Auberon Waugh: American fiction
The Season of the Witch James Leo Herlihy (W. H. Allen £2).
"The Season of the Witch is to other novels what Woodstock is to a chamber music concert," says the blurb proudly. Yes, yes. It makes the Isle of Wight pop music festival look like a vicar's garden party. Its heroine, Witch Gliz, makes Candide look like Dr Emile Savundra, Bernie Cornfield, Jerome Hoffman, Skinflint and Mr Reginald Maudling all rolled into one. But behind the tired old superlatives with which British publishing houses invariably dress their wares, whether they come from Tyneside or Kurdistan "(Mr Bogwash will be considered one the most significant novelists of the Kurdish language today "), there lies a profound and disturbing truth: that American drop-out society provides far better material for novels than Mr Heath's England, with its compassion, its purposefulness and its complete lack of any philosophical curiosity.
It removes much of the joy of the Alternative Society if one realises that it can only flourish parasitically on the organised society it affects to despise. In America this realisation is staunchly resisted, at any rate to the extent that it might impinge on the freelove fantasies of the Wall Street commuter. Whether the Aquarian generation of young Americans has really produced characters like Witch Gliz — beautiful, innocent, utterly unselfish and open — or whether she is no more than a literary stereotype is unimportant. My own experience of the American drop-out generation is that it is not only amazingly uninformed (this comes through in its literary presentation) but also almost completely inarticulate, not to say speechless, and above all, unenthusiastic. It practically never says "wow!", " zonk!" and amusing, vivacious things like that, as one reads in books.
But this, as I have said, is the least important aspect of the phenomenon. The most important aspect, from the point of view of a novel reviewer, is that American novelists have created a coherent system of fantasy — it might almost be called a literary convention — which has become accepted as part of the American dream. It is every American's escape. Belief in the existence of an Alternative Society makes continued adherence to the old society an act of choice, and therefore more tolerable. At one stage in The Season of the Witch, deeply committed middle-aged Communist exclaims to the middle-aged Guru of Witch's family:
This fine man, this Peter, with his beautiful ideas, he is Mr Nixon's best ally. He works for the generals and the billionaires and the corporation. He takes the young people and he keeps them soft in the head with his harhish and his dreams. They should be out organising and plotting the takeover of the Government, but he puts them to sleep instead with his talk of love.
By holding up a mirror to American society which portrays exactly the opposite of the truth American novelists have won instant acceptance and acclaim among their own people. There is no reason why we, on the other side of the Atlantic, should join the applause except that in the process they have managed to create a school of writing which has greater vitality than anything being produced over here. Mr Herlihy's new book is a strikingly successful example of this school.
Our heroine, whose real name is Gloria Random, runs away from her middle-class home in the Mid West to find her natural father in New York, a communist lecturer. She takes her boyfriend with her — a grotesque, pimply homosexual whose soul she loves. The dialogue at this stage might be thought extremely heavy-handed if its intention was primarily satirical, but Mr Herlihy approaches it, at any rate until near the end of the book, with the same open-eyed matter-of-factness as his heroine. John tries to explain to Gloria how he has come to the conclusion that Lake Erie is Jesus, but loses the thread of his argument; when in New York they solemnly try to tune into a dog's turd and see it as something beautiful, but then decide not to rush their fences.
The couple are accepted in a family or commune which has collected around a middle-aged, Jewish drop-out psychiatrist. At this stage the book becomes more serious and one has the ghastly suspicion that Mr Herlihy is starting to say something serious. But one need not have worried. The debate never rises above the level of simplicity which the authors and high priests of the alternative culture consider suitable for its citizens — that of a nice, highly sexed nine-year old.
He, Herlihy, draws the line at incest and hard drugs — heroin and methedrine. He also takes rather a dim, Anglican view of lying — except to parents, police, etc. Presumably, the line is drawn at incest to show that Mr Herlihy is basically a decent guy. I would like to think he is saying something more complicated — that the drop-out generation owes its essential characteristics — communal living and an almost superstitious credulity — to the collapse of the family as a basic social unit and the discrediting of institutional religion as moral preceptor, and that the confusion of the desire to belong with sexual appetite, shown in the Witch's approach to her father, is symbolic of this. But I am afraid that Mr Herlihy is saying no such thing. He is deliberately retreating into the same simplicities as he describes:
I've been doing a what it-we're-wrong scene for days now. What if I and my friends are wrong about everything? What if the Vietnamese really are dying to get their hands on San Francisco? What if marijuana is really the devil's week? What if war and booze and $ are really the keys to the Kingdom of heaven?
Never mind, the book is beautifully written and a joy to read. Novelists may not be the philosophers or even true observers of American society, but at least they have found a role as entertainers, which is more than can be said for their English counterparts.
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