BOOKS
437
In
attempting to categorize these writers, Mr. Jones plays it fast
and loose and chooses to make the distinction between urban and non–
urban (which to him, "in a more inexact sense," also means eastern and
western) writing. This distinction is apparent and misleading; one
look at the Appendix, where at least two opposed positions (Rumaker
vs. Kerouac) are maintained in theory, indicates that the differences
between these writers are somewhat more interesting than their geo–
graphical distribution.
In
fact, they fall into two broad groups: in rela–
tion to a community
to
which they have become imaginatively alien,
they serve either as audience or entertainer. Either position is a dead
end and precludes the possibility of style, which determines meanings
and defines the writer's whereabouts vis-a-vis
what
he describes. Hence,
the concerns of this work become more or less unrecognizable.
Although, in this book, environment is supposed to be
"total,"
few
of these writers seem able to make the human connections. Consequently,
their writing tends to be either totally personal or impersonal in an
almost industrial sense: stylistically dislocated or pre-fabricated. Some
of these writers tend toward documentation unspoiled by art, others
toward "pop art" collages employing, although in ostensibly back-hand
ways, mass media techniques. For most of them, Mr. Jones implies, writ–
ing has become "not merely ... a vehicle" but "an event in itself"; if
so, it is not a happy event. Whatever its therapeutic value, this ritual
makes little or no sense to anyone watching it. And this is exhausted
writing, haunted, in Robert Creeley's phrase, by a "brutal dullness."
On the "personal" side of this book, Edward Dorn, for example,
is writing from nowhere. His prose is flaccid, distracted, and sophomoric:
its subjects are non-existent. The same is true of Paul Metcalf's here–
a-page, there-a-page, shapeless fiction; the writing, which, for no ap–
parent reason, at times collapses into improbable verse (or broken prose
lines, to
be
more precise), is awful. "Indian Game" is predictable all
the way; it is meant to satisfy the perverse modernist thirst for gratui–
tous violence, just because violence is simple, something that
happens,
a momentary lifting of the fog of uncertain identities.
Mr. Jones, at least in "The Screamers," breaks through to the real
world; his jazzy picture of Negroes in Newark has a playful ferocity
which cuts away facile assumptions. His other pieces, unfortunately,
are written inside an unclosed parenthesis and all the sense seems to
have slipped out the open end. Hubert Selby, Jr. is also aware that a
place is defined by its moral as well as geographical limits; he knows
Brooklyn cold. But "Another Day Another Dollar," a deadly accurate
ice-cold eye-witness report, is a work existing outside of art. "A Penny
