Picked-Up Pieces (58 page)

P
ATRIOTISM
, I
NC
.,
and Other Tales
, by Paul van Ostaijen, edited and translated from the Dutch by E. M. Beekman. 170 pp. University of Massachusetts Press, 1971.

T
HE
A
DVENTURES OF
M
AO ON THE
L
ONG
M
ARCH
, by Frederic Tuten. 121 pp. Citadel, 1971.

Sans-serif type belongs to one of those futures that never occurred. Elegantly simple, jauntily functional, it was everything the Bauhaus thought modernity should be, yet except in posters and telephone books it never really caught on. As with so many oddities a revolution would sweep away, serifs exist for a purpose: they help the eye pick up the shape of the letter. Piquant in little amounts, sans-serif in page-size sheets repels readership as wax paper repels water; it has a sleazy, cloudy look. Yet now we have two works of fiction so printed—the first in a 9-point sans fainter than sandpiper tracks, and the other in a narrow-column boldface
sans that fairly stamps itself on the retina. What is being signalled? A defiant chic, a refreshing change.

By printing Paul van Ostaijen’s
Patriotism, Inc., and Other Tales
, the University of Massachusetts Press, itself obscure enough, has rescued a poet, proseur, and seer of the twenties from obscurity. E. M. Beekman, the translator, in his rather defensive and fancy introduction, blames van Ostaijen’s obscurity on his writing in “Dutch, that poor relation of Northern European languages.” He adds, “Van Ostaijen’s work is an indictment of the Monroe Doctrine in the world of literature.” This false hare (the implication that American foreign policy of some sort has kept the Dutch language down) is but one of several that Mr. Beekman starts; in the high-flown style of easy indignation associated with “black humor” and its apologists, he terms this century “the fool of history.” “Never before has there been such an unrelenting succession of absurdities.… When a pertinaciously sensitive and sensible mind encounters such a world he is horrified and terror-stricken.” Supposedly, however, the century has, in compensation, produced “a flowering of satiric literature” that includes such rich-relation-language types as Mann, Joyce, Gide, Brecht, Beckett, Grass, Nabokov, and Bruce Jay Friedman. Defining satire, Mr. Beekman asserts:

This trite opposition between a sick society and a dexterous, antiseptic-handed satirist/doctor does not do justice to the complexity of the humorous impulse. I doubt that many satirists since Voltaire have hoped to change the world even a bit. If a satirist is an entertainer, he is gunning for laughs, in those target areas just to one side of the audience’s really sensitive spots; if the satirist is an artist, he is venting a disgust mixed with love, a scorn hard to distinguish from fascination, an indictment that includes himself. Satire less than this is one-dimensional journalism that cannot outlive its object; L.B.J.’s retirement turns
MacBird!
into trash, or, rather, reveals it as the trash it always was. Nineteenth-century
America was prolific of vitriolic lampoons, yet the one book with verifiable political repercussions was a sentimental melodrama,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. Mr. Beekman is wrong to call the satirist “kin to the ideal revolutionary.” The ideal revolutionary—Washington, Robespierre, Lenin—is humorless. Illusions are destroyed not by ridicule but by better, more fiercely held illusions. Indeed, insofar as satire fosters the impression of an enemy met and dealt with, it reinforces, like philanthropy, the status quo; an abundance of satire typifies a reactionary and helpless society, such as imperial Rome. In all times, humor is a form of resignation; in modern times, it comes peculiarly charged with self-doubt and moral ambiguity. Kafka can be said to satirize the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy as something frozen, ornate, inscrutable, and cruel. But his art begins, not ends, there; satire is the mere crust of his real matter—his own confession of incapacity, his heroes’ lust for punishment and their pathetic willingness to enlist, if they can find the right official, in the workings of an absurd universe. Society is sick, no doubt, but only the coarsest modern writer would exempt himself as healthy.

Mr. Beekman does, later in his introduction, place satire in the right focus: “Its intention is to cut the reader into awareness.” This seems to me excellent, and all that any art should be asked to do. Also excellent, at a guess, is Mr. Beekman’s translation from the Dutch; at any rate, van Ostaijen’s prose comes over as elliptical and limpid and unlike Mr. Beekman’s own overwrought English.

Van Ostaijen is principally renowned in his native Belgium as a poet; his prose pieces, which he called “grotesques,” were written after two books of verse had made him a conspicuous presence on the Flemish literary scene, and were not published until after his death, at the age of thirty-two, in 1928. Much of his short life was spent in circumstances of constraint: he began his career in the blockaded port of Antwerp, fled to Berlin in 1919 to escape imprisonment for political offenses against the Walloons, returned to Antwerp only to be drafted and sent back to Germany in the occupation forces, and, after a few years spent struggling with poverty and an addiction to cocaine, died in a Belgian tuberculosis sanitorium. His “grotesques” were mostly written in the Berlin years (1919–1921), and they illumine a bizarre Weimar world of huge inflation and savage political competition, of brothels and cafés, of Dada and jazz, of Dietrich bluebirds singing to Grosz audiences. Van Ostaijen worked for a time in Antwerp’s city administration, and the theme of
corporate organization runs through his work: “The City of Builders” describes a city where ordinances foster a mad accumulation of buildings; “The Lost House Key” shows a thriving “free city” where syphilis has become the
sine qua non
of citizenship; “Ika Loch’s Brothel” and “Hierarchy” are concerned with the organization of whorehouses; “The General” proposes organizing armies by sexual character, in battalions of sadists, masochists, homosexuals, fetishists, and so on; and “Patriotism, Inc.” imagines an international conspiracy, among the conservative parties of Teutonia and Fochany, to rig provocative incidents in each other’s countries and thereby promote mutual chauvinism. Though politically obsessed and a convicted activist, van Ostaijen did not think of his satire as social therapy; in a Berlin letter he noted, “Wrote a novella in which I try to make monkeys of people. Positive criticism: baloney.… People aren’t worth criticising. Only material for burlesque novellas.”

All these stories are rather schematically developed, with few sensual details and turns of characterization. Though resembling Kafka in his obsession with officialdom, van Ostaijen is incapable of such a passage as this:

Here are a deep, puzzled humor, vivid particularization, and incalculable, dreamlike turns. Van Ostaijen’s mind, at least in his fiction, tends to travel straight to the mark. His pages yield a harvest of acute if dispiriting epigrams:

Hypochondria is eroticism in atrophied form.

Expatiating on the subject of war in the persona of “The General,” van Ostaijen teems with dark ideas:

With striking contemporaneity, van Ostaijen finds the alternative to war in drugs. “When negotiating for peace,” the General tells us, “narcotics are unquestionably important. The so-called primitive peoples have already taught us this.… The chieftains gather together and immediately a pipe with opium or Indian hemp is passed from man to man. A peaceful mood cannot be far behind.… Next to war, gentle peace is therefore dearest to me. And so I am willing to smoke the opium pipe. And so will all those others who have only waged war to actualize the personality they contemplated.”

“To actualize the personality they contemplated”—this is the talk not of a satirist but of a visionary. Van Ostaijen is fascinated by organization because he detests it. Ika Loch, the proprietress of a brothel, is a play on
the Dutch
logika
(logic), and her authoritarian mismatching of customer and whore results in the murder of the lovely Promethea, who symbolizes art; the scandal enhances the fame of Ika’s establishment. Though in “questions of business management” Ika possesses “a real talent for organization,” she cannot perceive that “a head and a neck, as a totality, are still not the same thing as the sum of the two parts.”

In the short prose poems, van Ostaijen projects synthesis out of derangement. A cocaine user, he writes out of “that peace of heart and tranquillity of spirit [that] could be his only after his retina became threadbare from the maddest realities of light.” He writes sometimes in the texture of a drug trip:

And in “Bankruptcy Jazz,” an electric confusion of phrases, placards, scenes, and oddly hydraulic jazz (
The jazz overflows into the street
, one direction reads) sums up an era when wheelbarrow-loads of inflated currency were trundled along Europe’s cobblestoned squares, between the Gothic cathedrals and the rococo city halls, when Charlie Chaplin might as well have been the government, when jazz tumbled everywhere and Dada took upon itself the slogans of salvation: “
DADA
is universal reason which the superidiocy of everybody can attain,” “
DADA
is not an artistic Business, but the
FORMULA OF BANKRUPTCY
,” “
JOIN DADA
.” The scenario, in its sans-serif spasms, has the fluttering fury of a moth beating against a street lamp. This volume of prose affords glimpses of a poetic genius, and we put it down hoping that soon Mr. Beekman and the University of Massachusetts Press will give us, in a slightly darker and bigger typeface, van Ostaijen’s poetry.

If Dada was, as “Bankruptcy Jazz” proclaims, Nietzsche Without Nietzsche, a definition of Pop could be Mao Without Mao.
The Adventures of Mao on the Long March
, by Frederic Tuten, wears a nice comic-book
jacket by Roy Lichtenstein and is described by Susan Sontag on the inside flap as “soda pop, a cold towel, or a shady spot under a tree for culture-clogged footsoldiers on the American long march.” Broken into components, the hundred and twenty-one pages of Mr. Tuten’s opus consist of (1) twenty-seven pages of straight history of the Long March (October 1934–October 1935), done in a neutral, factual tone, as by a fellow-travelling
Reader’s Digest;
(2) thirty-six and a half pages of quotations in quotation marks, from unidentified sources (such as, diligent research discovers, Hawthorne’s
Marble Faun
, Walter Pater’s
Marius the Epicurean
, and Engels’
Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
); (3) twelve and a half pages of parody, of Faulkner, Hemingway, Kerouac, the Steinbeck/Farrell school, the Malamud/Bellow school, and of modern-art criticism in numerous schools; (4) nineteen pages of a supposed interview with Chairman Mao in 1968, in which the Chairman reveals himself as an avid subscriber to American highbrow periodicals and a keen devotee of Godard films and Minimal Art; (5) twenty-six pages of what might be considered normal novelistic substance—imaginary encounters and conversations. For an example of (5): Chairman Mao is alone in his tent, after the strain of the Tatu campaign. He hears the rumble of a tank: