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a matter of overcoming the cultural lag in which the managers needlessly
act as if the owners still owned. For me, the issue remains radical:
to
penetrate the economic heart of darkness where Property still rules.
Alas, these differences with Bazelon are today politically irrelevant,
since the question is not one of dismantling the ultimate source
of irrational power but persuading the citizenry to a bit of sanity.
On the high theoretical plane, Bazelon's study is arguable, but always
provocative and valuable. On the level of radical common sense, it
is first rate.
With a big book like this, American intellectual life has taken a
long stride away from its Fiftyish paranoia about large ideas. Next, the
people have to enter the Sixties too.
Michael Harrington
"THE IMAGINATION OF DISASTER"
NICKEL MISERIES.
By
Ivon Gold. The Viking Press. $3.95.
"Bobbie Bedmer at the age of nineteen during the course
of three warm August days and nights lost not her virginity which
she had long before misplaced in the back of an automobile but the
memory of it, and almost, along with this, the capacity to remember."
On the very first page of "A Change of Air," a story written while
Ivan Gold was yet an undergraduate, we feel the taut economy of style,
the easy precision of thought and feeling, that give this collection so
much·of its distinction. Style, we are reminded, is not simply an element
of form: Gold's unsentimental toughness, his cleanness of detail and
avoidance of the merely ornamental make possible an intensity of
human concern that in too many young writers is lost in literary bravura.
This concern is evident too in his choice of characters. His people
are misfits-near-delinquents, long-suffering whores, Army stumblebums
-outcasts on the fringes of an existing order, who yet preserve a
certain autonomy of will which makes them something more than mere
victims. Their miseries are sometimes small, at other times they culminate
in violent destruction-Gold has in full measure what James called
"the imagination of disaster" and his narrative skill is nowhere so
striking as in moments of catastrophe-yet in each case they call our
moral feelings into play in an anxious and original way.
So insistent is Gold's vision of violence and misfortune,
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