PARTISAN
REVIEW
481
ground, "patriale work . . . work that might be ancestral and tradi–
tionally of my own home, while still being accessible to men of my
time everywhere." "Of my home" is a definition of beginnings, of places,
the spot we take off from. In fiction, which ought, according to my
sights, to look into the author's own dream world, subconscious, magic
and terror of childhood, one has to come genuinely to grips with tribe,
family, those house ghosts that follow and give tension to one's stories.
I could argue that all stories are ghost tales, not necessarily literal
ghosts but of anxie ty or guilt so unbearable that we enter the realm
of hallucination where not just unreal worlds but absurd worlds mingle
with what we take to be logical.
Given this partisan joy in fiction it's probably easy to guess that
I would like Wallace Markfield's
T eitlebaum's Window.
Despite bad
overwriting (oh for a good editor at Random and Knopf, an ounce of
honest boredom and whole forests could be saved) it remains in my
imagination and I have to come around half circle and praise the begin–
ning which I objected to last year as tedious because of the insistence
of its joking, the laughter cruel, silly, repetitious. Yet it's that very
teasing which is the geshmack, the taste of all sick Jewish tenements
of Brooklyn, the Bronx. Markfield details a jungle of sexual misunder–
standing, a world whose religious rituals have broken down, gone
bankrupt, so that a series of homemade games, a collage of influences
from radio, the movies, those priests of magic for the thirties, tum the
parents and children upside down. Everyone is acting. (A generation
before, the hysterics were praying.) Only no one quite believes in
their roles. Look at "the Mommy!" Listen to "the Daddy!" "Call me
the Pop!" Mr. and Mrs. Sloan shout back and forth in their kitchen
at their prodigy, "Second-Highest-in-Achievement-Test-Kid" Simon.
Competing for his mother's breast with a father no better than an
infant himself (crazed by a World War One bootcamp, elastic bandages
wound as spats around his ankles, black shako and faded blue cap,
appropriately, a movie usher ) - even that tit a stage prop, "the
:Momma," Malvena, " the Orphan's" kitchen a set to replay her life,
its great moments, the outrages - Simon's only defense is laughter.
The Sloan family is Markfield's archetype. All over Brooklyn chil–
dren are seeing too much nakedness. As they grow into adolescence
they veil the mysteries with sick jokes about their parents' lovemaking.
Sex is not holy but funny, yet the laughing strains and strains echoing
the deep embarrassment of the children over their own feelings. They
grow up terrified of love. At the end of
T eitlebaum's Window,
Simon,
a college graduate, can not face impending marriage. Yes, the family
is
