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PARTISAN REVIEW
of speech is the kind of speech necessary for going everywhere and
talking to all kinds of Americans: he is a highbrow of sorts, but he
does not talk like one, knowing that if he did, there would be the wrong
kind of distance between himself and most other human beings. Being
a pure product of the big city, he talks like a wise guy and he is a
wise guy, like the other guys on the block; but he does not entirely
like being a wise guy, and he is one not for the sake of any sense of
self it gives him, but because it is a way of staying alive if you live in
twcntieth-century America, staying alive and getting around. Augie is
an adventurer in evelY sense of the word, including the not so innocent
sense, because adventure is the only way to the reality of experience
in America. This essential fact about Augie has been the cause of mis–
givings in several critics who have otherwise expressed much admiration
for the book, and who feel that there is something wrong about Augie's
resistance to commitments, or what Augie himself calls being recruited.
Augie does not want to be recruited or committed to the commitments
which others have decided are desirable for him, one of which is a
wealthy marriage. To be committed is to be pinned down and cut off
from the adventure of reality and of America, to be cut off from hope
and from freedom and from the freedom to move on to new hopes
when some hopes collapse. Once you are committed, the frontier is gone.
This may not be the most desirable moral attitude, but it certainly
gives Augie a degree of awareness which none of the other characters
possess. The critics who felt misgivings about Augie's being uncom–
mitted recognized the overwhelming reality of a dozen other characters.
But since their reality is given solely through Augie's mind, there must
be a necessary connection between Augie's uncommitted or free mind
and his perception of their reality. Moreover, as Augie himself might
say, you have got to be sure that you are not committing yourself to
what that guy Erich Fromm calls "escape from freedom." To which
it must be added that Kierkegaard, in pointing the necessity of choice
and commitment, attacked the very commitments which Augie resists,
the conformist, conventional, and official roles which are characteristic
forms of inauthenticity, a term which anticipates the stuffed shirt.
And the connection between Augie's chief attitude and his grasp
of experience comes to a climax in the wonderful episode of the eagle
who, like Augie, refuses in his own way to be committed. Any para–
phrase of the episode would violate its narrative tact and subtlety, but
the main thing about the eagle is his refusal to be dominated beyond
a certain point by another being: which seems quite sensible to Augie
and outrageous cowardice to the girl who is training him and who is
also trying to impose another kind of domination upon Augie. Augie
