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STEPHEN DONADIO
happy accidents which almost persuade us that history is the subtlest
allegorist of all." Reality is seen as literature, specifically as some kind
of
roman
a
clef:
there is nothing at stake. The crucial gap between
the seen and the envisioned, between facts and the imagination, dis–
appears; and in the diagnosis of the ills of society its literature is
appropriated to be used as
evidence,
not seen, in a more complicated
and more useful way, as symptomatic.
In this connection Mr. Fiedler's false equation between Allen
Ginsberg and the Ferdinand R. Tertan of Lionel Trilling's story "Of
This Time, Of That Place," is significant. Briefly, Mr. Fiedler claims
that Mr. Trilling not only "evoked" the student Ginsberg, but that
"if Ginsberg invented Burroughs and Kerouac (in some sense, to some
degree), Ginsberg himself (in a similar sense, in a similar degree)
is the invention of the man who was his teacher, and who has
become the dean of the generation of the Forties and Fifties, as well
as the center of the new establishment," etc., etc. He maintains further
that Ginsberg "appeared as a character before existing as an author in
print. First portrayed as a mad student with whose madness his genteel
but intellectually committed teacher learned finally to identify himself,
Ginsberg sprang to a kind of mythic life." This is ambiguous, but
certain implications are apparent, none of them to Mr. Fiedler's credit.
As Mr. Trilling has already pointed out, the correspondence is im–
possible: not simply chronologically, however. For
Mr.
Fiedler's error
is not merely factual: it is a fundamental error in interpretation and
approach. This is a cartoon version of reality in which the poet Gins–
berg, like KoKo the Clown, climbs out of Mr. Trilling's inkwell. To
assume that Ginsberg is a wish-fulfillment, that he came to be by virtue
of what Mr. Fiedler seems intent on seeing as Mr. Trilling's combina–
tion of genteel timidity and cultural frustration, is both naive and
irresponsible, not to say terribly unfair to both these writers.
This tendency to mingle fact with fiction often lends an air of
unreality to Mr. Fiedler's observations; his comments conjure up an
amusement park America in which the literary world is a side-show.
It is all part of the great extravaganza. Bit by bit the book becomes
burlesque. Mr. Fiedler presides over his vaudeville America with an
uncommon skill; it is, of course, no great surprise that William Bur–
roughs, like a one-man band, becomes the star attraction. As though he
were outside selling tickets, Mr. Fiedler calls him "the Black Saint of
the American very young." This is inaccurate. With the exception of
John Rechy, Mr. Burroughs' influence has been most visible in the
work of certain writers, now approaching middle age, whom Mr.