BOO KS
291
a problem of individual psychology. Gold's accomplishment is to preserve
a counterpoint between objective fact and individual response, between
given conditions and private motives, and thus force us to confront
questions that lie beyond ideology.
The problem of protest and ideology is demonstrated in another
of the story's complex figures, the "liberal" white Southerner, Frazier.
Full of the slogans of equality, he is the only person who tries to
establish contact with Hines; but as the Negro realizes, he approaches
him not as Hines but as "Northern Negro," someone perhaps articulate
enough to provide him with a tale of personal humiliation as a feather
for his liberal cap. Weare not surprised-after Hines refuses to become
the cliche he seeks-when we glimpse the latent violence beneath
Frazier's good will, nor when he exercises his detached sophistication
at the moment of Brown's disaster to see it in comfortably symbolic
terms: "'That boy is crucified up there,' Frazier said aloud, 'he is
paying for the sins of Charlie Company.' He looked around-was it
possible that someone within earshot might be worthy of the conceit?
-but no one had heard." This then is the ambiguity of awareness that
operates in "The Nickel Misery of George Washington Carver Brown,"
and, though less fully achieved, it is not absent from the other stories
in this collection. "The girl has suffered an ordeal," the doctor proclaims
of Bobbie Bedmer, "been without food and raped many times." But
we know better. We know that her three-day binge among the werewolves
was not a rape but a calculated aggression against her respectability, her
emotional stability, and her job in a button factory. Indeed, we say,
not the most effective sort of protest, but when she returns two years
later, rehabilitated and adjusted by "one hell of a psychiatrist," the loss,
we know, is greater than the gain.
Other stories abound in similar, though less spectacular, inversions.
At their best, they come out not as a simple ironic reversal but as an
openness: our basic attitudes are left hanging, meanings seem to evade
our longing for clarity and simplicity, characters are suspended in
ambiguous positions, in attitudes charged with meaning rather than
explanation-the "Carver Brown" story concludes in a tableau, with
each character frozen in a gesture on the fringe of the central action.
Gold's subtlety sometimes leads him into unnecessary obscurity.
At these moments his language seems to take flight from normal syntax
into a region either of exuberant but misplaced virtuosity or, oc–
casionally, of plain bad prose. Now and then his effort to give detail
a physical immediacy leads to affectation. At other times he completely
masters an oblique narrative style, and makes good use of momentary
