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MORRIS DICKSTEIN
is his human concern, that he has evoked the suspicion of that fervent
believer in the ultimate humaneness of the Organized System,
Time
magazine. The collection, the Luce reviewer finds, is distressingly
obsessed with outcasts and minority-groups, and Gold himself, embittered
by
ressentiment,
must be a "sensitive outsider ruminating on his own
alienation." The writer concludes with a fatherly warning against
ideology; he teIls Gold that he is "too good a man for the doIlar-dreadful
trade." We can lay the reviewer's fears to rest. No writer could more
positively escape ideology and master it than Gold. Though his material
is that of Protest literature, the emotions are altogether new; this is
especiaIly evident in his best story, "The Nickel Miseries of George
Washington Carver Brown." The Protest Novel, as James Baldwin
showed in one of his first essays, involves a subtle coIlaboration with
the myths of the oppressor, that is, with his effort to
de-humani~
his
victim. The political (and literary) mission of the novelist is to create
the real human images that escape mythology, and therefore to explore
moral complexities that belie a simple Manicheanism. Ideological
literature has a point to make, but a point on the same abstract plane as
points it opposes; thus the categories of exploitation are inverted but
not transcended. The work of de-humanization is carried further. Gold's
greatest achievement-the result of his respect for integral human
experience, indeed the key
to
his claim upon us-is his extraordinary
grasp of moral complexity.
George Washington Carver Brown is a hapless Negro recruit
in
an Army camp in Georgia who is persecuted and finally destroyed
during basic training. The narrative builds up to a nightmare urgency.
An overall moral responsibility is clear, yet Gold pays painstaking
respect to the varying degrees of individual complicity with the actual
culprit, including the complicity of Brown himself. Beneath his genuine
terror, Brown (as we are perhaps too insistently told) takes an obscure
pleasure in his treatment, almost courts it. We meet another Negro,
the educated Northerner Hines, coping with his shame and humiliation
at the public latrine. Gold uses such a scene to evoke the tacit op–
pressiveness of Army life in its assault on the private self, just as
he uses small training details to portray its mindless overt brutality.
But here too, as with Brown, we hear a sort of continuous undersong;
for Hines, though his shame is understandable, is partly at fault, because
he shrinks in every possible way from human contact. Nuance of personal
feeling, of course, has a different order of importance from objective and
institutional conditions, and Gold rightly refuses to dissolve either
the persecution of Brown or the more subtle assault on Hines into
