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.
From Dyna Domes to Turkey-Pressing
DIVINE RIGHT’S TRIP, by Gurney Norman. 302 pp. Dial Press, 1972.
GERONIMO REX, 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.
The story is simple: D(ivine) R(ight) (for David Ray) Davenport, stoned crazy, makes his way in a VW bus called Urge, with a girl called Estelle, from the West Coast to his home territory of Appalachian Kentucky, where he finds peace and purpose in soil reclamation by means of rabbit manure. Along the way, he meets a number of more or less allegorical Americans, such as the Lone Outdoorsman, and a garageman who says, “All of you, come back and see us, you hear?” and a Greek who believes the world can be cleansed of mucus by adherence to the walnut diet of the ancient Sumerians, and St. Louis dope de
alers, and an Indiana talk-show host, and a Cincinnati housewife who is also Divine Right’s sister. D.R.’s favorite accolade is “far out,” and all the types he encounters dissolve into harmlessness under his guileless appreciation. Sheer good-heartedness rather saps the saga of tension. The Lone Outdoorsman, for instance, has many ingredients of a villain: an “absurdly handsome” face on a stubby body, a fastidious armor of camping gear, a hard-hatted interior monologue. But, the author reassures us,
The Lone Outdoorsman is far from your ordinary, everyday one-dimensional heavy: the thing that redeems the Lone Outdoorsman is a refreshing mental complexity of a kind you don’t ordinarily run into in folk tales. All mixed in with his gory mental images of bullet-riddled bodies and heroic assaults upon beachheads was a commendable impulse to be nice to these kids, to befriend them and hopefully influence them in some constructive way.
Having spied D.R. and Estelle copulating in the woods, he debates shooting them, and decides instead to feed them steaks. And D.R.’s sister’s husband, Doyle, a Cincinnati mechanic, feeds the young tripper at his table, freakiness be damned. “Doyle understood that his brother-in-law was some sort of mild outlaw. But … it never occurred to any of them to withdraw their affection just because the kid was in a phase.” Doyle himself had been a maverick when he was young, and even today—“Doyle was thirty-four now, but as he bit down on his food the tendons in his big jaw flexed beneath his skin, and for a second the old toughness, and even meanness, of his youth was restored to his face, and for some reason D.R. found that very moving. He loved Doyle.” D.R.’s America, indeed, is a web of such benevolent recognitions; nothing is too banal for him to dig, nothing too weird to merit respectful attention. If it is a land despoiled by strip mining and studded with importuning billboards, it is also a land of daily magic, where a credit card fuels a hegira, and collect phone calls bind together a freemasonry of friends, and a West Coast Prospero called the Anaheim Flash foots all bills and mends all missed connections and arrives in backwoods Kentucky in a silver Lotus to conduct a wedding in a silver jumpsuit.
No, the only real dragon our knight errant encounters is himself—one half of himself, when, in an extraordinary episode, he splits, under stress of long drug use, into two persons: D.R. and David. Surprisingly, D.R., the stoned new-consciousness half, remains our hero, and the dragon is pure, rational David:
There is David, lurking in the shadows of the ledge. He pulls my flesh around and makes me see his eyes shining in the murky darkness of his lair. My stomach turns, my hair feels wild, but my adoration of the light remains serene. It’s only David’s eyes, and lower forehead. The rest is monster, the mouth of dragon teeth, the chin and jaws receding to a short, thick neck and back of horns and scales and fur.
Oh, it’s true all right.
He’s the monster-guardian of the light.
The descriptions throughout Divine Right’s Trip of drug experience, in its range of revelation and nightmare, its jerkiness, its comically bent perspectives, and its atrocious cumulative fatigue, bear comparison with Malcolm Lowry’s descriptions of drunken states in Under the Volcano. In both books, an inflamed mind enlarges the universe, dyes it deeper, forces its petals wider. Yet Lowry’s Consul is a pathological case, a sick man even in his own judgment, whereas to a young man of D.R.’s cultural conditioning experience normally arrives as a “trip,” a “hit,” a “flash,” a “rush.” An image that frequently recurs is of the mind as a movie screen. “As D.R. drove on through the night to Cincinnati he entertained a very complex little drama in his mind, rather like a movie an airline might show its passengers while in flight.” Telephoning, he fantasizes that the transparent walls of the booth are “just bad movies projected from somewhere on the other side.” The television shows D.R. sees are described as circumstantially as “real” encounters. Reality, the implication is, has lost its objective backbone; inner space is the only space. Living has become continuous spectatorship. This generation was zonked on television before it zonked itself on drugs. What but an ingrained disregard for the workaday, empirical world could breed the swarm of superstitions, such as astrology and the I Ching, that distinguish the counterculture, and that in this novel aid D.R.’s pathetic search for “balance,” for harmony with a world drained of substance.
Gurney Norman and Divine Right were born and raised in rural Kentucky, and this regional reality does offer an outer space they can trust. When, midway through, Divine Right’s Trip hits Kentucky, the book sheds its shimmering snakeskin of fantasy and becomes a stout celebration of the clan, of native soil and hard work and pastoral goodness. Yet it rings less true than in the first, weirder half. Not that the Kentucky voices are not lovingly and amusingly rendered; not that the blasted coal land isn’t a cunningly appropriate territory for D.R.’s Dark Passage and Recovery of the Grail. The trouble is the marriage that Mr. Norman wishes to occur, and makes occur, between the rural proletariat of Trace Fork and the young would-be gods of the dome communes. The idyll becomes cute:
“I think ginseng is the answer to about half of mankind’s problems,” the freak said.
“Shoot,” said Elmer. “My daddy picked ’sang for a living, when I was a boy. It’s as native to these hills as it is to over yonder in China.”
The author names all of his friends, hill folk and dome folk, tobacco chewers and cocaine sniffers, and has them all dance round and square to a new sound “dubbed Hillbilly Hindu Rock.” And the bride and groom, D.R. and Estelle, take their vows wearing coonskin and gingham, and the Anaheim Flash in his silver jumpsuit pronounces “everybody at this wedding hereby married to one another.” Just so, The Last Whole Earth Catalog married Buckminster Fuller to L. L. Bean and pronounced the spirits of Buddha and Henry Ford one.
Well, let’s not have any dry eyes at the wedding. But a doubt remains whether D.R.’s love affair with rabbit dung and the blisters that come with digging fence-post holes amounts to much more than another “trip.” Is Estelle in gingham sufficiently different from Marie Antoinette in the garb of a shepherdess? Can the sated and disgusted offspring of middle-class urban and suburban homes ever do more than condescend, with however good a will, to the remnants of rural America? Agriculture, after all, is not an intrinsically virtuous enterprise. Those who are good at it are capitalists like any other, paying their Chicano fruit pickers no more than they must, manipulating their acreages and machinery and tax loopholes toward the highest profit. Those who are not so good at it hasten (as they have done ever since the first American communes, the Puritan villages, were broken up by entrepreneurism) to the cities, to get the soft desk jobs and the middleman’s cut. The counter-culture’s return to the soil is a luxurious gesture, financed by the Anaheim Flash and other such imps of industrial affluence.
Divine Right’s Trip in book form is subtitled “A Folktale”; its subtitle in The Last Whole Earth Catalog was “Our story thus far”—more modest and more accurate. A folktale must be made by the folk, “the gathered people” mentioned in the novel’s last words. But the folk are slow to speak, and in this country, even as the costumes and mores and prejudices of the once radical young gain wider acceptance each year, the folk are not yet ready to yield their suffrage to D.R. and his friends. Mickey Mouse and Archie Bunker are truer folk heroes, and will probably be reelected.* But Divine Right is bigger than life, and in giving the story thus far of a segment of his generation, in prose nicely threaded between the vernacular and the symbolic, Gurney Norman has shown a noble reach and a healthy grasp.
Although Barry Hannah, the author of Geronimo Rex, is several years younger than Mr. Norman, his novel belongs to an older tradition—the whining-adolescent novel of the fifties. The action begins in 1950, when the hero, Harry Monroe, is eight years old, and ends in the middle sixties, when he is married and a graduate student of English at the University of Arkansas. America broke in two in those years, when Johnson committed the half-million troops to Vietnam, and the new consciousness at the heart of Divine Right
’s Trip figures in Geronimo Rex as a bleak dawn, an irony heavily in hock to despair, an accelerating incoherence in the never very tightly woven events that make up the novel’s action. These events, though they fill three hundred and thirty-seven large pages, are adequately adumbrated by the author’s bio note on the jacket flap: born down South, educated here and there, “plays the trumpet,” took detours into “such odd work as a research assistant in pharmacology or trouble-shooter in a turkey-pressing plant,” married, “presently makes his home” someplace, “where he is at work on his second novel.” The major weakness of a first novel like this is its limp susceptibility to autobiographical accident; its vitality must lie not in the shaping but in the language of the telling, and here Mr. Hannah is no mean performer. His whine is full-throated: