by John Updike
In the short prose poems, van Ostaijen projects synthesis out of derangement. A cocaine user, he writes out of “that peace of heart and tranquillity of spirit [that] could be his only after his retina became threadbare from the maddest realities of light.” He writes sometimes in the texture of a drug trip:
You must lie on the ground. Thus, across the ground, past much ochre and brown, past much green, your eye gains the bark and again the green, the old and the young and finally this gray, this crazy gray green, which is so exhausting that your eye flees to earth and slowly, only slowly, awakens to the motion of a brown hay wagon in the midst of the yellow-brown bed of needles.
And in “Bankruptcy Jazz,” an electric confusion of phrases, placards, scenes, and oddly hydraulic jazz (The jazz overflows into the street, one direction reads) sums up an era when wheelbarrow-loads of inflated currency were trundled along Europe’s cobblestoned squares, between the Gothic cathedrals and the rococo city halls, when Charlie Chaplin might as well have been the government, when jazz tumbled everywhere and Dada took upon itself the slogans of salvation: “DADA is universal reason which the superidiocy of everybody can attain,” “DADA is not an artistic Business, but the FORMULA OF BANKRUPTCY,” “JOIN DADA.” The scenario, in its sans-serif spasms, has the fluttering fury of a moth beating against a street lamp. This volume of prose affords glimpses of a poetic genius, and we put it down hoping that soon Mr. Beekman and the University of Massachusetts Press will give us, in a slightly darker and bigger typeface, van Ostaijen’s poetry.
If Dada was, as “Bankruptcy Jazz” proclaims, Nietzsche Without Nietzsche, a definition of Pop could be Mao Without Mao. The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, by Frederic Tuten, wears a nice comic-book jacket by Roy Lichtenstein and is described by Susan Sontag on the inside flap as “soda pop, a cold towel, or a shady spot under a tree for culture-clogged footsoldiers on the American long march.” Broken into components, the hundred and twenty-one pages of Mr. Tuten’s opus consist of (1) twenty-seven pages of straight history of the Long March (October 1934–October 1935), done in a neutral, factual tone, as by a fellow-travelling Reader’s Digest; (2) thirty-six and a half pages of quotations in quotation marks, from unidentified sources (such as, diligent research discovers, Hawthorne’s Marble Faun, Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, and Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State); (3) twelve and a half pages of parody, of Faulkner, Hemingway, Kerouac, the Steinbeck/Farrell school, the Malamud/Bellow school, and of modern-art criticism in numerous schools; (4) nineteen pages of a supposed interview with Chairman Mao in 1968, in which the Chairman reveals himself as an avid subscriber to American highbrow periodicals and a keen devotee of Godard films and Minimal Art; (5) twenty-six pages of what might be considered normal novelistic substance—imaginary encounters and conversations. For an example of (5): Chairman Mao is alone in his tent, after the strain of the Tatu campaign. He hears the rumble of a tank:
A tank, covered with peonies and laurel, advances toward him. Mao thinks the tank will crush him, but it presently clanks to a halt. The turret rises, hesitantly. Greta Garbo, dressed in red sealskin boots, red railway-man’s cap, and red satin coveralls, emerges. She speaks: “Mao, I have been bad in Moscow and wicked in Paris, I have been loved in every capital, but I have never met a MAN whom I could love. That man is you Mao, Mao mine.”
Mao considers this dialectically. The woman is clearly mad. Yet she is beautiful and the tank seems to work. How did she get through the sentries? Didn’t the noise of the clanking tank treads wake the entire camp? Where is everyone?
Mao realizes the camp is empty. He is alone with Garbo. But Mao has always been more attracted to Harlow than to Garbo. What should he do not to break her romantic little heart?
“Madame, I have work to do,” says Mao gently.
“It can wait till tomorrow, my love,” she answers, unzipping her coveralls.
Mao thinks: “After all, I have worked hard and do deserve a rest.” But an internal voice answers him: “Rest only after socialism.”
“My Mao, this is no way to treat a woman who has made a long journey to be with you.”
“But what of my wife?”
“Ah, that is an old bourgeois ploy, Mao mine.”
Mao succumbs, and in the tent recites to her the entirety of the famous conclusion to Pater’s The Renaissance, wherein we are entreated to “burn always with this hard, gemlike flame.”
The whole episode is, like others in the book, charming, and it illustrates how well Mr. Tuten handles deadpan fantasy; except for a rare smirk like “her romantic little heart,” a chaste solemnity rules the book. The tone is hard-edged, straight, dry, lyrical—anything but facetious. The tone, and the pamphlet-like type, smooth the different textures of this outrageous collage into an oddly reasonable unity. We never doubt that a lucid intelligence is in control; unlike many experiments of fictional assemblage, The Adventures of Mao never sinks into self-display, never becomes the mounted Kleenexes and tangerine peels of an author’s private life. Mr. Tuten, in his jacket photograph, is looking not at us but at the flame of a match that is about to light his cigarette; he is wearing long hair and a wristwatch and has no biography. The contents of his book reveal nothing of him but his attitude.
And what is that attitude? What is The Adventures of Mao saying? Is it satirical? In general, when confronted with, say, a giant toothpaste tube of sewn canvas or a silkscreen of soup cans, we are predisposed to assume satiric content; our liberal prejudices and romantic aesthetics (in favor of trees, naked women, sunsets, and bowls of fruit) can accept any number of wry putdowns of our comfortably deplorable mass-trash society. But works viewed this way need only a glance. The more rewarding and plausible assumption, I think, is that the artist was obscurely delighted—“turned on”—by toothpaste tubes and soup cans, and that the ancient impulse of mimesis has led him to lift these things from the flow of transient impressions and to cast them into enduring form. Mr. Tuten likes Chairman Mao, is the first message of the novel. The school-book account of the Long March inspires admiration on the flat level of propaganda. Sub-heroically (as Homer dimples Hector’s heroism with glimpses of the private man), Mr. Tuten portrays Mao as sensitive to criticism of his poetry, as self-doubting and diffident and erotically wistful. In one of the funniest episodes, Mao lies awake coveting Eva Braun and Mussolini’s mistress (“Claretta, what was the marvellous creature but the Mediterranean itself”) but not Mrs. Roosevelt and Señora Franco (“a rosary-kissing midget, as sexy as a decayed turnip”). Mr. Tuten seems to be confessing that his Mao is a figment, a poster personality in a whimsical canon; he likes him as the author of the Gospel of John liked Jesus, but with the difference that he knows the Logos is a myth. Still, this is not satire, and in Mao’s spirited championing of the bourgeois avant garde we reach a level of serious statement:
“Pragmatically speaking, I like the opulent severity of this art, Minimal or ABC, because it both fills the imagination with the baroque by way of dialectical reaction to the absolute starkness of the object, and denudes the false in art and in life. [Such] work is like the Long March, a victory over space and time, a triumph of the necessary over the unnecessary, and, above all, it is like Marxism, or should I say like Heraclitus.”
The American interviewer finds this enthusiasm “astonishing” and the Chinese interpreter exclaims, “To be honest, Chairman Mao, hearing all this talk from you confuses and disturbs me.” It is, of course, impossible for Mao to be saying these things, but not—and herein the interest, the seriousness—implausible. When, in the same interview, he asserts that
“youth is never reactionary; youth is progressive in time and hence always in the avant-garde, hence never wrong in spirit, hence never to be satirized,”
the statement originates from a profound depth, where the Free World’s youth-proud greening merges with the mind that unleashed the Red Guards upon the entrenched Establishment of Communist China. We are confronted, in this
elevation of youngness to a moral absolute, in this denial of any possibility of venerable wisdom and selective conservation, with something truly other than the reasonable liberalism and sentimental romanticism that have shaped our radically imperfect world.
The ideological fabric of The Adventures of Mao is deliciously complicated by Mr. Tuten’s heavy reliance, for authority in aesthetic matters, upon fusty old wizards like Hawthorne and Pater—and Pater, it should be said, holds up nobly in this curious context. Another complication is that while the battles of the Long March are presented with the heroic generality of a newspaper recap, vivid and bloody and inglorious episodes of our own Civil War, as described in Whitman’s Specimen Days and John William De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, are interspersed. The warrior Mao, whose revolution, after all, was bought with millions of lives, is thus displaced, along with the Mao who, on cultural matters, declared (at Yenan in 1942):
There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.
For this implacable and dynamic dogmatism Mr. Tuten substitutes a “longing for the great simple primeval things.” Mao’s interviewer tells him, “All your thoughts have given me the desire to be inert.” Tuten’s Mao is a suave decadent, whose languor, nevertheless, has a certain appositeness to revolution. The book’s last sentence (quoted from Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis) sounds a call for purification: “I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence.”
So, in part, was Dada a call for purification—a purgation of cant through nonsense. Like Pop, it embraced its age’s random materials with a frantic hug that transcended criticism, cynicism, or satire. Such violent gestures seem to ask for revolution in human consciousness; what they achieve is, more modestly, a refreshing of conventional artistic forms. The Adventures of Mao on the Long March provides an intelligent, taut, and entertaining change from conventional novels. Its substance is satisfyingly solid and satisfyingly mysterious. Like any work of art, it could not be mindlessly replicated; a sequel might slip into being a mere anthology. Nor would it be easy to locate another symbolic person as fabulous and germane as Mao. As is, Mr. Tuten’s studied scrapbook, like van Ostaijen’s precipitous scenario, contains the live motion of a novel within a jagged form that does “cut the reader into awareness.”
Bombs Made Out of Leftovers
BAD NEWS, by Paul Spike. 152 pp. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971.
BEING THERE, by Jerzy Kosinski. 142 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.
THE BARK TREE, by Raymond Queneau, translated from the French by Barbara Wright. 281 pp. New Directions, 1971.
We have with us this week three, ah, experimental works of fiction. In our struggles to understand them, we shall depend heavily on the dust jackets. The jacket of the first, Bad News, by Paul Spike (jacket by Push Pin Studios), tells us that the author, “a member of our youngest generation of fiction writers,” was born in 1947 and that his work, published mostly in the Columbia Review, “could be classified as ‘experimental’ à la Borges or Pynchon”—though it is not Borges or Pynchon who comes handsomely through with a puff but William Burroughs, to wit: “… at once a beautiful and disquieting book, in which seemingly commonplace happenings suddenly open into other planetary perspectives.”
Though the jacket is at some pains to avoid creating the (correct) impression that this is a collection of short pieces, it does let slip the word “stories,” and stories they are—nine of them. They do, however, contain recurring characters, and they are wired for cross-currents, and some are so episodic that they might have been sliced another way and still be “stories.” After O. Henry came the epiphany, the kind of short fiction that an irreverent friend of mine use to call the “so what?” story. Now comes its successor, the “so nothing” story. Mr. Spike owes more to Barthelme than to Borges; the “other planetary” perspectives intrude upon a this-planetary texture of blague and Dreck, of parody and an unimpeachably deadpan tone, of obscene technology and mechanical sex, of stillborn indignations and friendly puzzlements and, at the end, a curt, fishy-eyed stare, as from a cocktail-party companion upon whom one has, with some sudden warmth of interest or desire, unwittingly presumed. Not that Mr. Spike’s cool is perfected yet; there is still something collegiate in his fascination with smelly socks and the word “mess,” in his unfeigned delight at cooking up sexual descriptions, in his imperfectly concealed worry that prose fiction ought to amount to more than nervous anti-silence, like the overlapping crackle of a radio tuned between stations. Certain persistent messages want to break through the static. Mr. Spike’s generation is one born to riot, and the telegraphy of social concern comes naturally to him:
“Calcutta has an epidemic and the guerillas won’t pump out the Pittsburgh enclave for months, which directly affects all of the East Coast. How about this submarine highway in the Pacific?”
“You agreed to leave that route for Russia, a token perhaps, they’ll go for it. The American government will iron that out.”
Certain public events—nothing, naturally, prior to 1947, or even 1957—have sunk into his generation’s consciousness, and they surface with symbolic portent; assassination is a recurring trauma. “Okay then I’m paranoid but maybe if the Kennedy family had been a little more paranoid? … The DIC is responsible for those assassinations, that’s my opinion.… In November, 1963, over 400 New Yorkers fell down with ‘speck attack’ raging in their chests.” And our accursed affluence, of course, takes its licks:
Comfort is a surface, a straight line. The emptiness of comfort astounds man. It is like the world’s most powerful ray gun.
Unexpectedly, the “emptiness that comes in the world’s biggest ice-cream cone” includes the sexual wealth that the post-Korea generation has created:
Nikolaus thought how odd it was that now that he could have all the sex he wanted, the world was becoming more and more messy.
The medicine of love unsettlingly merges with the diseases of pollution and aggression:
Man is the dirtiest animal. His pollution is driving him to look for an edge of the world which he can fall off. Yet he loves like no other animal.… And his love and beauty, in a sense, are a pollution to the world. They spray emotion into green vegetation.
But these thematic glimpses are mere footsteps in the underbrush of verbal celebration, a young man’s luxuriant revenge on the media that have nearly driven him mad. His gifts of mimicry are keen. They range from college-humor jesting (“The Conference Man”) to mock letters (“Box 456”) and memorabilia (“The Diary of Noel Wells”) and computer tapes (“Multi”) to a fluid, sprightly Surrealism (“Specks Saga,” “A Good Revolution”). The manner of presentation amounts to more than the things presented; the most tactile imagery, apart from the bodies of the young ladies who are handled, comes in the inventory of the hardware store where one of the young heroes works. The language, especially in the takeoffs of detective fiction, drolly bursts with exasperation at saying, after trillions of words of written English, anything at all:
His hands ticked away in his pockets now. A pink rash surfaced lightly across the top of his pectorals.
The sun is beginning to boil the atmosphere into a tight grease.
Her face was reminiscent of a pile of gears softly rounded into one another and covered with dreadful calm.
Bad News is as much a protest against fiction as it is fiction, and since it lacks pitiable characters, a sustained action, and an earnestly felt theme, we do not wish it—as Dr. Johnson said of Paradise Lost—longer than it is. Yet it has its poetry and its fidelity to the discontinuous, over-packaged, pre-trivialized way we live now. “The problem is,” Spike himself explains, intruding to discourse with one of his characters, “there is a bomb here made out
of leftovers.” The character responds, “I have nothing to do.” “Right” is Spike’s answer. “But there is something here,” the character insists. Such an affirmation is even weaker than that of Beckett’s minimal pilgrims. News is what fiction—nouvelles, novels—once was; Mr. Spike’s title implies that since “good” (coherent, morally convinced) stories are impossible, bad news is better than none.
The dust jacket of Being There tells us that the author, Jerzy Kosinski, was born in Poland in 1933, and that the first of his two earlier novels, The Painted Bird, has been translated into thirty-two languages, and the second, Steps, into twenty-nine. One wonders what the missing three are—Urdu? Korean? Arawak? Being There, simultaneously with its American publication, is being published in England, Holland, Germany, and France, and the flap copy, with its promise of a “modern parable” and a “quintessential anti-hero,” seems to be warming up an international audience in easy Esperanto. The description of the book, however, is twelve lines shorter than the description of the author, and, bizarrely, at the end of the novel the typography suggests that Kosinski’s biography is the last chapter—two pages’ worth of his degrees, his fellowships, his professorships, his awards, his translations. In short, the author, not the novel, is the product being pushed. Which is shrewd, since the novel, like its hero, barely exists.
