PARTISAN REVIEW
541
it...."). The open irony Wolfe withholds from the Pump House Gang
isn't withheld from the Vietnam Day Committee, and for one who
finds the evanescence of other styles an attraction and a confirmation
of his sociology
he
takes an oddly stern view of the evanescence of
political
styles, which by the way don't look quite so different in the
fall of 1969 from the way they did in the fall of 1965, whatever he
wants to pretend.
I blame Wolfe not for thinking public concerns trivial or fraudulent
- that is sometimes salutary and necessary - but for insinuating that
the reader in the suburbs or wherever is somehow supported in
his
essential indifference to social justice by the very different indifference
of the teen-agers and proles and the deracinated impressarios who
manipulate and USe them. Not that Wolfe's devices aren't cunning. He's
interested in power, not as a political possession but as a personal one;
his heroes, as I said earlier, are usually men of impressive physical or
psychic force, strong men who have mastered difficult skills or powerful
machines like motorcycles or souped-up cars and whose personal style
claims an indifference to fear or the complex social delicacies. And this
image grabs the respectable reader quite literally by the balls:
the genteel suburban kid rides his bicycle over to the gas station
and there in the grease pit area where they lubricate the cars the
hard rocks are hunkered down telling jokes about pussy, with an
occasional clinical reference to bowel movements and crepitation.
And oh christ don't you remember their forearms with the basilic
veins wrapped around them like surgical tubes, gorged with the
unattainable lower-class hard-rock power that any moment is going
to look up and
spot
us . . . genteel little pudding kids.
Well, yes, this is a pretty good and acute joke as far as it goes, but I
doubt that it explains quite as much as it seems to. Some intellectuals
do hanker after "Low Rent stuff' because it made them feel so scared
and sissified in those formative years, some middle-class citizens tum
SUPPORT 4-YEAR-OLD FARM WORKERS' STRIKE
FOR UNION RECOGNITION
Needed: Full Time Organizers
Food and Lodging
+
$5.00/week
Contact: Diana Chapman
United Farm Workers
Organizing Committee (AFL-CIOj
P.O. Box 30
Delano, California
