The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef by Charles Reich (review)

facts until I see the facts which are beyond reason”; here are some of the facts. DENNIS McNALLY, San Francisco, California Reviews 205 The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef. By Charles Reich. (New York and Toronto: Random House, 1976. $8.95.) Here the young-in-heart author of The Greening of America tells his personal story. It is a story of seeking-success-disillusion-alienation-rebellionself -discovery-and-enlarged-consciousness. (Whether the reader buys it is something else again.) It is also a rather uncomfortably frank confessional by a repressed homosexual who did not find sex and self and love until age forty-three when he broke away from success as a Yale law professor to join the homosexual seekers of San Francisco. Yet because of his skill as a writer and thinker, and his honesty as a story teller, Reich makes his personal story also one which reveals much about America and the times and the problems of living in a largely secular society. And he really makes you feel the agony of repression and alienation and lovelessness that can occur in any of our cities — in his case Washington, D.C. in the fifties, New Haven in the sixties and San Francisco in the seventies. The best part of the book is two brilliant brief sketches of Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black (for whom Reich served as law clerk right out of Yale Law School) and William O. Douglas, with whom he went on many a hike. We also see the brittle, high pressure world of mock success when for nearly a decade Reich was a young lawyer in Abe Fortas’s distinguished law firm in Washington, D.C. Reich shows how the youth-cult of the sixties, the celebrated counter­ culture, is essentially a religious movement — though conventional religious readers would say one with false gods (either/or sex) and false sacraments (the use of drugs and prostitutes). He also shows how the new-worlders are essentially seeking the ancient Christian goal of true, universal, personal love between all individuals. In the end he invokes a comic-prophet, thyself as sorcerer, to lead thyself by magic-chicanery and imagination to discover the glories of the released self within by rebellion against the self-tyranny of the American alienated state without. Reich senses that such rebellion against convention is indeed ultimately a political act. The major goal ofmyown work isfundamental, political change. I cannot accept living in a country where people feel powerless to affect their lives. I am unwilling to overlook injustice, cruelty, and oppression. I cannot in good conscience live in a country that 206 Western American Literature imprisons people, humiliates them, degrades them, or ignores their basic humanity. I do not want to live in a country where there is such pervasive cynicism, corruption, and betrayal of its own dignity. I want nothing to do with a country that oppresses the people of any other country. Therefore I want to bring down this system, and replace it with one responsive to human needs. I want to see the economic and social controls returned from giant impersonal institutions to the people. I want a revolution that is embodied in constitutional and legal change — a whole new vision of democratic participation in society. I want to see a sweeping political move­ ment replace those presently in power with people dedicated to new values, (p. 244) Thus from his leftist point of view Charles Reich is using his own tormented “success” story as a brilliantly written parable of what’s wrong with America and what it must do to live up to its own lost, great ideals of human freedom. STARR JENKINS California Polytechnic State University ...