PARTISAN REVIEW
581
The reinvigoration of the Left and the reemergence of sectional
politics has perhaps finally doomed a dominant political metaphor of
the fifties, which was based on an invidious distinction between "Amer–
ican" and "un-American." Today, Paul Cowan can quite seriously and
fearlessly call his autobiography
The Making of an Un-American.
Ob–
viously, much has happened, and new political positions may yet emerge.
The problem of assessing one's own past writings is often as difficult
as the actual writing about one's experience. Renata Adler's fourteen
pieces of reporting and criticism from 1963 to 1968, despite what she
says in her introductory essay, do not amount to a defense of language
and nuance, nor offer much proof that the "System" has accommodated
anyone out of the ordinary in the past decade, nor that it is getting
"better." In fact, Adler is a far better writer than she is a polemicist
for the radical middle. Her essays simply do not add up to the position
for which she claims to be a spokesman.
If
anything, Adler's political position is slightly off center. At her
best, as in "The March for Non-Violence from Selma," she has a mar–
velous eye and ear for detail and tone, and a sympathetic omnipresence
recording bits of conversation, faces, movements.
In
the piece on Sunset
Strip in Los Angeles, and the very funny report on the Washington
conference of the Independent Committee to End the War in Vietnam
in 1965 she adopts a half-serious acceptance of what is happening and
then slowly and deftly undercuts the pretense of a Los Angeles cultural
happening and a dead serious political convention. Her half-mocking,
ironic tone carries the reader to the inevitable absurd conclusion. In the
longest essay, "The Thursday Group," a long piece on group therapy,
she recreates a fascinating group, and sustains the interaction of individ–
uals through a series of encounters: snatches of conversation create the
continuity, and the mutual dependence, intrigue and self-exposure of
such a group is entirely believable. Here, as nowhere else, she comes
closest to creating the kind of soap opera that expresses her tastes and
her orientation in American society. But Adler's psychological soap opera,
and the one she recalls watching on T.V. for two years -
Another World
- are not the same thing.
After a while, the method and point of view break down. The re–
port on the Black Power march in Mississippi (after Selma) is a stereo–
typed, outsider's report dismissing white marchers as Drones, reporters
as disrupters and "Black Power," as one of those at best, bad, at worst,
worse, slogans. There are sympathetic sketches of Stokely Carmichael
and, especially, Martin Luther King. But one has the feeling that Adler
has tired of
it
all, sees the marches as boring and repetitive, and will
not write about them anymore. This sense is even stronger in her report
