Richard Brautigan: So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away. New York: Delacorte Press, 1983.
Richard Sennett: The Frog Who Dared to Croak. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.
This review was first published in Chronicles of Culture, Volume 7, Number 10, October 1983. Republished with permission.
In the twentieth century, first-person narrative fiction asserts individualism while undercutting it. Although we quickly learn who this ‘I’ wants us to believe he is, and we rarely fail, in the end, to see who he really is, we do not always clearly see what the author thinks, or believes, about his narrator’s seeming and being. By refusing to judge explicitly, late modern novelists and poets depend on their readers’ ability to find a constellation of meaning beyond the narrative’s landscape—beyond the individual portrayed. Even in an irreligious time we have some idea of Dante’s judgments. But what will readers make of James Joyce six centuries after his death? He himself identified an immediate need for literary archeologists to interpret his books.
This literary problem reflects and reflects upon the familiar political tension between liberty—an assertion of individuality—and authority—the embodiment of meaning. In modern times especially, individuals resent authority but find its destruction a diminishment of themselves. They eventually get the worst of both: individualism for Stalin, tyranny for the Russians; or, alternatively, anarchy for the many and subservience for the few.
The novelist Richard Brautigan, whose earlier book, Trout Fishing in America became an icon of the Sixties ‘counterculture, explores liberty in America. Richard Sennett, a sociologist by day and sometime novelist by night, explores tyranny in Hungary and the Soviet Union. Both use first-person narrators, and both pose the problems individualism causes for ‘we moderns.’
Brautigan’s middle-aged narrator remembers the summer of 1947, when he was twelve years old and “the most interesting thing happening in my life” was watching a husband and wife who fished in a pond while sitting in their living-room furniture, carefully trucked out and unloaded each evening at seven. Imitating their deliberateness, he intersperses his description of one afternoon spent waiting for them to arrive at the pond with memories of other days in his childhood, culminating in the day his “childhood ended” when he accidentally shot and killed a friend.
The reviewer for the New York Times could find no purpose for this procedure, but the narrator explains it simply enough. “I am still searching for some meaning in [the story] and perhaps even a partial answer to my own life, which as I grow closer and closer to death, the answer gets farther and farther away.” Hence the attempt to reverse aging by the means of memory, to recapture childhood, the time when truth seems closer—not only Wordsworth’s famous reason but because an adult can see “unknown vectors” the child did not see.
Brautigan does well. He remembers the boredom of childhood. His cuteness, which has irritated more than one reader of his other novels, here contributes to a story that does not omit childhood’s childishness. Children ponder lying and truth-telling, fantasy and reality, with an intensity most will lose in adulthood; Brautigan knows something of how these intertwine. So, for example, he has his narrator remember the “very ancient and fragile” lock on an old woman’s garage door:
“The lock was only a symbol of privacy and protection, but that meant something in those days. If that lock were around today, a thief would just walk up to it and blow it off with his breath.”
Blowing: the narrator remembers these things “so the wind”—today’s prevailing viciousness, a harsh reality—”won’t blow it all away.” His memories recapture not only childhood but the more humane minds of that time and place—the American Northwest a couple of years after World War II, “before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity.” This isn’t quite as sentimental as it sounds; lonely children who spend their days watching, not participating, often find their way to the eccentric adults (mostly old people, old age itself being a form of eccentricity) who have time for them. The narrator draws these portraits with a bright child’s mixture of sarcasm, curiosity, and fondness.
Brautigan has never offered any but the simplest ideas, and his sentiments—the mixture of satire and sympathy Christianity becomes when secularized—recall Dickens (as do his congruent fascinations with eccentrics and children). He gets his style from Hemingway. But his tone belongs to him, and it is what makes him one of our most elusive writers. His teaching (as it were) is straightforward enough: the narrator remembers his childhood recreation of shooting apples in an abandoned orchard. He bought the bullet that killed his friend because he preferred the “dramatic” sound of “a .22 bullet burning an apple into instant rotten apple sauce” to the satisfaction of eating a hamburger in the restaurant next to the gun shop; he had only enough money for one or the other. He identifies the bullets with “aggressions,” hamburgers with the pleasant eccentricity of the married couple (“Take it nice and easy is my motto,” the husband says while cooking one). Brautigan surely thinks of this homey dichotomy as a choice Americans always have before them, and he leaves no doubt that he now prefers hamburgers.
After the shooting, his narrator developed a sad/comic obsession with hamburgers. (“I was a weird kid,” he concedes; “weird” derives from a word that meant fate, “unknown vectors”).
“Looking back on it now, I guess I used the hamburger as a form of mental therapy to keep from going mad because what happened in that orchard was not the kind of thing that cases a child to have a positive outlook on life. It was the kind of thing that challenged your mettle and I used the hamburger as my first line of defense.”
This satirical counterpointing of guilt with Boy Scoutmaster understatement-by-cliché must leave many readers, including some good ones, strewn like apples shot by a weird kid. The problem of tone reveals the problem of meaning. The whole account sidesteps the fact that the accident could still have been prevented had the boy known not to fire a gun if your friend could be standing in the bullet’s trajectory. The narrator never considers this, his imagination obscuring common sense even after thirty-two years. What of Brautigan?
We can’t know. Whatever Brautigan may think of his narrator, the tone gives us contrary signals, or signals one can interpret variously with equal justification. Like his narrator, Brautigan enjoys individuality, liberty, but not the responsibility they force upon us. That goes for the imagination as well as for action. He detests the mass-imagination of today, preferring the time when “people made their own imagination, like home-cooking.” The result was more palatable, perhaps, because however dotty or injurious it was still on a human scale. But to what extent can an individual really make his own imagination? Brautigan will not or cannot delineate the limits, or the complementary extent to which one must take his bearings from things beyond himself. Responsibility, which must be to something or someone, arises there; Brautigan eludes it. He knows and mocks the old fatherly bromides but his narrator has no father to tell him how to shoot a gun.
Brautigan presents the world of pre-adolescence, omitting sexuality, that complication of love and friendship. In his imaginary memoir of a Hungarian philosophy teacher named Tibor Grau, Richard Sennett devotes only a few pages to childhood, many more to youth and adulthood. Sexuality and politics matter here. But they do so in a way that equally evokes the atmosphere of ‘counterculture’ sentiment.
The notion that sexual liberation really is liberating was the ‘counterculture’s’ central illusion. Despite numberless illustrated instruction manuals and copious experiences, many of us still contrive to overlook the fact that sexual activity involves linking bodies—however variously—and not unrestricted movement. Presented as an act of liberation, ‘sex’ must disappoint. Reportedly, it often does.
Tibor Grau does not share this illusion. Resented by his public school classmates for his superior wealth and intelligence, he wanted “to have them, to conquer them”; his homosexual passion based itself not on the illusion of sexual liberation but on the illusion that one’s enemies are worth “having,” an egalitarian presumption that lies beneath much of what passes for power-hungry elitism. After moving from teenaged schoolboys to young, displaced peasants who frequented Budapest’s Municipal Park, Grau’s “first steps” toward Marxism came “when I began to feel such love for some of the older boys that I wanted to stop paying them, imagining that they would freely return my feelings” if suitably impressed by his mastery of dialectics. They didn’t, of course, and Grau learned early “how sordid life is,” and “how sad and impossible it is to live.”
Evidently, life’s sordidness, sadness, and impossibility result from the rarity of making love, liberty, and sexuality coincide. Liberty in particular causes the young to be “confused and afraid, as they should be.” Personal liberty means you’re on your own. “To avoid the terrifying solitude of liberty,” the young “search to find a realm of life in which they can immediately belong.” Giving up on the male prostitutes in the park, Grau sought love and friendship among the poor, sharing their “anger and hatred against the world.” Even in old age, he imagines “hatred of the world as it is” to be “the noblest emotion an adolescent can feel.”
Resentment and love of love mix easily; they make a poison. We see this when Grau remembers a Deputy Director of “Cultural Propaganda” in Hungary’s short-lived socialist regime of 1919. With the rather heavy irony that tyranny provokes, Sennett shows how this poison caused suspicion, betrayal, and lying, not fraternal struggle for truth against shared enemies. Most insightfully, he has Grau write that he foolishly resisted what turned out to be at routine inquiry not only because he suspected a conspiracy but because he wanted to assert his liberty; he did not want to be forced into writing an apologia. Sennett knows that the problem of liberty would remain even if socialism solved the ‘problem of scarcity,’ economic and emotional, that socialists believe they can solve.
Elsewhere, Grau reflects that socialism asks and promises too much because “no one can give another more than permission to exist, and that permission entails all manner of mistakes, stupidities, and waywardness.” Evil is the denial of this permission, a denial made by too many frustrated socialists, and fraudulent ones. The existence Grau praisses, moderately, is not mere life; “to live is to love something concrete for itself”—a formula that mixes Marxist materialism with Kant’s categorical imperative, in the hope of avoiding the worst aspects of both.
Sennett has Grau survive some fifteen years in Stalinist Russia, including the Second World War. He gives him an elderly, male lover with whom to spend his last years in Hungary; justifiably embarrassed by this bluebird finale, he has Grau write, defensively:
“I know what you will say: Grau, such a self-absorbed, unpleasant man before, now redeemed. You really understand nothing. I simply have something to do. This life formed for me these habit of small pleasures each day which the young would call the prison of old age.”
We are meant to “understand” that the love of something—here someone—specific, for itself, is true liberty. It is surely closer to true liberty than either utopian socialism or Marxist ‘realism.’ But Grau overlooks something. Throughout, he describes himself as a philosopher. The prototypical philosopher, Socrates, insisted that philosophia or love of wisdom differs from loving men—or, for that matter, women. As long as he retains his wits, a philosopher always has “something to do.” Grau doesn’t know this, remaining an intellectual, not a philosopher at all.
Does Sennett know this? He is less elusive than Brautigan; I suspect that he does not.
The modern individualist recognizes no present authority; at most, he might recognize the authority of some imagined future condition of the human race. Yet he often finds the quest to satisfy mere appetites unsatisfying—as indeed he must, with advancing age and infirmity. With no faith in reason or revelation, he can only turn to memory or imagination. Not themselves authoritative, memory and imagination can conjure a dim authority. Remembered authority stands against the rapid changes of democracy or the equally rapid but more brutal changes of ‘totalitarianism’ or modern tyranny. Imagined authority wants to accelerate those changes, to move onward to a future that seems to resolve the unresolvable tensions of the human condition.
Brautigan’s narrator attempts to find authority in childhood, rather like an American Rousseau. Sennett’s narrator “weed[s] his memories… to clarify and refine his understanding,” yielding a materialist Kantianism. The procedures differ, but both men look to the modern substitute for reason and revelation: sentiment. Unfortunately, sentiment’s multifariousness equals or exceeds that of reason, or perhaps even that of revelation. As a substitute for other forms of authority, it is insufficiently authoritative. Modern individualism undercuts itself in its very self-assertion
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