Awake and Sigh
The Beat of Life.
by Barbara Probst Solomon.
Lippincott. 222 pp. $3.95.
Every four or five years along comes a new younger generation. Watchful observers of the social scene are quick to label and package the latest group, sending it on, hangdog, into its twenties to join the rest of us. If we are to believe the recent talk, a revolution is taking place on our campuses that makes the young people in Barbara Probst Solomon’s novel, The Beat of Life, look definitely old-hat.
These three post-adolescents—Natasha Thompson, a well-to-do, assimilated Jewish girl, her Gentile lover Tim, and her sinister girl-friend Donella—are fringe members of the beat generation. They are the youngsters who have been betrayed, whose stony regard of their elders is full of bitter, passive reproach. Unlike the students of 1961 who fool around in sit-down strikes and write letters to the newspapers, Mrs. Solomon’s trio are unconcerned with causes, except for the lost causes of their parents’ day. Their interest in the political and social enthusiasms of twenty and twenty-five years ago is intense, sentimental, and morbid. It is their religion.
The Beat of Life is a first novel. The imaginative gaze of its author is neither broad and encompassing nor close and subtle: it is vague. Nonetheless her writing, which is bright, immediate, and moving, carries the reader along on a plane of increasing assent so that, by the time he is done, he is ready to mourn, with Tim, for the lost world of the 30’s and to accept a view of young people that sees as their main characteristic a grim acknowledgment of death.
For Tim, the latest “white hope” at Columbia’s School of Russian Studies, spectres from the past obscure the delights of the present. His parents had “a stake in things,” they thought that the world could “be good in their time”; the “great sadness of the death camps” and the sterility of the 50’s made their failure clear. Tim’s legacy is defeat. “I feel nostalgia for a time I never knew,” he says, but he forbids Natasha to listen to Bunny Berigan records or to see the old movies at the Thalia because “they are not ours.” Foolishness of this sort can soon become a bore, but it is saved by the author’s ability to extract the look and feel of youthful despair and force it on the consciousness of the reader.
Tim worries that he cannot “love.” This seems to be a common goblin for certain young people, induced perhaps by too much Fromm and too little sense. The author takes him seriously, however, and has him performing the sexual act “to keep from falling into space.” (While uncertainty and loneliness are unquestionably part of youth, I doubt that many young men make love for this reason.) If we are to take Tim at face value—and Mrs. Solomon persuades us that we must—he is mainly selfish and inadequate. When Natasha becomes pregnant, his first wild thoughts are of murder; he tries to induce a miscarriage by taking Natasha on a roller coaster and at last decides that he has never loved her. He sneers at his parents’ failed liberalism and speaks of his own “sense of sin,” but is able to express it only by the recognition that his prurient interest in a burlesque show is indeed prurient. If he is a latent moralist, his dreams of goodness scatter before the first wind of experience. By the story’s end he has become an obnoxious young careerist with, as they used to say, a hunk of ice where his heart ought to be.
It is the Medusa-like Donella, sometime painter, user of mescaline, seeker of thrills, who leads Natasha to the abortionist’s table and, indirectly, into death. In this character Mrs. Solomon has created a frightening little mistress of latter-day evil. Donella, whose only virtue is practicality, is from the start the zombie Tim is afraid of becoming. She is scornful of Natasha’s vulnerability and the boy’s quest for meaning, and carefully chooses her own adventures to advance her way in the world. Served up to us as one of the by-products of a decadent age, she is quite believable. When the straw shows through her nasty exterior—for example, when describing a skin-diving experience, she declares that it was “the only time in my life I’ve felt pure”—we overlook it, though cold thought tells us that the author means this to be a distinct revelation of moral (or immoral) character. More cold thought would uncover Donella as a new type of stock company villainess, but one does not look coldly at Mrs. Solomon’s book, at least while one is reading it.
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Like too many novels of today, The Beat of Life is not a translation of life but the exploitation of a mood. Plot and characters are superimposed on some background music, but it is the music that is important. None of the characters become more than superficially real. They stand apart not only from their elders and from each other but from events—and this contributes to their flatness. It is a special failing of most contemporary young writers that they cannot construct an artistic approximation of the actual friction, the movement-in-depth, of men and objects in the world.
The Beat of Life is no more than funeral music which laments simultaneously the death of old jazz, old movies, and old ideals. It is written in the present tense and in the first person, with each of the two lovers taking up the narrative in turn. These devices, together with a tone that is at once nostalgic and excited, lend it an impressive credibility. Tim and Donella, from whom youth and hope have gone, are not like the twenty-one-year-olds one meets at college parties, not even the beat twenty-one-year-olds. Yet Mrs. Solomon persuades us that they speak for a vast, bitter horde. The reader is moved by an undertow of truth ; this is the kind of genre writing that validates its own pretensions.
The characterization of Natasha, the hero of this tale, has some further contemporary interest. She is not drawn as well as the other two, but the author is more ambitious for her. As the Jew of the piece she is first pet, then victim, and around her has been constructed a blurry race-mysticism. Pretty and sweet, if a little slow, Natasha comes from a family of prosperous, Anglicized Jews who have raised her on a pleasant blend of plum pudding and gefülte fish. Jewishness, per se, means nothing to her until she is wakened into self-consciousness by one of her lover’s remarks. Her new-found identity leads her at first into the nauseating role of “real” Jew: she learns a few Yiddish words and pretends that she is dark and exotic-looking. This phase passes, however, and subsequent mention of the Jews by both Natasha and Tim, as well as the over-all presentation of the girl, provide the reader with some brief glances at the current-day interest in the martyr. Comments on the subject include these of her lover: “. . . on account of all those millions of years, and Hitler and Germany, and me being a Christian and never having any trouble—the baby has got to be a Jew.” Or again: “I will love him desperately and he will always be vulnerable and my love for him will make me part of the world. Having a son that’s a Jew, well, Christ, then you’re committed.”
In the minds of many, Hitler has defined once and for all the role of the Jew. Where in the past he has played the dissenter, our conscience as well as our scapegoat, today’s Jew is definitely “in.” Now that we are all outsiders, the Jew stands in relation to his Gentile friends not as critic or unwilling victim but as congressional representative. We embrace Jewish forgiveness and Jewish passivity, ignoring traditions of rationalism, radicalism, and stubborn pride.
For Natasha—according to Tim—“the world is a familiar place,” and she is envied by her less fortunate friends. Most ignorant and innocent of the three, she is the only one who—for reasons which are not explained, but presumably have something to do with her Jewishness—can truly love. Forced by the others into having an unwanted abortion that stills within her the beat of life already stilled in Donella and Tim, Natasha, clutching her Catholic aunt’s garnet cross, commits suicide in a dénouement of touching bad taste.
Natasha has earlier asked, “. . . what right have we to our gentle Passovers, our conscience tithe of bonds for Israel? How do we get off so easily? Why do we call ourselves Jews?” Her right to the name is obviously established by her death.
Mrs. Solomon’s own conception of Jewishness, if she has one, is not defined in her novel. In the jumble, however, one picture is clear. Once again the Jew, betrayed in love but superior in pain, places his head in a gas oven. Such is the way of the world, sighs the modern reader.
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