Picked-Up Pieces (62 page)

Yet, in another way, Miss Piercy’s second novel does reveal a (let us call it) Christian sense of human fallibility. As an anti-utopian novel, a study of the breakup of a visionary movement into doctrinaire factions,
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
has a credible complexity. It is
Lord of the Flies
with girls on the island. The warrior spirit is here embodied in the Piggy figure, the fat bright boy with glasses, now called Billy Batson. Corey, the Indian chief, remains a mystic theorist. The debates within the councils of the young are vigorous and subtle; Miss Piercy follows the cruel exigencies of the social contract as they arise in the tribe with just the sympathetic understanding she denies the enclosing society. “We were right and wrong,” Shawn admits in the end, without surrendering his faith that “the system is all wrong.”

Where
did
the Indians go wrong? In a sense, by biting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. At first “there were almost no tools available in the tribe to communicate political values, but only to embody them. Which worked, sort of.” Then communication becomes all too practiced: “Councils tended to turn into sharp debates now between different sides gathered around leaders who could argue a position and put others down.… The louder got louder still.… But somehow they were not getting any better at talking to people who were not yet Indians.” Marcus, the Negro to whom the mantle of wisdom descends after Corey’s death, says, “We thought guns made us real, but it was people, and we didn’t have them.” (Bernardine Dohrn’s statement says, “We became aware that a group of outlaws … cannot develop strategies that grow to include large numbers of people.”) The delusion that better communication would win “the people” seems shared by the author; her novel leaves us with the impression that the movement’s only fault was not being strong enough. In the last chapter, a girl, Ginny, cries out in childbirth, “I thought I was stronger than I am.” Marcus’ answer comes back: “Human beings aren’t naturally strong enough or nasty enough to live in this world.” So even labor pains seem to be allied with the evils of “the system.” What did the Indians want? For a time they live in a New Jersey farm commune, and their idyll centers upon a brown hardness of body, which they gain through the outdoor labor that millions of their ancestors hastened to escape. Joanna, the heroine, is always “tough” and “skinny.” When she turns traitor and sides with the system, the first
thing Corey notices is that she has put on weight. She is “a robot that looked a little like Joanna. A plastic doll with rubbery skin and a smell of plastics about it.” In short, the system—substitute “history” or “technology” or “overpopulation”—has alienated us from Nature. As in the original myth of Eden, there is in
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
a suggestion that sex is behind the Fall. Joanna, once a blithely promiscuous runaway, becomes Corey’s mate, then betrays him with Shawn. Yet this event, though much discussed, does not offend the sexual code of the tribe or bear upon its military defeat. Indeed, by this time the reader has become enough of an Indian himself, having witnessed so much random and inconsequential copulation, that he cannot give the incident the emotional significance it would have in a conventional, bourgeois novel. Shawn himself says it:

This confessed awkwardness and the curious failure of Joanna, though she is the most vividly realized character, to be anything but a pendant upon the book’s essential action finger one crisis in the novel form. Is sex in the shape of “romantic interest” subject enough? If sexual “possession” is scorned as part of the hated private-property bag, fidelity becomes meaningless and betrayal impossible. Joanna tries to make it possible again; she tells Corey, “I’m not liberated.… I’m your private property.” And later, more wifely still: “I was trying to castrate you.” Corey despises her new psychoanalytical vocabulary as part of her sellout, but does not answer her questioning of the “freedom” he and his desperate revolution offer. “I’ve got a scholarship to a decent school. I’m going to be a teacher. I’m going to be something on my own”—is the reader meant to scorn, with Corey, her moderate hope? In this ambiguity Miss Piercy uncovers a private feminine theme within the mighty masculine one of social rebirth. Just as the old novels etched the tragedies of private persons within the gray revolution of industry and technology, new ones may trace the personal liabilities of the anti-Establishment Establishment.

•   •   •

Single File
, by Norman Fruchter, presents a texture much different from
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
. Whereas Miss Piercy’s prose crackles like a comb being hastily pulled through rather tangled hair, Mr. Fruchter’s glints like fragments of a mirror. While Miss Piercy, in her haste to get on with it, is not fastidious about clichés, resorts to a hurried sociological tone, makes people talk like press handouts, and declines to linger upon sensual details, Mr. Fruchter deals in the exquisitely concrete:

After Miss Piercy’s editorializing, it is a relief to read through the hard news Mr. Fruchter has assembled: mock documents, interior soliloquies, street sayings, descriptions clean as ice chips, dialogue better than tape-recorded, all of it smartly shuffled and laid before our eyes in a fancy typographic dress of ragged-right margins, italics, play format, and an intermittent left-hand hairline. The conceit is that all this heterogeneous material exists in a single file of welfare casework, but my one complaint about this book is that its excessive “interestingness,” its continual declaration of itself as a literary object, insulates the reader (whom Miss Piercy does engage in argument, however feverish) from the shocking substance. For this is a novel of the urban humiliated and oppressed, a novel rich far beyond its modest bulk with the sights and smells and processes of present-day city life. In content, indeed, it is more radical than
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
, which deals with middle-class teen-agers and ends with the hoariest of sentimental affirmations—the birth of a baby. Not since Steinbeck and Algren has a writer of Mr. Fruchter’s skill demonstrated such unforced love for the proletariat, entered so willingly into their cramped lives, and found so much room for drama and mystery in the cabins of desire, scruple, and frustration that confine their freedom of choice.

Two clusters of days in April and July of 1965 are interwoven to form the plot. In April, Dutch Matto, an illiterate Italian laborer, limps with his mangled, infected knee from a nameless city hospital through the vacantly sociable routines of his utter solitude—pain and memories crowding
upon him—to his destiny: at 5:21 a.m., “with the only pure motion of his life,” he goes upstairs to where a black woman is pounding on the radiator for heat and “sweeps the pan’s handle from her startled fingers and swings it through an arc which, completed, smashes her skull.” In July, in the same lower West Side neighborhood, a welfare worker called only “the kid” suffers a rude ending to his affair with Angie, a Puerto Rican woman downstairs: she kicks him out and then piles the sheets he has soiled into the arms of his wife. Matto’s memories and “the kid’s” casebook amplify this double strand of action outward into a wilderness of other lives, and for each brief scene Mr. Fruchter finds the exact accent, the one poetic yet honest image that might filter through Matto’s stupidity or the bleakness of bureaucratic notation. An uptown poolroom, a Chinese man’s “bare room that smelled of scalding tea-kettle water dousing already spotless surfaces,” a weekend on the water with sunburned call girls, the ins and outs of robbing trailer trucks—no corner of metropolitan existence evades the light of the author’s imagining; the many vignettes expand and merge into one large landscape of impoverishment and confusion, individual egos and libidos winking like phosphorescent animalcula in a sea of despair. The “system” is seen functioning in its lowest forms (the neurotic, uncertain, well-intentioned welfare worker; the tired, tough, racist, grudgingly conscientious cop), where it intertwines with the “victims” (the ignorant laborer, the sexy, angry, helpless young hooker and her child). The policeman, Sal, lives with Angie while she is also accommodating “the kid,” and he is in on Matto’s arrest. Sal and the neighborhood itself are the definite links between the two strands of the novel; the indefinite link, which binds them into a “single file,” I take to be a verdict—scarcely audible in its irony—of guilty on the book itself.

That is, “the kid,” if not quite the author, is the assembler of these fragments. His interest in Matto’s act of murder generates the vivid re-creation of Matto that is set before us; his affair with Angie, his affectionate word-portraits of his welfare cases, his willingness to stretch and overlook regulations for them all stem from a “romantic interest” in the poor. Yet the depth of the poverty he sees swallows and exhausts him. Sal dislikes his type (“I knew the kid was bad news first morning I met him, sipping Angle’s coffee.… Department was dying for staff, but he hadda pretend he was on a mission!”), and his wife, Laurie, begs him to quit (“You know why you went to work there and it hasn’t worked out.… It’s
another one of those private notions you have, nobody’s keeping score”). “The kid” pretends to acquiesce, pleasantly envisions returning to college, but then sinks back into his “squalid anemia of the soul.” In a world so radically awry, no effort is enough. One man goes upstairs to murder a woman, another man goes downstairs to fornicate with a woman; it equals out, it is the same. A possible response lies outside reality, in art, but his own work of art Mr. Fruchter has enigmatically fractured as if with the blow of a fist.

Both authors offer to tell us about sections of American society—the revolutionary young, the urban poor—more frequently met in the newspapers than in prose fiction. Need it be argued that the novel form accommodates some kinds of people better than others? Lively dialogue, for instance, assumes a degree of articulate self-consciousness beyond the Dutch Mattos of this world. Indoor actions like domestic quarrels are easier to diagram than outdoor actions like the street war of
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
. Secretive sufferers like Matto and Sal, vision-possessed youths like Corey and Billy, behave uncomfortably in the living-rooms of fiction, whereas on the basis of previous acquaintance very marginal figures like “the kid’s” wife and Shawn’s parents call out heartily to the reader. Good, greedy, guilty, quasi-Christian people: without them, where are the moral tension, the irony, the retribution that give a novel its tug and design? Mr. Fruchter’s first novel,
Coat Upon a Stick
, showing the same clairvoyance and the same fascination with the humble and even the same trick of inserted monologue, dealt with an area of urban experience, the Jewish, already under cultivation; while striking his own note firmly, the young author yet based his precocious achievement upon a literary tradition. And the personae of Miss Piercy’s first novel were also familiar—young bohemians and small cultural operators, their traditional absorption in sex and art wrenched toward political commitment by a not yet overt streak of demagoguery in the author. These second novels move further from bourgeois conventions.

The bourgeois novel is inherently erotic, just as the basic unit of bourgeois order—the family unit built upon the marriage contract—is erotic. Who loves whom? Once this question seems less than urgent, new kinds of novels must be written, or none at all. If domestic stability and personal salvation are at issue, acts of sexual conquest and surrender are important. If the issue is an economic reordering, and social control of
the means of production, then sexual attachments are as they are in Mao’s China—irrelevant, and the fewer the better. Vast portions of the world have always lain beyond the boundaries of bourgeois arrangements, and a sizable new population is in conscious revolt against them; the novel, moving into this territory of subject matter, encounters resistance. Sex figures in
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
as a puzzled promiscuity, and in
Single File
as a squalid menace. Yet neither author could quite do without it; indeed, against the grain of their prophetic purposes, it threatens to dominate their narratives, as something inchoate, unchannelled, mysterious. Both second novels—in contrast to the first novels—show people removed from the context of families. In one case, parents have been rejected; in the other, urban pressure has broken families down. Without the multiple perspectives of a family, Miss Piercy’s portrait of youth rampant is a lopsided cartoon; writing about city dwellers interconnected with an extreme of tenuousness, Mr. Fruchter has compiled a scrupulous brochure of fragments. Loss of perspective, however, is where vision often begins, and less, in the case of these second novels, may be more.

D
IVINE
R
IGHT
’
S
T
RIP
, by Gurney Norman. 302 pp. Dial Press, 1972.

G
ERONIMO
R
EX
, by Barry Hannah. 337 pp. Viking, 1972.

“We
are
as gods and might as well get good at it,” announced page 1 of
The Last Whole Earth Catalog
, that mind-blowing, prize-winning compendium of hardware, natural foods, aerial photographs, cosmological tracts, and a thousand and one other handy aids to good-god-making. On the right-hand side of many of the pages, and identified by the device of a dragon, ran a narrative called
Divine Right’s Trip
, written by one of the editors, Gurney Norman; this novel has now been published separately, in hard-cover by the Dial Press and as a paperback by Bantam. Though the text is little changed, and has even kept its dragons, it reads very differently out of the
Catalog
’s farraginous, clangorous context; there, competing with advertisements for Synectics and Dyna Domes and Kama Sutra Oil, Norman’s episodes appeared slier and more shard-like
than they now turn out to be. Within covers of its own,
Divine Right’s Trip
shows itself to be a subtly written and morally passionate epic of the counter-culture, a fictional explication of the hopeful new consciousness come to birth—midwifed by hallucinogens—amid the communes and rock concerts of the sixties.