468
WILLIAM YOUNGREN
relation between thought and language, will encourage precisely the
arbitrary and rigid dependence on authority they were devised to
prevent.
William Youngren
THE BIG HURRAH
MARK THE GLOVE BOY OR, THE LAST DAYS OF RICHARD NIXON.
By
Mork Horris. Mocmillon.
$4.95.
One must speculate, however discomfiting the implication,
that many of our best writers feel the Dr. Strangeloves are ascendant
(if not yet rampant) and that if their own writing is to have any social
efficacy, they must forego the metaphor of fictive form and address
themselves to the madness directly. Mailer, Baldwin, Algren, Ellison,
Edmund Wilson and George Elliott, among others in past years alone,
have eschewed fiction in order
to
write directly and sometimes movingly
on issues and events in the headlines or lurking just behind them. This
is not to say we have no fiction grappling urgently with the social and
psychic dislocations of our times. Indeed our most exciting new writers
-Heller, Pynchon, Purdy and Ken Kesey among them-are dealing
precisely with the lunacy menacing us all. Still, there is an increasing
temptation for the literary man to tum journalist-polemicist and to bring
to that role the intensely personal vision and evocative skills that we
hope for in a novelist.
If
Mark Harris's new book has any value, it is
not alone as an extension of his curious and quite special body of fiction
but as a splendid instance of the passionate, artful political tract that
is more and more with us.
It is a strain to think of a less promising subject for artful inspection
than the somber eminence of Richard M. Nixon. Before the Kennedy
assassination one could summon a vision of Mr. Nixon hurtling regres–
sively through the 'sixties and 'seventies, running for Mayor of New
York ("how long must we bottlefeed these welfare chiselers?") and
losing, running for California State Superintendent of Public Instruc-
