New Writing In America

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30977, 5 February 1966, Page 4

New Writing In America

l Reviewed bv

R.F.S.]

Moderns, An Anthology uf New Writing in America. Edited by Lerol Jone*. Mac Gibbon & Kee. 351 pp.

This collection of short stories and “fragments” from novels by fourteen American authors has a purpose. According to the editor, Mr ILeroi Jones, who is also represented in the selections, the object “was not merely to get together stories and pieces 1 happened to like, cookbook style, but to present those writers who have impressed me. over the range of say ten years or so, as having something to say in a prose i medium that was in adjunct to the artful writing of the marketplace.” He considers the authors chosen to be doing “the most interesting and exciting writing that has taken place in this country since the war.” Only two of the fourteen presented in “The Moderns” are well known, most of the others having appeared in the little magazines. In fact, the brief biographical notes on the authors indicate that “The Black Mountain Review” and the “Evergreen Review” have led in presenting several of the writers for the first time. Jack Kerouac has three short pieces in the volume, and anyone familiar with “On The Road” will not find the present contributions startling. “Seattle Burlesque” is a clever, highly impressionistic evocation of a visit to a strip show in Seattle, and “Manhattan Sketches” takes you into the cafeterias and subways of New York. There is a nostalgic, wistful quality in Kerouac which recalls Thomas Wolfe whom he also resembles in the long lists which often make up a considerable portion of his stories. On leaving the burlesque show he sees two of the actors in the alley outside, returning from a quick lunch and hurrying to make the next show and “making a living.” “Just like my father, your father, all fathers, working and making a living in tire dark sad earth—l look up at the stars, just the same, desolation, and the angels below who don’t know they are angels.”

The other widely read American in the anthology is William Burroughs whose “Naked Lunch” (1959)) created something of a sensation when it was published. Considered with Kerouac as one

iof the “beat generation.” he is represented here with portions of a forthcoming novel. Fortunately, there is an appendix at the end of the anthology which allows these authors who wish to do so to attempt to explain the more obscure pieces. William Burroughs helps the reader by te"ing him that “in writing th.- chapter I have used what 1 call the “fold in’ method that is I place a page of one text folded down the middle on a page of another text (my own or someone elses)—The Composite text is read across half from one text and half from the other—The resulting material is edited, re-arrang-ed, and deleted as in any other form of composition— This chapter contains fold ins with the work of Rimbaud, T. S. Eliot. Paul Bowles, James Joyce, Michael Portman . . . some newspaper articles and of course, my own work. . . .” The punctuation, incidentally, is Mr Burroughs’s. Perhaps, then, the dominant quality of this anthology is the freedom of form which characterises so much of the work. There is a willingness, even an eagerness, to experiment with the English language in the effort to extend the boundaries of meaning. If this kind of experimentation strikes you as tiresome, probably you will be disappointed with “The Moderns.” It is impossible. however, to forget the whole new horizon of expression that a book like James Joyces’s “Ulysses” opened to writers; it is also worth remembering that many critics found “Ulysses" to be incomprehensible when it was published in Paris in 1922.

The blurb on the dust jacket of “The Moderns” suggests that its tone is that of the mid-19605; “gone are the attempts to justify society; gone too are the academic and political grinding of axes.... Their concern is with the here and now of America, not with something filtered down through other books or magazine articles. They are working direct Their reports may breed dissent but they are not themselves Dissenters.” Certainly many of the selections included in the anthology are “reports” more than stories. For example, John Rechy has three pieces which amount to an attempt to catch the quality of three American cities, El Paso, Los Angeles and Chicago. He succeeds, or at least succeeds at one level. He knows where the homosexuals hang about, where the poor, the vagrant, the down and out congregate, and he knows the dreariness

: of slums. Compared with th. . band outs of public relations . officers, the honesty of his i impressions is magniflce nt . “To Southern California everyone comes: to be Discov. i ered and get into the movies to be loved by the world. u> find out if indeed yo Ur Brother is your keeper to find the evasive child-world or to find God in fruit and vegetables or in the sun or ghosts—or standing on a balcony creating stars and clouds ...or to bask in the sun—1 0 rot without really knowing it —to think you’ll be cured, with sex, religion, junk, cool nights, etc. . . ." William Eastlake has two stories, both of them powerful in the economy with which they develop character and project a setting. “Little Joe” is a direct immersion in childhood, with all of its terror and all of its seeming logic: it is a story that will shake you as does also Michael Riunaker’s “The Puppy.” The very lack of cohesiveness of plot may possibly be seen as adding point to some of the selections. Paul Metcalf in “Indian Game” gives us this: a boy meets a girl on a deserted beach and they make love together. Later they swim in the ocean and as they come ashore, he drowns her. It is a moving story yet the seemingly gratuitous killing of the girl leaves the reader with many doubts and not enough clues. The principal “evidence” provided is when the girl first sees him and the boy thinks “Now she knows that I am an Indian not a stocky white youth burned in the sun but an Indian. This is the body, these are the cheekbones, the straight nose, colour not of sun but of the man.” There is enough of violence in the book, not all of it as seemingly pointless as in the above story. The only selections by a woman writer concern a “chick” who is being beaten up in the street by “this cat.” Then the fuzz (police) pull up and dig the scene. What conclusions about the quality of American life would a stranger arrive at from reading “The Moderns"? He would have experienced the seamy side, the burlesque shows, the dives, the underground world of some children, the revolt against commercialisation of art. the pointless violence that so mars urban life, the uninhibited language and perhaps felt something of what it is like to be an adolescent in the United States in the 19605. The dust jacket is right: there is no political propaganda as such; for example, there is no concern with the Civil Rights Movement in the South. You will be stimulated by “The Moderns” if not angered and provoked; the questions are all there, sometimes lovingly phrased, and the answers may well be in the questions themselves.