438
STEPHEN DONADIO
For Your Thoughts," however, the story of a man with an outrageous
but entirely credible obsession, puts the facts into a sly and witty shape
and reaches fiction.
The selections
by
Fielding Dawson are grim and quiet, "dimly
envisioned," hung-over with an unkillable sense of futility. In some
sense, Mr. Dawson's work marks the crisis-point of "personal" writing;
it bears the deep scars of a corrosive distrust and skepticism as to the
ultimate value or possibility of expression, even of feeling, and is, in its
curious way, intent on destroying itself.
The "impersonal," ready-made writers substitute wisecracks for
wisdom; in lieu of style, they are content with soft-sell techniques which
show a breakdown of dignity and of distinctions between the public and
private life. This accounts, in part, for their wide success; this is writing
that can easily be absorbed by the set-up. It is entertaining and has no
sharp edges: the techniques themselves are so powerful that they either
neutralize or obliterate all meaning. Hence, there are a couple of pages
of double-spaced dialogue here by Diane Di Prima which read like a
Feiffer cartoon, though Miss Di Prima isn't looking for laughs.
Douglas Woolf, however, is; his "Work In Flight Grounded," an
exasperatingly cute description of a transcontinental flight, is written
for people amused by everything. There was a time when Mort Sahl only
had to come out onto a stage and say "Eisenhower" to break everyone
up; that is the way Mr. Woolf writes. Of course, when the stewardess
with the "gluttonous" smile came down the aisle with magazines, our
hero "let her go, for someone had beat him to Big Table." That elbow
nudging you in the side sets your teeth on edge.
This same offensive complacency runs through Mr. Kerouac's prose,
coupled with exhibitionism. These are the hot flashes of a trade journal–
ist for those "who make the mad night all the way (four-day sex orgies,
three-day conversations, uninterrupted transcontinental drives) ."
"CITYCitycity," in contrast to Mr. Kerouac's usual travel tips for hu–
man marginalia, comes as a surprise; it is a mildly interesting, almost
political, bit of science-fiction which indicates that he is not completely
without imagination and can, occasionally, manage to tear himself away
from the rear-view mirror.
John Rechy, like the "birls" who wander dazedly through his
hysterical documentaries, can only throw up his hands and giggle "Too
Much" when he )ooks at America. And yet Mr. Rechy, who can say,
without flinching, that "searchlights screw the sky," who can talk about
"jukeboxes rattling rock and roll sexsounds," who can, after all these
years, proclaim that "Jazz musicians came up the long, long river,
