Wasteland’s New Priests
Wastelend.
by Jo Sinclair.
New York, Harper and Brothers, 1946. 321 pp. $2.50.
This $10,000 prize-winning novel is an epistle to the Jews who are poor in spirit. Our St. Paul, who becomes Saul again, is Jake Braunowitz, alias John Brown. Because he has a pain in his back, is ashamed of his family, and ashamed of being a Jew, and because his sister, Debby, insisted he should go, he consults psychiatrist about his troubles. For eighteen years John has been hiding his Jewishness from his Gentile women, his Gentile colleagues at the newspaper where he is employed as a staff photographer, from himself and society at large. Nevertheless, he is unable to break away from his family and gefilte fish. Lacking identity, he can identify himself with nothing; at thirty-five he is still unintegrated and obsessed with a sense of waste, hence “wasteland.” One reads his story as it comes out in weekly, and later in bi-weekly, interviews with the psychiatrist.
The poverty and degradation of the family are rather well sketched in—the stingy, dirty, irresponsible father, the beaten, semi-illiterate mother, sister Roz with her promiscuity, Italian boy friends and night clubs, brother Sig with his cars and cigars, and above all, sister Debby. Debby, who has taken over the male role abandoned by her father and become a Lesbian, keeps company with colored girls, listens to classical music, writes stories about the poor and oppressed, cripples, social outcasts, Negroes and Jews for the New Masses and literary magazines, and knows what the score is. She has identified herself, inwardly and outwardly, with the people, and it is the example of her courage and resolution, together with the psychiatrist’s sympathetic understanding (clichés intentional) that pull Jake-John back on the road to life.
The therapeutic procedure followed by the psychiatrist is mainly that of prodding the subject with questions and suggestions, and letting him talk it out. It works wonders. No sooner has John got down on record the story of his family’s poverty and humiliation, and the hatred he feels toward it, than his tzores drop off one by one, the pain in his back disappears, and he calls himself Jake once again. The new Jake is a kindly fellow who photographs his parents and his brother Sig, takes his nephews to prize fights and hockey games and gets them jobs on the paper, introduces his sister Roz to his Gentile friends when they visit the night club in which she waits on tables, gives blood to the Red Cross, enlists in the army and asks the Four Questions at the Seder.
If there is any literary moral to be drawn from this drab but profitable little poem in celebration of the beatitudes of psychiatric social work, it is, perhaps, that naturalism is the best method of describing adversity, but God protect it from good fortune. The political moral, and the moral concerning Jewishness, are, however, of much greater consequence.
The noteworthy thing is that the secular priest who works redemption is now a psychiatrist. Not so long ago, in a novel of this sort, he would have been a Party organizer, and Jake, if he were to lead his family at all, would have led them to the barricades. The difference is significant, for whether or not Miss Sinclair is herself a fellow-traveler, and it’s no concern of mine, the piety of her book is oriented toward the Jerusalem of a recent Party line, now known as Browderism.
Wasteland comes to an end in an ecstasy of belonging. Jake’s Jewish blood has been accepted, it has mingled in the Red Cross station with the blood of America—Negro blood, it is hoped, will soon be allowed to join the stream—and Jake has become Everyman. (It doesn’t hurt, by the way, to perpetuate a few little racisms on the side of blood; it makes the final mingling so much more poignant and exciting.) The only ghetto in America is your own. (In all the eighteen years of its concealment, Jake’s Jewishness was never once suspected, and he had the good fortune, apparently, never to have heard an anti-Semitic remark.) As for the ghettos elsewhere, the war will wipe them out. Though some have Seders and others have not, at heart all people are people. But everywhere belong! And as for psychiatry (in the critical work of this period, a good deal was made of the unification of Freud and Marx, with adjustment becoming a very respectable word), psychiatry will change the world into a playground and a settlement house.
There is a superficial attractiveness about this position that has, I imagine, proved tempting to many Jews. It blesses the bourgeois in all of us, and is kind, in particular, to the Jew’s self-hatred, with an indulgence that passes for understanding. The line removes the stigma from assimilation, presenting it, to a degree, as a duty and a positive good, and is moderate in its demands on residual Jewishness (John becomes Jake, but Brown does not again become Braunowitz.) To show that it recognizes human frailty and has our interests at heart, the dispensation lets redemptive activity down to an easier level—one runs fewer social risks in working for brotherhood than in working for communism. And above all it dangles the eternal carrot of belonging before our noses with a “Bravo, old donkey, and an end to alienation!”
Fortunately, the human imagination cannot make too much of a good thing out of a bad thing. At least novels fail when they dish out this pap, and parties, too, have a way of succumbing to their own poison. For poverty is a friend of truth. What about the terrible poverty of Jake’s family, which was so important in the diagnosis of his ailment—why has even mention of it disappeared from the cure? Are we really back to the origins of free enterprise, blaming poverty on shiftlessness and (new term) neurosis? No, not quite. Miss Sinclair has, or at least had, her answer for that one, too. WPA, we are told, was a respectable thing; it was in its own way a project for reclaiming wasteland. But now that you are back on your feet again, stay out of the red, plump for a people’s government, learn to wear your Jewishness and your other differences correctly, as you would a suit of clothes, and you, too, can be a well-dressed man.
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I am aware that as far as novels at the imaginative level of Wasteland are concerned, the shift from Marx to Freud is no more than a shift in clichés; resumption of the earlier allegiance would not necessarily raise the standard of literary quality. The same, however, cannot be said of the social orientation of which popular fiction is but a single manifestation. Here, it seems to me, a real sacrifice has been made. The transformation of “change the world” into “adjust yourself to it” has had the effect of abolishing concern with the kind of society that is worthy of our adjustment, and of removing the discussion of social problems from a historical context.
Treatment of Jewish problems in these terms absolves the world of responsibility for what the Jews have suffered as a people, and breaks up their integrity as a group by requiring them to adjust themselves as individuals. As in Wasteland, bourgeois society is taken for granted as possessing in itself all the norms of successful adjustment, all the conditions that the Jew, rid of the inner burdens of his Jewishness, shall be expected to meet. Nothing need be said of the historical context of anti-Semitism, of why the world permits and encourages it; for here we touch upon the guilt of bourgeois society, its alienation from humanity, and adjustment, as the program of the bourgeoisie, is designed to encourage forgetfulness.
Once again, the Jew is scapegoat, except that in this case, in return for the sacrifice of his interests, he is allowed to forgive the world by coming to terms with it. All of which tends to make liberalism synonymous with reaction, concentration on individual psychology and limiting the social problem to issues of racial brotherhood serving as a strategy for masking and maintaining social injustices at a deeper level. It is not inappropriate that a novel embodying this theme should have won the generous Harper Prize—for this theme happens to be the program of wealth in search of a conscience.
