Arab vs. Jew: Homogenized
I Never Saw An Arab Like Him
by James Maxwell.
Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1948. 207 pp. $2.50.
As the land of technical genius, America has perfected millions of pleasure-giving, work-saving devices—smooth-riding cars, static-free radios, automatic washing machines, and so on indefinitely. It seems only natural then that Americans should have perfected a style of writing compatible with these mechanical conveniences—a style also mechanical, smooth, without static, full of devices, laundered of all distressing odors and smudges, etc.
Mr. Maxwell’s stories are a good example. They are about the last days of the recent war, as seen through the eyes of an army intelligence agent in North Africa. According to the blurb on the jacket, they are supposed to give us insights into our political maladies. Instead, the author stays true to the “take it easy and you’ll live longer” tradition. He treats his subject with a bedside manner and various placebos, but no strong medicine, no fever charts, and no insights (except, inadvertently, into himself).
Make no demands. Don’t be a bore. These are Mr. Maxwell’s guiding principles—a post-Hemingway, Emily Post, post-no-bills conception of fiction. And, indeed, he is as solicitous as a waiter in serving up these stories. They’re all à la carte. The moral is optional. If you think it will give you indigestion, you can skip it.
But for all their studied credibility, and the homogenized, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary realism of their carefully contrived anti-climaxes, Mr. Maxwell’s minimal fictions are still un-convincing. The North African Jew in this book, for instance, is a hollow cliché: patient, philosophical, studious, much given to ceremony, quiet wisdom, and self-definition, he seems bloodlessly un-human and abstract. The one American Jew, Dave Goldstein, is an easygoing “Whaddya want from me?” ex-football player, who, when finally insulted by an Italian, becomes a great juggernaut of righteousness.
Mr. Maxwell’s Arab too, is a parody. The sarcastic title is taken from the story of an Arab who liked to work. All the other Arabs are unhygienic persons, thieves, horse-beaters, castrators, fanatics, etc. Except one: in an obvious attempt to give a “well-rounded” picture, the author portrays a “good Arab.” No, not a dead one—he’s a newspaper editor, a deracinated romantic who translates Arabian poetry, an impotent Hamlet who joins a fanatic nationalist group out of neurotic desperation for a cause.
Then there’s an American fascist, Fuller, who really provides us with the perfect example of the sophisticated style at work solving problems. This typical mid-Western fascist (all three terms are, of course, pejorative), after insulting the Jewish troglodytes (crossing invisible ceremonial lines, refusing to drink out of a “filthy” ceremonial cup, etc.), finally gets sick (I mean pukes) as a result of drinking from his own flask. Here is the symbol of symbols: alcohol as the great American disinfectant! It cures everything—even fascism! Reading this story—and, in fact, this book—one gets a vivid impression of America as a huge balanced aquarium floating in alcohol.
Just for a finishing touch, Mr. Maxwell’s first person hero appends a little personal peroration over the end of the war (which he celebrates, incidentally, with a bottle of Black and White Scotch). It seems he can’t really feel the end of the war. In a philosophical post coitum triste mood, he tells us that it only reminds him of his wife, Helen, and his prospective mistress, Peggy. And the tone in which he makes these remarks shows, unmistakably, that he expects us to agree with him; he expects his confession to be met with sympathetic, mutually-recognizing cries of “Me too!”
The jacket of I Never Saw An Arab Like Him tells us, among other things, that Mr. Maxwell “likes his whiskey with a little water.” Perhaps he likes his stories a little watered too—that’s his privilege—but, as a would-be commentator in a world desperately trying to keep its head above water, he could meet his responsibility far more effectively by serving them up straight.
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