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10. Making It!
- Syracuse University Press
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131 10 Making It! “Making It!” kicks off Krim’s career-long public struggle with his desire for success , his doubts about its worth, and his inability to achieve it. His five essays on success and failure—written between 1959 and 1974—amount to one of the postwar era’s most important and honest records of this crucial American theme. And Krim often ponders how being a Jew figures into what he saw as his failure. In “Making It!” the classic Krim voice—demanding, hyperbolic, and comic —is in top form as his wise-guy alter ego belittles the high-minded artist. “Man, I know what I’m doing! I’m swinging instead of standing still, I’m racing with a racing age, I’m handling 17 things at once and I’m scoring with them all!” This 1959 essay marvelously captures the language of the hard-boiled and anticipates Saul Bellow’s depiction of the brutal Reality Instructors who torment the hero of his 1964 novel Herzog. It is Krim’s appetite for this tough-guy lingo, combined with his higher cultural yearnings, that stamps his work as belonging to a classic moment of Jewish-American writing. Irving Howe identified a hallmark of that writing as a mixture of “street energy with high-culture rhetoric” (1977, 15). It is all here. W hen has an inside phrase like “making it” or so-and-so’s “got it made” shot with such reality through the museum of official English? In this terse verbal shorthand lies a philosophy of life that puts a gun in the back of Chase Manhattan rhetoric and opens up, like a money-bag, the true values that make the Sammys and Susies of modern city life run today. You’ve got it made. How the words sing a swift jazz poem of success, hi-fi, the best chicks (or guys), your name in lights, pot to burn, jets to L.A. and London, bread in the bank, baby, and a fortress 132 . Missing a Beat built around your ego like a magic suit of armor! You’ve got it made. Royalties pouring in, terraces stretching out, hip movie starlets strutting in butt-parade, nothing but Jack Daniels with your water, your name in Skolsky ’s column, Tennessee for lunch, dinner with—somebody who swings, sweetheart! And tomorrow the world (as a starter). Middle-class ideals of success once curled the lip of the intellectual; today he grins not, neither does he snide. Columbia professor, poet, painter, ex-Trotskyite, Partisan Review editor, G.E. engineer, Schenley salesman— they all live in the same world for a change and that world says, go! The Marxist, neo-Christian, romantic, humanitarian values of 20 years ago are great for the mind’s library and its nighttime prayer mat; but will they fill the cancerous hunger in the soul for getting what you want today? Softies become tough, toughies get harder, men dig that they’d rather be women, women say to hell with lilacs and become men, the road gets rougher (as Frankie lays his smart-money message on us) and you’ve got to move, hustle, go for the ultimate broke or you’ll be left with a handful of nothing, Jack and Jill! What happened to the world out there, the one you always thought you loved and honestly-couldn’t-get-enough-of-withoutwanting -a-sou-in-return for your pure and holy feelings? Baby, that world went up in the cornball illusions of yesterday! Forget it just like it never knew you were alive. This bit about being a fine writer, a dedicated actor, a movie-maker with Modern Museum notions of heaven, a musician because you truly love it, a painter because you die when you smell the color? Don’t make me laugh—it’s not good for the stitches, dad. This world (nuts, this rutting universe!) is a Mt. Everest , kiddo, and you’ve got to start climbing now or the dumbwaiter of this age will slam you down into the black basement. Use whatever you’ve got and use what you ain’t got, too! Throughout the jumping metropolis of New York one sees vertical fanaticism, the Thor-type upward thrust of the entire being, replacing pale, horizontal, mock-Christian love of fellow-creature; the man or woman who is High Inside, hummingly self-aware, the gunner and gunnerette in the turret of the aircraft that is Self, is watching out for...