150
PARTISAN REVIEW
Shawmut is wise enough to know that the witticism is vile. But the
temptation remains irresistible . Even his friendships seem to be
defined by the temptation. His gimpy friend Edward Walish (shades
of Valentine Gersbach, the villian in
Herzog)
reflects his own darker
nature : "a wise guy in an up-to-date post-modern existentialist sly
manner."
The wisecracking artist is endemic to contemporary fiction. In
God Knows,
Joseph Heller, for example, discovers that God is not an
earnest social democrat, but (imagine the chutzpah!) the original
comic Jewish novelist. The novel is a tissue of dumb wisecracks
(King David on his marriage to Michal : "Michal, my bride, was not
just the daughter of a king but a bona-fide Jewish American Princess
... I am the first in the Old Testament [sic] to be stuck with one"
and on the comparative merits of the Moses story and his own story :
"Moses has the Ten Commandments, it's true, but I've got much
better lines .") . Such inspired words should have been blocked and
absorbed back in the system, as Shawmut suggests about his own
bad witticisms.
The so-called avant-garde (bad witticisms, deliberately deviant
imagination and all), paradoxically American mainstream, needs to
be resisted. Thus Shawmut who writes with fraternal affection for
Allen Ginsberg (he has included the queer nation in the Whitmanian
universal embrace) nevertheless doubts that "the path of truth must
pass through all the zones of masturbation and buggery." Shawmut
at least knows that "right speech" is based on self-control. The max–
ims of La Rochefoucald are not wisecracks, nor is Bellow's res–
onantly aphoristic prose, which rather serves as an antidote to the
compulsive wisecrack . Shawmut's story is a confession of sin, an at–
tempt at purgation, so that he can hear words of ultimate
senousness.
The world's grandeur is fading. And this is our human set–
ting, devoid of God, she says with great earnestness. But in this
deserted beauty man himself still lives as a God-pervaded being.
It will be up to him - to us - to bring back the light that has gone
from these molded likenesses, if we are not prevented by the
forces of darkness. Intellect , worshipped by all, brings us as far
as natural science, and this science, although very great, is in–
complete. Redemption from
mere
nature is the work of feeling
and of the awakened eye of the Spirit. The body, she says, is sub–
ject to the forces of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure .
I listen to this and have no mischievous impulses .
