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or "gyrate their heads"; something "sags in dull symbols" and someone
makes "a gesture of amelioration." One
girl
is "the prettiest of the two
girls," another restrains amorous advances by pointing out she hasn't
brought her diaphragm: "'And,' Louise laid the final brick, the cuncta–
tion, 'I hate those awful rubbers, don't you?'" Not half so awful as
brick cunctations.
Last and worst, the structure of the novel is lopsided. We are to be
shown
how Manny gets gradually sucked into respectability, how hypo–
chondria and pusillanimity propel him out ,of hipsterism into bourgeois
aecurity. But the hipster phase, with only slight irruptions of the transi–
tional, occupies three hundred and nine pages, whereas the
embour–
,eoirement
is accomplished in less than two. This, to me, is a major
strategic blunder\ The best one can say for
On Ice
is that it exhibits a
certain pervasive good-naturedness, but even that is scarcely more than
a chirrup in the cacophony of petty chaos.
The stories in
Behold Goliath
fall chiefly into two categories: the
weird,
heterosexual, and unconvincing ones; and the sordid, homosexual,
and convincing ones. There are tw,o exceptions: "As I Was Going Up
the
Stair," which is not homosexual but convincing and excellent; and
"In
Praise of Vespasian," which is homosexual but unconvincing and
dreadful.
In the first category, we find stories like "Rapunzel, Rapunzel," in
which a deranged, beautiful, dying young millionairess falls wildly in
love with a repellent clairvoyant, who, however, is interested only in
midnight window-shopping for sexual scenes
to
which he can mastur–
bate.
For her clairvoyeur's sake, she gives herself with clockwork regu–
larity
to a preposterous little Oriental whom she loathes, with the knowl–
edge
that her truelove is watching and the conviction that it is he who
is
possessing her. In "Beds and Boards," a young couple about to separate
for six months or, just possibly, forever, spend their last night-im–
probably-smashing and burning their furniture.
In the second category, there are stories like "From the Phoenix to
the
Unn'aIIlable, Impossibly Beautiful Wild Bird" or "Ismael," which
tell
in
different keys the same tale of mutual torture in homosexual
menages, and the illusory happiness to
be
snatched from a male pick-up,
which, with the passage of time, proves equally bitter and impossible.
This is the theme of Mr. Chester's stories-what Jean Prevost made
the
subtitle of one of his
novels-l'impossibilite d'aimer.
"In this world
it
is
dangerous to love," we read in one story. Another ends with, "per–
haps
love is only the moment before separation." Elsewhere: "in the
equation of !"omance no plus can exist except by virtue of a minus";
and, again, we are "destined, never to profoundly have whom we love nor
