622
off his own, well, nose. Instead of
pushing on with his attitude, even
while Tom Sawyer works against
him, he reports a series of events
that sound more literal than the
first explosive pose but which also
contradict it. Miller claims a rev–
olutionary point of view every
chance he gets, but except for the
first few shrieks, he never acts
like a revolutionary, and he never
tells us what there is to revolt
against. He chooses Life, disorder–
ed and nonselective, which is fine
except that he is then, like God
but unlike the artist, not entitled
to judgments, philosophies or rev–
olutions.
He says: "My idea in collaborat-
CH ESTER
ing with myself has been to get
off the gold standard of literature.
My idea briefly has been to pre–
sent a resurrection of the emotions,
to
depict the conduct of a human
being in the stratosphere of ideas,
that is, in the grip of delirium.
To paint a pre-Socratic being, a
creature part goat, part Titan." So
he wants to get off the gold stand–
ard, to break with over-sanctified
traditions. O.K. Bravo.
Art,
like
Nature, smiles kindly on the man
who changes her wardrobe. She
even smiles kindly on the man
who merely tears up her old
clothes, for she knows that the
sight of her rags will excite an
army of seamstresses into hysterical
The rise and the fall,
the gUilt and the
redemption - the entire German experi–
ence is captured in this masterful story
of a single German family through three
agonized-generations
Billiards at
Hall-Past
Nine
By HEINRICH BOLL
$4.95, now
at
your
I
bookstore
McGRAW-HILL "' __
