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Penelope Gilliatt Heartland Mort Sahl (Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch £4.60) harrowed book is Mort Sahl's testimony to his life so far. It is as powerfully el°91-te11t a piece of evidence about the l'eas°os for a dissident American to wish to !taY American as any I have come across. It „Is funny, rancorous, brainy, and the fuel that It is the black-hearted energy of a tined lover: the disappointing beloved
of course, America. The urgency of
book's wish for change has a particularly American quality of irascible hope. It rem een-linds one that the US is unique in being . country that was imagined before it was Inhabited. mSince his emergence in the early 'fifties, Sahl has begun to be recognised as a political and social wit in the great ition. He was the first entertainer to go the FBI and the CIA. He can read a jwsPaper out loud at length—almost any °f it, not only the leaders—and make it, tale litn his interpolations, a scabrous moral he of the times. But lately he has found it hard to get work. He is said, as if it were p-illning, to have grown more serious. erhaos the situation has. mAfter President Kennedy's assassination Sahl became obsessed with the truth re' shakiness of the Warren Commission's fi.,•13°,_rtThe television networks started to be st'ntened, or perhaps embarrassed, by his c„,eddMess of purpose in keeping the blaueL",?ns about conspiracy open and dates and his agents stopped booking him coi,es• apart from what he got himself on ,indiege campuses. He was tagged a nutcase wo a Paranoiac. But his book makes you lider whether 'paranoiac' isn't often the name given by the ignorant to the more knowledgeable. Sahl may be notorious now to his plumper fellow-countrymen as unemployable, but Heartland is patently the work of someone who simply happens to have absorbed more than most, been more saddened than most, and seen through more milky public fibs than most.
Sahl has discovered that the established order in America never objects to what you say, merely to your chance to say it. He understands the workings of power with the calibrated knowledge of a spy in enemy territory. He sees 'liberals' with a basilisk eye. Twenty years ago in America, your serious liberal was 'the kind of guy who wanted to teach.' The same man now, says Sahl, would be content to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jnr: 'I have a dream that someday.every black man will have his own television series.'
Not that he derives any comfort from defining his fellow-men as an alien lot. There isn't much security in knowing that, if you're haemorrhaging, your species has a
different blood type. He uses wit to make characteristically quick and shocking contacts with people. Its quality draws on his defiance, his dash, and his anger with pallid friends and perfidious women. Johnny Carson of the Tonight Show, Hugh Hefner of Playboy, Paul Newman, and other causes of rage in this book choose to account for his fall from grace with the fable that he became boring. What he did was more risky. Having constantly told America that it was in trouble, he came to feel that 'the fight had gone out of this family. The fight goes when the purpose goes. If the government can say to the American people, "We're not anti-communist any more; it's not politic," and if the American people can then feel deprived of its purpose, they're made for each other.' This is hardly boring. Humphrey's 'I'm not necessarily wed to that concept' provokes the exclamation that he's not even faith/it/to it: Sahl is one of the few American comedians to know what a great tool the English language is.
His fault is that he chooses to shake people out of sleep. As Freudianism teaches, few acts are more hated. His nose for conspiracy leads him to scent trouble and hypocrisy in the most comfortable axioms. We are accustomed, for instance, to thinking of this as a permissive time. He finds otherwise. It is no more permissive than Los Angeles is casual. It's indifferent. It refuses to be offended, and to Mort Sahl there is no greater offence. He is himself in a state of furious recoil from the show intellectual who plays with words instead of thinking, and from the 'desensitised' art that he finds as nerveless as the news, full of a brutality that is an index of the audience's dormant mood. Sahl himself is smoulderingly displeased, left, right and centre. Having considerably helped to get Kennedy into office, he is now riotously rude about the family style. In a restaurant dining near Nixon once, he was persuaded to offer his arch-target a drink ; Nixon sent back a note saying he'd have some wine if Sahl would join his table. He couldn't just have a drink, says Sah I, he had to make a deal.
At the beginning of this lithe book— which is so mortally suspicious of staleness that it seems to be in a condition of perpetual mistrust of its own technique, unconsciously shifting from the one-liners of Sahl's own nightclub past to a less agitated and heavily shadowed delivery—there is a note about Adlai Stevenson's having said that the worst problem is that 'there's no one to talk to.' Out of the same loneliness a fine, unruly work has been written; and the author isn't talking to himself.
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