PARTISAN REVIEW
129
SEIZE THE DAY
SETIING FREE THE BEARS. By John Irving. Random House. $5.95.
NOG. By Rudolph Wurlitzer. Random House. $4.95.
SLAUGHTERHOUSE·FIVE or The Children's Crusade. By Kurt Vonnegut,
Jr. Oelacorte Press. $5.95.
GOING PLACES. By Leonard Michaels. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. $4.95.
CONVERSATIONS WITH JORGE LUIS BORGES. Interviewer, Richard
Burgin. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
$VI5.
A PERSONAL ANTHOLOGY. By Jorge Luis Borges. Ed. by Anthony Ker–
rigan. Grove Press. $1.95.
One of the ideas we have learned to live with during the past
five years is that the young are not particularly interested in
our
history.
That a student has never heard of Sacco and Vanzetti or Joe McCarthy,
not to mention Daddy Warbucks, may not be shocking, but that he
doesn't smart from his inadequacy has been hard for the grown-ups to
take~
Though my father never did more than delouse doughboys, I was
impressed by the German helmet with its gold spike and sunburst of
the Kaiser's Imperial Army that drifted around our attic during my
childhood. I was eager to be taken in by the helmet along with an old
record
Hunting the Hun
("If
you want to force them out, just put out
a plate of old sauerkraut") so that it became my past too. And I'm sure
that part of what we're saying when we go in for aggrieved statements
like "kids today just don't care," is not only that they don't care for our
values but they don't care for our experience-and that hurts.
The more thoughtful young do not assume that the past can be light–
ly disregarded: it can't be easy to throwaway so much and depend com–
pletely upon today. In
Setting Free the Bears,
John Irving has as part of
his
scheme a careful reconstruction of the capitulation of Austria to the
Nazis in 1938. This section, which he calls prehistory, is brilliant and
belongs to the notebook of his Viennese hero, Siegfried Javotnik. Siggy
complains that he was too young for the war, that at twenty-one in
Austria he is "at an interim age in an interim time ...."
I guess that
if
you're twenty-one in 1967, in America, you needn't
glut yourself with pre-history; in America I understand that there are
crusades every day. But I'm not in America. I'm in the Old World
and what makes it old isn't that it's had a head start. Any place
that's lagging, waiting again for the National Crisis-that's an Old
World, and it's often a pity to be young in it.
A statement which contains a perilous nostalgia for times of war-but,
