MILLICENT I3ELL
59
who wants
to
keep her son in roillpers. It seeills that "if Mary was modest
she was also vain .. .. She did not enjoy what she did not understand." She
tries
to
Illake her
SOli
afi-aid of the
l~omallS
when he is young and later she
is obsequious to wealthy jews. She always thinks she knows what is good
for him better th :lIl he does himself, and she becomes something of a nui–
sance. So, he rejects her with his "Who is Illy mother)" God the Father is
also a banal disappointillent: "My Father. .. does not often speak to me.
Nonetheless I honor him. He sends forth as much love as he can offer, but
his love is not withollt limit." jesus cries out vainly for paternal help in his
last moments, but afterwards the old oedipal anger subsides in a cozy rec–
onciliation: "My Father was only doing what He could do. Even as I had
done what I could do. So He was truly my Father. Like all Fathers He had
many sore troubles... and some had little to do with his son." jesus and his
relatives are, alas, duller, in Mailer's account, than one had supposed them.
Finally, what does it mean to live in Illodern times on the margin of a
culture that calls itself Christian? David Mamet, no less than these seniors,
continues to ponder the question by writing a novel about a true
American episode, the 1<) 15 trial of a jew accused of raping and murder–
ing a Southern girl. He is Leo Frank, Llctory manager of the National
Pencil factory in Atlanta, Ceorgia. The Pulitzer prize-winning playwright
gives draillatic form to the forgotten events-his adroitly-told story pro–
gresses by means of di ;llogue- but what is heard and what is thought
interlace in a Mailletian way , in abrupt, half-uttered fragments in which
actual speaking presence alternates with recollection and renection. At one
moment we seelll to overhear the discussions of a small cluster of jews
established f(w two generations in the Illidst of a cOlllmunity from which
the Ku Klux Klan has begun to hound and harry them. Yet we are also
inside the head of Frank, who is often arguing with hilllself during a suc–
cession of moments recalled in brilliant kaleidoscope during his trial.
Some of these moments seem culled at random from the trivial details of
his former routines at home or in his office; they are vivid, imlllediate, and
without obvious significance, the ordered sensations of a man who seellls
to find his place in an ordered world, the life of the well-adjusted assimi–
lated stranger. Yet they vibrate with a sense of doom as Mamet exhibits the
racist world that crunches Frank in its jaws. This is the society that
oppresses and segregates its outcasts within the gates, its l3lacks, yet uses a
Black man as a false witness to accuse the Jew who is called "the Nigger
to the nth degree." Frank's jewishness is grounds for suggesting sexual
perversity; factory girls testify that he is a lecher: "He came up to me one
Saady, and we were going out, by the second noor, and he ast me
to
stay."
We are with Frank during the months when he is waiting for execu–
tion, goes through forty-seven Trollope novels in the prison library, and
