Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN There was a time when I was a subscriber but eventually its critics hounded me off the mailing list. I respected the way its editors fought to keep Greenwich Village free from property specu- lators, corrupt politicians, witch-hunters, book- banners, heavy-fisted cops, status-seeking admen and other enemies of Hobohemia. From 3,000 miles away, some of these battles seemed almost Byzantine in their parochial complexity. But this was the strength of the paper on its native ground where its roots went deep into the local midden. The American liberal does not segregate his con- seience into Home and Away as do so many of our British progressives.
He attacks injustice, prejudice, bigotry, bureau- cracy and vested interests first on the street where he lives, in his children's school, at his neighbourhood bar. He wins enemies and in- fluences people whose faces he knows and who
are in a position to hit back at him where it hurts. That social pressure towards conformity in. American life, so much derided by British sophisticates, is heavy just because the tradition of dissent and protest is so vigorous and wide- spread. How many of our own armchair agitators (and I include myself) whose hearts bleed for the castrated Negro in Alabama, the imprisoned striker in Spain, the machine-gunned villagers of Vietnam, the persecuted satirists in the Soviet Union, ever seek to enlist the support of the man next door against the poison in their parish pump? The evils in British society may seem duller, less glamorous, not so dramatic as those abroad but they are just as real to people who suffer them at first hand. It is little use earning a reputation as a fearless freedom fighter in the letter columns of The Times if you are embar- rassed •to let the hall porter know you are a Socialist. Even when we march or sit down or boo and cheer at a teach-in, we are simply signalling our solidarity with the comfortable, if temporary, majority around us. It is in lonely contact with the awkward, permanent Majority of men-in-the-street, their obstinate philistinism, their suspicious conservatism, their resentful apathy, that the left-winger should raise his banner reading 'Blame me, I voted Labour.' There is always a mandate for the status quo.
The belief that social-democratic Britain is somehow more revolutionary than free-enter- prise America cannot be justified by the facts. There even the reactionaries are rebels. Here we can fill Trafalgar Square to Ban the Bomb—a grandiose, Utopian, generalised demand which purges us of guilt but puts no individual under the obligation of performing -any specific task. There demonstrators of all political shades are campaigning in the open somewhere every day against something—against digit dialling, against fluoridisation of water, against the poll tax,
against violence on television, against censorship, against increases in subway fares, against the persecution of nudists. But whatever the Cause, it requires its partisans to stand up and be counted on their own doorsteps. The kind of municipal squabble which occurs so often in the plays of Ibsen, and seems to British audiences so quaintly dated, erupts continually in American small towns.
The Village Voice is staffed by Ibsen heroes and its. political and social reportage is radical, accurate, aggressive and picturesque. But it is a viewspaper as well as a newspaper, widely read for its opinions on the arts. Here it seems to me it founders on that perverse cult of woolly double-talk which passes for criticism among the American intelligentsia. They have an almost Soviet contempt for any elegance of style, any eccentricity or originality of phrasing, any witty and shocking choice of image or explosion of metaphor, which could be classed as bourgeois formalism. They leave that sort of thing to Madison Avenue copy-writers, Tom Wolfe, and Time correspondents. The assumption appears to be that their ideas are so glowingly new that they would damage the naked eye if they were not muffled in second-hand academic clichés. They are anti-journalists who regard readability as a commercial compromise suited only to Reader's Digest. The fuzzy, lumpish, often un- grammatical, prose would be rejected by any British literary weekly (with the possible excep- tion of Time and Tide) unless in an advertisement._ Mr. Sarris's review is a prize-winning example of the New Incoherence in full bloom. He begins with a pompous Presidential announcement-1 would like to go on record with the judgement that . . . ' (Is any printed remark more on-the- record than any other because the writer pro- claims it to be so?) Then he pats himself on the back for his non-conformity-1 seem never to be happier in fact than when I am standing most alone.' (How alone can you get?) Then, oddly for such a• proud individualist, he cites the enjoy- ment of the audiences as proof that he is right and the 'professional' and `conventional' critics Wrong.
His forensic technique depends on the con- frontation of two irrelevant opinions arbitrarily linked in one sentence—`the movie has been called "campy," and yet I have never seen comedy direction of such conviction.' (If `camp' is being outrageous successfully and stylishly, why should it lack conviction?) It is naturally im- Possible to gather from his piece what the film is about though there is a concisely potted des-
cription of another film. And Mr. Sarris even seems curiously confused about the impression it makes upon him, praising the directo;'s `deliberateness,' his `formal contemplation,' his ability to make both sex and humour 'lucid and direct' and yet also applauding the film's 'feeling of raging disorder.' There` is the ritual allowance of one weak joke—`since the late Preston Sturges was in his hey-hey day': one grammatical mis- take—`none of the characters are'; a sprinkling of fashionable OK cultural references—'delicacy and complexity that is almost Jamesian'; at least one professional pseudo-definition to be under- lined in the student's notebook—This is what I would call dirty humour, that is. humour with dirt to conceal some of the meanings': a dollop of near-nonsense jargon-1 do think that Allen's farce script is the most fully textured . . . and a final paragraph written at the top of his voice in the tone of a TV commercial-1 laughed and I laughed and I laughed and all the king's critics and all the king's columnists can never deprive me of that laughter in the dark.'
I shall read with interest the reactions of the British critics. If there is one more pretentiously unpretentious, more boringly button-holing, more obscurely plain-spoken. I will take out a life subscription to the Village Voice for every one of them.
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