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know each other and the novelists don't. One judges the sentence not so much
as truth (it is a more -than-half-truth , of considerable implications) , as drama,
deciding whether it was an appropriate thing to have said to
that
Yugoslav on
that
occasion. So it is with the persistent themes that work their way through a
book that seems aleatory and improvised but is thematically quite deliberate,
the nature of American-ness , the nature of education both American and
European, the stability and plasticity of words , the character of political
movements . "I wonder sometimes ," muses Newman, "if 1wouldn ' t give up
some ofmy personal freedom simply
to
be governed by men I could respect as
human beings." And one understands the sentence to be at once idea and
dramatic response, in this case
to
Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1968 .
What finally seems to me most remarkable , however, about this remark–
able book is its relation not so much to the world of intellect and politics,
which it constantly refracts, but
to
plain and classic autobiographical truth .
The confessional tradition , through Augustine and Rousseau, Thoreau and
Henry Adams, is full of, indeed characterized by , dizzying alternations of
bravado and humiliation, self-absorption and self-rejection , solipsism and
the passing panorama of the not-self, as Fiedler once put his view of the
polarities chutzpah and pudeur. To say that Newman 's book finds its own
voice , makes its own relations between those poles, in a tradition as old as
Augustine, is , 1 think , saying very much indeed . I see Newman as a marginal
participant in public events , but 1do not see him as a copy of Mailer. I see him
flashing back
to
his origins, but 1 do not see him as a copy, say, of Edmund
Wilson or Nabokov or a hundred others who have done the same. It is a
personal history with both a structure and a voice all its own . I find myself
quoting again from Newman's marginal notes on himself. "Inadvertently, "
he writes , after an episode no more preposterous than a dozen others and
perfectly credible as it is being told, " long about page 247 , this became
fiction. It won't happen again." I find that sentence an encapsulation of a
mixture of inventive energy and self-irony , chutzpah and pudeur, so haunt–
ing that I cannot imagine anybody else , in the whole history of confessional
literature , having written it.
Philip Stevick
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