260
PARTISAN REVIEW
ally present at the game, learned about the atom test even as he sat in
Durocher's private box near the Giants' dugout in unlikely companionship
wi th three other representatives of the culture of the moment-Toots
Shor, Jackie Gleason, and Frank Sinatra. As the game progresses, the fans
rain torn-up scorecards and crushed paper cups down on the field, and
from an upper deck seat a man throws pages of the current
Life.
With their
feature stories and the ads for a mounting fifties consumerism they drift
onto the privileged quartet. "Baby food, instant coffee, encyclopedias, and
cars, waffle irons and shampoos and blended whiskies. . Johnson
&
Johnson and Quaker State and RCA Victor and Burlington Mills and
Bristol-Myers and General Motors." Gleason, whose grainy comic epic of
working-class life, "The Honeymooners," will begin its run two days later,
notes "how the dazzle of a Packard car is repeated in the feature story
about the art treasures of the Prado. It is all part of the same thing. Rubens
and Titian and Playtex and Motorola." A page with a reproduction of
Breugel's "Triumph of Death" flutters onto Hoover's shoulder like a por–
tent of atomic end-of-the-world: "Death himself astride a slat-ribbed
hack, he is peaked for blood, his scythe held ready as he presses people in
haunted swarms towards the entrance of some helltrap, an oddly modern
construction that could be a subway tunnel or office corridor. A back–
ground of ash skies and burning ships." Hoover thinks of the distant
explosion of unknown destructive power and reflects, "What is the con–
nection between Us and Them, how many bundled links do we find in the
neural labyrinth? It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to under–
stand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion." Or, as a
Hoover henchman will be told in 1966 by a demonstrator invading
Truman Capote's famous Black and White Waldorf ball,
We can look around us and see the business executives, the fashion
photographers, the government officials, the industrialists, the writers,
the bankers, the academics, the pig-faced aristocrats in exile, and we
can know the soul of one by the bi tter wrinkled body of the other
and then know all by the soul of one. Because they are all part of the
same motherfucking thing.
Deep completion, the unity of the same motherfucking thing, is what
the novel strains for. But it is haunted by a dominating image-waste,
garbage, the formlessly massed, infinitely heterogeneous, no longer differ–
entiated leavings of history which we strive to compact and bury if we
cannot "convert" it to new use-some of it, like nuclear waste, bound to
