Biopsy: Biography

Biopsy: Biography Helens.Garson. Truman Capote. New York:Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980. 210pp. Mark Harris.Saul Bellow: Dnunlin Woodchuck. Athens: Universityof Georgia Press, 1980. 184pp. Sheldon J. Hershinow.Bernard Malamud. New York:Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980. 165pp. Jerome Klinkowitz.The American 1960's: Imaginative Acts in a Decade of Change . .\mes:IowaState University Press, 1980.119+ x pp. SurnmeHenningUphaus. John Updike. New York:Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., IQSO 149pp. Ronald Weber.The Literature of Fact: L1te1a11· Nonfiction in American Writing. Athens:OhioUniversityPress, 1980.181pp. Stanley Fogel The Sixties. The phrase, not to mention the period, has already acquired talismanic properties. It is enough to say "the Sixties" as one says "the Twenties"or "the Nineties" for a certain set of attitudes and events to be conjuredup. With all the reverence of Shreve McCannon begging Quentin Compson to tell him about the South, a good many students demand of apparent Sixties' survivors an account of those halcyon days when, rumor hasit, students were a force to be reckoned with. What with the installation ofthe "new conservatism" regarded as a "fait accompli," thankfully by the MoralMajority and many academics who yoke such profundities as "the Sixtiesare over" and "back to basics [sic]," the allure of defining the Sixties' sensibilityhas increased for would-be cultural sages. How tempting it is to try to bring into focus that "whole new sense of priorities and values," those "new cultural styles," the "new cultural model," the "sixties aesthetic." JeromeKlinkowitz has obviously succumbed to such aspirations, the phrases in the preceding sentence being his-readers who confront The American 1960 swill wish he hadn't. This book will probably stand for some time to come as one of the most portentous, least incisive and least insightful attempts to articulate the Sixties' zeitgeist. InEdwin Mullhouse's only slightly garbled version of the opening ofA Tale of Two Cities, "It wuzza besta time, it wuzza wussa time, it wuzza age a whiz,itwuzza age a foo !"1 : the Kennedy and King assassinations, the Columbia Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 13, Number 2, Fall 1982 268 StanleyFogel student uprisings, the SDS, the march on the Pentagon, the ineluctable modality of the body counts, Dylan and the Beatles, and so much more. How to write down the decade? In Gates of Eden: American Cultureinthe Sixties, Morris Dickstein wrote: "Most general works on the sixties, especiallv those written toward the end of the decade when the culture was stillactivel~ in process, lack critical and historical perspective." That perspective hasn~t yet, it seems, been gained. Dickstein's book is interesting insofar as it chronicles his own growth during that period, as it is isolated in his engagement with Allen Ginsberg over the course of fifteen years and three readings at Columbia. When he tries to distill the era into critical prose, though, to integrate rock music and emerging black writers and experimental fiction into a portraitof the decade, he produces a collage more elaborate and studied than Klinkowitz's certainly (Rauschenberg's collage, Estate, 1963,is on the cover of the latter's book), but a collage rather than a synthesis, nonetheless. The books that most effectively examine events of the period have beenthe personal and/or strictly delimited works such as Mailer's The Armies ofthe Night, which contains an insight into the reasons for his involvement inthe march on the Pentagon, and parts of Milton Viorst's recently published Fire in the Streets: America in the 1960'swhich includes a readable and sympathetic account of the prominent protest movements-notably the SDS-of the time. Least effective of the literature to date is, as has been mentioned, a book such as Klinkowitz's which bears out Nabokov's maxim that cosmic isalways in danger of losing its "s." Klinkowitz has, it should be said, compiled some worthwhile collections of and on contemporary fiction: The Vonnegut Statement is a useful source-book for those interested in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s work; Innovative Fiction contains some stock experimental pieces, but also some clever, little known stories by Thomas Glynn, Steven Katz and Carl Kram pf; Writing Under Fire: Stories of the Vietnam War offers some diverse and exciting material...