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439
bringing American jazzmoans," is contemptuous of
Time
magazine's
writing. This scorn is indeed mysterious, for the elements (rhetoric,
word fusions, agitation of surface, synthetic language and hotshot
stance) of Mr. Rechy's own non-stop sick comic monologue are no less
preposterous. This is why Mr. Rechy is at his best when he writes about
Southern California: his techniques correspond, for once, to the lunar
world he describes. In one of its most extreme expressions, Mr. Rechy
represents what has happened to the "impersonal" writers here ; passive
and unresisting, he has become a receptacle for experience, is overrun
and invaded by it: he is, in short, selling his sensory data.
William Burroughs's "Cut-Up Method," a parlor game in itself no
more interesting than computer prose or the monkeys typing out
Hamlet,
is symptomatic of the same frustration and impotence: it, too, is a way
of masturbating the language. Mr. Burroughs's misplaced cinematic
technique makes all life literary. His intelligence is parasitic: it kills
whatever it touches, substitutes "Vaudeville Voices" for human beings.
Although his single-shot demolition of "The Life Time Change" ("The
news is served, sir") is one of the shrewdest things in this book, it is
not very much. In a series of news flashes, Mr. Burroughs, the "ape of
history," writes like his own mind-blasting "Berserk Machine," pro–
ducing an endless "flesh tape" in which reality and hallucination copu–
late wildly.
Still, not all of this writing is fractured and frozen into such hideous
shapes. Michael Rumaker's stories, though they are awkward an_d halt–
ing, have the kind of simple purpose so conspicuously absent from Mr.
Kerouac's tiresome "spontaneous" themeless variations. Mr. Rumaker's
comments in the Appendix indicate that he is working toward intuitive
form, i.e., toward forms which are still imaginatively possible after ob–
jects have been mauled by analysis and self-expression. Robert Creeley's
stories are coy and crafty. At its best, his prose gnaws quietly at the
consciousness; at its worst, it closes its eyes and goes off whistling, its
meanings all lost in its pockets. And William Eastlake, when he is not
writing local color ("his eyes the color of between the clouds" ) scena–
rios or lapsing into advertisements ("they shared a togetherness of igno–
rance"), has something to say.
The best thing by far in this book, though, is Russell Edson's "Selec–
tions from
Gulping's Recital."
It makes good sense, is imaginative,
lyrical, screamingly funny and shrewdly written. Mr. Edson is able to
distance himself from the elements of his work and is not paralyzed by
his own techniques; his marvelous, deadpan, throat-clearing, All-right–
men-this-is-serious style sets the cold war rhetoric on its ear: "... We
