Bookend
Torn Wolfe's latest book, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers,' brings a valuable new tag across the Atlantic for the use of book reviewers, political columnists and the stern committed and the sneering uncommitted of every persuasion. On January 14 1970, Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia gave a party in their gracious East Side apartment to raise money for the Black Panther movement. Otto Preminger, and the wives of Sidney Lumet, Richard Avedon, Arthur Penn and Harry Belafonte, to name but a few hundred carats worth, were invited to meet live Black Panthers, listen to their programme, and make out their cheques to the Panther defence fund. Radical Chic, the longest and best part of the book, describes the party and the attitudes of the guests, summed up by goggle-eyed Cheray Duchin : I've never met a Panther — this is a first for me!
Tom Wolfe, always a witty and shrewd journalist, wreaks havoc upon this tinkling menagerie of good intentions. He knows that in the status jungle, the colour, shape and attractiveness of an object is irrelevant beside the cachet of its brand name—so that a white window-shade behind the Panther orators might be silk, but more likely is a Jack Lenor Larsen mercerized cotton "lustrous but more subtle than silk ". He also makes it clear that radical chic is an etiolated desire for the raw, vital thrills of low life, a nostalgie de la boue, 'but, more than that, a desire to wallow in the mud with one's peers for just so long as mud-wallowing remains fashionable.
The Bernsteins' party reached the society page of the New York Times which, a day later, editorialized about "the politicocultural jet-set" and "elegant slumming which degrades patrons and patronized alike." Syndicated columnists, the picadors of debate, added their barbs, and Bernstein suddenly found himself further entangled — in an old, embittered quarrel between Jewish rights groups and the militant black brotherhoods. Panic among the Manhattan salon activists. Bernstein retreated to rehearse a concert in England and give an interview condemning the Panthers for supporting Al Fatah. Radical chic plumed its ruffled conscience and turned kindly, horrified eyes on wild animals slaughtered to have their pelts put on the backs of society hostesses.
Without actually misrepresenting his victims, Wolfe is unfair to them in two respects. They are wealthy and influential enough to make a substantial contribution to the smaller causes they take up; and the causes themselves are not likely to be frivolous ones. Two recent British publications, on the other hand, suggest the level maintained by radical chic in this country — on a par with Vanessa Redgrave chanting "Power to the People!", soul food recipes in the Observer colour supplement, and cartridge belts and forage caps photographed as fashion accessories for Vogue or Harper's. One is Adrian Mitchell's latest book of poems2; the other a Penguin collection of contemporary activist manifestos and ephemera, BA MN'.
Riding the Nightmare is not so much a collection of poems as a gathering to gether of random reflections, most of them crudely expressed, which are cut into lines of unequal length to achieve maximum effect. The poet reflects, unusually, on Vietnam, the Bomb, sex and capitalism. Gradually his world picture begins to emerge — for anyone who isn't already familiar with Adrian Mitchell's world picture. On the one side is money, guns, blood and screams; on the other is music, love, green meadows and a formula for snowflakes. A blind, destructive bitterness alternates with woozy sentimentality.
Fortunately Adrian Mitchell has inherited a fashionable biochemical composition —
My brain socialist
My heart anarchist My eyes pacifist My blood revolutionary
which allows him to rise above accusations of insincerity or fatuousness. But does he ever have doubts? When he concludes, on the same page, "I am either a sound poet : or a bowl of Rice Crispies " one can sense the genuine puzzlement of a simple mind groping towards self-knowledge.
BAMN, edited by Peter Stansill and David Mairowitz, takes a nostalgic look at the international Movement since 1965. In their selection of its protest material, ranging from the constructive and ironic literature of the Amsterdam Provos and Kabouters to an illustrated Weatherman instruction in the making of a Molotov cocktail, there are two outstanding pieces. One is the finely written Kabouter proclamation of the Orange Free State, and the other Richard Neville's sad, dignified requiem for the Movement which he wrote as an Oz editorial late last year :
One of the promises of the new life-style was the abolition of false criteria for judging human beings. Today hip symbols and fashionable rituals count for more than ever . . . In the formative stages of the counter culture it was possible to draw inspiration from the open behaviour of Albion's children. It was tempting, if naive, to hope that with the intake of liberating rock, lateralising dope, the emerging group tenderness, communal living style and an intuitive political radicalism, that from all this a qualitative change in the conduct of human relationships might develop. But now, as the Movement's utterings reach fever pitch, as the rhetoric becomes more frenziedly fascist, affection suffocates reason.
It is worth reading in full. But the book, by then, has already given evidence of the sad decline of the English underground press, from its early days, full of invention and humour, to the present when no single writer in its pages can be found to defend the tactics of peaceful subversion against the Peace Is Violence brigade. There is a mindless, obscene brutality about much of the writing nowadays in Frendz and IT, and the new impatience with anything short of Weatherman tactics goes hand in hand with a retreat from literacy. At such a time, for Penguin Books to call their collection of manifestos by the initials of the revolutionary call to action is a pretty gesture of radical chic.
'Michael Joseph, E1.80 'Cape, £1.75 and 80p 'Penguin 75p
Christopher Hudson
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