BOO KS
617
displayed between the photo on the front of
Numbers
and the drawing
of the author on the back is utterly puerile and unreflective. To prove
his sexual desirability, the hero sets out to be had thirty times in ten
days. Johnny Rio makes it: as a novelist Rechy doesn't. Any literary
notions that might raise this book to discussable pornography are
inflationary.
Knowing that the first-person stance can lead to some pretty empty
posturing, Nicholas Delbanco assumes it in his non-novel
Grasse 3/23/66.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing (this nightmare of meretricious
prose would drive anyone to commonplace), and so we never really know
who the tortured soul is who beleaguers us with 139 pages of creative
writing, though the clues lead directly to Harvard Square. The preten–
sions are Joycean. In a recent article in
Encounter,
Daniel Cory quotes
Ezra Pound on
Ulysses:
"He said 'the job had been done once and for
all'; and that it would be futil e for anyone to attempt that kind of a
work again." In the case of
Grasse
3/23/66 the model is
Finnegans
Wake:
... The pupil and the apple of his sty, glazed gaze.... Fine me an
honest man to slake me every slackening, to line. . . .
What mockery is this, that I, enranged, can merely rag, and then a
red rag weave and wave to no bull's eye? (What wanton soup to
gourmand gods, who scruple-scrapIe, offered mess are we?)
An artistry is honesty, so honesty is art. Imperious, impervious, avid
or pavid, we swap our stories (darn good yarn, crayon, rayon), knit
wit and wash our mouths with lye.
John Lennon did all this, diffidence of a deity, in (dentured) dif–
ferential, a few years back, for love and money.
After Nicholas Delbanco's obsessive paronomasia and James Bald–
win's artless dodging of the issues, it is a delight to turn to Nat Hentoff's
Onwards!,
a novel of simplicity and consequence. The story is superbly
focused on the current political scene - that's what Nat Hentoff is
writing about, and by never puffing his novel into a literary occasion
he has achieved a small, exemplary work of art. His hero, a fortyish New
York City academic, finds himself torn between the ineffectual dramatics
of the old liberals with their nostalgic yet affecting sense of history and
the tasteless aggression of the New Left babies with their justifiable
urgency. All the "characters," though briefly done, have a surprising
depth, and Hentoff's statement is perfectly pointed. Some obvious pitfalls
for an indulgent farce - the academic world, the spectacle of New York
intellectuals - are avoided by a determined honesty. The tone is light
