as has been

suggested, the conclusion ol Garden seems unnaturally

arranged. Clara's "numbness" seems causeless, as docs

Swan's killing of Revere and subsequent suicide.

Christopher Ricks remarks that in them Joyce Carol

Oates "has a staunchly old-fashioned, and salutary, sense of the relations between self-respect and respectability.

The degradations of city life," he continues, " are so in­

tense, and so intensely created by her, that respectability 1 7 can be seen as vital to self-preservation. . . ." Cer­ tainly this is one of the principal lessons of the novel.

Loretta intermittently seeks, but never attains, this re­ spectability; Maureen achieves it deliberately and Jules accidentally--Jules regards his anti-poverty position as only a stepping-stone to " 'something solid,' " like

" 'real estate' " (p. 476), and his ambition remains to make money and marry Nadine. In the meantime, he has begun by equipping himself with the principal American status symbol.

Described as "mindless" on page nine, Loretta remains trapped in a narrow world of slums and drink, men and child­ ren. She wonders when her life is going to begin, and thinks often that she has finally escaped the past, but she never does, and her portrayal suggests that she never really Kants to. Loretta is too demanding and irrational

at the wrong moments, just as she is too easy-going at

other moments. Except for her lack of her mother's beauty,

Belly, who remains in the world of the streets where she

grew up, is exactly like Loretta.

Maureen is more sympathetically portrayed, but she

as also more ambitious. When no other means seems likely

to free her from the narrow world of her birth, she catches

with her surest weapon a man--unfortunately, someone clse's

husband--who will do so. "Her ultimate respectability is

hard and hard-won, but who," asks Ricks, "has the right to 18 ask anything else of her?" Giles suggests that Oates por­

trays Maureen rather harshly, but one measure of Oates'

objectivity is that we never lose sight of Maureen's wretchedness, even when we consider the means by which she

escapes it.-- I-1

Jules, seen by many as a figure idealized and admired by Oates, escapes in yet another way. Surely his commitment

to the anti-poverty program is a chance turn, just as his good fortune is luck. Giles flatters him by comparing him

to Jay Gatsby; he is more of a Clyde Griffiths who doesn't 20 misstep. But Jules cannot be too easily dismissed, for he

is the most ambitious and large-minded of Loretta's child­ ren. Betty's imagination gets her only as far as the street streets, and Maureen's as far as the suburbs, but Jules, as we have seen, is from the first seized by grander ideas. Why they arc grander, and the exact location of the author's sentiments will become more apparent when some of

Oates' essays and interviews are examined. For the m o ­ ment, I want to suggest that Christopher Ricks is both right and wrong when he remarks that "the revolutionary talk and the Detroit riots . . . are clearly to Miss Oates of apocalyptic importance. Yet the political argy-bargy fatally manages to be at once as boringly solipsistic as if ? 1 it were real and yet wanly unconvincing. . . As we shall sec, Oates has great tenderness for the sources of these sentiments, but is less enthusiastic about those who contemplate with pleasure the destruction of cities and the loss of life.

Oates shows us three possible courses of action to es­ cape poverty, and makes us see without blinking the origins and consequences of each. Like Dreiser, who deliberately concludes An American Tragedy with a chapter suggesting that another Clyde will replace the one just executed, and that conditions change slowly if at all, Oates reminds us that the world is not easily made better.

*****

One of the most curious turns in contemporary letters has been executed by Joyce Carol Oates in the past several years, and it is a turn largely unrecognized because of the preeminence of them among her works. It is to that preemin­ ence, however, that we are indebted for helping us to trace 80

her turn away from the world-view there expressed; the

author of them suddenly became a celebrity, and magazines

both popular and literary suddenly found her worthy of

interviews and articles. Of these, three interviews and

three short pieces of expository prose, all published be­

tween 1972 and 1974, collectively illustrate the change

in character and thrust of Oates' ideas about society, man- 1 ~> kind, and art. The occasion of the letter quoted at the

beginning of this chapter was’the (so to speak) gasp of

surprise emitted by the editors of Saturday Review upon re­

ceiving "New Heaven and Earth," an essay they felt would

"no doubt come as a surprise to those familiar with the 2 3 grim, unrelenting nature of her previous work." It does,

though understanding of it permits one to see more clearly

the relationships among her novels.

It is difficult to know where to begin in discussing

Oates' ideas, for they are extraordinarily ambitious and--

historicallv speaking, both backward and forward--far-

reaching. Like Charles Reich, to whose The Greening of Amer-

ica she alludes, she believes that "we are in the tumultu­

ous but exciting close of a centuries-old kind of conscious­ ness ," but she warns against "mistaking a crisis of trans­

ition for a violent end," and later, "against the paranoia of history's 'true believers,' who have always misinterpre­

ted a natural, evolutionary transformation of consciousness as being the violent conclusion of all history." And where 81

Reich focuses almost provinci.illy on America, Oates takes

a wider and longer view. "As J see it," she says, "the Uni­

ted States is the first nation . . . to suffer/enjoy the

death throes of the Renaissance. . . . the United States is

preparing itself for a transformation of being. . . ."

The choice of the Renaissance to express her ideas is

deliberate and useful. She can and does allude to the pain­

ful and glorious transformation of European consciousness

from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, noting,

perhaps in anticipation of a protest from some Renaissance

scholar, that it is not the "distance" from the Middle Ages

that strikes us, "but . . . their closeness, [their] almost poetic intimacy." But the Renaissance also serves, particu­

larly in contrast to the "God - centered , God-directed" Mid­ dle Ages, as a symbol of an ideal that declares "I_ will, I_ want, I_ demand, I_ think, am," whose "voice tells us we

are not quite omnipotent but must act as if we were, push­

ing out into a world of other people or of nature that will necessarily resist us, that will try to destroy us, and that we must conquer. I_ will ex is t," she concludes, "has meant only I_ will impose my will on others."

Very well, we are in the midst of a transformation of consciousness not unlike that which was occurring in Europe five hundred years ago. Towards what are we moving? Oates answers: A simple evolution into a higher hu­ manism, perhaps a kind of intelligent pantheism, in which all substance in the universe (including the substance fortunate enough to perceive it) is there by equal right.

"We are tired," she says a few lines later, "of the old dichotomies: Sane/Insane, Normal/Sick, Black/White, Man/

Nature, Victor/Vanquished, and--above all this Cartesian 24 dualism--1/1 1 ."

Four questions arise from the contemplation of these ideas: (1) What do they mean for America, (2) What do they mean for the individual, (5) What do they mean for the con­ temporary artist, and (4) What are their implications for the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates?

One and two may be answered together. Oates does not believe in a special American destiny, in fact, she chides those who do, but she does believe that since ours is the most dynamic culture in the world, world cultural changes will occur here first. She tells us in the Preface to

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been : Stories of Young

America that

A new morality is emerging in America, in fact on the North American continent generally, which may appear to be op­ posed to the old but which in fact is a higher form of the old--the democratiza­ tion of the spirit, the experiencing of life as meaningful in itself, without divisions into 'good' or 'bad,' 'beau- ?^ tiful' or 'ugly,' 'moral' or 'immoral.'“ 8 3

Since she is addressing a slightly different question here than she does in her Saturday Review essay, her focus is slightly different. What was "a higher humanism" is now the recognition of "the democratic essence of divinity."

"Each of us," she reminds us, is in some sense "the center of the universe," but "we were born into a culture that as­ sumes that some people are in the center, some few individ­ uals are absolute, and their decrees, their beliefs, their ways of life must be accepted by all, no matter how destruc­ tive they are." Though in some cultures, she continues,

"divinity is spread out equally, energizing everyone and everything," in others and "unfortunately" in ours, it "was snatched up by a political/economic order, and the democra-

2 0 tic essence of divinity denied."

One wonders what to make of this manifesto. Certainly, if by personal divinity something of the uniqueness and in­ violability of the individual is suggested, the growth and influence of the ideas of Emerson, indeed, the whole course of American culture in the nineteenth century suggest that if the democratic essence of divinity has been denied, then its denial is a relatively recent phenomenon. Even today, one might search the earth for a culture in which individ­ ualism is more sedulously worshipped and officially encour­ aged . 8 4

Oates might answer that "officially" is the necessary qualification to "encouraged"; like DeTocqueville, Dickens, and Sinclair Lewis, she has noticed what she finds so well delineated in Harriette Arnow's The Pollmaker,"the basic split in the American imagination between an honoring of the individual and a vicious demand for 'adjustment' and 2 7 conformity." In any case, she has a grander conception in mind. She connects the "re-emergence" of this "essence of divinity" with the troubled years of the 1960's and 1970's, citing not only the generation gap, but also the struggle against the Vietnam War and the rise of the drug culture.

She continues:

We have experienced countless manifes­ tations of the struggle I believe to be common to most young Americans today: the attempt to rescue spiritual poverty constantly in the process of devaluing itself.28

In the same spirit, she remarks in a Harper's Bazaar interview that "the United States, though set up a r a demo­ cracy, is in fact an oligarchy," and though "the optimism

The Greening of America seems . . .a bit excessive or at least premature," she admits that "the new consciousness" is "imminent," though "it may take generations to 2 9 achieve." "Because we are living in the transformational years," she says, 8 5

our lives cannot be eventless. Some of us vill survive beautifully; some of us--perhaps the very youngest--wi 11 ex­ perience the turmoil as if it were quite natural and the acceleration of change in our time nothing extraordinary.'-’"

Oates is discussing what she sees as the source of the

upheavals of our times--the rise of a new consciousness--

and her last paragraph suggests that she thinks we have

not seen its zenith. And though personal divinity is not

created by forms of government, concentration of politi­

cal, social, and economic power, living and working condi­

tions, and the state of religion and morality, the sum of

these phenomena, reflected in the power of the individual

to realize himself, to change the conditions of his life,

and to influence those around him, is the measure of how democratically divinity is spread about in a culture.

So our country is changing fundamentally, though

slowly, and each of us is affected differently by the change. What about the artist, and, more particularly, what about Joyce Carol Oates in the midst of this change? From

the epigraph of this chapter part of the answer can be dis­ covered; it is revealing, too, to consider her remarks on other authors. She quotes with approval "visionaries" such as Lawrence, Nietszche, and Teilhard de Chardin; Norman

Mailer--whom she compares to "a late medieval churchman resisting the future even when it is upon him"--"exempli­

fies the old, losing, pitiful Last Stand of the Ego, the 8 6

Sc 1 f - Aga ins t-A1.1-Ot her s , the Conqueror, the Highest of all

Protoplasms, Namer and Begetter of all Pictions. And though she admires Nabakov as an artist, she finds him

"tragic" because he sees so little "divinity" in humanity outside an inspired few, i.e., himself and certain others, others.'^

A picture of Joyce Carol Oates the artist now begins to emerge. She tells Joe David Bellamy that "my 'charac­ ters' really dictate themselves to me. I am not free of them, really, and I can't force them into situations they haven't themselves wi 11 ed . " ^ Apparently she contemplates her characters until the moment their stories are worked out in her mind, and then she writes furiously, sometimes up to fifty or sixty pages a day.

In a short article addressed to prospective writers she sets out her own conception of what in good writing is important:

It isn't 'words' or 'style' that make a scene, but the content behind the words, and the increase of tension as the char­ acters come into conflict with one ano­ ther. . . . Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but„gnly content will stay in his mind ."5

"All art is moral," she tells us in another article.^

These sentiments are appropriate for the writer whose motto motto, printed on the cover of every paperback edition of her fiction, is "I am concerned with only one thing, the moral and social conditions of my generation." Joyce Carol Oates, then, has not ceased "to dramatize

the nightmares of [her] time," but she has begun to drama­ tize the possibilities of awakening from them. Her focus, however, remains firmly on the interaction ol inward and outward phenomena, the attempts of the human spirit to deal with a universe it cannot completely understand. NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

^ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been: Stories of Young America (Greenwi ch , C t. : Fawcett, 1 974 ), p. 10. 2 Walter Clemons, "Joyce Carol Oates: Love and Vio­ lence," Newsweek, 11 December 1 972 , p . 77.

^ them (1969; rpt. Greenwich, Ct.: Fawcett, 1970), p. 1 0 . 4 "Naturalism and Experimentation: The First Five Novels of Joyce Carol Oates" (unpublished), p. 10.

A Backward Glance (New York: Appleton-Century, 1 934 ), p. 204. Mr s. Wharton * s description of the means by which she conceived of her novels is also similar to that of Joyce Carol Oates.

^ A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967; rpt. Greenwich, Ct.: Fawcett, n.~cT.7^ p~) 9. Subsequent references to this text will be parenthetical.

7 Giles , p . 10 . g Giles, p. 14.

^ The Scarlet Letter, ed. Harry Levin (Boston: Hough­ ton-MifTlTn, 1961), p. 85.

"Joyce Carol Oates and an Old Master," Critique, 15, 1 (1973), pp. 49-50.

"Clara the Climber," New York Times Book Review, 10 September 1967, p. 5.

^^ Janeway, p . 63.

Janeway, p. 63.

14 Bright Book of Life (Boston: Atlantic-Little Brown, 1973), p. 204.

88 ^ Joyce Carol Oates, them, p. 35. Subsequent referen­ ces to this text will be parenthetical.

^ Ka z in , p . 19 9.

^ "The Unignorable Real," New York Rev i ew o f Books , 12 February 1970, pp. 22-23.

^ ** Ricks , p . 2 3.

19 Giles, p. 2 1 .

Giles, p . 21.

^1 Ricks, p . 23. ? ? The three interviews are: (1) Michael and A n a n c Batterberry, "Focus on Joyce Carol Oates," Harper1s Ba- zaar, September 1973 , pp. 159, 174- 176 , (2) Joe David- Bellamy, "The Dark Lady of American Letters: An Inter­ view with Joyce Carol Oates," Atlantic, February 1972 , pp. 65-67, (3) J. A. Avant, "An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates," Library Journa1 , 97 (15 October 1972), 3711-5712. The essays are: (1) Joyce Carol Oates, "New Heaven and Earth," Saturday Review, 4 November 1972, pp. 51-54, (2) the Preface to Where Are You Go ing, Where Have You Been: Stories of Young America, and (3) Joyce Carol Oates, "A Personal View of Nabakov," Saturday Review of the Arts, January 1973, pp. 36-37. 2 ^ Oates, "New Heaven and Earth," editors' prefatory remarks, p . 51.

^ The material quoted in the preceding three paragraph is drawn from Oates, "New Heaven and Earth," pp. 52-53. ? ^ Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, p. 9.

26 Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, p. 8. 2 7 "The Nightmare of Naturalism: Harriette Arnow's The Pollmaker," in New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Ex­ perience in Literature (New York: Vanguard, 1974), p. 107.

Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,

1 Q M. and A. Batterberry, p. 174. 90

Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, p . i n . r

Oates, "New Heaven and Earth," p. S3.

^ Oates, "A Personal View of Nabakov," pp. 36-37.

Bellamy, p. 62.

"Building Tension in the Short Story," Writer, June 1966, p. 44.

•7’*1 "The Unique and the Universal in Fiction," Writer, January 1975, p. 12. CHAPTER THREE

SOL YURICK

The hack writer recreates the dra­ matic and imagistic presentation of che popularly accepted national conscious­ ness; the bestseller as dramatized ide­ ology. The writer as stylist and iso­ late objectifies a frozen unconscious that struggles between the need to make it popularly and the romantic need to reject the world--gentle snipings of a small class of anxious intellectuals who conduct their campaigns with one eye on the cutting knife and the other on the castrating cash - register drawer. Rut the great writer must always be rebellious, which is to say that he doesn't spar with middle-class concep­ tions, hut goes after the system as a whole. If not, it's announced to the world that he's content to draw his images from the Central Bank of fidu­ ciary symbols. The great writer pre­ sents the resistance unconscious, the subversive underworld.

--Sol Yurick, in "Hubert Selby: Symbolic Intent and Ideological Resistance (or Cocksucking and Revolution).

Our examination of the work of Joyce Carol Oates

suggests that her abiding interest is in "the moral and

social conditions of [her] generation," that she sees her­

self as an artist whose "place is to dramatize the night- ? mares of [her] time,"“ but that she is interested in how

91 individuals escape those nightmares as well.

Sol Yurick, a native and inhabitant of Brooklyn

thirteen years Oates' senior, whose literary career began

later, and whose literary output lias come forth at a pace

slower than that of Oates, provides an illustrative con­

trast. Like Oates, though in a different way, Yurick's

view of the world is one for which naturalism, as a con­

ception of life and manner of expression, is uniquely

suited.

Both her expository prose and fiction suggest Oates'

concern with the moral and spiritual state of the indivi­

dual; she wants "to show how some individuals find a way

out, come alive, move into the future." As we have seen,

she perceives that we are experiencing what she calls "the

death throes of the Renaissance," of a consciousness that

glorifies the demanding and conquering ego. She sees us

approaching "a higher humanism, perhaps an intelligent pantheism.""5 Ke of the transitional generations, she tells

us, began by experiencing great turmoil, but gradually will experience greater understanding as the change of consciousness proceeds.^ It is necessary to remind our­

selves periodically that this process, which thus described

sounds so abstract and spiritual, is made up of the bits of violence and revelation that compose so much of Oates'

fiction. The contrast Kith Yurick's view of the same process,

though the end result may be the same, could hardly be

greater. The extract quoted in the epigraph only begins to

suggest how politically Yurick sees virtually everything,

even--or rather, particularly--art . Our consciousness, he

suggests in a comment appended to Frederic Jameson's "The

Great American Hunter, or, Ideological Content in the

Novel," is the deliberately shaped version of the past and

key to our experience that the rulers (whoever they may be)

of our culture have fashioned for us. He asks:

. . .why does a po 1 itica1/artistic group­ ing choose a number of authors, a cul­ tural segment, to express its politics? Why Kafka, why 1:1 iot, why Camus, why Freud, why Plato, why formal and analo­ gical/symbolic interpretation, why ex­ istentialism, why Koestler, why Orwell, why the Greek Tragedies and "the tragic condition," why Dante? Coupled to this "why" is the question of, in what way were they used? In short, a political/ economic/socia 1 system appropriates a past but discards other elements of that past and makes it a non-past. . . .

The artist, Yurick suggests, may be a "victim of ideo­ logy, or . . . a conscious practitioner, or . . . both." He concludes his comment thus:

Marxists do not fight only capitalism but fifty thousand years of politically selective culture, which I fit under a rubric I call, aj^ this time, The Central Bank of Symbolic Forms; which includes not only the dominant and dominating symbols and symbo1-systems, which now have a currency value, which supports 9 4

all forms of culture, science, economics, etc., but involves a logic of permissible transactions which warps perceptual space in which the individual is warped. Fight is the key word. The formal properties, the aesthetics of revolution have thence not completely emerged yet.

It will be recalled that Oates has expressed similar sentiments about the "oligarchical" nature of our culture, but where she sees the revolution in consciousness occur­ ring gradually but steadily, Yurick sees a struggle for liberation whose outcome is by no means certain. This

Marxist and revolutionary sensibility informs all his fic­ tion and expository prose, and it has made him increasing­ ly ambitious, in his own words, to "[go] after the system as a whole." In his published works he has done just that, and often in contexts and ways that are unexpected.

For example, in "Not All Middle Class America Is in the Suburbs," an article written for the New York Times, he discusses the gradual but perceptible renovation and im­ provement occurring in Park Slope, a once-deelining Brook­ lyn neighborhood.^ By means of appropriate historical anal­ ogies and hip slang, Yurick conveys an undercurrent of jeering at the middle class and indignation at the pushing out of the poor. The reader, who sees a conventional head­ line and an assortment of photographs of the "see-how-much- better- Park- Slope- looks-now" variety, is unsettled as he realizes just how mixed a blessing Yurick sees this change to be . 9 S

Yuiick's ability to expose and evoke the more omin­ ous aspects of contemporary phenomena is also well displayed in his essay on Roone Arledge (then Executive Producer of

ABC Sports), "That Wonderful Person Who Brought You Howard 7 Cosell.” Like many observers, Yurick agrees that Arledge has been one of the main shapers of the change that has occurred in American sports, but his particular bias is in­ dicated by his characterization of the shift from player- to viewer-orientation as "the industrialization of sports."

If it be granted that Sol Yurick sees the world through

Marxist and revolutionary lenses, perhaps we should explore further the implications of his view of writing as a poli­ tical act. What is the relation of literature to politics, and how has Yurick applied his idea of this relation to the writing of others?

The writer who aspires to greatness, we are told,

"goes after the system as a whole." For him to do so re­ quires that he understand that his consciousness has been manipulated, that a Reality does exist, but that he may not see it because he has been trained to view history and ex­ perience selectively. Thus, the writer's duty is to remove his own lenses as well as those of his readers. In an arti­ cle written for the "Literature and Revolution" double issue of Tri-Quarterly, Yurick discusses at some length the lessons he learned about this subject while writing 96

The Rag: he had been taught, he says, that literature too involved with ideological/political notions degenerated 8 into propaganda. However, he had eventually to admit this:

”1 found it impossible to say things simply: I found it impossible to be timeless. Everything interfused with every- 9 thing else."

It is not therefore to be inferred that Yurick values writers for their understanding of the issues of political consciousness alone; though he admires the efforts of the

Proletarian writers of the thirties, and even remarks that

"perhaps the only possible tragic form is the up-to-now defeat of the left,"10 lie notes in his introduction to

Vo ices of Brooklyn (1 975) that he "remember[s] , as they say, the lessons of the thirties when the drive to Zeus- out a Minerviad of 'Proletarian' genius had such deplorable results."11 Nevertheless, it is with this problem he is most concerned:

How then is the revolutionary vision, the socialist vision, the glimpse of the unborn world, to provide the dimen­ sion from which writers draw their strength? What is a revolutionary liter­ ature that goes beyond mere stylistic play?

His answer: the writer must move from "bourgeois space" to

"Marxist sphere"--the bourgeois accepts the world; the Marx­ ist moves into another dimension, which he begins to under- 12 stand when he realizes his very culture censors him. 97

The criticism and applause Yurick has applied to the works of others follow from these principles. What he most admires is a work that provides what he calls "a break­ through to undeistanding reality, and in his published critical articles and reviews, he explicitly compliments only Hubert. Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn and Melville's

M oby Hick in such terms, though Nelson Algren's The Man w i t h the Go 1d en Arm is implicitly admitted to their com-

1 4 pany. Opposed to this Reality is what Yurick calls "en­ gineer reality," "the popularly accepted national conscious­ ness," what our rulers wish us to think of ourselves and our i In • story. , 15

If !iaJ l L fx *f to Brooklyn is the exemplar of the former, then Truman Capote's Jut Cold Blood is that of the latter.

Last Exi t ". . . is probably more important than any of

Joyce's works'1^' because its six "stories," seemingly in­ coherent and fragmented, full of apparently pointless vio­ lence and degradation, add up to "a coherent and shatter- 17 ing world-view," ". . . that there is a system and that fragmentation masks it, . . . that it makes no sense from the point of view of the oppressed, [and] . . . that most

1 ft are oppressed according to their station."

Now Jji Cold Blood is attacked precisely because it validates (or papers over the contradictions inherent in) engineer reality. Yurick is not content to point out that

Capote , by claiming the novelist's license one moment and the reporter's commitment to truth the next, can escape

the obligations and reap the rewards of both. He says that

the objectivity Capote and his admirers thus claim is

really only a device that permits him to write his own "mor

ality plav,"^ a play in which he transforms an act of

"obsession, almost sexual passion, bringing a release that was almost as intense as any orgasm or mystical experience, 20 into an act done "in cold blood." The middle class, ar­

gues Yurick, is threatened by the notion that violence is normal and to be expected; since its ideology "stresses personal volition, cause-effect, reason, logic, and histor-

icism,” it applauds Capote's depiction of the murders as 21 "unusual" and "aberrant." The intellectual correspondent of this middle-class ideology is, of course, the engineer reality created by historians writing history from the top.

The Charles Dickens of Bleak House and Hard Times

Yurick finds sentimental and counter-revolutionary, rather

than radical and e x p o s i n g . L i k e w i s e he finds the black humor of Joseph Heller's Cateh-22 defensive and passive.

Why talk and propose an absurdist Min- derbinder (though the name is exquisite­ ly apt) implying by style a hilarious levity--that Minderbinder is at best a laughable aberration. Minderbinder is the ruling classes at work. And there­ fore that humor is not only inaccurate but mi siead ing . *- :>

Or, as one of Yurick's most sympathetic admirers has written, "black humor is intellectualized blues. It's what 9 9

happens when the singer goes to college and remains a

slave. . . . The argument for revolt is slipped at the last 2 4 moment, and instead of shooting, someone laughs."

These scattered reviews and articles, written between

1965 and 1974, offer some hint of the nature of Yurick's

Marxist and revolutionary sensibility. Ib is not to be con­

fused with the Proletarian writers he admires; he spurns

what he calls "the social work philosophy of our time,"

and he is cynical about the possibilities of conventional 7 S political reform. And, as the examination of his novels will show, he is as much moralist as Marxist.

* A A *

In addition to his articles, reviews, and anthology of

hitherto unpublished Brooklyn authors--Voices of Brooklyn

(1975)--, Sol Yurick is the author of four novels--The War­ riors (196 5), Fertig (1966), The Bag (1968), and An Island

Death (1975)--and a volume of stories--Someone Just Like

You (1972). All five volumes share certain characteristics.

All are set in the sixties and early seventies, and all deal with New York and/or New Yorkers. Like many authors,

Yurick revives and reuses major characters; Minnie Devlin of The Warriors reappears in "The Annealing" (in Someone) and in The Bag; her sons (half-brothers) Hinton and Alonso, both introduced in The Warriors, play important roles in

The Bag. The same is true of Ismael Rivera. Roy Bleakie, inn

Irving Hockstaff, and Mahle Crossland, all of Fertig , arc

reintroduced in The Bag. Only An 1 s1 and Pea th stands apart

in this re spec t .

This linking greatly increases our sense of the con­ nectedness of the works, particularly of the first three.

The Warriors deals with the street gangs of New York, Fer- tig with the middle-class world of accountant-murderer

Harry Fertig and his manipulators in the legal, bureaucra­ tic, and commercial worlds he affects. Yurick intended The

Bag to deal with the workings of welfare, though in fact, as his comment in "The Politics of the Imagination" suggest, it became the closest of his books to something socially panoramic. Someone1s stories likewise deal with a cross- section of New Yorkers, mostly lower and middle class. An

Island Pea th's protagonist is a professor-administrator, on the point of achieving enormous power in the university, who suddenly falters because he loses confidence in the rightness of his actions. Welfare clients, gangs, lawyers, accountants, politicians, judges, social workers, and au­ thors- -through such figures Yurick anatomizes the New York of the sixties and seventies. For reasons both practical and literary, this discussion of Sol Yurick's fiction will focus on what might be called his trilogy of radicalism--

The Warriors, Fertig, and The Bag. They possess a coherence from which Someone and An Island Death stand apart. 101

D . B . G ra h a m, t he o n1y critic to have written exten­ sively about The Warriors, remarks that it is "a synthesis of classic naturalistic premises of determinism and reform.

What makes Yurick's synthesis particularly interesting,"

Graham tells us, "is its underlying revolutionary ideo- 9 ( logy." 0 Certainly it works with the materials commonly associated with naturalism. Set in New York in the middle sixties sometime after the assasination of John P. Kennedy, the novel is narrated in short chapters designated by the time of day (e.g., July 4th, 10:50-10:50 P.M.), and is told from several different points of view, with those of the

Coney Island Dominators and Hinton Devlin, Yurick's fifteen year old protagonist, predominating, essentially, the ac­ tion of the novel takes place between 5:50 P.M. July 4th and 6:00 A.M. July 5th. With representatives of hundreds of other gangs throughout the city, seven Dominators--Arnold,

Hector, Lunkface, Bimbo, Dewey, Hinton, and The Junior-- travel to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx for a secret mass meeting of gangs organized by Ismael Rivera, a revolution- ary-megalomaniac Puerto Rican who wants to organize all the gangs in the city. But before Ismael can do more than de­ liver his message, the distrustful gangs start fighting, and virtually all are taken in by the police. Now in the

Bronx, fifteen miles from home, the Dominators must return to Coney Island at the southern tip of Brooklyn, and, with some difficulty, they do. .1 0 2

A reviewer of The Warriors remarks that "this journey

allows one to see plainly what has not been evident before

these cane youths are not at odds with society: they move through society on trails cut between settlements. . . . Yurick has set up the prisms that allow one to judge them by their own [stan­ dards] . 2 !

Perhaps this is one of the most striking features of

the novel--the way a place we are accustomed to thinking of in a certain way, like New York, becomes strange and unfamiliar when viewed from another perspective. We think of New York as composed of five boroughs, located in a

state, governed by officials and politicians. We might think very little of driving from Van Cortlandt Park to

Coney Island in terms of either violence or politics. Yet to perceive the world as do these gang members we must re­ vise our notions. Consider the departure of the seven Dom­

inators from their neighborhood:

They reached the end of their turf and stopped. No one had lined it, like on school maps, and there were no visible border guards. The only sign of perman­ ent divisiveness was the usual scum of oily motor leakings, dirty paper, white crossing lines, but the frontier was there, good as any little newsreel guardhouse with a striped swinging gate. The eyes of the Colonial Lords were hard and hostile, even though they were al­ lowed free passage t o d a y . 28 i n 3

The imagery of fending clans and warring principal­

ities is used deliberately, and the impression thus created

is intensified in the passage that follows:

They crossed the street. The turf felt different; it was Other country. The sun shone brightly, it was as hot on this side as on theirs. But the dirt fallout in the air smelled different, choky. The people were the same as in their own land, but somehow not the same. (p. 24)

The turf they have just entered is that of the Co­

lonial Lords, a gang they have been fighting intermittently

for more or less the two years of their existence. They wish only to travel to the subway station, but since they want to do so in peace, they remove their gang insignia and engage in diplomatic rituals. Arnold and the First of

the Lords "gave each other cigarettes and lit them for each other." .Arnold "pulled out Ismael's printed invitation,

schedule, and through-pass and showed it to the First, who politely said that, man, he took Arnold's word." The nego­ tiations concluded, the Dominators pass.

They walked it cool, showing they were friendly, but as men do, cool always and fight-ready. It was six hard blocks to the station, in daylight exposed, not in force and not on a raid. (p. 26)

They arrive without incident, and board the north­ bound subway. 1 0 4

Thus far, much of this matter might have come out of

West Side Story. What is unique, as Graham observes, is

Yurick's conception of the origin and function of the gang

in the life of these adolescents.

When Arnold formed his Family . . . [Yurick tells us] he had two mottoes in mind. He had taken them from subway posters. One was "When family life stops, delinquency begins"; the other was, "Be a brother to him." If they were a fam­ ily, Arnold reasoned, then they couldn't be delinquents; so he became the Father to all of them. The second in command was the Uncle; the others became bro­ thers. They were closer to one another than to their families; t h i s family freed them. Where they happened to live with their parents was always The Pri­ son. Arnold's woman became the Mother, the other women in the inner circle were daughter-sisters . Members of the outer circle were cousins, nieces, and nephews. When they were taken into the Family, they all swore oaths of belong­ ing. (p. 2 1 ).

In the context of the Family, these boys (they are from fourteen to eighteen years old) are warriors and heroes, and they inhabit a world populated by Unfriendly warriors and Others, of whom they must be wary. But this world that gives them a sense of place and value is easily dispelled; when in Manhattan Hector, Bimbo, and Lunkface unpin to avoid recognition and arrest, they immediately sense that i ns

they had lost the identity of oneness and were almost like three squares, coolies, three men who no longer had the special power. They all felt uncom­ fortable, detached, somehow--naked, like any three who happened to know one another and be dressed alike. (pp. 145-146)

Not surprisingly, in the bungled rape incident that follows, they are arrested. Likewise, when early the next morning Hinton, a warrior who has proved his bravery and is full of pride at the Family's exploits, tries to tell his junkie half-brother Alonso of their adventures, Alonso replies:

"Jim, you been playing soldier. When will you learn? When are you going to stop that bopping and, you know, punk stuff?" And Hinton, as he had so many times, tried to tell Alonso about the Family and what it meant, and how they had gone through so much that night. But Alonso kept smiling that smile and nothing made any sense with that smile looking you in the face. "Jim, don't tell me that, you know, brother- shit. I have been through it all. Take, you know, advice. There is only one thing and that is the kick, the Now. Nothing else counts. Get yours. Get it because, you know, no one cares and they will always put you down in the end, Jim, and the only word that counts is, you know, Now. (p. 188)

Alonso and their (never-named) sister sleep together in one bed; Minnie (their mother) 's younger children sleep in another room; in the filthy kitchen the baby cries 1 0 6 neglected and hungry in its crib. Yurick completes the picture of this ghetto family in describing Minnie and

Norbert (her latest lover). As Hinton walks past their open room door, Norbert looks up and says, " 'Get out of here or I'll clout you,' but," Hinton thinks, "lie said that all the time anyway.

'Where you been? I been worried sick,' Minnie said and shrieked and frowmed and closed her eyes and moaned

(p. 187). As Graham says, "for all these youths family

2 0 life lias not stopped; it has never begun." ‘ The state schools them and maintains them in a culture where they learn that work, even if they could get it, is foolish and unnecessary, and that their wants will be supplied by welfare supplemented by hustling, and that their families' homes are so many cells in a prison. Suddenly we perceive that the Coney Island Dominators and their fellow warriors around the city are not the stupid, passive, and malicious-- they are the intelligent, spirited, and good.

Despite the pleasing picture of a social group in which boys learn to practice virtues, Yurick knows, what the boys themselves know, that they are doomed. So he adds to his story the person who understands this and, wanting to do something about it, provides the occasion for the story - - Ismael Rivera.

Ismael, Presidente of his own gang, the Delancey

Thrones, has the ambition to be more than a successful gang 10 7 leader, and the intelligence and vision to construct an ideology and a plan. He plans a gigantic operation, invol­ ving thousands all over the city, with signals called by the playing of records on a popular radio station. As the gang world is invisible to Other eyes, it is appropriate that the Youth Board worker assigned to watch the Thrones should think to himself, even as the operation begins, that he "had channeled Ismael's ego drives into socially accept­ able [i.e., middle class] patterns," "a job, books, a fu­ ture" (p. 19). In fact, the drift of Ismael's thought is made clear in an incident that precedes the mass meeting.

As his car passes a large house in an affluent neighborhood, one of his Thrones says, " 'Man. . . .that's the way I want to live. I want one of them.' " Speaking for Ismael, ano­ ther, who has learned his lessons better, replies, " ' You should want to throw rocks at it' " (p. 34). At his meeting,

Ismael presents his case thus:

What was to be done, Ismael asked, and waved his palm-down hand over the great area of darkness. Brotherhood, he said. . . . And be­ fore he heard the protesting murmurs, he told them, "Now we're all brothers, I don't care what you say. They make us think we're all different so we rumble in colored gangs, white gangs, Puerto Rican gangs, Polish gangs, Irish gangs, Italian gangs, Mau-Mau gangs, and Nazi gangs. But the iron fist breaks all our heads in the station house the same, and when that judge, he looks down on us and says Youth House, reformatory, or .10 8

Rikcr's Islam.., or the Pen, he is treat­ ing us the same; they treat us like we, one and all, had the same mother, and they fuck our mother, and that's what makes us brothers." (p. 47)

Ismael's plan, to run the city with the hundred thousand gang members, joins class consciousness to mili­ tary and terrorist action. But racial and ethnic rivalries prove stronger than the uniting force of a common enemy, and the meeting breaks up into a confused melee. Ismael is shot, and most of the others are rounded up by the police. If the revolution has failed for the moment, what happens to the Dominators?

When the return home of the Dominators is considered, the deliberate parallels to Xenophon's Anabasis become both apparent and relevant. The novel is prefaced by two quo­ tations from Anabasis. And the Dominators generally are called warriors, except, significantly, when they unpin the second time. The crossing of a hostile and politically divided land, the unlucky lot of the Greeks who survived the Battle of Cunaxa, is also the lot of the now-Fatherless

(for Arnold has been taken prisoner) Dominators.

The Junior carries a classic comic book of Anabasi s, which he reads repeatedly because he finds it so exciting.

He thinks, at one point, that "the heroes were . . . the hardest men in the world, admirable but . . . he wouldn't like to be in their place, even though he envied their 1 0 9 adventures" (p. 122]. The irony (as Graham observes) is that the Dominators have been heroic themselves. Yurick also has his surviving Dominators, like Xenophon's Greeks, shout for joy upon arriving at the ocean. The effect of this deliberate parallel is to invest the journey home of these boys with an element of the heroism and sense of danger that Anaba s i s itself possesses.

Huddled in a cemetery in the Bronx, superstitious and afraid, surrounded by enemies, with the fireworks of Fourth of July celebrations exploding all around them, the Domin- tors elect Hector Father and Bimbo Uncle, to the disgust of Lunkfacc, who is too stupid to lead but too strong to be ignored. As Arnold had feared, Lunkface will later tear the gang apart, but now the sense of danger suppresses in­ ternal hostilities. They board the subway, and even with

The Junior's bad directions, it seems as if they will have an uneventful ride to Times Square and home. The cars are full of stuporous riders, people Hinton recognizes as com­ pulsive bettors, back from Yonkers Raceway. But a con­ struction detour and some confusion causes them to miss the transfer bus to the next stop. Instead, still in the Bronx, they are spotted by the warriors of a Puerto Rican gang.

The events that follow demonstrate both Yurick's aware­ ness of the importance of rituals and the closeness of vio­ lence and sex. Hector negotiates passage with the leader of the gang, who, once his dignity is assuaged, is willing 1.1 0

to let them pass in peace. But the spirited girl with him, of whom Hector thinks at once that "he recognized the old trouble-making look: a bitch"(p. 91), shames him into de­ manding that the Dominators unpin while in his territory.

When they refuse, he follows them at a distance on their slow walk to the next station. The Dominators ambush him, sending him back, hut taking the girl with them. Near the station, they are challenged by a strong-looking man, whom, in a scene of unparalleled violence, they stomp, slash, and kill, all the while egged on by the girl, who is excited orgiastically by the scene. Pillowing her head on the body, each rapes her.

Thereafter, they board the subway, amusing themselves and terrifying other passengers with various contests. Only a few stops from 42nd Street and safety, they incautiously excite the attention of a transit policeman, whose chase causes them to split up and run. Hector, Bimbo, and Lunk- face enter the street level; Lunkface's refusal to wear his pin causes the others to remove theirs, with consequen­ ces already mentioned. The Junior and Dewey catch a local train to 42nd Street, where they wait, still pinned, for the rest of the Family. Hinton, all the while developing from undependable kid to real warrior, runs into the north­ bound tunnel and walks to the next stop. In the tunnel, he imagines enemies all around him, and thinks of unpinning.

But he conquers his fears, realizing that "what he had just 1 1 1

done terrified him, because it so completely cut him off,

and though they couldn't see it, it was as though the family

would know what he had done, and he would be out, but good”

(p. 157J .

Yurick tells us that Hinton

was ashamed of himself. He had gone through . something lie didn't understand. . . . He asked himself how many of the others could do what he had done-- walk through that darkness alone. The answer didn't comfort him. (p. 157)

But it should have, for it prepares him to complete the

process by which he proves himself.

The several levels of train and subway tracks at 42nd

Street form, in effect, a multi-level arcade. So many

transportation arteries intersect here that shops and

amusement areas flourish. This set-piece, ready-made

symbol, developed in a manner almost Hawthornian (1 am

thinking of the opening chapters of The Scarlet Letter) ,

is used by Yurick to suggest a paradigm of America. Hinton

buys quantities of junk food, but it leaves him hungry.

Homosexuals approach him. A men's room on a lower level is

a brothel; for three dollars Hinton walks into a stall and has sex with a teenage prostitute dressed only in sneakers.

"Cops patrolled," Hinton notices, "club-swinging, always on the alert, but prepared to see only what was not paid

for" (p. 165). 112

No Family having arrived (Hinton reaches Times Square first), Hinton is drawn to an amusement section, where he hazards his money and pride at "TRY YOUR LUCK WITH THE FAST­

EST DRAW IN THE WEST--ONLY lue" (p. lt>8). Twice the mechan­ ical sheriff--of El Dorado--beats him in rounds of three draws. The third time,

wounded Hinton, bruised Hinton, tired a and drifting Hinton, Hinton the outcast, set himself against the town and its sheriff. He fought for his Family; he fought for his pin; he fought for him­ self. While the sheriff was sounding him and boasting and making his rep big-- hadn't he put down a thousand pitiful out 1aws--Hinton drew his guns and cocked them. And when the word came, lie fired just a fraction of a second ahead of the sheriff.

Hinton wins. He "felt new now--like a man. He had faced up to and beaten the sheriff" (pp. 172-173). Re­ freshed, he looks for the Family. Upon meeting The Junior and Dewey, he takes command.

He gave them the order feeling good now, feeling strong, and they took his com­ mand because that took the responsibili­ ty away from them. They sensed his new strength now and they were under him now, even though Dewey was Hinton's older brother, (p. 174)

Upon arriving home, they raid the housing project of the Colonial Lords, challenging and cursing at the dark and silent buildings. When no one answers, they leave the 1 1 3

Family mark as a sign of their presence. Though at the

ocean, The Junior and Dewey acknowledge Hinton to be their

Father, at headquarters they discover Arnold has been re­

leased by the police and has returned."At least," Hinton

thinks ,

now he had won his rep, and now they knew him to be a man who could lead, even if he did not always choose to fight--certainly not for the leader­ ship of the Family. For hadn't he brought the remnant home? It would be enough to be a big man of the turf and get, perhaps, an Uncleship. (p. 187)

Exhausted by his adventures and discouraged by Alonso,

at home Hinton crawls out on the fire escape, "lay down on

his side, his head on his rumpled hat, and curled up there,

staring, his thumb in his mouth, till he fell asleep"

(p. 189). For all that has happened to him, Hinton is still

a boy .

Graham remarks that The Warriors is "a dialectical

reply" to other treatments of adolescent gang life . ^ As an example of what he calls "the standard liberal view" of gangs, Graham cites Irving Shulman's The Amboy Dukes (1947).

In this view, Graham goes on to explain, "gangs are socio­

logical deviations, destructive alternatives for youths dissatisfied for many reasons with home, family, and the restrictive, hypocritical values of their communities."3'*'

Thus the gang, like Studs Lonigan's Bunch (to cite another 114 of Graham's examples) is the agent that destroys youth by leading them down the wrong path.

As the account of the novel suggests, Graham demon­ strates that Yurick's account of the origin of gang atti­ tudes emphasises lower class envy of middle class property and respectability. That Graham is right in this statement is confirmee] by reading Yuric.k's discussion of Last Lxi t to

Brooklyn and his New York Times article about Park Slope.

As we have seen, the warriors are not destroyed by gang life; they arc ennobled by it. They desire the stuff of re­ spectability; only Ismael, who believes that ownership and employment are merely traps the power structure holds out to eliminate the danger of revolution on the part of the discontented, preaches the necessity of revolution. That

Ismael's attempt at revolution fails, Yurick tells us, proves only the inadequacy of its means, not the dubiety of its origin. Assigning social workers to watch gangs and using the police to break them up attacks only the symptoms of social decay, not the disease itself. This novel suggests that the origin of adolescent gangs is to be found in the structure of capitalist society, and that their elimination requires more than cosmetic change. The story of an attempt to make just such a change, and the history of its failure, is the subject of The Bag.

***** 1 1 s

If T r r I or s ’ s a dialectical reply to novels

embodying conventional views of adolescent gangs, then per-

haps Fertig exists in the relationship to works embodying

conventional views ol crime and punishment, e.g., I_n Cold

Blood, which Yurick reviewed about the same time Fertig was published. As we have seen, Yurick's ideological ob­

jection to I_n Cold B.1 ood was that its view of the murders

(and murderers) as passionless and aberrant validates

(falsely) middle class views of violence. It is with some

surprise, then, that we turn to Fertig and discover it to

be the story of a man--the apotheosis of the middle class, a Jewish accountant from Brooklyn--who docs murder seven people in cold blood, and of the successful attempt by the organs of society to turn his act into mere insanity and him into a madman.

Yurick seems to want to have it both wavs; he attacks

Capote for presenting murders as passionless, and then him­ self writes a novel attacking society for deliberately and falsely making a succession of carefully planned murders into insanity. As will be shown later, one of the marks of this inconsistency is the unreality of Fertig himself.

The opening pages of Chapter One are intensely domes­ tic; Harry and Sara Fertig sit contentedly in the living room of their Brooklyn home in the evening. Yurick tells us : 116

Fertig sighed. He looked at Sara half- Iving on the conch. She was serene. . . . The past three years had brought her a long way; all the harshness of her striving to maintain what she thought she had been before they were married, thirteen years ago, was al­ most gone from her face; in a few years it would be perfect. Stevie did that, he thought. And if this happened to her, what had happened to him, he wondered. Nothing, Fertig thought; but he felt warm and relaxed and all the tense lit­ tle aches he used to have were gone.^2

This domesticity is at first ruffled, then temporarily interrupted, and finally completely shattered by the loud crying of Stevie. When, disregarding Doctor Spock, they re­ spond to his crying, they discover that he is fevered.

Their pediatrician, disgusted at their panic (and their calling at night) prescribes aspirin, and after a time

Stevie cools and sleeps. Not long thereafter, Stevie cries again, and his condition alarms them so much that they call an ambulance. When the hospital refuses to send one (" 'They couldn't go sending ambulances for everyone who thinks they're sick.' " [p. 7]), they take a taxi to the Emergency

Room of Mercy Memorial Hospital.

There they are made to wait by a ward clerk frustrated with her job, and, when Stevie is finally examined by a doctor, a young man more interested in hustling the nurses than in treating the patients, they are patronizingly as­ sured that he is healthy. Fertig begs anyway that Stevie be admitted to the hospital, but he is refused. Thoroughly 117 panicked, they rush off to another hospital, but Stevie dies en route in Fertig's arms.

A year later, in the course of a single day, seven people, each in some way connected with Mercy Hospital, are murdered. They range from the humble to the powerful, and

include a cancer specialist, Mercy's administrator, the young resident who pronounced Stevie healthy, an influent­ ial rabbi, a retired surgeon, and the nurse and ward clerk in the Emergency Room the night of Stevie's death. Panic sweeps the hospital, and though the police immediately un­ derstand that _it_ is the target of the killer because all the victims had some connection with it, nothing, apart from two descriptions and the contrast of six coolly and one savagely executed murder, offers any clue as to the murderer's identity.

"It took the police six weeks to catch Fertig," Yurick tells us. "Not that he ran away; he waited" (p. 24). Be­ cause Fertig waits to be caught and because Yurick ex­ plains that, in the process of checking out everyone who might bear a grudge against Mercy, the police would eventu­ ally find him, we soon perceive that the focus of this novel is not primarily the solution of a crime. Nor is it to a very great extent the examination of motive and a state of mind, though Fertig's motive is central to the theme of the novel. Yurick is primarily interested in soci­ ety's response to the crimes. 1 1 8

While awaiting detection, Fertig is explored, however;

his recovery from a year of depression immediately follows

the murders, and he and Sara begin to be social again. Yur­

ick says of Fertig in this period that

the daydream grew. He would be standing in an auditorium. He could see himself talking: at his side, a judge, stern yet benevolent, sat. He was telling them why he had to do it, talking about the evil in the world, the evil that had killed his son. He would talk about his feelings, the need, the ache to balance things, . . . the pain, that awful pain he suf­ fered as he came--he grew-- to The Deci­ sion. Friends would be m the audience, strangers he overheard discussing The Crime, people he had never seen. . . the world. . . even the murdered, some­ how resurrected, would be there. They filled an arena, and sat in balcony tiers that rose and receded till they disappeared into darkness. Fach time he daydreamed it, it became clearer; his thoughts were more wonderfully organ­ ized. Of course he was no orator so he would have to speak softly, calmly, let­ ting truth generate power, as it had invested him before with the strength to act. He made his account to the world. (pp. 26 - 27)

In tiie sixth week following the murders, Fertig is taken in for questioning. Donnell, one of the two detect­ ives to come for him, instinctively knows that Fertig is the killer. They try to ferret a confession out of him by ruse, but since Fertig's idea demands his capture and trial, he volunteers his confession quickly. He is prob­ ably the only figure in literature who expresses a 11 9 profound moral principle in the language of accounting.

" 'You see, killing balanced it [Stevie's death] out, and my being caught closes the account.'

'Jesus. You got even with interest,' Martin said.

'No. It was almost a perfect equity,' " Fertig replies without irony (p. 42).

Tn a few hours, Fertig has been booked and sent to prison .

The hypothesis Roy Blcakie poses to Dr. Heisenberg--

" 'Supposing lie's not insane. Supposing he's found out what he'd never imagined, that everything was corrupt' "

(p. 272)--is an exact statement of the case. Bleakie, upon being retained by Fertig's old boss Jack Grenoble (who wishes his involvement to remain a secret) to defend the muidercr, discovers in Fertig's home a notebook in which findings, plans, schedules, and reactions were jotted down for a year. The contents of the notebook confirm Donnell's belief that Fertig acted coolly and carefully. He chose early to kill the resident, nurse, and ward clerk, and added the others gradually as he reasoned out who was re­ sponsible, among all the people involved with Mercy Memor­ ial Hospital, for his son's death. Dr. Cartwright, cancer specialist and hospital board member, joins the list after

Fertig, on an office visit for examination of some faked cancer symptoms, becomes impatient at being left alone in an examining chamber and goes through a door, only to 1 2 0

discover the doctor doing what Roy Rleakic later calls

"tearing off a piece" (p. 273) with his nurse. Rabbi Gordon,

to whom Fertig had gone for spiritual guidance, revealed

himself in an unguarded moment to be a consummate actor,

a short-tempered hypocrite, and a homosexual.

Even Grenoble (though unbeknownst to him) was on Fer­

tig 's list twice, and was removed twice. As his accountant,

Fertig had discovered that he, Gordon, and Blumenthal (the hospital administrator) were involved in a huge scheme to profit from the enlargement of the Mercy.

Now the loss of innocence is not exactly a neglected theme in American literature; one thinks (to give only one of many examples) of Young Goodman Brown, whose evening in the dark forest reveals to him the evil of all he had thought good. Brown, as readers of Hawthorne know, chooses to solve the problem of evil in the world and in men by shunning it and regarding them with suspicion, and by this choice Brown demonstrates the essential viciousness and moral inadequacy of New England Calvinism. Stevie's death and the events that follow it--the swift destruction of

Fertig's safe and happy world in Chapter One is a dramatic example of this process --give Fertig the same suddenly re­ vealing vision of what the world is really like. But since, to paraphrase Melville (in "Hawthorne and His Mosses"), Fer­ tig has nothing like Original Sin to strike the uneven bal­ ance, his response is aggressive; in the absence of a God 121 who will do so, Fertig chooses to assign responsibilities and levy penalties. But he recognizes that killing will make him guilty, so he wants to be caught, tried, and pun­ ished (forcing society to acknowledge his sanity) rather

than incarcerated in the Institute for the Criminally In­ sane (rendering his act meaningless.

At his second sanity hearing, Fertig i_^ given the opportunity to explain himself. But the judge at his side is not a man stern and benevolent, but Judge Mable Cross­ land, who explains to him that " 'the court acts a a parent in the interests of the child' " (p. 358). And though many spectators (though not the murdered) do sit in the audience, and though Fertig explains himself completely (he beams with satisfaction at the conclusion of his testimony), he is by pre-arrangement declared insane and sent to the Insti­ tute anyway. Fertig's real innocence is revealed by his be­ lief that the truth would "generate power"; what he has done and why he has done it are simply ignored, as if he were indeed a child. The bulk of the novel is an examina­ tion of the unfolding of this process.

What Yurick shows us most successfully is how Fertig's case is merely a battleground for conflicting social forces.

After his confinement to the psychiatric ward of City Hos­ pital, Fertig is interviewed and tested extensively by Dr.

Heisenberg, a psychiatrist who believes all criminals to be ill, and who devotes much time and effort to finding ] 2 2 evidence of illness in Fertig. Like many determined seek­ ers, he finds what he wishes to. Dr. Heisenberg doesn't care about Fertig as a person at all; he is absorbed in professional wariarc with "the psychiatric right wing"

(p. 276). Significantly, Dr. Heisenberg dislikes Fertig until he can categorize him: ". . . compulsion paranoia delusion grandeur protest savior . . . GOD! And lie loved the poor, low, wretched Fertig"(p. 126).

Heisenberg's enemy is Dr. Bridgeman, the psychiatrist retained by the prosecution, who wishes merely to ascer­ tain whether Fertig knew what he was doing at the time of the killings and whether he understood it to be "wrong."

He requires no more than fifteen minutes to satisfy him­ self that Fertig did so know and understand. As Bridgeman prepares to leave, Fertig asks him,

" 'But don't you want to hear what happened after

Stevie's . . . . '

'Some other time. Soon. I must go now.' He left"

(p. 178). Bridgeman cares no more for Fertig than Heisen­ berg .

Those lined up with Heisenberg to declare Fertig in­ sane are his lawyer, Roy Bleakie, and Judge Mable Cross­ land. Dr. Bridgeman is seconded by MacGruder (the prose­ cutor) and Judge Jeffries. Yurick shows clearly, however, that there is no, so to speak, teamwork, on either side. 125

MacGruder wants to convict Fertig because he dislikes

Bleakie and wants to be District Attorney. Bleakie, from whose point of view a good deal of the novel is told, is more ambitious and more complex. At first, he has no great interest in the case, but Grenoble's money and the panic he hears in his voice make him take it. Bleakie's interest in law is primarily "the fight against the Opponent"

(p. 92). Himself the son of a judge, he also wants to be­ come District Attorney; readers of The Bag know he becomes a Senator.

Bleakie thinks of Fertig as dull and bourgeois, but his self-conscious masculinity makes him simultaneously resent and admire him. "He could almost feel sympathy for

Fertig," Yurick tells us.

He could admire what Fertig had done-- pit himself against the world--if it weren't for the madness that had driven him. Bleakie had no use for the irra­ tional, for the compulsive, had con­ tempt for those who couldn't control. Of course, if the act had been attended by logic, neatness of thinking, bril­ liant and patient planning, efficiency of execution, as Fertig claimed-- that one could admire. (p. 91)

The presence of these qualities Bleakie confirms when he finds Fertig's notebook. But because he wants the Fertig case to benefit himself and not his client, he suppresses it after thoroughly studying it. ] 2 4

Another side of Bleakie's feelings toward Fertig is revealed by his seduction of Sara Fertig. Sara does not initially understand that Bleakie's interest in her is, so to speak, nothing personal--Fertig alone is on his mind.

When she discovers that for him sex is nothing more than ego-gratification, she loses interest.

Ultimately, Bleakie attempts to maneuver too cleverly.

The first sanity hearing is to be held in the court of

Judge Jeffries, an elderly man with definite ideas about

Law, Justice, Good, and Evil. Jeffries tells Bleakie and

MacGrudcr beforehand that he considers Fertig sane and will remand him to City Prison, but Bleakie intentionally pro­ vokes him into losing his temper in open court, laying the groundwork for a second hearing on the basis of prejudice and hasty judgement. Now confident, he leaves the country for several weeks.

When he returns, he discovers that Heisenberg may prove

Fertig mad unaided--ho help to his ambitions - - so he engin­ eers Fertig1s return to the psychiatric ward by having a columnist threaten the Prison Commissioner with an expose of conditions. Now he has goaded MacGruder and pushed around the Commissioner, and Mable Crossland wants to be

District Attorney, so he must accept (as a consolation prize) the judgeship offered by political broker Irving

Hockstaff; Fertig, as we have seen, gets another sanity hearing, but this time before Judge Crossland, who believes 12 5 criminal? to be misguided children and the police to be iniquitous bullies. Bleakie, who prides himself on his control, is only a spectator as Fertig tells his story, and for a moment lie believes that Fertig may get his trial and cost him his reputation. But the pre-arrangement saves him.

What is telling about many of Yurick's figures is how instantly recognizable they arc; not recognizable in the way of Oates' strange beings, whom we come gradually to sec as original creations, but recognizable because they are stereotypes. Fxamples of these stereotypes are

Donnell and Martin, the detectives, Grinzing and Morgan, liberal and conservative columnists respectively, and the host of figures in the psychiatric ward (The Religious

Killer, The Latino Junkie) and the City Prison (The Habit­ ual Killer, The Terrified Middle-Class Citizen Thrown In

Jail For A Parking Ticket). On the other hand, Yurick's ideas about social structure are conveyed very clearly; if his characterization lacks the imaginativeness of Oates', she certainly lacks his ability to depict convincingly a vast and interlocking social organism.

This novel invites comparison with two of its prede-- cessors, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Richard

Wright's Native Son. Like Dreiser and Wright, Yurick uses crime and punishment to reveal the nature of the system of justice. All three novels detail the workings of interest 1 2 ft and pressure groups on the supposedly impartial trial process. In its command of detail of time, place, speech, and persons, Fertig is equal if not superior to its fore­ runners. One need only think of Dreiser's poor ear for dialect and Wright's cardboard Communists and rabble- rousers, and compare them to Yurick's carefully observed figures and milieu.

Yet, as a whole, Fer t i g is less successful than the others, and this is so largely because of the unreality of the protagonist. Clyde Griffiths is so exhaustively por­ trayed that we understand and accept him completely. His religious upbringing, his indifference to his parents' values, the poverty of his imagination, his vague ambitions, his amiable amorality, all arc of a piece. Likewise, Bigger

Thomas is the vital center of a novel whose secondary figures are often clumsy and propagandistic stereotypes. Hi

His ignorance, his ambitions, his simultaneous fear of and admiration for the white world, his reluctance to disturb social conventions that he nevertheless resents intensely, and his lurking violence are a complete portrait of the figure he represents, and contemporary history has proven how accurate Wright was in portraying Bigger as being psy­ chologically liberated by killing.

Dreiser, working from an actual case, succeeds in cre­ ating both a protagonist and a world that are convincing.

Wright, beginning with figure of Bigger, produces a 127 convincing protagonist, but is more propagandistic the further he gets from Bigger. Yurick, one feels, has begun with a situation, and then created the figures to fit into it. His verisimilitude is unimpeachable. But his protagon­ ist must serve too many purposes to be convincing. He must be so loving, careful, prudent, and rational that he can be driven to plan seven murders over the course of a year, and he must possess such a strong sense of justice and morality that he will wait to be caught so he can explain to the world his deed, after which he will demand his puni shment .

And since the novel deals with the means by which so­ ciety conspires to avoid moral responsibility, all of the explanations of fertig's conduct offered in the text must be suspect. Heisenberg and Bridgeman fight professional wars, MacGrudcr and Bleakie are interested only in their careers, and Judges Crossland and Jeffries represent con­ flicting judicial philosophies. Fertig functions as a kind of litmus paper, who, by the very way in which he is re­ sponded to, demonstrates the moral bankruptcy of his so­ ciety.

*****

Though The Warriors and Fertig received a sprinkling of reviews, they were not the work of a prominent author.

The Bag did for Yurick something like what them did for 128

Joyce Caro] Oates; the novel was noticed at length in pub­

lications ranging from Rairtpar t s to the Na tiona 1 Ohs erver to the New York Times. As might be expected, those who shared

Yurick's political attitudes (e.g., Carl Oglesby) applauded the novel's vigorous attempt to "deal with the immediate, pressing reality of America's psychosocial ruptures, while those whose critical standards were more traditionally literary than social (e.g., R. M. Elman in the New York 34 Times) found it mere "Zeitgeist literature."

The scale of the novel is considerably more ambitious than that of either of its predecessors. The worlds of the other two are incorporated into that of The Bag; even though, as Yurick has said, the work began as an attempt to describe how welfare works, something that at least pro­ mised limitation, he found that everything interfused with everything else, so all was included.

In its multiple plot construction, The Bag is almost

Victorian. The events surrounding a welfare worker and professional writer named Sam Miller provide one major plot. Minnie Devlin is the center of the second. A third is built around Hinton Devlin, now a successful artist in his twenties. A fourth concerns Meyer Faust, a slumlord- visionary. A fifth deals with the Commune Brotherhood, a group of young community-action radicals. At appropriate moments, figures like Roy Bleakie (who has metamorphosed from F. Lee Bailey into Robert Kennedy) and Ismael Rivera ] 2 ^

reappear. The several plots interlock throughout the novel,

and the whole is concluded by one of the great riots of con temporary 1i terature .

Carl Oglesby writes that

tlie title of the book, precisely, is also the name of the book's agonist: the ideal of fixed, continuing, serviceable social relations. The action of the book: the dismemberment of that idea in contemporary America. The writer cannot write, the painter cannot paint, the governed cannot be governed, the ruler cannot rule. Violently assaulted with the existential fact of their inadequa­ cies and frauds, men's bags burst. . . . The one bag which is left at the end-- more accurately, the one which emerges, not pieced together out of the ruins, but on the contrary precisely that tor­ rent of ruination itself--is revolution. Rut not revolution as we know it from conceptual meditation on the past. This new, rough and most American so­ cial realism becomes disfigured but is perhaps also made more chaste by its passage through Freud, Stalin, and Sartre. Its most acute perception, a despairing one, is of the immense un- creating power of its mQdern enemy, the bewildered technostate . ^

Of all the commentators on The Bag, Oglesby, because he himself is so attuned to revolutionary rhetoric, is the most acute. Yet the very' ease with which one can validate his observations by contemplating the novel and the stereo- typicality of its characters-- The Jewish Writer, The Black

Artist, The Ambitious Senator, The Cynical Jewish Slumlord

(himself victimized by the Nazis in Poland), The Young 130

Ex-Student Radical (and this by no means exhausts the

1ist)--suggest that here, as in Fertig, Yurick has begun with the depiction of the social organism, and let it

shape his characterization.

The novel opens with one of Yurick's best set-piece chapters, as dramatic as that which opens Fertig, or that

in which Hinton's wait at 42nd Street is narrated in The

Warr1ors. Much of it is narrated from the point of view of

Sam Miller. Miller had submitted An Island Death (this is only one of many autobiographical details Yurick has in­ cluded in Sam Miller's characterization) to his publisher, and, when he was told that the book was magnificent and a sure-fire best-seller as well, taken it back and refused to permit its publication. The shock of realizing that he had

"sold out" and written "a piece of shit" on the one hand, and on the other, that his refusal to publish had meant had meant that he would continue to live supported by his wife, drives him to cease writing and move out of the house, sup­ porting himself by working as a caseworker for the Welfare

Department.^

The Welfare Center is half an old armory in Manhattan, and Yurick carefully describes its opening on a typical business day. The chapter suggests the routine and atmo­ sphere of the place, its cynical, idealistic, dedicated and time-serving workers, and its needy and cadging clients.

Gradually our attention is directed to Miller, who is 1 51

working through the necessary red tape to help his clients,

and to Minnie Devi in --ca1led initially "the ADC"--who,

with her children, has come to the Center because she has

been evicted from her apartment for non-payment of rent.

Now Minnie is both needy and cadging. She lacks either

the motive or the discipline to stick to the budgets a

succession of caseworkers have made up for her, and she is perpetually swindled and left pregnant by the succession of men who make love to her and/or beat her at Check Time,

and, when she is asleep or unconscious, make off with her relief check. After her money is gone, she cannot pay the

rent, so periodically she is evicted, and after she is e- victed she returns to the Center to get more money and a new apartment. Minnie is a volatile woman wdiose only plea­ sures are sex and drink, so when in the bureaucratic con­ fusion she is made to wait most of the w'orking day, she becomes progressively more sullen and angry.

Miller interviews her and, his weariness and ill- hidden contempt striking her sullen resentment, she has a violent psychotic episode and must be taken away. Miller himself is both aroused and disgusted by the violence; in desperation he calls his literary agent and begs for a writing assignment.

Considered by itself, except for the concluding inci­ dent, Chapter One alone seems to explain how welfare works; the client is maintained at a level so low' that though he i :s2

never starve?, he never rises above dependent poverty, and

the welfare worker is caught uneasily between his liberal

values and his perception of the helplessness and unself­

helping passivity of his clients. Periodically an explo­

sion occurs, but affairs quickly revert to their normal

state, and the problem remains: how is the welfare system

to be turned from a swam]'* into a springboard? Yurick's

novel chronicles a major attempt to deal with that prob­

lem, and the consequences of that attempt.

To write as lie does of the book trade in New York,

Yurick must have had some frustrating experiences with the

publishing industry. In Chapter Three, he suggests another

cause of the state of the welfare system--the inconsisten­

cies of contemporary liberalism. Miller and his agent have

planned a series of "fact-pieces" about welfare, and in the

exclusive restaurant where the chapter takes place they meet with publisher Prank Enshel to convince him to take an

article, perhaps the whole series. What passes between Mil­

ler and Enshel--spoken and unspoken--is used by Yurick as

a kind of dialogue between revolutionary writer and liberal publisher.

"Well, when Victor told me about this Welfare Department and poverty thing . . . I thought, oh, no, not again. Slum­ lords, gouging credit people, high- priced food in blighted areas, holes in the plaster and rats in the wall. . . . it's all been said . . . again and again and again . . . I want something different." 15 3

Miller explains in response to Enshel's statement

that he believes the relationship of worker to client to

be more complex than the popular image of heartless bureau­

crat slowly and reluctantly doling out support to needy

client; the paperwork, he suggests, " 'constitutes a field

of truce and . . .brotherhood between the client and the

worker who are representatives of two different cultures.' "

Enshel replies:

"You have wonderful ideas, but they're a little far out. I think that treating the welfare bureaucracy and the bureau­ crats this way is a splendid and origi­ nal idea, but it will be a little over the heads of our readership. After all, the people, the clients themselves, their dramas, their worries, their re­ actions under d r amat i c tension, that's the thing our readership can understand and identify with."

Clearly Enshel wants nothing original at all, only the

tried and true. As if to validate this perception, Miller

asks him who is the villain, and he replies, " 'Mr. All-

American bureaucrat.' "

"Hadn't he heard anything," Miller thinks. " ' I mean,

look into yourself, your assumptions. Everyone is beating

the drum: the client is doing it to himself . . . we might

look at it that way' " (pp. 85-90). Miller already suspects

that Enshel wants something titillating and dramatic, but nothing that smacks of radicalism. It is no coincidence,

that of all novelists, Enshel admires Dickens the most. i :v i

This emerging picture of how welfare works and who is

responsible for maintaining it in its defective state is

given another dimension by the introduction of Hinton Dev­

lin and his wife Elaine. While still in his teens, Hinton had been taken from Minnie and put into a succession of

foster homes and finally the "Youth Bin" of the City Hos­ pital psychiatric ward; there, Matthew, Elaine's father, a psychiatrist, had recognized his talents and brought him home. Matthew and his wife, as Elaine says, possessed a strong element of "that old middle-class liberal shit," but their daughter is one of Yurick's most prominent sym­ bols of white liberalism gone mad (p. 48). They raise Hin­ ton as a son, and in an environment without the hostility and instability he has lived with all his life, he ceases to think of himself as merely "black," and begins to think of himself as a "man," all the while developing his artis­ tic talent .

Unfortunately, Elaine admires--and desires--in Hinton exactly what he loses every moment he spends in their house­ hold. Rebellion against her parents and white guilt drive

Elaine to experimenting with drugs, to seducing Hinton and arranging to be caught, to marrying Hinton and cutting her­ self off from her parents, even to cultivating what she thinks are the speech and attitudes of the ghetto. Consider her outburst to him in the chapter in which they are intro­ duced : 1 3 5

"He [Matthew] made you a handkerchief- head. Who arc you? You don't even talk right . . . you're ashamed of your her­ itage . . . Oh," she moaned, "and the only thing that will rescue me is when you reach deep and touch that black in me . . . an old ancestor, a thousand years ago, was an African king: oh lover, loose the black from this white prison and I will suck out the white infection in you, baby. Till then I'm like a sis­ ter to you, baby, a sister." [p. 52)

That Hinton is only a club with which Elaine beats her

parents (and white society) is hardly to be missed; what is

less obvious is that she interferes successfully with his

creative life, and Hinton finds that to work he must keep

hours almost directly the opposite of hers, while to pla­

cate her he resort to the now put-on speech of his ghetto

days. Though he knows how romantic and superficial her understanding of ghetto life is--and the idea of blue­

eyed, blond-haired, Germanic Elaine claiming to be part- black is only one of her more harmless illusions--, he is unable to make her see past them. The proof of this is

Elaine's reaction to Alonso when they are visited by him.

Though temporarily off drugs, Alonso is essentially unchanged from The Warriors. Hinton at first fails to re­ cognize him, and when he does, he remains wary and hostile.

Elaine is fascinated by him and responds to him immediate­ ly, for he is all that Hinton no longer is--for that matter, he is all that Hinton never was. Yet it is Hinton who re­ cognizes what he calls "the hopelessness of his brother's 156

life," though he believes he can do nothing for him (p. 70).

Elaine, the (literally) golden child of liberal parents, embraces eagerly the ruined and hideous product of ghetto

life, though paradoxically the hopelessness of his ruin is precisely the reason for her attachment, while Hinton, miraculously saved from that culture, rejects his brother and contemplates his art.

In Chapter Four, Yurick introduces Meyer Faust, a

55-ish Jewish slumlord. A Polish rabbinical student in

1939, Faust had been captured and sent to an extermination camp. He thinks, after his subsequent escape, of "how wil­ lingly he had gone then . . . like meat. Now they would have a fight on their hands, Faust would never go down to hell that easily any more" (p. 98). In his wanderings be­ tween his escape and the end of the war, Faust hardens both spiritually and physically; his wartime experiences teach him that he is alone in the universe, and that to survive he must struggle ceaselessly and take everything he can get.

These lessons fit him to be a successful capitalist, and now, a quarter of a century later, his wife estranged from him, having retreated into a world of genteel culture and women's clubs, and his daughter Clara a lesbian and a radical who opposes everything he stands for, he is still driven by dreams of gain--and just recently, glory. He wants to continue to acquire houses and rent them profit­ ably, he wants to buy housing in anticipation of the city's 137

urban renewal projects, and he wants to win the Sons of

Charity community service plaque. His success in the first

is unbroken, he has suffered a temporary defeat at the

hands of the Commune Brotherhood in the second, and to get

the third he periodically seeks the advice of Irving Hock-

staff.

Paust's rent collector is Ismael Rivera; he remains

radical, but his instrument, the gangs of The Warriors, has

been rendered useless by Youth Board workers, who, in break­

ing up the gangs, "had made a generation of junkies, a

generation of unreliables" (p. 112). With la i s collector's

income and the revenue from his heroin dealing, he schemes,

buys weapons and explosives, and waits for another revolu­

tionary opportunity.

In Chapter Six, the last plot is introduced. The Com­ mune Brotherhood, though it has beaten Paust once, has been

ejected from its old neighborhood and without its base is

falling apart. Drugs, non-violence, and other fashions melt

its student members away.

The lives of all these people are joined and Yurick's

theme is illustrated by the formation of a city Task Force

to deal with the so-called "Unreachable" clients--hard-core welfare recipients like Minnie Devlin--and the making avail­

able of twenty million dollars in OHO money to that person

or group who discovers how to deal with unreachables. 138

Yurick shows us, what he so well demonstrates in Fer­ tig, the negotiation, competition, and in-fighting char­ acteristic of the workings of bureaucracies and interest groups . Faust, inspired by Miller and the attractive social worker he and his daughter are competing for, proposes a

"Frommian cooperative. The medieval guild all over again.

. . . The pride of ownership," he believes, "would cure the unreachable" (p. 287). In his excitement over his idea, he becomes indifferent to even the Sons of Charity plaque.

His main antagonist is REBIRTH, a business-backed organiza­ tion that proposes changes that would make the community a captive labor market for corporations, but would have the side-effect of employing many people. The Welfare Depart­ ment wants only more money and a freer hand in dealing with its clients. Finally, the Commune Brotherhood distrusts all bureaucratic and commercial interests and emphasizes the importance of community control and united action.

Faust, realizing he lacks power, solicits the support of his late opponents, the Commune Brotherhood, and--obvi­ ously speaking directly for Yurick--convinces them that

REBIRTH'S plan will result in outside control and, intheir their terms, a kind of colonialism, while his will assure community control and autonomy. They agree to back him. But

Yurick the idealist is always followed closely by Yurick the cynic. Just as Faust is at the point of success, events occur which prove his old motto--"Show your head and they I 3 9 came down on you and left you stripped" (p. 104)--to have been correct.

REBIRTH'S backers, Roy Bleakie and other important political figures in the city, confront Faust at what is supposed to be a meeting of the awards committee of the

Sons of Charity. They hear his proposal and bluntly inform him that if he opposes REBIRTH, they will expose the minor corruption that has helped maintain his empire, break him financially, and send him to jail for violation of the landlord - tenant laws. If he plays along, he will receive the plaque and a piece of the twenty million dollars. His cynicism confirmed, Faust accepts.

The same pattern of idealism and substantive change stopped or perverted by a corrupt system is worked out on other levels. Miller's first submission to Enshel, one that hypothesizes a Mr. Alpha, a fictitious welfare recipient, and describes the steps he must go through to receive assis­ tance, is rejected by Enshel as being too abstract.

" 'Everything is there, Sam, but nothing is. It doesn't

1ive ' " (p. 214).

Miller then follows Enshel's implicit suggestion, and formally opens the case of Mr. Alpha, takes an apartment in the heart of the ghetto, and prepares to live the life of the client. From this time forward, Miller becomes Mr. Al ­ pha. One of Yurick's most effective devices is to estab­ lish in our minds the image of Sam Miller, the educated, 140

midd1e-c1 ass writer, and then to show him transforming

himself into Alpha, slum-dweller and stud. The chapter in

which these events, which include his establishment of a

sexual relationship with Minnie, his resignation from the

department for having done so, and the raping of his wife

when she seeks him out, are narrated is significantly the

only one in which Yurick uses a first-person narrator. In

his own voice, Miller tells of the events that follow his

departure from the Center; as he nears Minnie's apartment

he slips in both speech and narrative into the dialect of

the ghetto. At length, he finishes his article and sends

it again to Enshel.

Having found his first submission too dry, Enshel

finds the second too arrogant. " 'instead of detachment you have given me an intensely personal view . . . a bag of

tricks out of such writers as Selby, or William Burroughs; probing aberrant psychic sores rather than giving us the

facts' " (p. 388). Liberalism, Miller's fate seems to say, will not endure the facts of the matter in any form. As

Oglesby remarks, the writer cannot write.

Nor, it seems, can the artist create. Working to cre­ ate enough figures for his one-man show, Hinton is constant­

ly importuned by Elaine (now living with Alonso) to give them money. He refuses. When his Assassination Environment

is rejected by fifteen successive gallery owners, he rents 141 an East Village storefront to show there, but all his art is stolen just before his exhibit is to open.

These attempts at expression and amelioration failing,

Yurick shows us signs of other activities. Jimmy Hardison and Ismael Rivera, the ideologue and the anarchist, col­ laborate in buying arms, recruiting local revolutionaries, and broadcasting bulletins to the community from an illegal radio station. In one of their broadcasts they warn of

AGAPE, a Department of Defense spin-off of a think-tank counter-insurgency game. Anticipating unrest, the police department has hired AGAPEmen to help them contain it.

Yurick has now set the stage for the climax of his novel. The existence of a social problem has been demon­ strated, solutions have been suggested, and these solu­ tions have been thwarted by those in power, and as a re­ sult both those who seek change by and those who prevent it by violence prepare for confrontation. This confronta­ tion occurs on the anniversary of John Kennedy's assassin­ ation, a date Yurick settles upon both because of what he finds symbolic about the man and the act that killed him.

As in them, the conflicts in The Bag are expressed, if not resolved, in mass violence. Since the Detroit riots of

1967 actually occurred, Oates made her figures parts of them. But Yurick, with the luxury and obligation of creating his own riot, is able to shape and use it much more 142

deliberately. The beginnings of them1 s riot are unexpected

and random, like real mass violence, and we never see the

disturbance from above, since our interest is primarily in

the three Wendalls, not, so to speak, in "the big picture."

Yurick tells of his protagonists, but since his interest

is very much in "the big picture," he orchestrates the event carefully and describes it as if it were itself a

living organism.

It originates in the parade and dedication of a memor­

ial statue to John Kennedy in Tompkins Park, between the

East and West Villages; spectators join the marchers and fights break out. The police quell these outbursts and the dedication proceeds without interruption, but in the com­ munity celebration scheduled for that night violence breaks out again. Six black teenagers circle the eternal flame at the monument and attempt to extinguish it with urine; when the police chase them away, one is caught and clubbed; immediately the cry of police brutality is raised. Though the arrest is only routine, the already-aroused community gathers before the station house; words are exchanged, a scuffle breaks out, and shots are fired. The riot has begun.

In the cleverly mimicked language of game theory, the

AGAPEman recommends that the police permit minor and spora­ dic destruction and make no arrests, and that they seal off the area and stop drug trafficking, though liquor should 14 5

continue to be sold; in this "Lord of Misrule" phase, the

riot will burn itself out. But the police, not sophistica­

ted enough to use the weapons of suppression that technol­

ogy has created for them, prepare to respond in force.

Khat the police fail to recognize, the AGAPEman soon

docs; their misdirected and brutal response turns mere dis­

turbance into insurrection. After a time, a compromise is

arranged, and AGAPE henceforth determines strategy.

Each of the protagonists is referred to periodically.

Alonso, needing a fix, sells Elaine to a group of about

twenty men, each of whom rapes her. Characteristically she welcomes it; "total degradation alone would clean and free

her now, pass her over to the other side" (p. 421). Armed with a rifle and with a baby on her back, Minnie goes hunt­

ing for victims. Alpha passes the Plaza, noticing that the

statue of Kennedy has been overturned, shattered, and de­

faced. Hinton, told by Alonso that he has sold Elaine,

retreats to his loft.

But the real protagonist of this chapter is the riot

itself:

Like some great beast spent, fucked out, the crowd subsides slowly in the night. . . . The beast does not, proper­ ly speaking, like someone we are all used to, go lying down to sleep in one place . . . it finds sleep by dissolv­ ing its manifest parts slowly, its uni­ fying factors, though more tenuous, 144

still hold it together: hate, frustra­ tion, excitement, expectancy, injus­ tice, revenge, all keep its components pulled together in its sleep, (p. 42 6 )

The next day, during daylight, the atmosphere is

almost carnival. Not only from New York, but from Connecti­

cut and New Jersey, curious teenagers and college students

stream into the Village. But precisely at dark, a hush

falls, a shot is heard, and the riot begins again. Now the

insurrection is organized; a radical movement takes over

several square blocks. Fearing they cannot contain the trouble, the police call in the National Guard.

The organized power of the state is stronger than that of the scattered resisters. Ismael, seeing that the masses have not risen, vows to fight another day. Elaine is sold again; Alonso, high, is beaten by a street gang, and Hin­ ton, who has regressed to his warrior state, kills him in a manner explicitly reminiscent of the slash-and-stomp in­ cident of The Warriors. Minnie's death, caught by tele­ vision cameras, becomes a media event. The weather cools; by the next morning, all violence has ended.

The epilogue of the novel, with its classical, liter­ ary, Biblical, and popular allusions, its successively lul­ ling, portentous, and liberating tone, and its cadenced- jive diction, makes explicit what we have suspected all along: a distance between subject and audience. Yurick 1 4 5 write? of event? in the city thal are the product of the welfare system and the culture of poverty, but here he ad­

dresses those beyond the city'? borders, hitherto fortunate

enough to escape involvement in those events. What has

happened in Manhattan will eventually have its effect in

Scarsdale, he seems to say:

There you are in your split level and the soft trees murmur and the crickets sound and the soft skylight of the late- late moon lights the asphalt and roman­ tic shadows bathe the carport; sweet air and there is a little bushquivcr and maybe a nightingale and what's that soft sweet hum coming up the road and what's that distant tinkle? And then the flames will lick your sleep and prickle up and you know the beast you used to kill every night while you slept has come . (p. 4 5 2 )

When Oglesby suggests that Yurick despairs here be­ cause of the "immense, uncreating power of . . . the 31 bewildered technostate," he is only half-right; in this epilogue Yurick asserts that no amount of repression will stifle the impulses that are the origin of the events of this novel .

*****

It is curious that no man is always aware of the sources of his own strength. These novels are not merely the product of a developed and distinctive social philoso­ phy; they are the work of an author whose learning and 1 4 b

convictions have been supplemented and cnr.ic.lied by careful and curious observation of his fellow men and his culture.

If some of his finures seem contrived fMeyer Faust") or ridiculously symbolic (Elaine Devlin), others, especially

Minnie Devlin, show that Yurick can be a master of charac­ terization. The difference, one suspects, is that in por­

traying Faust and Elaine, the sociologist-revolutionary has fatally influenced the novelist, and since they often work at cross purposes, the result is a hodge-podge of ir- reconci1iable qualities. Kith Minnie Devlin, however, the sociologist-revolutionary and the novelist have cooperated very fruitfully.

Minnie is a figure who has engaged his attention far longer than any other, and his initial characterization of her in "The Annealing" suggests how in a few lines he can individualize a figure and generalize an attitude:

She lived from day to day and didn't care much which day it was. If she laughed once or twice, laughed big that day, she had it made. If she cried more than she laughed, she knew it wasn't her day. Sometimes it wasn't her day, not really, for weeks on end. Sometimes, with that liquor sloshing around in her, it wasjier day, her night, her every- time. 38

In the same story, he uses a similar technique to il­ lustrate another of his recurring themes, the collision of 147

lower and middle class values

Over the years, it had been a case of not knowing or caring that there was a tomorrow. Mr. Jones [Minnie's social worker] knew the tomorrows and the pro­ mise in store for the world of man when all the inequities would be righted. It was a matter of managing, cleaning, meeting deadlines, marrying, saving, keeping appointments, and bringing up the children with a sense of the future. He couldn't understand Minnie D.'s re ­ curring fall from grace. She drank. She had lovers and had children. She spent her money on the wrong things. Bright, impermanent things interested her. . . . Well, she needed to laugh, didn't she? Mr. Jones, he wouldn't understand, (pp. 6-7)

Yurick also anatomizes the conflict of the aged and the welfare bureaucracy, particularly well in "Not with a

Whimper, but ..." The story centers around retired Mor­ ris Billig's struggles with Miss Kaley, the social worker wrho wants him to conform more to the world's expectations of a "senior citizen," e.g., join clubs, take up hobbies, etc. Billig refuses, and one of Yurick's most penetrating insights is Billig's remark that " 'the trouble with those

Florida places is that they are senilopoli . . . , not really places for the old, but places the young hope the old would like to be in' " (p. 166).

Someone Just Like You might justly be described as a series of anticipations and follow-ups of the themes dealt with in the novels. What Robert Osterman says of it might 148 well be applied to the novels as well

These characters and their peers would be both unrecognizable and unbelievable outside the city environment. The city acts on them as another person, appear­ ing as both ally and adversary in the way of the natural environment of pri­ mitive societies. . . .39

Osterman and others note that Yurick successfully characterizes the city in Someone. But the collection also provoked a mixed review from Joyce Carol Oates, who found his more experimental stories lacking "an artistically or dramatically compelling structure," while she admired

"the kind of writing he can do so well, with his formidable knowledge of reality, his ability to synthesize facts into aesthetic experience."^

What Oates wrote has perhaps proved to be prophetic.

For An_ Island Death, a novel seven years in the writing, seems to have been treated kindly more out of regard for its predecessors than for itself. The novel centers around

Targ, formerly Trag, protege of the powerful in the Uni­ versity, and his painful (and fatal) acquisition of self- knowledge and integrity. To become Targ, he had shed accent, habits, name, and first wife; having undergone the process of "Anglo-Saxonizing the self," he married his Helen (the 41 daughter of a Boston banker) and began his rise. 14 0

Inspired to become a classicist and an antiquarian,

Targ learned and later indoctrinated others in what might be called the myth of Western Culture [the reader familiar with Yurick's essays already knows vdiat he thinks of the way our conception of the past is formed.)- At the point of achieving power, he suddenly looks about him and dis­ covers, like Sam Miller, that his activities, however aca­ demic and high-minded, contribute to the maintenance of a system he abhors.

Targ and Helen spend his leave of absence in the Med­

iterranean; while in Athens he meets an old man named Kai- ros whose great enthusiasm is classical Greece, and while

Helen goes to Paris, lie and Kairos travel to the small island of Terminus. When Kairos commits suicide on the island, the superstitious islanders, the too-bureaucratic policeman, and the too-religious priest refuse to permit his burial there. Targ, faithful to his last wishes, at­ tempts the burial, and is killed by the angry islanders.

As a tale of cultural deception and personal self- deception, concluded by a courageous and humane act, An

Is land Death has a certain merit and deals with themes

Yurick has dealt with before. And he uses many of his characteristic literary devices--dream-narrative sequences, flashbacks, elaborate and gross puns. But the substance of the novel simply does not support its ambitions, which 150 arc nothing less than the criticism of our whole cultural se1f-conception, and one must agree with Doris Grumbach's. opinion, that "it does not stick to the ribs, it avoids the memory bank and goes through the system without nour­ ishing the imagination, without exciting the digestive and retentive mental juices.

At his best, Sol Yurick is a naturalist in the sense that Dos Passos is a naturalist. His concerns are expli­ citly social, and he portrays individuals as creatures of a milieu, a milieu intensely realized and enriched by knowledge of politics and social science. In his willing­ ness to go after the system as a whole, he meets at least one of the conditions of his own definition of a great writer. NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

Evergreen Revi ew , October 1969, p. 78. 2 Joyce Carol Oates, "New Heaven and Earth," Saturday Review, 4 November 1972 , p. 51.

Oates , pp . 52- 5 5 .

^ Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been: Stories of Young America (Greenwich, Ct. : Eawcctt, 19 7 p . 9.

^ Published in College Eng 1i sh, 34 (1965), 180-197 (Comment by Sol Yurick, 198-199). It compares James Dickey's Deliverance with Norman Mailer's Why Are We in Vi etnam?

^ New York Times , Brooklyn-Queens-Long Island Ed., 11 June 197T, Sec. 1-A, p. 16.

^ Esquire, October 1974, p. 152. O "The Politics of the Imagination: The Problem of Consciousness," Tri-Quarterly, 23/24 (Winter/Spring 1972), p p . 50 5- 5 52 .

^ Yurick, "The Politics of the Imagination," p. 505.

Yurick, "Comment" to "The Great American Hunter," p. 199.

Voices of Brooklyn, ed. Sol Yurick (Chicago: Amer­ ican Library Association, 1973), p. xiii. 1 7 Yurick, "The Politics of the Imagination," p. 540.

1 *» 0 Yurick, "Symbolic Intent and Ideological Resis­ tance," p. 49.

In addition to those listed above, Yurick has pub­ lished (1) a review of Nelson Algren's Notes f_rom a Sea Diary: Hemingway all the Way (1965)--"Correspondent to the Underworld," Nation, 25 October 1965, pp. 283-284, and (2) a review of Truman Capote's In Co Id Blood - -"Sob Sister Gothic," Nat ion, 7 February 1966, pp. 158-160.

151 1 5 2

Yurick, "Sob Sister Gothic," p. 160, and "Symbolic Intent and Ideological Resistance," p. 78.

Yurick, "Symbolic Intent and Ideological Resis­ tance," p . 4 9. 1 7 Yurick, "Symbolic Intent and Ideological Resis­ tance," p. 50. 1 O Yurick, "Symbolic Intent and Ideological Resis­ tance," p. 77.

1 9 Yurick, "Sob Sister Gothic," p. 158. 2 0 Yurick, "Sob Sister Gothic," p. 159.

2^ Yurick, "Sob Sister Gothic," p. 159.

22 Yurick, "The Politics of the Imagination," passim.

7 -z Yurick, "The Politics of the Imagination," p. 557. ?4 Carl Oglesby, "Beyond Black Laughter," Ramparts Maga zinc, 24 August 1968, pp. 53- 54. 2 5 Yurick, "Correspondent to the Underworld," p. 285.

9 f D.B. Graham, "Naturalism and the Revolutionary Imperative: Yurick's The Warriors," Critique, 18 (1976), 1 , p. 1 2 0 . 2 7 Robert Hatch, "Yurick's Way," Nation, 22 November 1965, p. 395. 7 8 Sol Yurick, The Warriors (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1965), p. 24. Further references to this text will be parenthetical.

“^ Graham, p . 12 4.

30 Graham, p. 119.

Graham, p. 120.

3“ Sol Yurick, Fertig (1966; rpt. New York: Avon Books, 1975), pp. l-2~. Further references to this text will be parenthetical.

Oglesby, p. 53. 1 S 3

"Fvcrvbody Has One," Neiv York Times Rook Review, 19 May 1968,' p. 4.

^ Oglesby, p. 53.

Sol Yurick, The bag (1968; rpt. New York: Avon books, 1972), p. 75. Further references to this text will be paren­ thetical.

Oglesby, p. 53.

Sol Yurick, Someone Just Like You (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 1. Further references to this text will be parenthetical. 3 9 Robert Osterman, "The Subject--No, the Protagonist-- is the City, grim and full of Devils," National Observer, 30 September, 1972, p. 27. 4 0 "Someone Just Like You," New York Times Book Revi ew, 5 September 1972, p. 7.

^ Sol Yurick, An Island Death (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 10.

"An Is1 and Death," New York Times Book Review, 20 April 1975, p . 5. CHAPTER FOUR

HUBERT SELBY, JR.

My only influence, so far as I can see, is Beethoven. Christ, what that man could do with two, three, four notes. He states them. Then he repeats them. Then again, and again, over and over. When he gets through, you've got the Fifth Symphony. That's the kind of writer 1 want to be. Maybe if I live long enough I can reach the last Quar­ tets .

--Hubert Selby, Jr.l

Hubert Selby, Jr. is an unusual figure among con­ temporary writers. In an age when well-known writers are university-trained, or the products of university-sponsored workshops, or associated with university writing programs,

Selby, solitary and self-taught, responding to the inner desire to write, with no previous writing experience, has evolved his own distinctive style and found a subject mat­ ter, and, both despite and because of his works, become famous .

The notoriety and fame that one might expect to be the product of the writing of three novels, a minor American and a major British obscenity trial, the basing of one film

154 155 on a novel and the cancelling of another as a result, of

Supreme Court's 1973 obscenity standards decision, has pro- 2 duced very little in print about Selby himself. In Haskel

Frankel's 1965 interview with him, given after the publi­ cation of Last bxit to Brooklyn (1961), he speaks of him­

self, his antecedents, and his life as candidly as any bio­ grapher might :

My father's an engineer in a power house. My folks still live in Brooklyn. My family's been in this country for 350 years. My father's family settled around the Jamestown Colony. Mother's was part of the Plymouth Settlement. They came over about ten years after the M ayflower. One of my grandmothers - - I forget how many greats go before it-- had all seven of her sons in the Civil War. At one time my ancestors owned all of the Flatbush flatlands in Brooklyn. What I dig the most is that the family has nothing to show for it. But my fam­ ily is one of inherent gentleness; that's what I consider aristocracy.I was a football player at fifteen. Weighed 165 pounds then. I never pushed my head much in school. Never read at all. Mine was a physical life. Right after school--P.S. 102--I went to sea. Merchant marine. And then I got TB and my life went to hell. Three years in a hospital on Staten Island. One lung was collapsed, and a piece of the other one, too. I was gi­ ven the last rites three times. Lost eight ribs on one side, two on the other. . . . I just gave up when I got out of the hospital. That's how I ended up around 58th and Second in Brooklyn, where the book takes place. I went down there, I guess, looking for sympathy or hoping maybe I'd get killed. Something. 1 5 b

I was a ringer down there. People told me that when I was loaded 1 preached to them. Socrates, things like that. It sounds 1 ike m e . . . . Anyway, at the end of six months, I was back in the hospital with IB again. Suddenly, I realized that I must be a- live for some reason. God was giving me a chance to atone. There had to be a reason for my being alive. I had a re­ sponsibility to the people--like my family-who wanted me to live. That's when I started reading. When I got out, I went to school and became a secretary. I learned Pitman. I got a job as a secretary in a mail­ order house. . . . At the time I decided 1 had to try and write, I was married--my first wife-- and had a three-year-old daughter. 1 quit my job and bought a typewriter. I looked at it for a couple of weeks. I finally wrote a letter to a friend. When he answered, I wrote another letter. Then finally I started "The Queen is Dead," one of the stories in the book. And then I stopped. Where was I going? What did it mean? 1 couldn't go on un­ til I understood. I found in writing the only thing that gives me gratification, not that it's a joy to do. . . . About my book--I never thought it would be a success. Last I heard, there were over 40,000 copies sold. Can you imagine? My wife bought a hair dryer and some new dresses. I finally got new shoes and two new shirts. Pizza pie an}’ time^we want. We're living high on the hog.

In this interview Selby sounds rather ordinary, seem­

ingly unaffected by his success. The intense, working-class face that adorns to back cover of the paperback edition of

Last Exit is not markedly different from the older, more relaxed and more pro sperous -1 ook .i ng face that stares out

from the back cover of The Demon. The large amount of

money Selby made from L a s t Ex i t, much of which, he ruefully

admitted to the London Times, he squandered, permitted him

to move to California, where he continued to write fiction

and worked on the (never to be used) script for a film ver­

sion of Last Exit . The Room appeared in 19 71 , The Demon in

1976.4

Some sense of disparity, perhaps the product of our preconceptions of the relationship of author to work,

inevitably makes itself felt when Selby and his work arc considered together. It is easy to imagine the man who says

"Pizza pie anytime we want. We're living high on the hog," as having experienced, or at least heard of the events of the kind of which La st Ex i t is almost entirely composed.

What is difficult to imagine is his writing them out, let alone doing so in a distinctive and powerful literary style

Once it is admitted that this sense of disparity is large­ ly the product of stereotyping and snobbery, it can also be observed that Selby's perspective on his material is different from, say, those of Oates or Yurick. Both Oates and Yurick have seen the horrors of which they have written but part of Selby's distinction is that, much more than either of the others, he has, so to speak, been there. This perspective serves him well in Last Exit and The Room, though its (and his) limitations are apparent in The Demon. 1 5 8

Like Dreiser, Selby has a certain range within which he

is acute and effective, but beyond which he flounders.

At any rate, Selby’s work has always aroused violent opinions. When Last Exi t appeared, for example, the New

Statesman reviewer, after he had noted the objectionable qualities of the novel's manner and matter, remarked that

"lack of punctuation and some breathless coinages give the illusion of hip energy to what is in fact merely an enter­ prise of accumulation, repetitious, bored, contemptuous .

John Ciardi would not have banned the novel, but he wanted to damn it.( Even R. M. Adams, who admired it, remarked 7 that "the book's major effort is clearly to nauseate."

At the same time, La st Exi t provoked admiring compari­ sons with the work of Zola, Dreiser, and Farrell; Granville

Hicks wrote that

no author I can think of has presented so impressive and authoritative an ac­ count of the life of people at the bottom of the heap in our so-called af­ fluent society. This is a book that ought to shock us, not because of this word or that, but because a sound craftsman has shown us so much of what we would prefer to ignore. 8

And, as we have seen, Sol Yurick has declared that "Last

Exit to Brooklyn is probably more important than any of

Joyce ' s works.

In the sixties, Selby's work was the exemplar, and was often used as the test of, the difference between what was 159 pornographic and obscene and what was (and was justified by) art. Most of the reviews of La st Exit, for example, either began or ended with at least a brief paragraph, or often a detailed discussion of the matter. Adams, whose discussion is probably the best, remarks that Last Exit narrows the distance between "reflection-writing" (liter­ ature) and "impact-writing" (pornography)^0 ; Hicks, who reviewed the novel along with William Burroughs' Nova

Exp res s (1964 ), finally declares that

Selby's use of the four-letter words is objective and, as I have said, is neces­ sary for the effects he wants to achieve. Burroughs' use of the words is subject­ ive and expressionistic , and whether one regards them as necessary or unnneces- sarv depends almost entirely on one's estimate of his achievement. 1

Our time has seen much controversy over the question of what is justified in the name of art, and both trials provoked by Last Ex i t revolved around this question. The first occurred when, in its third issue, the Provincetown

Review printed "Tralala," later to become one of the six stories of Last Exit. The magazine was sold, a complaint was made to the Provincetown Police Department, and pub­ lisher William V. Ward was tried for publishing an obscene short story. After a one-day trial, during which Stanley

Kunitz, Norman Podhoretz, Jason Epstein, and Allen Tate testified on behalf of the defense, Judge Robert A. Welsh 160 found the story obscene and fined Ward $1000. Three months later, however, in November .1961, Massachusetts State At­ torney General Edward J. McCormack concluded that the story was not obscene according to state law, and chose 1 0 to discontinue the case.

The second trial, or series of trials, occurred in

London between September 1966 and July 1968, and, to judge from the amount of space devoted to them over the two years by the London Times, was a series of events of major inter­ est and significance to English publishers and their read­ ing public. At first, it seemed that no legal controversy would arise at all, for when Calder and Boyars announced their intention to publish Last Exit, the Crown declined to prosecute them under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, in which an attempt had been made to distinguish between the artistic and the pornographic. But the two years of controversy opened in early September 1966, when Sir Cyril

Black, a Conservative Member of Parliament, brought a pri­ vate suit against Calder and Boyars. The trial, before Leo

Gradwell, Marlboro Street Magistrate, produced a verdict, delivered December 11, that Last Exit "would tend to de­ prave and corrupt.

Only two months later, in February 1967, the Director of Public Prosecutions began proceedings against Calder and

Boyars. The publishers, however, were now prepared to risk 161

.liquidation of their firm and spend up to 1 5,000 pounds to 14 contest La st Lxi t ' s obscenity, even though it had sold

only about 12,000 copies in Britain down to December 1966.^

The trial was set for Marlboro Street Court before a Magis­

trate again, but Calder and Boyars successfully had it

moved from the local court to the Central Criminal Court

and before a jury; the trial commenced November 1 5, 1967.

Calder and Boyars called in a number of eminent cri­

tics, including Frank Kermode and A. Alvarez, to attest to

the novel's artistic value, and in response, the prosecution

called in authorities who asserted that the novel would in­

deed deprave and corrupt.^ On November 23, after the jury

had read the novel, Last Ex i t was found obscene, Calder and

Boyars were fined and charged court costs, and found guilty 1 8 of publishing an obscene article. The publishers ap­

pealed^; the appeal succeeded, and on July 31, 1968, two

years after the controversy began, the conviction was quashed and Calder and Boyars were permitted to republish

7 0 Last Exit to Brooklyn.“

The seventies have witnessed a tightening of stan­ dards of what may appear in public, and though Ralph Bak-

shi's animated Heavy Traffic (1972) was based on Last ?1 Exit, “ the long-planned film for which Selby had been writing the script was cancelled by its nervous producers after the 1973 Supreme Court decision that permitted local­

ities to determine their own standards of obscenity in 162 2 ^ books, film, and behavior.^" So if Selby may be said to have benefitted, and benefitted from, the liberalizing trends in standards of public taste in the sixties, he may also be said to have been one of the first casualties of the conservative trend of the seventies.

*****

The individual stories of Last Exit to Brooklyn ap­ peared in little magazines as early as 1957; they were com- 2 3 pleted and joined together to form a novel in 1964. Col­ lectively they deal with a group of individuals living near the Brooklyn Army Base during the middle forties and the late fifties. Periodically figures from one story appear in another, but portrayal of character development over a long period is not the author's intent. In this respect, the individual stories of La st Exi t have less connection than do Yurick's The Warriors and The Bag. Each figure's portrait is self-contained within a given story, and, structural 1y and dramatically, the reading of no one story is essential to understanding any of the others."Another

Day Another Dollar," "The Queen is Dead," "And Baby Makes

Three," "Tralala," and "Strike" are all set in the forties, while "Landsend" is set in the fifties.

Remarks admiring and disparaging Selby's prose have been cited; examination of some typical passages will re­ veal its qualities. ] 6 3

(1) from "The Queen is Dead"

Vinnie got kicks from refusing Georgette when she tried to get him to take a walk with her, and from patting her on the ass and telling her not now sweetheart. Maybe later. He felt good having someone hot forim like that. Even if it is a fag. He followed her over to the counter where she was sit­ ting and, wetting his finger and stick­ ing it in her ear, laughed as she squirmed and giggled. Too bad I didn't haveya upstate. . . . It cost loot to do me now sweetchips, turning once more to the others wanting to be certain that they understood that Georgette was in love with him and that he could have her anytime he wanted to, but, he was playing it cool, waiting for her to give him loot before he condescended to allow her to do him; feeling superior to the others because he knew Steve who had been killed by the bulls, and because Georgette was smart and could snow them under with words (at the same time hat­ ing anyone else who might use polysylla­ bic words and thinking anyone who went to school was a creep), but (mistaking in his dull, never to be matured mind, her loneliness for respect of his strength and virix^ty) she would never try that with him.-^

(2) from "And Baby Makes Three"

The baby was christened 4 hours after the wedding. Well, whatthehell, they got married first anyway. But I/ll tellya man, it was a ball! I mean after. Her old man threw them a great party. And Spook with his damn motorcycle. Tommy had a 76 Indian. He's the guy who got married. He had this Indian--you know, one of those small jobs. Not a onelunger. Nonea the boys would have one a those. They can really move and all that, but theyre too small. Yawant something that can be fixed 1 6 4

up. Yaknow, made real sharp- - streamers and things and a bigass buddyseat with chrome. Man, the snatch really comes runnin. Its real crazy! Anyway, he had this 76 and Tommys long and kinda skin­ ny and he looked sorta like the bike was growin outtaim; like he had a bike be­ tween his legs instead of a pecka. (p. 83)

(3) from "Landsend"

The housewives were on a bench. They looked at Ada and laughed. Everything comes out in this weather. Even Ada. I guess she's airing out her clothes. Laughter. Same shitty coat. She wears it all winter. Why don't she take it off? She's got nothin on underneath. Whattaya mean? I bet shes wearing scabs. Laughter. Shes a filthy slob. I bet even the fumi- gator is afraid ta go up her house. I bet her crotch smalls like limburger cheese. Laughter. (One picked her nose, exploring each nostril first with the pinky, locating the choice deposits, then with the forefinger broke loose the nights accumulations, scraping with thumb and plucking forth, with thumb and forefinger, a choice meaty snot, long and green, spotted with yellows, waving it about, then trying to flip it off but it clung tenaciously, adhesively to the finger until it was finally rubbed off on the bench.)(p. 253)

All these passages possess remarkable verbal precision.

As Hicks so observantly remarks, Selby's use of detail and four-letter words is very calculated, and the opposite of expressionism. Reading (1), for example, one sees how care­ fully Selby shifts dialect, vocabulary, and tone according to speaker and mind. Most of the passage is an account of 16 5

Vinnie's attitudes and actions toward Georgette, or direct quotations from him; only in the parentheses does the narrator step back and judge Vinnie in his own voice.

To know that Vinnie pats Georgette's "ass” and "likes having someone hot forim" tells the reader volumes about him. (2 ) is a retrospective first-person narrative, and read aloud--it is written, of course, as if someone were speaking it--it demonstrates Selby's command of Brooklyn idiom and lore. The rather heavy dramatic irony of (3) suggests that Selby's acquaintance with literary devices is greater than he is given credit for; the long descrip­ tion of the woman picking her nose, with its careful, almost loving, discussion of each step and of the extracted mater­ ial's appearance and texture, suggest how observant he is, and to what his observation is drawn.

These passages also recall Arthur Symons' phrases about

Zola, that in the novels of Zola "there is something greasy, a smear of eating and drinking. . . . But how . . . h e drives home to you the horrid realities of these narrow, 2 5 uncomfortable lives'." Selby's prose as well is fairly characterized by this observation. None of his predecessors or contemporaries since Zola, save perhaps James T. Farrell, conveys so effectively as Selby the sensations of squalor.

Yurick attains it occasionally, as in the ninth chapter of

The Bag, but more often he is either slick, sociological, or (in Alfred Kazin's phrase describing Erskine Caldwell) 166 2 6 "energetically grotesque." Oates recognizes it but does not seek to attain it; "the various sordid and shocking events of slum life, detailed in other naturalistic works," she tells us in the introduction to them, " have been under­ stated here, mainly because of my fear that too much real­ ity would become unbearable." Selby seems to have no such fear .

To what end docs Selby use this powerful prose? Gran­ ville Hicks tells us that

though he maintains an air of objecti­ vity, he is capable of compassion. This is hell, he seems to be saying, and these are people on whom we must have pity. We must resolutely contemplate their squalor, their brutishness, their empty lives, their callousness, and the pover­ ty of their hopes, and we must consider what their existence means to us.

One of the few to have written extensively about

La s t Ex i t, Sol Yurick shares Hicks' opinion of the impor­ tance of the novel, but goes much further in his account of Selby's ambitions. Yurick tells us that "Selby's strat­ egy is to present six revelations which appear to be self- contained fragments in a world which has no stories, which are interrelated by personnel, geography, suffering, all 2 8 building toward a coherent and shattering world view."

And what is this world view? 167

First of all, that there is a system and that fragmentation masks it. Secondly, that it makes no sense from the point of view of the oppressed. Thirdly, that most are oppressed according to their station. . . . Man, a collection of once specialized, once useful and now irrele­ vant tasks, drives, man as surplus and a glut on the market, must destroy him­ self as he exists on the level of the permanent Depression for, if he connects, lie must come screaming out of those depths. The underworld is then a nation­ al and suppressed unconscious. ■

Selby himself tells us that

when I first started writing, I wrote social documents. It was terrible. I have to fight my Puritanism, my preaching. I want to preach but not in such an overt manner. I'm against sin. Sin has become an ambiguous thing in our society. It's not concrete, except maybe burglary or murder. Hurting people, being vicious is sin. People don't even regard it as wrong. Why, if someone puts 300,000 people out of work and they die of starvation, that's okay today. It's not a sin^so long as someone makes a profit. > Q

As this statement suggests, Selby's aims are more am­ bitious than those ascribed to him by Hicks, but less so than those ascribed to him by Yurick. His relationship to his subject is more than mere pity, for pity requires a superiority to its object to which Selby does not pretend, but it is an overstatement to call his aims revolutionary.

Selby is concerned with individuals; he wants "to teach the 168

meaning of the emotional depletion indivisible from the

economic," but his focus is not squarely on the system

(unlike that of Yurick, who can never resist the tempta­

tion to preach the doctrine of economic-political-socia1 -

cultural conspiracy by the elites of history), but always

on those individuals. Selby dramatizes problems, but offers

no solut ions.^

A A A A A

The ten pages of "Another Day Another Do 11ar"chronic1e a brief incident near an all-night diner in the vicinity of

the Brooklyn Army Base. The gang sit bored and broke in

"The Greek's," passing the time playing games and talking about cars. When a neighborhood girl asks one of them for money and is refused, she complains and is hit. Three drunken soldiers , returning to base, threaten to inter­ vene, and when they do, the whole gang enters the fight.

The outnumbered soldiers run; one is caught and savagely beaten. The police and the Military Police arrive, and after a brief argument, the soldiers return to Base and the gang, temporarily amused, returns to the Greek's, contin­ uing the same idle banter with which the story began.

The picture of the gang presented here is what D. B.

Graham calls the Standard Liberal View; one recognizes then as the spiritual and literary brethren of Studs Lonigan's

Bunch at the pool hall. None of them works or has married, 1 6 9 nor does any care to. Their money comes from odd jobs and intermittent, small-time crime. Their talk is dominated by cars, sharp clothing, and sex. They are certainly unrelated to Yurick's Coney Island nominators; their gang docs not ennoble them, it destroys them.

The language of narration is their own, demotic Brook- lynese. The narrator himself seems objective; the flatness of his style is unvarying, even, as in the following ex­ tract, when sadistic violence is being described:

The guys jumped off the fender and leaped on the doggies back and yanked him down and he fell on the edge of the hood and then to the ground. They formed a circle and kicked. He tried to roll over on his stomach and cover his face with his arms, but as he got to his side he was kicked in the groin and stomped on the ear and he screamed, cried, started pleading then just cried as a foot cracked his mouth. . . . (p. 17)

" 'My stories,' Selby once said, 'are about the loss of control. But this is not quite accurate; they are about people who never had control, whose aspirations are so elemental, attainments are so transitory and range of con­ sciousness so severely curtailed that "control" was never the remotest possibility.' The tonal flatness of "Ano­ ther Day Another Dollar" permits the significance of the events--the horror of destructive and self-destructive hu­ manity wasted and twisted--to hit the reader with maximum impact. 170

"The Queen is Dead," a longer and more developed work,

examines another earner of this world. Its central figure,

George (Georgette), "a hip queer," is referred to almost

invariably with feminine pronouns to accentuate his identi­

fication of himself as a woman. Georgette possesses a range

of sensitivities and interests foreign to the heterosexual males of this novel, and Selby suggests by implication that homosexuality is the only refuge in a world where "a real m a n 's"interests are summed up in violence, sex, clothing, automobiles, and crime.

Her life [Selby tells us] didn't re­ volve but spun around stimulants, opi­ ates, johns (who paid her to dance for them in womens panties then ripped them off her; bisexuals who told their wives they were going out with the boys and spent the night with Georgette [she trying to imagine they were Vinnie]), the freakish precipitate coming to the top. (p. 24)

The absence of love is one of Selby's principal themes, and if "Another Day Another Dollar" centers around sadistic violence that is the product of boredom and insensitivity,

"The Queen is Dead" is a story of unrequited love.

The story may be divided into three parts; in the first (pp. 23-36) we are introduced to the characters, straight and gay, at the Greek's, when, in an incident as random and sadistic as that of "Another Day Another Dollar,"

Georgette is stabbed in the leg during a knife-throwing 171 contest between Vinnie and Harry, two of the gang. Since

Vinnic cannot afford to be noticed by the law, he has a cab take Georgette home rather than to the hospital, though she dreads going home because of her hostile bro­ ther.

In the second part (pp. 35-41), Georgette is put to bed by her mother and brother; clearly Selby wants to re­ veal in the tensions of her/his home life the origin of her homosexuality, and, not incidentally, he also shows how Arthur represses his own only by violently hating both mother and brother:

. . . listening to his brother crying and wanting to laugh with satisfaction, and even happy to see the misery on his Mothers face as she looked at Georgette and lifted his arms and stroked his head, humming, shaking tears from her face . . . Arthur wanting to lean over and punch his face, that goddam face covered with makeup, wanting to tear at the leg and listen to hid fairy brother wail. . . . (p. 38)

Arthur is the first in a long line of Selby's male figures whose delight is to make others miserable; a line that includes Harry Black of "Strike" and the unnamed pro­ tagonist of The Room. The third part of the story (pp. 41-

79), which concludes with Georgette's death by drug over­ dose, chronicles an all-night party at the home of another homos exua1 . 172

Georgette passes her life in a world populated by

brutes and perverts, of which the Greek's, men like Vinnie

and Harry, and even Goldie's place are all a part. Homosex­

uality and drugs permit her to cultivate her sensitivity;

her heart's desire is indicated by her constantly recur­

ring dream of sex with Vinnie:

She looked at him coquettishly. Let me do you Vinnie, forcing herself to re­ frain from trying to kiss him, from caressing his thighs, dreaming of the warmth of his groin, seeing him nude, holding her head (not too gently), pressing close to him, watching his muscles contract, running her finger­ tips gently along the tightened thigh muscles (he might even groan at the climax; the feel, taste, smell. . . . (p. 24)

"Love for Georgette," as Sol Yurick remarks, "is not

merely sexual but a kind of thirties' moviehouse platonism

shored up by poetry, gauze, Busby Berkeley visions of hea­

v e n ."'5'5 To be content, she must remain high and spend as much time as possible in the company of other homosexuals,

and when with Vinnie, act very carefully to keep her dream

alive, as Vinnie has little interest in her except as a

source of money and face with his peers. Georgette senses

this, but works actively to convince herself that it is not

the case.

Upon her arrival at Goldie's, where she goes after es­

caping from her mother's house, she fortifies herself with 173

coffee and benzedrine and fantasizes aloud how Vinnie had visited her (he hadn't) and how she had beaten up her hated brother (she hadn't). The bored queens are uplifted by this

fantasy, and decide to have a party.

Long Live THE QUEEN, and the laying out of Arthur. He should be laid out, but I mean really, the freak, each in her mind and in turn laying out every rough or straight sonofabitch that ever hit them or pointed and laughed; dancing through the apartment until they fell into chairs trying to catch their breath, fanning themselves; . . . then gradually they quieted, too spent to shout, stretching in their seats, getting higher and high­ er as they sat quietly and becoming con­ scious of the absence of men, their high spirits and overflowing joy making the absence of love known. So her subjects petitioned the Queen to summon forth her dashing husband and his rough trade friends, for tonight they were daring and even Camille, a frail queen from a small town in Jersey, longed for rough arms, there being no room, but abso­ lutely no room, for johns. (p. 43)

After Vinnie and his friends arrive, a curious mood builds up for the next twenty pages; the comedy of the queens scoring on one another in a parody of feminine be­ havior combines with the jarring tone of the conversation of the gang--"She [Genet] creates such beauty out of the tortured darkness of our souls--Oh well, yes. That is true enough--and I feel so beautiful. Hey'. Where's the shit- house" (p. 54). When Goldie's roommate, a prostitute, needs the apartment for business and they must move to another, 1 7 4

the mood is disturbed, but it is shattered when a neighbor

woman, pregnant and just beaten by her husband, comes for

help and breaks water on the floor. No one helps her.

Georgette, wanting to restore the romantic atmosphere,

suddenly picks up a volume of Poe and reads aloud "The

Raven." She moves everyone; even the gang, habitually in­

sensitive and now drunk and high at the same time, arc

momentarily touched. Her dreams peak: ". . . and the final

words still whirled with the light and stayed in the ear

as the sea in a seashell and Georgette sat on a wondrous

throne in a wondrous land where people loved and kissed

and sat silent together, holding hands and walking through

magic n i g h t s. . ." (p . GO).

But Georgette is denied the sex that follows, until

Vinnie (as it were) gives her "seconds," permitting her to

fellate him only after he has had sex with another of the

queens. All her dreams come down to a desperate attempt to

deny what her senses tell her ("Its not shit. Please. He

didnt fuck her. . . ."[p. 7 5]), and she overdoses and dies.

"And Baby Makes Three" is comic in a way that no other story in Last Exit is, and for this reason, perhaps,

Yurick has chosen not to mention it. Told entirely by a retrospective narrator, the story is built around a wedding reception held for Tommy and Suzy ("a big-hipped Polack and even her old man didn't know she was knocked up until she was in the hospital." [pp. 83-84]). After she returns from the hospital and they marry, her father ("a bit of a lush anyway" [p. 84]) has a reception in the upstairs room of a local tavern. Sentimental parents and relatives, bar regulars, and hoods eat and drink and dance, the whole rendered in what Erich Auerbach would probably have called low comedy. Spook, obsessed by his motorcycle, wants every­ one to ride with him. Roberta, "a hip queer from the neigh­ borhood" (p. 8 8 ), dances with Susy's drunken parents. When

Spook wants Tommy to go riding with him, Susy urges him to go ("Whatthehe11. Cant do anythin tonight anyway. You know, too soon." [p. 89]). The party? "Of course we stayed until they kicked us out the next morning. I mean, whatthehell.

The old man paid good money f o r the joint and every tiling.

No sense in letting it go to waste" (p. 90). Yet in its own way, love triumphs in this little tory.

The same cannot be said of "Tralala." In the epigraph, from the Song of Solomon, the speaker "seeks him whom my soul loveth. . . but I found him not" (p. 91). Tralala is a female version of the hate-filled Selby protagonist; she wants money and recreation for herself, and misery for others. Her means of self-expression and weapons are, in

Yurick's phrase, "a magically elastic cunt and two big breasts"^; she engages in sex principally to avoid bore­ dom at first, and later to support herself. "Tralala" is 17 6 thc best told story in the novel; for ten pages her career is on the rise, and then it declines for ten pages, con­ cluding in her death. The story is a sort of naturalistic tragedy, in which the protagonist finds love but fails to recognize it. The tragic element is masked by the difficulty of even considering Tralala human, though ultimately one feels that what is repellent in her, her callousness, is also what is tragic in her.

The story covers about ten years in a series of smooth­ ly connected episodes. At fifteen, she has sex for the first time. "There was no real passion. Just diversion" (p. 93).

The other girls "giggled and alluded. Tralala shrugged her shoulders. Getting laid was getting laid. Why all the bull­ shit?" (p. 95). But soon she learns to play her own games. wShe didn't tease the guys. No sense in that. No money ei­ ther. Some of the girls bugged her and she broke their balls. If a girl liked one of the guys or tried to get him for any reason Tralala cut in. For kicks" (p. 93).

Soon, pizzas, movies, and a few dollars from drunks are insufficient. Working with a gang, she entices drunken soldiers and sailors, and the gang clout, beat, and roll the victims for their money. Now older, she is more con­ scious of her appearance; "she wore a clean sweater every few days" (p. 94). But soon she tires of splitting her pro­ fits, so one night she waits in the Greek's until a soldier, home after two years and wanting some female companionship 1 77

for an evening, picks her up. "If hed fucker maybe she could get the money out of his pocket," she thinks (p. 95).

In this, the first of three such encounters narrated at length, she takes brutal advantage of the soldier. Hitting him over the head and stealing his wallet, she returns to the Greek's, where sire is found by him as he is looking for his military pass. Fearful primarily that he will men­ tion to tire gang how much money she has taken from him, she incites them to beat him up.

In the second encounter in which she is offered ten­ derness, she meets an Arm}- officer; she goes off with him because "officers are usually loaded" (p. 101). But now a strange thing occurs; when they get to his room, she de­ cides she may as well enjoy herself. "For the rest of the night," Selby tells us, "she didn't wonder how much money he had" (p. 103). That he is quite literally from a differ­ ent world is shown by their interaction over the next sever­ al days; thinking of her as sensitive and tender, he treats her like a human being instead of a piece of meat, and is even reluctant to buy her anything, lest she be offended at the suggestion that she is a prostitute. She, on the other hand, curses him because after four days instead of giving her money, he offers her only his love. He leaves her with only one memory--that "she had the most beautiful pair of tits he had ever seen" (p. 1 0 2 ), a line whose repetition, 178

later in the story, in her decline, produces a macabre

effect.

In her long decline, signaled by Selby's fine trans­

itional paragraph--

Time passed-months , maybe years, who knows, and the dress was gone and just a bcatup skirt and sweater and the Broadway bars were 8 1 la avenue bars, but soon even these joints with their hust­ lers, pushers, pimps, queers and would- be thugs kicked her out and the inlaid linoleum turned to wood and then was covered with sawdust, and she hung over a beer in a dump on the waterfront, snarling and cursing every sonofabitch who fucked herup and left with anyone who looked at her or had a place to flop. The honeymoon was over and still she pulled the sweater tight but there was no one to look. (.p. 108)

--she retains the rage and confidence of her youth, but is

unaware of how she has changed. Her third and final encoun­

ter makes this appallingly clear. Back in Brooklyn, needing

a bed and the price of a beer, she tries an old trick--

stealing a customer from another prostitute. But the cus­

tomer only looks at her and wonders "how many blackheads

she had on her face and if that large pimple on her cheek would burst and ooze" (p. 1 1 0 ), though he laughs when she

drunkenly pulls out her proudest possessions and bounces

them on the bar. She offers to take any man who will have

her, an offer that leaves her dead, lying, like a worn-out piece of machinery, on a junk pile. 179

"Strike," the longest individual story in L a s t Ex i t ,

is the detailed story of one man's experience during a

nine-month labor stoppage. More than any other story in

the novel, "Strike" reveals the interworkings of a whole

cluster of life aspects-- home , sex, work, companionship--

in a single man over an extended period.

With the factory, both at work and on strike, omnipre­

sent in the background, Harry Black passes through three

distinct stages in his life: (1) Harry working and living

the straight life, and hating it, (2) Harry liberated sex­

ually and otherwise by the strike and his role in it, and

(3) Harry unable to return to his former life after the

strike, and suffering for it. In fact, Selby performs a

considerable feat in evoking something like compassion for

Harry in this revelation of his personal changes.

Like Tralala, Harry's principal emotion is rage; un­

like Tralala, when Harry is exposed to the means of acqui­ ring happiness, he takes it. Unfortunately, outside of the

special conditions of the strike, Harry cannot possibly gratify his desires, and having experienced the pleasure of their gratification, he cannot accept the frustrations of his old life, and in his first attempt to make do, he is caught and pays the penalties.

When we first meet him, Harry Black is a more than or­ dinarily dislikable lathe operator, shop steward, father 180

and husband. His habitual reaction to the world is resent­ ment: he resents his wife because she demands attention and

sex, and he resents his job because it requires him to work, and to do so in a hierarchical scheme in which foremen,

superintendents, and managers arc his superiors. His re­

sentment is alleviated (though this is not to say that lie is made happy) through fantasies of the torture and mutil­ ation of his wife, through the vicarious enjoyment of watching any violence performed on anyone, through drink­ ing and bragging, and through the trouble he can make ex­ ercising his function as union shop steward at his Brooklyn factory.

He sees himself as unfairly burdened, but something of a stud, a raconteur (though ho would never use such a word), one of the guys, and an important man in the union whom others must respect; he does not realize, and cannot see, that he is considered at best a loud-mouthed bore, and at worst, a perpetual irritant.

Selby depicts Harry in what seem to be ordinary, but not particularly depressing circumstances; for pages we are exposed to a man who rages internally and whenever possible expresses this rage boorishly and hatefully. In fact, Harry is so dislikable over a not particularly bad lot that we do not initially dwell on the origin of his dissatisfactions, though the principal clue to this puzzle is the extraordin­ ary domestic scene that opens the story. 181

Watching television in the evening, Harry wishes his wife would leave him alone and go to bed. He knows that she wants to have sex; "always breakin my balls," he thinks

resentfully (p. 118). Finally he turns in, and she, still

awake, demands his attentions. He fights it, anger increas­

ing, and finally, infuriated, he rolls over atop her.

. . . Harry shoved and pounded as hard as he could, wanting to drive the fuck­ ing thing out of the top of her head; wishing he could put on a rubber dipped in iron filings or ground glass and rip her guts out. . . . [Harry lunged] phys­ ically numb, feeling neither pain nor pleasure, but moving with the force and automation of a machine. . . . [he was completely unaware that] his brutality in bed was the one thing that kept his wife clinging to him and the harder he tried to drive her away, to split her guts with his cock, the closer and tighter she clung to him. (p. 12 0 )

What follows confirms our first impressions; while

Mary falls contentedly asleep, Harry lies awake in agon)’, unable to move from sheer nausea. And after he does fall asleep, he dreams the nightmare that regularly follows his having sex--harpies tearing at him, he helpless and en­ chained, walls crushing him, his eyeballs rolling away and he chasing them, stuffing burrs into his eyesockets. Sig­ nificantly, nothing--sex, nausea, nightmare--can make him cry.

Harry's behavior at work is another side of his behav­ ior with his wife. Described as "the worst lathe operator of 182 the more than 1,000 men working in the factory" (p. 128), he spends as little time as possible at his lathe, usually walking around the shop four to five hours a day, ostensib­ ly on union business. His position as steward protects him from the dismissal he would otherwise receive. It is to the union that he gives his greatest loyalty, though not be­ cause he believes in trade unionism, but because it gives him status he would not otherwise have, and because it per­ mits him to work out his aggressions legitimately. On this day, for example, Harry discovers a worker in technical vio­ lation of a work rule, and it is a measure of his power that, despite the reasoning and placating of the manage­ ment, the man must be removed from the job.

Such events are Harry's triumph, even more exhilirating to him than watching a white beat a black; as he contem­ plates the coming strike, he thinks:

The whole fuckin shop/d be quiet. And he had cartoon like images in his mind of dollar bills with wings flying out the window, out of the pocket and poc- ketbook of a fat baldheaded cigar smo­ king boss; and punks with white shirts and ties and expensive suits sitting at an empty desk and opening empty pay en­ velopes. There were images of gigantic concrete buildings crumbling and pieces flying out of the middle and himself suspended in the air smashing the buil­ dings to pieces. He could see himself crushing heads and bodies and heaving them from the windows and watching them splatter on the sidewalks below and he 185

roared with laughter as lie watched the bodies floating in pools of blood and drifting toward, the sewers. . . . (p. 139)

"for Harry Black," Yurick remarks. . . the straight world is one of perpetual discomfort and anxiety. . . . It brings on choking, nightmares, anxiety. The only way he can survive at work is to create scenes. . . . But Harry has adjusted to this world, the only one lie has ever known; wife and work make demands he can handle because drink, bragging, and union activities provide legitimate outlets for his resentments. The strike frees Harry from the de­ mands of this world and introduces him to another, but it also leaves him vulnerable.

As regards the larger issues of the strike, the few' glimpses Selby gives us of the operations of company and union suggest that wages, hours, and benefits have little to do with the long duration of the work stoppage. The lead­ ers of the union want increased contributions to their wel­ fare fund, which they want to keep under their exclusive control. The company can easily absorb losses through tax breaks and contracting w'ork out; their principal goal is to fire Harry Black. The union has no love for Harry, but they refuse to permit his firing because to give in on an issue--any issue--might provoke a power struggle within the local. When the strike is settled--nnine months later--it is only because both sides are tired of talking. 184

The men rc;i 1 i r.e nothing of this, though their manipu­ lation by both leaders and employers is only a secondary concern of the story. Selby's focus in the long strike sec­ tion of "Strike" is on the changes in Harry himself.

As shop steward, Harry is to man the storefront near the plant that serves as strike headquarters. His duties are little more than to answer the telephone, provide pic­ keting signs, and stamp union books. He discovers that, like other union officers, he will have a more-or-less unlimited expense account, and will generally be unaccountable to anyone for his time or actions. Part of the interest of this narrative is Harry's gradual adapting to this new free­ dom .

On the first day of tlie strike he arrives early, eager to begin. He learns his simple routine quickly and, feeling out the limits of his power, soon orders beer and other supplies for the picketers, charging them to the union. He has much more opportunity for camaraderie with the men.

Pleasantly drunk by the end of the day, he eats dinner in a bar where, by chance, he overhears the conversation of some homosexuals. Fascinated, he remains until midnight.

Still transfixed by the voices and gestures, he returns home only to have them dispelled by Mary's demands for sex, demands which successively anger, nauseate, and frighten him. The strike will also liberate Harry from heterosexuality. 18 5

He spends more and more time at the storefront, be­ cause he finds there companionship, a congenial role, re­ creation, and, of course, at the storefront he can avoid

Mary. One night he is introduced to Ginger, a homosexual from Manhattan, and the memory of her later drives him to patronize the gay bar she mentions. Initially frightened, he relaxes long enough to permit himself to be picked up by Albert(a), another homosexual. The passages in which

Harry's first weekend with him (her) is described contrast in every way with those which describe Harry at home; he anticipates sex with pleasure, finds he enjoys it immense­ ly, and, most significantly, he is made happy.

Selby dwells profitably on this point and its impli­ cations .

He knew he felt good, yet he couldnt define his feeling. He couldnt say , Im happy. He had nothing with which to com­ pare his feeling. He felt good when he was telling Wilson off; he felt good when he was with the guys having a drink; at those times he told himself he was happy, but his feeling now went so much beyond that that it was incom­ prehensible. He didnt realize that he had never been happy, this happy, be­ fore. (p. 20 0)

This happiness, which he experiences whenever he is in the company of his new friends, does not make him a better man. He remains a big talker and spender, and a bore. But he completely rejects Mary, beating her when she demands his 18(1

attention. When she leaves him alone, his happiness is com­

plete; his sexual desires and work preferences are satis­

fied. But with the settlement of the strike, itself an

unusual and temporary situation, Harry must return to his

old way of life--no office, no desk, no expense account.

And his new friends will have nothing to do with him if he

has no money to spend, and the dispatch with which they

reject him almost permits us to sympathize with him, even

after he takes out his frustrations on Mary. When he re­

turns to work, he can take his old routine for only half a

day .

That evening, he accosts a neighborhood boy and at­

tempts to fellate him; the boy's cries for help bring the

gang from the Greek's, who bealr-him savagely and leave him

lying on the ground.

Yurick's account of this story is certainly provoca­

tive. It is true that Harry's attempt on the boy is his do­

ing "the most loving thing he knows," for the only tender­ ness he has ever known has been in the context of homosex­ ual love, and it is also true that the hoods "are not mere­

ly brutal, illegal, but a sort of para-police" of the

straight world. Yurick goes on to suggest, however, that

Harry is a God-Christ figure who "implicitly . . . announ­ ces himself as Christ the Communist who is in combat with

the system of the Old Testament. Here again, Yurick 18 7

imposes his own revolutionary preoccupations on Selby's

work, preoccupations the text will not support. Harry is to

be understood as a victim, but not worshipped as a Savior.

"Landsend," the "Coda" of Last Ex i t , brings the nar­

rative out of the forties and into the fifties. The living

have grown up and married; the scene is still Brooklyn, but

a housing project rather than a neighborhood. "Landsend" is

actually five narratives interspersed, all occurring in one day. The protagonists do not know one another, though some are near neighbors. This, one suspects, is deliberate; the housing project provides better physical conditions than the neighborhood, but it lacks its neighborly intimacy and

friendliness--anyone who has ever lived in an apartment complex knows the feeling of oppressive closeness without intimacy that is the consequence of such arrangements. That the managers of the project understand that this is the case is indicated by their bulletins(about littering, gangs, and dead babies) that Selby uses to punctuate the story.

The individual narratives confirm the indictment of this form of progress. Taken as a group, they complete the gloomy picture that Selby has drawn of the life of the un­ derclass, and, taking place later in time than the other stories, they reveal the depths of the problems and the in­ effectuality of the actions understaken to alleviate them.

Mike and Irene Kelly live on her income, though Mike refuses to care for their children more than perfunctorily 188 or do any housework at all. Since he does not work, Mike must find other means of shoring up his diminished sense of malcncss, and he thinks principally of sex; when his

(bachelor) buddy Sai visits, Mike must demonstrate his dominance by humiliating Irene. Ironically, Mike drinks so much that evening in his cruising of the bars that when he returns home he is unable to do anything but sleep.

Ada, a widow whose only son is dead, is alone in the world. She lives almost entirely in the past, laying out her dead husband's pajamas as she had done for years. When she is dragged into the present, her only pleasure is sit­ ting alone in the sun; her neighbors (the nose - pickers) never speak to her. The rare times when she thinks of her life she rails horrifyingly against her fate.

Vinnie and Mary, a quarrelsome couple unfortunate enough to have met and married, and even more unfortunately the parents of two children, awaken yelling at one another and cease doing so only when they go to sleep. Sex, food, plans, the children--any subject is fit for noise and vio­ lence .

Louis and Lucy, a black couple with two children and ambitions to escape the project, are being divided by the very conditions of their lives. They rarely quarrel, or even raise their voices; Louis, absorbed in his studies to be a television repairman, takes no part in the 189 disciplining of their children and never comforts his wife, while Lucy, offended by the filth of the projects and too anxiously bourgeois to make friends or permit her children to play with other children, lives a life of per­ petual irritation at noise, filth, commotion, impropriety, and, most particularly, sex with Louis, the mere thought of which makes her flesh creep. Estranged from one another by trifles, they isolate themselves emotionally by a wall of silence and private gratification.

Abe ami Nancy, another black couple, live in the pro- icct because even though he is a longshoreman, their eight children qualifiy them for it. Nancy, a faded and bitter woman tied to home and children, is treated by a mere ser­ vant by Abe, who regards his family as an irritating drain on his time and income, both of which are better spent on his Cadillac, personal appearance, and entertainment.

Times have changed in Brooklyn, "Landsend" tells us, but the problems remain. People who live their lives on the lowest level with no control, and who lack emotions recognizable as human are not made any better or happier by removal to a housing project. As a whole, Last Exit to

Brooklyn engages our sympathies, our anger, our feelings for those dehumanized by a life they are unable to influ­ ence. It is the picture of humanity wasted.

***** 190

The PI a yboy reviewer of La s t hx i t: , who might have been expected not to notice it, remarked, in a generally commendatory review, that "Selby has a keen eye and keen ear, but his artistic cruelty, valid in itself, has a fla­ vor literary sadism."'*17 What is only a flavor in Last Ex i t, and which in any case is controlled by and subverted to the larger purposes of the novel, becomes the dominant ingre­ dient of The Room and Thc Demon. Josephine Hendin is right to remark that Selby is "the clinician of male violence, an explorer of those recesses where the question of sexual identity is always in doubt," but after Last Ex i t the de­ piction and exploration of this male violence is carried *5 8 out at the expense of the quality of the fiction itself.'

Let us consider Tlye Room.

In many respects, The Room is a much more carefully constructed book than Last Exit. Selby reaches a peak here, portraying in almost too loving detail the fantasies and frustrations of a twisted, but not untypical mind. The name­ less protagonist of this novel, spending several days in a cell where the passage of time is indicated only by meals and lighting changes, arrested because he was acting suspi­ ciously like a man about to rob a jewelry store one morning at two o'clock, over a two-and-one-half day period under­ goes a complete psychological cycle beginning with resent­ ment at being caught, peaking with fantasies of triumph over his captors, and concluding with sullen resignation at fate. 1 9 1

Selby's use of detail is as effective here as it was

in Last Exit, and his ability to render the process by which

the mind fantasizes and re-fantasizes, creating from mem­

ory and wish, is never better. This much praise is his due,

though he has received more from his critics.

Like its predecessor, The Room produced some criticism unable to get past the four-letter words. It also produced criticism aware of Selby's aims, as well as of the literary sadism so prominently a part of them. Possibly the most prominent review, Dotson Rader's in the New York Times Book

Review, was the most blindly adulatory. Like Yurick, whose essay on Selby he quotes, Rader is disposed to impose his own conceptions on the novel. For Rader, The Room is an in­ dictment of "the authorities," whose crimes in this novel include the rape and disfigurement of a woman, as well as the unjust incarceration of the prisoner. Rader tells us that the novel "could not have been written without the fact of Vietnam, without Kent State, without the ghetto re­ bellions. In the light of Attica and the monstrousness of

American war crimes even the horror of Selby's world is re- 39 duced to the commonplace."

So it is, though perhaps in a way different from that which Rader imagines. This novel does point toward the source of human atrocities, but it is important to note that the atrocities are generated entirely in the mind of the 192

prisoner. Selby does make the reader feel both the horror

and the plight of this trapped and twisted figure, whose

least important restraints are those imposed on his body.

One might well call the novel The Womb, except for

the steel-gray walls. The prison cell, solitary, with

regularly varying light and temperature conditions, a place where the prisoner is physically safe but helpless to es­

cape or act, in fact helpless to do anything but think, is used by Selby as an analogy with and symbol of the pri­

soner's relationship with his mother.

In observable terms, surprisingly little happens. A man is locked in a cell. He sleeps, performs bodily func­

tions, leaves once for his pre-trial hearing and several

times for meals, pops a pimple on his face, masturbates once and suffers an attack of nausea, but rarely, even when angry, utters a word or even moves around his cell much.

His rage, guilt, and bitterness, however, produce a terri­ fic succession of fantasies. One of the most typical exam­ ples of the bottle-up quality of his feelings is the scene, repeated many times, of him lying quietly on his bed while inside he boils with dreams of yelling, cursing, and fighting.

Inarticulateness, inability and unwillingness to ex­ press his feelings, fear of authority, fear of (and hatred and dehumanization of) women, independence of combined with dependence on his mother, inability to be happy except ] 9 3

when others are in pain, these are the prisoner's charac­

teristics. The reader will recognize his blood-brother re­

lationship with Harry Black in Last Exi t and with Harry

White in The Demon.

No sooner is the prisoner left alone in his cell than

his restless mind begins to work. He contemplates his sur­

roundings, attempts some mind games, and then, reflecting

on the slowness of the passage of time, thinks a thought

that expresses what the reader comes to realize is the pat­

tern of his life: "You always end up where you started

from. No matter what happens.A childhood reminiscence

concretizes this pattern:

Like the model airplanes. They never looked like they should. Not really. But it was fun to build them and set them on fire. They sure did burn fast. Sure was dumb sweating over those fuck­ ing models. Spend all that time and what have you got? A model airplane. What dumb shit. (pp. 14-15)

Effort accompanied by failure, no matter how minute--

and the prisoner expects failure, wants it--, always pro­

duces destruction and disillusion.

The extended series of dreams that will occupy him for

the duration of the novel commences with his fantasizing writing a letter to the editor-publisher of a prominent

liberal newspaper. He explains that he now understands that

America is a police state, where the laws exist only to be broken, and that only in the near future will we be "awa­

kened some night to the sound of axes chopping down our

doors and Storm Troopers . . . dragging us out of our beds

(p. 18).

Imagining this letter to be sent in dangerous circum­

stances, he resolves to keep his silence even in the face

of death, but this resolution is unnecessary, because he

now imagines Donald Preston, publisher of The Press, and

Stacey Lowry, the crusading attorney, to have sought him

out in prison. Impressed by his remarkable qualities, they

immediately bail him out and take him to Preston's office, where he tells his story with such intelligence and articu

lateness that they are inspired by him. He tells himself:

It was obvious that the immediate rap­ port they enjoyed was due not only to their singleness of purpose, but also because they accepted him as a man. They were complete equals. He realized that they understood immediately that he was not just another crank, or simply a paranoid, but a man wronged by the authorities. It was also evident that they understood that he was not only fighting for his own rights and vindication, but for those of others who have been, are, and will be abused by this same authority if something is not done to check its malignant growth immediately. It was good to know that they understood these things and realized the type of man he was. (pp. 22-23)

It is hardly necessary to remark on the gigantic in­

security that this passage betrays, an insecurity that is 19 5 basic to his personality, and for which he constantly com­ pensates in his dreams. Quickly the two propose that he aid t h e m in a g i g a n tic c a m p a .i g n a g a i n s t abuse of authority of all kinds; modestly, lie accepts.

Die process by which the prisoner creates his fanta­ sies is quite conscious; at the conclusion of this chapter

"he reviewed the scenes and dialogue and found nothing that needed changing or improving." Nevertheless, he believes in his fantasies intensely; "with their backing," he tells himself, "lie would really show them" (p. 28).

His first chance to do so in the real world occurs the next da>', when he is taken to court for his pre-trial hear­ ing. billed with determination, he listens to charges and testimony "poised and read}' to take notes, and when his at­ torney failed to notice discrepancies in testimony he would make note of them and provide the ammunition necessary to destroy the prosecution's case" (p. 51). But he is unable to do so; "lie couldn't find the proper words to define ex­ actly what was going on inside his head" (p. 32). Hopeless­ ly frustrated, he soon sits back and begins to brood on the injustice and meaninglessness of the proceeding. And when, at the end of the da}-, he returns to his cell, he tells himself that "itll be different next time. . . .They cant play their games with me" (p. 35).

In these first forty pages, the several concurrently running patterns that fill the rest of the novel have been 196 established. In his fantasy world, the prisoner imagines himself becoming the central figure, noble and Christ-like in his determination and gentleness, in a great crusade against the abuse of police authority. He is on a first- name basis with the great ("Stace" and "Don"), and elected officials treat him with deference. Alternatively, he dreams a scries of fantasies in which the two officers who accosted him arc at first put in fear of losing their jobs, then put into his power and tortured physically and mental­ ly until they arc trained to act like dogs. When he is not thinking of them as his dogs, he imagines them to have raped a young woman, for which crime, in a masterly trial scene, he has them removed from the police force and com­ mitted to a mental institution, where lie sends them pictures of all the sex acts lie has committed with their willing wives in their absence. In the real world, he thinks almost entirely about his youth, and as little as possible about the future.

He thinks little of the future, largely because he be­ lieves he has none, and couldn't control it if he did. He is unable to forget, but unable to resolve the problems of the past. How will the prisoner face his trial? Exactly as he has faced the rest of his life, without confidence, with­ out hope, without interest. It is possible to trace his path from the confidence of page 35 to the "and anyway, 197 what's the use? Everything will fall apart eventually any­ way" of page 2 87. His thoughts build upon one another - -past and present coalesce, and from the new "reality" created by fantasies of wish-fulfi1 lment other, newer "realities" are spawned.

Much of Chapter Two dwells on his childhood and his fantasy of retribution. There is something "lovely," to use

Rader's word, in these childhood memories, but there also something ominous. The origin of his attitudes toward au­ thority is found in these scenes:

And then home to mother to show her the report card and tell her you got promo­ ted. And she was always happy to see the good marks, but then she wanted to know why the D in effort and D in conduct, and there was never an answer. Youre such a good boy. Why can't you get A in effort and in conduct, the hurt look on her face. And you try shrugging and mumbling the question away, but it does­ n't work. And you get all knotted up and sick to your stomach, and you feel hot­ ter and hotter and there's nothing to say. (p. 39)

But his mother is more than authority; she is refuge.

Even at a remove of over twenty years, her comforting of him after a fight or a scare raises his spirits; conversely, one of the signals of his resignation at the end of the novel is the refrain of "sometimes I feel like a mother­ less child." 19 8

The origin of his fear of thc police is fount! .in a cluster of scenes: in one, in Chapter Two, his left hand is broken by an officer's night stick as he breaks up a crap game. In another, in Chapter Three, he is taken by the police to identify a dog that bit him, but all he can think of is the danger of their discovering his slingshot.

In a third, also in Chapter Three, he is playing John Dil- linger, play-shooting out the window, when the police barge in, thinking he is a sniper.

This dependence on his mother and fear of authority-- being called to account by anyone produces silence and fear, and later, resentment and anger--is combined with other ex­ periences. There is little mention of his father, for exam­ ple, the absence of whose influence may account for his pe­ culiar combination of oversensitivity and brutality.

Likewise, he seems never to have had a fulfilling sex­ ual experience. All are accompanied by guilt and secrecy, and often by discovery and reprimand. When he finally does lose his virginity, nothing but the smell remains in his mind, and he is paralyzed by fear of discovery on the part of, of course, his mother. Disgust is the emotion almost always associated in his mind with sex.

How has he passed his life since the age of fifteen, when he joined the Merchant Marine, until the present, since internal evidence suggests he is in his mid-thirties when 199 the novel take? place? Without hope or reflection, appar­ ently; any one year seems to have been like any other for this sullen loner, except that their passage has reinforced his bitterness and pessimism. These qualities express them­ selves most devastatingly when he considers his arrest and trial, first tlie energy of bitterness, and then the resig­ nation of pcssimism.

His dreaming is a kind of masturbatory self-stimulation that is both spiritual and sexual, which begins as a way to pass the time, and rapidly acquires an attraction of its own. By the end of Chapter Two, instead of being despondent at being locked up again after his meal, he thinks of his solitude as "a dessert of sorts," "something to look for­ ward to” (p. 5 9).

He dreams of getting back at everyone. He faces down the officers who had arrested him long ago while he was in the Merchant Marine. When he is arrested in front of the jewelry store, he calls Stace, whom lie lias now known for years, and the latter arranges for his immediate release with the Police Commissioner. Immeiately he revises the scene, so that after his release, he gently reprimands the officers before their captain, who, after the prisoner and

Stace leave, reprimands them severely, as they stare at him fearfully. The prisoner responds to his own imagination:

"He put his arm even tighter against his eyes so he could 200 see their faces more clearly. The red of embarrassment turned to a white of fear and panic. The joy surging through his body was so intense his throat constricted and he sat up as he started coughing. . ." (p. 54).

In Chapter Three, when the officers arrest him, he knocks them out, places them in their squad car, and walks away. Unable to answer their radio, they fail to respond to a distress call from some brother officers, and as a re­ sult they arc suspended from the police department. Their personal lives deteriorate, their families leave them, they become universal pariahs. "The ex-cops finally disappeared and the story forgotten until the body of one is found, slightly decomposed, in a junkyard" (p. 63). Still later, when he is apprehended, he knocks them unconscious, charges them with police brutality, and, in a brilliant trial in which he is the center of attention,though not a lawyer, he makes the charges stick.

By Chapter Four, he is before a special committee of the State Legislature, now the center of the great anti­ authority campaign. The sensation of this dream is so power­ ful that at his next meal he imagines himself to be "the focal point of [his fellow prisoners'] despair and frustra­ tion. And he knew, too, that though he sat there silently and slowly eating in the midst of the clanging tin trays and cups that they found the reassurance they needed in his eyes. He was the hope of the hopeless" (p. 96). 2 01

Chapter Seven reveals another side of the prisoner's

vigorous imagination. Rader, as has been noted, takes this

scene, in which the prisoner fantasizes the rape-mutilation

of a "Mrs. Haagstrom" by the two officers ("Harry" and

"Fred"), to be a real event, and uses it as an occasion for

some indignant remarks about authority in America. In fact,

the scene is only a further indication of the state of the

prisoner's mind and the direction of his wish-drearns. Chap­

ter Six concludes with the prisoner recalling a single frame

of an old Fu Manchu comic--"an ancient and evil looking ori­

ental had a white woman chained to a pillar in a large hall.

What was the oriental going to do with her, he always won­

dered" (p. 130). Seven opens with his expressing resentment

at the thought of "Harry" and "Fred" "cruising around the

street looking for some young broad driving alone" (p. 137).

Soon these two strands are combined--the officers stop

a woman, drive her away under pretence of police business,

rape, beat, and mutilate her. We know this is one of the prisoner's fantasies because the attitude toward women and

sex is his, and because after the fantasy concludes, he be­ gins the nervous pacing characteristic of him when he is

aroused. Having identified with the officers during the

"rape," he now identifies with the victim.

He becomes, in succession, the Christ-like campaigner against the abuse of authority (now testifying before 202

Congress), the sharp and relentless cross-examiner, picking apart the testimony of the officers as to why they arrested him,' and incidentallv forcinp <_> them to reveal their cpuilt ’ in the Mrs. Haagstrom incident, and the sadistic dog trainer.

Two .passages in the latter part of the novel remind us that the prisoner can conceive of human relations as having only two roles--tormentor and victim. After (in his imagin­ ation) he has caused the officers to be institutionalized and sent them the pictures of their wives having sex with him, he calls up the image of the wives telephoning him in d i smay :

He smiled and his body tingled as he felt their world coming to an end and he could see the tears streaming down their faces and could feel the marrow draining from their bones, see them on bended knees, washing his feet with their tears and begging him for their lives. It was a lovely scene and he loved the music, and when he had heard enough he gently cradled the phone and let the jov flow through his bodv. (pp. 2 5 91 2 4 0)

He even falls into these roles with inanimate objects.

Consider the prisoner as he ties a knot :

He looped the string this way, that way, positive that that was the way to do it, yet it never came out right. . . . He stopped for a second then very methodi­ cally tried it another way and still he couldn't get the goddam thing tied pro­ perly and he strangled the string with his hands and screamed at it and threw the sonofabitch on the floor. . . . (p. 241) 2 0 2

These events introduce the climax of the novel. Two

days of fantasies have aroused the prisoner emotionally

and sexually; now, stimulated by the memory of having been

caught peering up a woman's dress In church as a boy, he

ej aculates.

From this moment on his spirits desert him. Holding

his penis in his hands, feeling it detumescc, lie senses

his spirits ebbing:

. . . it hung limp and unresisting. The battle had to end without an opponent, without bones to break or flesh to sink teeth into, without entrails to be gored or spewed about. No victory. Only submission, (p. 249)

Hitherto he has felt either trapped or secure in his cell;

suddenly, his energy gone, he becomes pretcrnatura1ly aware

of his surroundings. His guilt about sex and his fear of

discovery return. "He felt," Selby says, "exposed and vul­ nerable" (p. 250). He wants only to run and hide, to fall

into a deep sleep; once again he becomes aware of the op- » pressiveness of time.

At mealtime he feels weak and self-conscious, unplea­

santly aware of the stain on his trousers. No longer the hope of the hopeless, he can think only of returning to the safety of his cell. And when he does return, he vomits, nauseated by weakness and disgust. But this sickness com­

forts him; it is "the safe and known" (p. 273). "And he knew it would always be there. That it would never desert

him. That no matter what happened, no matter where he might

go or what the world might do to him, he could always rely

on his companion" (p. 272).

The vigor of his resentment abates, and the directions

of his expectations change. When he reviews his courtroom

scene for the last time, he sees himself failing to refute

his captors' testimony, silenced by objections to his nit­

picking and badgering manner. Stacey Lowry wouldn't bother

with him now, he thinks; "... somehow everything I touch

turns to shit" (p. 281).

"This book is dedicated," Selby tells us in his dedi­

cation, "with love, to the thousands who remain nameless

and know." What they know is made explicit in the last page

of the novel:

They don't know what it is to feel the sorrow of the world. To feel the hollow, lumpy pain of hunger. Or loneliness. That terrible loneliness that make sim­ ple movements gigantic chores and weighs so heavy inside you that you cant answer a simple question with a yes or no, or even shake your head. You cant even stare into inquisitive eyes. You can only feel the heavy loneliness flowing through your body and hanging wet and heavy on your eyes. To them tears are just tears and nothing more. They dont feel them. They just dont feel. Thats what it is. (p. 284)

One recalls Loretta Wendall of them lashing out at the world as the source of her problems; Loretta, at least, 205

could always forget. Selby's nameless ones seem to be the

oversensitive and insecure, who, in his own phrase, lack

control, who are brutal one moment and soft the next. They

know most acutely their own unworthiness, and their con­

stant reflection on all the manifestations of that unworth- ness robs them of the ability to face the future. Such an

individual is the prisoner, and, coming from a lower-class

environment, he finds his way into a life of drifting and petty crime almost accidentally.

In the bulk of the novel, Selby shows us the danger­ ous and threatening aspect of such a person, whose fantasies

realized would endanger the world. But the last pages of the novel show his fury evaporating into sullen whimpering and self-pity, a grousing at a world he is unable to deal with.

It is for this reason that in the foreword Selby does "not ask for justice for the defendant, but mercy." And as the prisoner shuffles dejectedly out of his cell to a courtroom where the criminal justice system will dispose of him with­ out active participation on his part, Selby means the reader to recall the words of the foreword.

*****

This most apolitical of writers is able to recreate vividly the Brooklyn of the past thirty years, and the rage at life of those who are victims of spiritual, and not merely economic poverty. In his first novel, Selby put down 2 06 on paper both the rnw life outside and the jangled feelings inside his figures. In The Room, he provided an environment as devoid of influence and action as any imaginable, and devoted all Iris attention to the thoughts of a man reliving his past and dreaming of his future almost without inter­ ruption for over two days. The very intensity of the pri­ soner's fantasies made T. R. Edwards remark that "to make a dull mind interesting enough to be lovable, the novelist intrudes upon his own illusion, but by making the prisoner express what can't be accepted as his own, the intrusions 4 1 interfere with the credibility that precedes compassion."

Another reviewer found these intrusions "an emotional in­ dulgence on the part of the main character" that become "a technical indulgence on the part of the author, and a self-

4 7 delea ting one at that."

It is self-defeating for two reasons, though only if certain assumptions are true about The Room. If this novel is intended to evoke the same response as Last Exit, then it fails: aside from sadism and brutality that makes its predecessor look tame, and this in a figure we are supposed to feel sympathy for, The Room's protagonist is not some­ one particularly burdened in his childhood: it would be hard to say that anyone ever did anything worse to him than fail to push him out into the world; like Studs Lonigan, he is a mama's boy grown up. 207

But I believe that The Demon demonstrates both Selby's progress as a novelist and the shifting nature of his aims.

Considered as a novel, The Demon is much inferior to its predecessors; it takes Harry Black, sends him to college, and makes him an engineer become business executive. Selby does not render the shibboleths of the middle and upper classes with anything approaching the authority of his por­ trait of lower class life, and for this reason, both the setting and the plot of The Demon are cardboard.

What is not cardboard, and what is rendered with all his customary intensity, is the inner anguish and rage of

(the protagonist) Harry White himself. What Harry does be­ cause of his anguish--he goes from philandering, to sleeping with diseased prostitutes, to petty crime, to theft, to mur­ der, to murder in public on national television--is uncon­ vincing, as is Selby's explanation of the nature of Harry's demon--that in Harry exists a desire simultaneously to look respectable in the eyes of the world and to have his thrills as well, thrills that must constantly rise in intensity.

But even as the reader dismisses the manifestations and ex­ planation of Harry's anguish, the anguish itself commands belief.

The novels since Last Exit reveal Selby's increasing preoccupation with dramatizing male violence, even at the expense of the other qualities that make fiction good. At 207

But I believe that The Demon demonstrates both Selby's

progress as a novelist and the shifting nature of his aims.

Considered as a novel, The Demon is much inferior to its

predecessors; it takes Harry Black, sends him to college,

and makes him an engineer become business executive. Selby

does not render the shibboleths of the middle and upper

classes with anything approaching the authority of his por­

trait of lower class life, and for this reason, both the

setting and the plot of The Demon are cardboard.

What is not cardboard, and what is rendered with all

his customary intensity, is the inner anguish and rage of

(the protagonist) Harry White himself. What Harry docs be­

cause of his anguish--he goes from philandering, to sleeping with diseased prostitutes, to petty crime, to theft, to mur­ der, to murder in public on national television--is uncon­ vincing, as is Selby's explanation of the nature of Harry's demon--that in Harry exists a desire simultaneously to look respectable in the eyes of the world and to have his thrills as well, thrills that must constantly rise in intensity.

But even as the reader dismisses the manifestations and ex­ planation of Harry's anguish, the anguish itself commands belief.

The novels since Last Exit reveal Selby's increasing preoccupation with dramatizing male violence, even at the expense of the other qualities that make fiction good. At 20 8 his best, when he remembers what it was like and what it felt like to be there, Selby is a superb naturalist by re flex. ^ ^

I NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

1 "Drums of Hell," Newsweek, 28 December 1904, p. 59. 2 Mine comes principally from four sources: (1) "Drums of Hell," (2) Haskel Frankel , "Call Me Cubby," Saturday Review, 25 January 1965, pp. 40-41, (5) "The Times Diary," roncTon Times, 1 August 1968, p. 8 , and (4) the back cover of the paperback edition of Last Exit to Brooklyn.

^ Frankel, p . 4 0 .

^ "The Times Diary," p. 8 .

3 I. Hamilton, "Fatal Fascinations," New Statesman, 20 March 1966, p. 256.

^ "Last Exit to Nowhere," Saturday Review, 3 April 196 19 6 5, p . 12. *“

' "Throwing Up Absurd," New York Review of Books, 5 December 19 64, p. 26. O Granville Hicks, "Life in Four Letters," Sa turday Review, 7 November 1964 , p. 25.

^ "Hubert Selby: Symbolic Intent and Ideological Re­ sistance (or Cocksucking and Revolution)," Evergreen Re­ vi ew, October 1969, p . 49.

1^ Adams, p. 26.

11 Hicks, p. 24.

Provincetown Review, 5 (Winter 1961). The entire is­ sue is devoted to a discussion of the trial arising from the publication of "Tralala" in Provincetown Review, 3.

13 London Times, 12 December 1966, p. 9.

1^ London Times, 6 February 1967, p. 9, and 7 February, 1967, p. 10.

13 London Times, 4 April 19 67 , p. 3.

209 210

^ London Times, 14 November 1967 , p. 2, and 16 Novem­ ber 1967, p. 2. An all male jury was chosen to hear this case because British law permits a judge to bar women from serving on juries whose cases might embarrass or offend them . 1 7 London Times, 17 November 196/, p. 5, and 22 Novem­ ber 196 7, p . 3.

London Times, 2 4 November 1967, p. 3. I 9 London Times, 20 December 1967, p. 2.

London Times, 1 August 1968, pp. 3, 8 , and 10. The On p. 16 of the Times of 23 July 1968 is a particularly lucid discussion of the legal aspects of the case. s 1 A. II. Wciler, "Busy as a Bogdanovich," New York Times, 27 February 1972 , Sec. 2, p. 57. II Stephen Farber and Estelle Changas, "What Has the Court Saved Us from?" New York Times , 9 December 1973 , Sec. 2 , p . 5 .

In addition to Provincetown Review, Black Mountain Revi ew , New Directions V l T ~, and Swank published individual stories later incorporated into La st Ex it. "> 1 Hubert Selby, Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn (New York: Grove Press, 1964], p. 28. Further references to this text are parenthetical.

7 5 The b Symbolist v m __ Movement in Literature (New York: E. P. Dut ton, 1919), pp. 165-164.

On N a t i ve Grounds (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), p . 2 96.

-‘ Hicks, p. 25.

Yurick, p. 50.

29 Yurick, p . 78 .

Frankel, pp. 40-41.

Kenneth Alsop, rev. of Last Exit to Brooklyn, Specta tor, 28 January 1966 , p. 113.

32 Eliot Fremont - Smith, "Beyond Revulsion," New York Times Book Review, 8 November 1964, p. 67. 211

Yur i ck , p . SI.

54 Yurick, p. 74.

3 5 y u r y c p ( p t 7 5 ,

36 Yurick, p. 76.

Review of Last Exit to Brooklvn, Playboy, January 1965, p. 39.

"The Room," Saturday Review, 11 December 1971, p. 57.

59 "p)iC Room," New York Times Book Review, 12 December 19 71, pp. 28-29.

40 Hubert Selbv, Jr., The Room (1971; rpt. New York: Grove Press, 1972), p. 13. Further references to this text are parenthetical.

44 "The Real Thing," New York Review of Books, 9 March 19 72, p. 19.

42 "piqsticking," Times Literary Supplement, 25 February 1972, p. 209. 4 5 ' Kazin, p. 291. Kazin coined this expression to des­ cribe naturalists after John Dos Passos, e.g., James T. Far­ rell or Lrskinc Caldwell, and to contrast them with philo­ sophical naturalists, e.g., Dos Passos and Theodore Dreiser. CONCLUSION

Naturalism in America has, by its persistence in time

and multitudinousness of form, always made coherent accounts

of it very difficult to write. Had it followed the model of

naturalism in France, for example, it would have produced a

respectable body of theory in addition to novels, and it

would have persisted for about a generation after its origin

in the 1890's, dying away after about 1915. Instead, how­

ever, American naturalism has produced little significant

fictional theory, has embraced three distinct "styles of

reflection" (of which Social Darwinism was only the first),

and has been produced in three outbursts since around the

turn of the century.

The basic reason for American naturalism's distinctive quality is that (unlike French naturalism) its originating

impulse is not primarily literary, but social. Since about

1890, America has undergone three periods of intense social consciousness and reform, alternating with which have been two comparatively quiet and complacent periods. It is no accident that naturalism should have first arisen in the

Progressive era, and that to express its deterministic ideas about the relation of man and society it should have 21 3

seized the currently popular vocabulary of Social Darwinism.

Likewise, when another period of intense social con­ sciousness began after 1929, politically conscious writers who turned to naturalism chose as their vehicle of expres­ sion the then prestigious ideas of Marxism. After each of these periods, during the 1920's and the 1950's, the decline of social consciousness was accompanied by a falling-off of natura1i sm.

It is natural to expect, therefore, that the 1960's, the most turbulent decade in American history since the

Civil War, should have seen the re-emergence of literary naturalism, though in a guise appropriate to the times, as

Social Darwinism and Marxism had been appropriate in theirs.

In this work I have examined selected novels by Joyce Carol

Oates, Sol Yurick, and Hubert Selby, Jr., three novelists

I believe representative of the latest manifestations of literary naturalism.

In A Garden of Earthly Delights and them, Oates writes of the ways in which those trapped in a destructive and op­ pressive life attempt to find their way out. Clara Walpole/

Revere of Garden and Maureen Wendall of them each achieve some sort of good life, but at terrific cost to their per­ sonal integrity. Like Dreiser, Oates depicts the traps the spirit of man must cope with in his groping for a place in the universe. 214

Sol Yurick's The U'a rriors , I: e r t i g , and The Ba g arc col­ lectively a three-part description of the attempt and fail­ ure of a complex social organism to deal with the pace of change in the I960's. Yurick's eye and ear for detail re­ create the last decade in sight and sound. Like Dos Passos in the scale of his ambitions and the acuteness of his po­ litical consciousness, lie also resembles his predecessor in his tendency to make the protagonist of his fiction the system, and his figures its manifestations and creatures.

In Last Exit to Brooklyn and The Room, Hubert Selby,

Jr. makes his subject the rage of those stunted by the con­ ditions of their lives. As observant as Yurick of evocative detail, Selby is more interested in individuals than in social systems. Like Farrell in his relationship to his material, Selby employs naturalism almost reflexively.

Each of these novelists has abandoned naturalism after writing major works employing it. That they should have done so suggests that naturalism in America is indeed more the product of social than literary impulses. LIST OF REFERENCES

Aaron, Daniel. "The American Left: Some Ruins and Monu­ ments." University of Denver Quarterly, 1 (1966), 5- 25.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. 1918; rpt. Boston: Houghton-MiFTTin, 1961.

Adams, Robert M. "them." Rev. of them, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review, 28 September 1969, pp. 4-5, 4 5 .

'’Tlarowi ng Up Absurd." Rev. of La s t Exi t to Brooklyn, by Hubert Selby, Jr. New York Review oT~ Books, 5 December 1964, pp. 26-28.

Allsop, Kenneth. Review of several novels, including Last Exit to Brooklyn, by Hubert Selby, Jr. Spectator, 2 8 January 1966, p. 113.

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Wes tern Literature. Trans! Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, rpt. 1968.

Avant , J. A. "An Interview with Jovce Carol Oates." Library Journal, 97 (15 October 1 972 )', 3711- 371 2.

Batterberry, Michael and Ariane. "Focus on Joyce Carol Oates." Harper's Baiaar, September 1973, pp. 159, 17 4-176.

Bellamy, Joe David. "The Dark Lady of American Letters: An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates." Atlantic, Febru­ ary 1972, pp. 63-67.

Bernard, Claude. An Introduction to the Study of Experimen­ tal Medicine. Trans. H. C. Greene. New York: Henry Schuman, 1949.

Berthoff, Warner. The Ferment of Realism: American Litera­ ture 1884-1919. New York: Free Press, 1965.

Burwell, Rose Marie. "Joyce Carol Oates and an Old Master." Crit ique, 15, 1 (197 3), pp. 145-158. 2 1 5 216

Bryant, Jerry H. "The Last of the Social Protest Writers." Ari zona Quarterly, 19 (196 3), 313-32 5.

Ciardi, John. "Last Exit to Nowhere." Saturday Review, 3 April 1965, p. 12.

Clemons, Walter. "Joyce Carol Oates: Love and Violence." Newsweek, 11 December 1972, pp. 72-74, 77.

Cook, Bruce. "Fertig." Rev. of Fertig, by Sol Yurick. Com­ monweal , 14 October 1966, pp. 59-61.

Courbet and the Naturalist Movement■ Ed. George Boas. Balti­ more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938.

Cowley, Malcolm. A Many-Windowed House: Collected Essays on American Writers and American Writing. Ed. Henry Dan Piper. Carbondale! Southern Illinois University Press, 196 9.

The Creative Present: Notes on Contemporary American Fic­ tion. Ed. Nona Balakian and Charles Simmons. New York: Doubleday , 1963.

Demetz, Peter. Marx, Engels, and the Poets: Origins of Marxist Literary Cri tic ism, rev., enl. Ed. and trans. JQ L^ Sammons. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.

Document s of Modern Li terary Real ism. Ed. George Becker. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.

"Drums of Hell." Rev. of Last Exit to Brooklyn, by Hubert Selby, Jr. Newsweek, 28 December 1964, p. 59.

Edwards, T. R. "The Real Thing." Rev. of The Room, by Hubert Selby, Jr. New York Review of Books, 9 March 1972, pp. 19-20.

Elman, R. M. "Everybody Has One." Rev. of The Bag, by Sol Yurick. New York Times Book Review, 19 May 1968, pp. 4, 38.-

Essays on Determinism in American Literature. Ed. Sydney J. Krause. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1964.

Farber, Steven, and Estelle Changas. "What Has the Court Saved Us From?" New York Times, 9 December 1973 , Sec. 2, p. 3. 2.17

Frankel, Haskel. "Call Me Cubby." Sa turd ay Review, 2^ Jan­ uary 1965, pp. 40-41.

Fremont-Smith, Fliot. "Beyond Revulsion." Rev. of Last Ex i t to Brooklyn, by Hubert Selby, Jr. New York Times Book Review, 8 November 1964 , p. 67.

Furst, Lillian, and Peter Skrine. Natural ism. London: Methu cn, 1968.

Giles, James R. "Naturalism and Experimentation: The First Five Novels of Joyce Carol Oates." Unpublished. 29 p.

Graham, D. B. "Naturalism and the Revolutionary Imperative: Yurick's The Warriors." Critique, 18, 1 (1976), pp. 119-128.

Grumbach, Doris. "An Is1 and Death." Rev. of An Island Death by Sol Yurick. New York Times Book Rev i ew , 20 AprTl 1975, pp. 5, 10.

Hamilton, I. "Fatal Fascinations." Rev. of Last Exi t to Brooklyn, by Hubert Selby, Jr. New Statesman^ ZO-March 19 66, pp. 255-256.

Hatch, Robert. "Yurick's Way." Rev. of The Warriors, by Sol Yurick. Na t ion, 22 November 1965 , pp. 594 - 595.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Ed . Harry Levin. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin , 1961.

Hendin, Josephine. "The Room." Rev. of The Room, by Hubert Selby, Jr. Saturday Review, 11 December 1971, p. 57.

Hicks, Granville. "Life in Four Letters." Rev. of Nova Ex - press, by William Burroughs, and Last Exit to Brook­ lyn , by Hubert Selby, Jr. Saturday Revi ew, 7 November 1964 , p p . 25- 24 .

Hofstader, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944, rev. ed. New York: George Braziller, 1959

Jameson, Frederic. "The Great American Hunter, or Ideologi­ cal Content in the Novel." College English, 34 (1965), 180-197 (Comment by Sol Yurick, 198-199).

Janeway, Elizabeth. "Clara the Climber." Rev. of A Garden of Earthly Delight s, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review, 10 September 1967, pp. 5, 63. 218

Kazin, Alfred. Bright Book o f Li fe: Amori can Nove1 is ts a n d Story-Tellers from Hemingway to Ma i1e r. Boston: Atlan­ tic-Little, Brown, 1975.

------"Oates." Harper's , August 1971, pp. 78- 82.

------< Oji Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. Garden City, New York: Doubledav, 19 56.

Kuehl, Linda. "An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates." Common­ weal , 5 December 1969 , pp. 507- 51(1.

Levin, Harry. The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Reali st s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

, "Qn the Dissemination of Realism." Tri-Quarter­ ly ,------11 (Winter 196 8), pp. 155-171.

Lukacs, George. Rea 1 ism in Our T ime: Li ter ature and the Class Strugg1e . "Trans. J. and N. Mandcr. New York: Harper and Row, 1964.

Mills, C. Wright. The Sociologica1 Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Muste, John M. Say Tha t We Saw Spa in D i e : Li tera ry Conse­ quences of the Spanish Civil War. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Building Tension in the Short Story." Writer, June 1966, pp. 11-12, 44.

_ A Garden of Earthly Delights. 1967; rpt. Green­ wich, Ct.: Fawcett, n. d.

# "New Heaven and Earth." Saturday Review, 4 No­ vember 1972, pp. 51-54.

------# New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Exper­ ience in Literature. New York: Vanguard, 1974.

------_ "A Personal View of Nabokov." Saturday Review of the Arts, January 1975, pp. 56-57.

. "Someone Just Like You." Rev. of Someone Just Like You, by Sol Yurick. New York Times Book Review, 3 September 1972, pp. 6-7.

. them. 1969; rpt. Greenwich, Ct.: Fawcett, 1970. Oates, Joyce Carol. "The Unique and the Universal in Fic­ tion." Wri ter, January 1975, pp. 9-12.

------# Where Are You Go ing, Where Have You Been: Stor- ics of Young America. Greenwich, Ct.: Fawcett, 1 9 7 4.

Oglesby, Carl. "Beyond Black Laughter." Rev. of The Bag, by Sol Yurick. Ramparts Maga z ine, 2 4 August 1968, p p . 53-54.

Osterman, Robert. "The Subject--No, the Protagonist--1s the City, Grim and Full of Devils." Rev. of Someone Just Like You, by Sol Yurick. National Observer, 30 Septem­ ber 1972, p. 27.

"Pigsticking." Rev. of The Room, by Hubert Selby, Jr. Times Literary Supplement, 25 February 1972, p. 209.

Pizer, Donald. Rea 1ism and Natura1ism in Nineteenth Century American Literature. Carbondale: Southern 111inois University Press, 1966.

Proceedings of the Comparative Literature Symposium, Vol. V Modern American Fiction: Ins ights and Foreign Lights.— L d . W7T. Zyla and W. M. Aycock. Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University Press, 1972.

Rader, Dotson. "The Room." Rev. of The Room, by Hubert Sel­ by, Jr. New York Times Book Review, 12 December 1971, pp. 5, 28-29.

Rahv, Philip. "Notes on the Decline of Naturalism." Parti­ san Review, 9 (1942), 483-493.

Rev. of Last Exit to Brooklyn, by Hubert Selby, Jr. Playboy January 1965, pp. 38-39.

Ricks, Christopher. "The Unignorable Real." Rev. of them, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Review of Books, 12 February 1970, pp. 22-24.

Scenes from American Life: Contemporary Short Fiction. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Random House, 1973.

Selby, Hubert, Jr. The Demon. Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976.

------Last Exit to Brooklyn. New York: Grove Press, 1964 .

------The Room. New York: Grove Press, 1971; rpt. 197 220

Stewart, Randall. "Dreiser and the Naturalistic Heresy." V i rginla Quarterly Revi ew , 34 (1958), 100-116.

Swados, Harvey. "The Coming Revolution in American Liter­ ature." Saturday Review, 21 August 1965, pp. 14-17.

Symons, Arthur. The Symboli s t Movement in Literature. New York: Dutton, 1919.

Taylor, Walter Fuller. The Econom ic Novel in Am erica. 194 2; rpt . New York: Octagon Books, 1964.

Voices of Brooklyn: An Anthology. Ed. Sol Yurick. Chicago: American Library Association, 1973.

Weiler, A. H. "Busy as a Bogdanovich." New York Times, 27 February 1972, Sec. 2, p. 37.

Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. New York: Appleton-Cen- tury, 1934.

Wilson, Edmund. Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginati ve Literature of 1870-195 0. New YorkScribner's, 1951; rpt. 1969.

Yurick, Sol. The Bag. 1968; rpt. New York: Avon Books, 1974.

------"Correspondent to the Underworld." Rev. of Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way, by Nelson Al- gren. Nation, 25 October 1965, pp. 283-284.

------< Fertig. 1966; rpt. New York: Avon Books, 1975.

------_ "Hubert Selby: Symbolic Intent and Ideological Resistance (or Cocksucking and Revolution)." Evergreen Review, October 1969, pp. 49- 51 , 73- 78.

------_ Island Death. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

------_ "Not All Middle Class America is in the Sub­ urbs." New York Times, Brooklyn-Queens-Long Island Edition, ll June 1972, Sec. 1-A, p. 16.

------. "The Politics of the Imagination: The Problem of Consciousness." Tri-Quarterly, 23/24 (Winter/Spring 1972), pp. 503-552.

...... "Sob-Sister Gothic." Rev. of In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. Nation, 7 February 1966, pp. 158-160. 221

Yurick, Sol. Someone Just Like You. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

------^ The Warriors. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1965.

------_ "That Wonderful Person Who Brought You Howard Cosell." Esquire, October 1974, pp. 152-154.

Materials dealing with the Last Exit to Brooklyn trials (1966-68) and the "Tralala" trial (1961).

London Times:

1966--14 September, p. 1; 14 November, p. 9; 12 Decem­ ber, p. 9; 16 December, p. 15; 17 December, p. 8. 1967--6 February, p. 9; 7 February, p. 10; 4 April, p. 3; 28 July, p. 8; 14 November, p. 2; 15 November, p. 5; 16 November, p. 2; 17 November, p. 5; 18 November, p. 4; 21 November, p. 2; 22 November, p. 3; 23 November, p. 2; 24 November, pp. 1,3; 2 December, p. 9 (letter); 20 December, p . 2 . 1968--3 April, p. 2; 23 July, p. 16; 24 July, p. 7; 25 July, p. 15; 1 August, pp. 3, 8, 9, 10; 12 August, p. 7.

Provincetown Review, 5 (Winter 1961). The entire issue is devoted to the controversy surrounding the publication of "Tralala" in Provincetown Review, 3.