470
PARTISAN REVIEW
cheap hotel-in a flatly detailed prose.
It
is not until his much more
interesting third novel,
The Man Who Was Not With
it,
that his skid–
row tempters are turned into symbolic devils and his physical and social
detailing becomes a richly metaphoric style indebted both to the aphor–
isms of Heraclitus and Freud and the jargon of carnival barkers and
hopheads.
As in Nelson Algren's
The Wild Life,
Gold's hero is a lower class
youth who is given mythic proportions. While Gold is a less sentimental
writer than Algren, there are some basic similarities in the exaltation
of harsh reality and the education of a young man by way of crime,
physical violence, wandering, sexual voyeurism, and in the lovingly
elaborated purlieus of cheap pleasure. Gold's affirmation of gross ex–
perience has a more coherent pattern than Algren's and
The Man Who
Was Not With It
consistently develops the maturation theme favored
by so many of these novelists: the growing-up, and wising-up, of the
passionate but inchoate rebel against family, society and self. Without
examining in detail Gold's allegory-that it is allegory, everything from
chapter epigraphs, symbolic names and metaphoric asides to frequently
jagged over-writing, insists-we can note the rather surprising implica–
tions of the maturity the rebel is reaching for. While such heroes learn
to eschew the carnival morality of the fast buck and the con-man's
hard-sell to empty success, they also learn to despise the middle-class
escalator (and the pretty but compulsive and ambitious, and therefore
sexually counterfeit, middle-class girl). However, the heroes have no
desire to change society nor, finally, to escape from it. They leave the
road and go home again; they quit trying to kill their fathers and
authority; they give up their larcenous artistry and their more imagina–
tive longings and go along with the philistine rules and an ordinary job;
and they tend to identify their own contradictions and failures with
those of the society, and maturely settle down to living with both. These
wise ironists masked as ordinary and representative heroes, see through,
yet accept, ordinary life and society as it is; or, in Gold's "head-talk,"
they are simultaneously "with it" and "not with it."
What, then, has all the violence, sordidness, wildness, rebellion and
extremity been about? It would simply appear that the harsh actuality
is to
be
understood as the "really real" that underlies the ordinary ap–
pearances of common life. The poetry is there to insist upon the point.
By rebellion, violence, and the purgation of disgust-the downward
path to wisdom-the sensitive heroes become ordinary people accepting
life and society as it
is,
only they are disenchanted in advance and
therefore not capable of having vicious ambitions and illusions.
