The Working Eye
Going Away. By Clancy Sigal. (Cape, 30s.) THE trouble with British journalism is mainly fear. Quite apart from the fear of libels, pro- prietors and their friends, paper manufacturers, advertisers and rocking the leaky old party boat, there is a pervasive and lethal fear of experi- ment. So that when Clancy Sigal, a serious wit and a worldly poet, wrote a series for the Observer about teenagers, there was a small outcry.
Mr. Sigal hadn't spent his time sieving statis- tics or talking to bishops and youth club leaders, he had straightforwardly joined a teenage gang and recorded what they said and did. Being a working-class American, he wasn't either timid or patronising with the boys. But the real shock to readers was that he didn't moralise about the low company he was keeping, he didn't say that they needed either excuses or the birch.
His reputation as a startling journalist grew with Weekend in Dinlock, another unromantic, careful exploration of a working-class group. His second book, Going Away, subtitled 'A Report, A Memoir,' deals with his frantic fare- well survey of the United States before coming to Europe in 1956. Already it has been under- estimated. British critics seem to fall for the deadly charm of the early Hollywood passages which are funny and, on the surface, non-toxic to English readers. But they are bothered by the bulk of the book, especially by the sketched quality of most of the characters the protagonist meets. I think they are wrong. These characters are the ghosts of the American left; if you don't catch a spectre in a lightning sketch, you'll never record his face at all.
Mr. Sigal's protagonist, alternately and some- times concurrently on the White Horse and the Dexedrine, drives his De Soto all over the northern States looking up his old leftist friends, listening from time to time to the news bulletins on Hungary, interviewing strangers of all kinds in a delirious effort to understand his own coun- try. But from his old comrades he collects hostility and disillusion, from strangers, con- fusion and apathy.
This report is completely honest though, strangely, not completely discouraging, partly because it never pretends to be more than the vision of one shaken man from one shaken generation. Before July is out, someone is going to compare it with On The Road, but Going Away, while it shares Kerouac's excitement about the look and smell of huge America, avoids self-indulgence, plays with no mysticism, has a sense of direction and a great care for words. It dazed me. I wouldn't like to compare it with anything.
Decker, the hero of Mary Carter's A Fortune in Dimes, is a young Californian con- formist who loves to think of himself as James Dean Ns ith a fraternity pin. Decker is neatly summed up early in the book by a woman called Rosa : She looked at Decker and all she could see . . . was cereal crumbs.'
Decker's freckly fascination is that he thinks his dwarfish troubles arc giants and believes that his miniature heart is enormous. All he wants is admiration from everybody. Naturally he betrays his girl and his best friend as soon as he senses any threat to his popularity.
And then, at last, he has something, a sort of personality. 'a sorrow of his very own to swim in, a plot on which to jerry-build a philosophy : 'In the first place, a person can improve himself. A person can make himself better. There's no need to, worry about being in a mould if you can be bettering yourself all the time. To begin with, you could be a little more considerate of the people around you. . . . There are things that can be done, things to help. I could listen to 'people, when they talk.' It's not much, but it's the best poor Decker can manage, and at the end of the book you are left Ns ith a hunger for a sequel.
Almost all the supporting ' characters live, especially the hypochondriac Alex, who has raised himself and his small sister on a diet of cereals and peanut butter, and the strange surf- ing girl BJ, who allows the boys to do anything so long as they don't touch her zippers.
Alan Clark's Summer Season was, for me, a glum romp. It stars a young tutor called Ken- neth Crane and his misadventures in a seaside town. Its 'ponderous slapstick and tickle should appeal to the readers of the comic leader in The Times and at least one British film director.
Mr. Clark's prose style tramps through the book like this : 'Emerging, finally, on to the pavement of the ring road, I began energetically to brush myself down with my hands, soliciting an offensively curious stare from a labourer passing on a bicycle. With this done to the best of my satisfaction, I began to walk back along the road, with appropriately measured tread, towards a pub. . . .' Summer Season is 160 pages long.
ADRI.kN MI1C111.1
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