LETTER FROM HOME
277
towards which
to grow? In France little boys set out to become men,
little girls to become women; there is no confusion, except in pathologi–
cal
cases, about what this means. Our peculiar history, the experience
of pastlessness, the trauma of immigration-these and other factors have
combined to make problematical and indeterminate precisely that which
other cultures stamp most "organically" on their members. "A children's
paradise" is one of the foreigners' most constant cliches for this country.
The contours of adulthood are not yet fixed in America, and perhaps
this
is what accounts for our notorious idealization of childhood and
the fascination, unparalleled elsewhere, which our literature has shown
and continues to show for adolescence. But if parents continue to situate
paradise ("The Best Years of Our Lives") in childhood-be it rough,
tough, gun-toting childhood-how are the young to value maturity or
even, indeed, to learn what it is?
So we have the inarticulate rage of James Dean, trying in vain to
get
some advice from his father in
Rebel Without A Cause.
But there
is
also the self-contempt of the fathers and teachers,
a
la Fiedler, which
may
be
embarrassingly articulate, adorned with balanced cadences and
verbal postures. Fiedler is admittedly a special case, holding down as he
does a sort of Oddities Counter in the sprawling bazaar of our letters,
but here he is speaking for us in
Encounter;
and he tells us in what the
British call a blush-making passage at the end of his piece that he already
perceives the advance guard of his imitators, rising up through the
graduate schools. Alas! The critic who presents his own experience-–
and
ours-as something inauthentic, make-believe and queer-does he
not
also "prophesy the ruin of culture"?
* * *
A letter from Paris brings me news of another suicide, an unsym–
lic one, alas. Oscar Dominguez, the surrealist painter, alone in his
dio on New Year's Eve, broke and probably drunk as he had been
ost every evening for years, opened his veins and allowed hinlself
die with the disastrous year which had administered the final proof
t he could no longer give his fantastic mind to wonder, his heart to
. friends, or even his hand to his canvas. Dominguez was fifty-two and,
principle, opposed to growing old. He was a neighbor of mine and,
ving known him for ten years, I had ample occasion to witness the
g agony of the
caiman,
as he was called in Montparnasse. A
mar–
lous
painter in both senses of the word, he saw his work as the visible
e or vestige of a destiny which must be marvelous or nothing, so
ring was his conception of what a man should be.
