712
PARTISAN REVIEW
But Sabbath has grown older. What preoccupies him now is how
one goes about setting a course for oneself in these godless, soulless
times. In the absence of a higher life, what is a man to do? Mickey - or
is it Roth? - seems to have taken his cue from a poem by Yeats read at
sea when he was little more than a boy. Yeats had written in "Meru":
"Ravening, raging, uprooting that he may
cornel
Into the desolation of
reality." Better Mickey's own "relentless mischief," "cunning
negativity,""oppositional exuberance," satire, wit, chaos even, than the
pale, timid, meek, normal, decent, healthy representation of
ordinary
life
that seems to have swept the country from Madamaska Falls to
Manhattan to
L.
A.
Conventional ways of speaking, of organizing life, of educating
(indoctrinating) kids, bring out the brazen bull of protest in Sabbath.
While tearing his way through the personal effects of Deborah, the
aforementioned young girl whose parents have given him shelter, he dis–
covers among her notebooks, her teddybears, her underwear that she,
too, had studied Yeats's "Meru." Here Roth treats us to an excerpt
from the kid's college notebook: "Class criticized poem for its lack of a
woman's perspective. Note the unconscious gender privileging - his
terror, his glory, his (phallic) monuments." Sabbath concludes that dear
young Deborah would be well-advised to take her junior year abroad in
Bahia - the raunchy Brazilian port where he received his higher
education from prostitutes: "Learn more about creative writing in one
month in Bahia than in four years at Brown."
The morally righteous, the many who jog and who, when they have
caught their breaths counsel us to share and to care ("the eloquence of
blockheads"), the well-intentioned healers (in institutions, hospitals, and
AA meetings), the educators, the
bien pensants
have no answers to any
real question whatsoever. They specialize in diagnosing everyone as a vic–
tim of child abuse or incest and soothe all sufferings with Prozac. These
are the makers, Roth tells us, of an "Age of Total Schlock" - flat, bor–
ing, passionless, sexless, dead.
And so wicked Sabbath continues to follow his
. .. laughable hunger for more. More defeat! More disappointment!
More deceit! More loneliness! More arthritis! More missionaries!
God willing, more cunt! More disastrous entanglement in everything.
For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty
side of existence.
Now if this, dear reader, sounds to you like still more Nietzsche re-
