122
JOHN THOMPSON
gather from the blowing clouds and after a moment hurl away, so
the reviving grass is bleached by an- astonishing storm of confetti.
. . .
Mr. Springer in a sPiffy dark gray drip-dry and Nelson in a
sissy suit with straps .
..
her wild heart bathes the universe in red.
. . . And the revulsion the reader feels at being asked to take pleas–
ure in these verbal displays is transferred to a revulsion for the feel–
ings of the characters that he is being asked to share, for Rabbit's
wish for irresponsibility, for Rabbit's sexual readiness and random
tenderness. But this is not enough, and indeed many reviewers have
been puzzled by what they have taken for
a
discrepancy between
all this "good writing" about "good feelings" and the fierce morality
of this tract; for "good sex" is known to be
a
positive value today,
whatever the circumstances. So it will not do that the destruction
caused here could come from plain old intercourse. The reader is to
be shocked by Rabbit's unbridled desires: he wants blowing and
buggery. You start with what's "inside" you, you let yourself do
what seems natural, the next thing you know whatever you have
touched is destroyed. The little whore tells him straight out, and
here, I
think,
we are to believe every word. "Boy, you really have
the touch of death, don't you?" And we are to believe, also, the
next step of meaning : "In the white light, faces wear the American
expression, eyes squinting and mouth sagging open in a scowl, that
makes them look as
if
they are about to say something menacing
and cruel."
Rabbit, Run,
then, is not a description or a moral lesson,
but literally a damnation, and what is damned is all the poor effort
of humanity. And the unctuous skill is there to confuse us, to
mix
the obvious truth that there must be responsibility in feeling with
the covert meaning that feeling is death, the obvious truth of the
misery of our time with the covert meaning that life itself on this
earth is a miserable squalor.
I t is tedious to read so many pages of sheer fiction. After a
while the reader may begin to wonder, Why doesn't he simply
say
it? We don't really care so much what happens to the so-called
people, the characters, and this is often true today, I believe, even
with the best novels. One of the pleasant things about Paul Good–
man is that he seems to have this impatience, too. The stories in
Our Visit to Niagara
are most of them mixtures of fable, memoir,
fiction, and essay. When the action seems to
be
running out, or
