Pieces of the Hour
Rocking the Boat.
by Gore Vidal.
Little, Brown. 300 pp. $5.75.
The Age of Happy Problems.
by Herbert Gold.
Dial Press. 236 pp. $4.95.
A Radical’s America.
by Harvey Swados.
Little, Brown. 347 pp. $5.00.
Known to professors as essays, to members of the public as articles, and to writers as pieces, works of the kind collected in these three volumes flourish in the periodicals, big and little, new and old, at the present time. Making us all frenetically magazine-minded, they keep us thumbing through an ever expanding array of publications. When may we expect the piece of the hour in Organic Gardening, the indispensable article in the Yale Review? And having first enriched the magazine world, many of them achieve a second existence in omnibus volumes such as those at hand. Mr. Vidal’s volume is comparatively small. But its acknowledgments page reveals a range of magazine publication which, extending from Life to Zero, could scarcely be bettered. The ranges of Mr. Gold and Mr. Swados are pretty impressive too. Roughly averaged, they stretch from the Hudson Review to Playboy.
Of the three, all in some degree novelists by profession, Mr. Gold is the only one who brings to essay writing anything like his full equipment as a writer of novels. Where Mr. Swados and Mr. Vidal compose essays to persuade us of the validity of their ideas, Mr. Gold composes them to show us the meaning of his personal experience.
Neither effort need exclude the other, of course, and The Age of Happy Problems contains several essays that advance ideas on manners and conduct. But even in these reflective pieces Mr. Gold draws on memories of dilemmas faced by himself (“Divorce as a Moral Act,” “How to Be an Artist’s Wife,” etc.), and he writes in a style vaguely suggesting the nervous rhythms of dramatic monologue. But if he tends, as I think, to extract the sweetest wisdom from the bitterest experiences, this is probably a consequence, not of his novelistic approach but of some unworkable partnership between the two chief aspects of his literary personality. One half of him is trying to be a good citizen, a modest hero of moral “commitment.” The other half remains a wanderer in the underworld of disgust and despair, doomed to circle back and back over his past as if no moral problem he has encountered was really capable of solution, no city he has visited was ever really strange, and nothing in life was ever quite finished. God knows we are most of us halved in this way, and Mr. Gold would be an exemplary essayist if only the citizen and the wanderer were franker with each other and could agree on a common style of writing. As it is, they seem to be involved in a process of mutual intimidation, with the result that one of them sounds compulsively miserable, the other primly sentimental. Neither has a good time; and between the partner who goes in for the fanciest of mandarin prose (“Still, we are not blithe spirits; birds we are not,”) and the partner who produces the bleakest of gut prose (“good belly luck,” “my battery,” meaning his creative energy, “forking up eggs,” “I ogle the oglers,”) the reader himself has a tough time too.
The best pieces in the book are the portraits of cities that Mr. Gold has lived in or visited at some length. His feeling for the modern city and for the oppressed or corrupted lives lived therein is admirable. So is his talent for objective reportage—as long as he sticks to it But as a rule he doesn’t stick to it; the inner moodiness takes over. Read in sequence, his metropolitan studies show a certain monotony of grayness in the emotional weather. Scrutinizing his native Cleveland he observes an “acrid pall” hanging above one section of the city. This pall seems to follow the traveler everywhere, like a bad conscience. It even trails him to Paris, forbidding him so much as a provisional indulgence in the simple pleasures of escapism. “Death in Miami Beach” is the most brilliant performance in the book. A highly wrought essay-parable, it calls upon all the brutality and vulgarity of the Florida resort to testify to its theme: the peculiar grimness of death in a mass society. The theme is urgent and Mr. Gold tracks it down with a fury of irony which seems more urgent still, sometimes inventing horrors that don’t exist. A “nude in plaster” glimpsed briefly outside a resort hotel is imagined to be beckoning obscenely to the crowd and saying, “All aboard, you masturbators.” I suggest that if the statue is saying anything it is asking humbly that words not be put in its mouth.
Unable to settle their differences, the moralist and the emotionalist in Mr. Gold resort to a kind of obfuscating irony. This irony is the last refuge of the divided soul and it is as familiar today as the divided soul itself is. Considered as a feature of the rhetoric of social criticism, it represents a stock response to the stock properties and catchwords of popular culture. (From soap operas to package deals, the properties and phrases of popculture are just about all accounted for in The Age of Happy Problems. Mr. Gold’s title itself is a sardonic reference to that culture: he writes that a certain television producer demanded “happy stories about happy people with happy problems.”) But the triumph of sentimental irony insures the defeat of social criticism. The sentimental ironist immobilizes himself along with the abuses he is deploring and makes sad war on sitting ducks.
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If the chief fault of Mr. Gold’s essays is easy ironizing, the occasional fault of Mr. Swados’s essays is the equally easy rhetoric of sociological expertise. In this, Mr. Swados abuses the peculiar authority enjoyed by criticism today through its alliance—or what many suppose to be its alliance—with the social sciences and their techniques of the poll and the survey. Mr. Swados writes that it is not “accidental that the only civilized TV programs are presented on Sundays when the average viewer is either sleeping it off or visiting relatives. . .” His point is that the television industry, or at least the capitalist spirit embodied in that industry, is deliberately “degrading” the worker (which is what “average viewer” means in the context) by withholding from him its best programs. But Mr. Swados’s clairvoyance regarding the worker’s Sunday habits only seems to me to visit upon the worker a different kind of degradation. Has the worker no alternative to sleeping it off or visiting relatives? Can’t he go fishing? Are working class hangovers so much worse than other hangovers that they keep a man in bed all Sunday afternoon and on into the evening, thus depriving him of the civilized programs also available at those times of the day? Has Mr. Swados access to some statistical study that he is so knowing? Probably not. Probably he is only going through the motions of the sociological expert.
His regard for logic is rarely as much in doubt as it is in this instance. And his regard for the worker in society, for the meaning of work in general, gives his book its special authority. A professed socialist, he is not very good as a defender of Marxist theory. The essays written from a dogmatic angle for the party press are stunningly innocent of any serious doubts as to the potential rationality of human society. On most other subjects Mr. Swados is persuasive. He is good when he is contending against the complacent economics of affluence. His proofs that an authentic working class still exists and suffers are definitive. So are his studies in the malaise consequent upon non-working. As a critic of the intellectual life of America today he manages to be impressively monitory without sounding like a common scold. He doesn’t cry “No in Thunder” like Leslie Fiedler and Jove. He is especially good in pointing to the historical roots of “anger,” “guilt,” “sex,” and “self-advertisement” considered as literary staples.
“The Cult of Personality” is his phrase for the self-promoters, and it is a pretty dim phrase at that. Any intellectual tendency can be, and usually is, dismissed as a “cult” by somebody; and what is a “culture” but the sum of its “cults” ? Mr. Swados’s capacity to shape an argument is greater than his capacity to turn a phrase. His words seldom sound as if they belonged to anyone in particular. Perhaps he should join that cult of personality himself. At most he sometimes sounds like a youngish socialist imitating an old socialist who finds himself in polite literary company. “It may be accounted cause for optimism that this play has found an audience”—that sort of thing. But his “Robinson Crusoe—the Man Alone” would be a fine performance in any company. Devoted to demonstrating Defoe’s practical humanism, “his ability to normalize the abnormal,” the essay also testifies to Mr. Swados’s similar humanism and abilities.
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Mr. Vidal would probably be the Third Man in any trio of modern American writers. We learn why from Rocking the Boat, which, like the other two books, is frequently autobiographical. The writer was exposed as a youth to some wealth and much Washington Senatorial society, and in his guise as an essayist, just as in his social background, there is a mixture—sometimes disturbing, generally engaging—of dazzle and duty.
Vidal’s role is that of the free spirit; and through his devotion to writing and to ideas he has made this risky attitude effectively his own, as distinct from merely owing it to the background. Only occasionally does he appear to be under the necessity of reminding a possibly forgetful world of his privileged state. Then he sounds a little like Proust’s ducal family, the Guermantes. One of the first-rate things in Rocking the Boat is a sketch of President Kennedy done from the life and enriched with personal observation. It is “good journalism” with a touch of Plutarchian stateliness. Quite in the Guermantes spirit, however, is Mr. Vidal’s remark apropos the White House: “I am happy to say that I have no influence.”
So much for the dazzle; the duty comes out in his attacks on dullness, demagogy, and the injustices done to individuals through the abuse of power by statesmen, literary critics, and cops. Indeed power is Mr. Vidal’s chief subject, just as work is Mr. Swados’s. The enjoyment of power interests him as much as does the abuse of it, and in several of his best essays he explores the ways in which possessing it or wanting it have modified the fate of individuals from the Twelve Caesars to Senator Goldwater. His friendly essay on Norman Mailer reminds Mr. Mailer that there are some people for whom “the preoccupation with power is a great waste of time.”
I don’t mean to suggest that power is the sole subject of Rocking the Boat. A professed satirist, Mr. Vidal fires away at numerous features of American life and letters. Some (but not all) of his best stuff is satirical; for example, his brilliant critique of the sloganeering use made of love and psychoanalysis on Broadway, or his feud with those writers who have converted the American vernacular into an official literary mode, a “national style.” Rocking the Boat is even more of a miscellany than A Radical’s America or Happy Problems. It includes things that Mr. Vidal has written over the past ten or twelve years while pursuing his various careers as a novelist, a writer for television, the movies, and the stage, and a candidate for political office. His many subjects are touched upon with sharply varying degrees of thoroughness. The book does nevertheless have, besides the recurring concern with power, a distinct unity of tone. And this tone, one of its great attractions, clearly reflects a certain style of being and doing in the author. It arises from an unusual (in our time) conjunction in him of audacity, wit, and pure if spasmodic intelligence. That boat Mr. Vidal is cheerfully manning is a small-scale ship of state. He is testing its ability to float, not all culture and family too, but only a single, separate, rather exacting person like himself. There are, he plainly implies, other free spirits. Rocking the Boat is further distinguished by a remarkable literary style: clear, unmannered, lively, at times dazzling but never unmindful of its duty to be prose. He prefers to call the writings in Rocking the Boat neither essays nor articles nor pieces but “comments.”
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