Reviews

Leaps of Imagination and Faith OILERS AND SWEEPERS George Dennison (Random House, NYC, 1979/ 179 pp., 57.95.

Educators pretty much agree that the best book so far to come out of the revolt against traditional schooling is George Dennison's The Lives of Children, an account of the First Street School in New York where Dennison worked as a sort of therapist! uncle for some of the needier children. Dennison improves on Holt and Kozol and all the others by focusing on what no one else has quite shown us, the living breathing child. He is not writing a book on education so much as he is telling how he spent the day with his boys and girls. Pedagogy and theory are backdrop to this drama.

Though he once taught school briefly and worked several years with severely disturbed children in much closer quarters than the classroom, Dennison is not a professional educator. Neither is he primarily a psychotherapist, an art critic, or a house-painter, other pursuits that have given him a livelihood while he followed his calling as a story-teller.

While his stories have had enthusi- astic admirers as they appeared every year of so in The American Review and other places, Dennison has not written enough to catch the attention of a very wide audience. Oilers and Sweepers, his first volume of fiction, is not a thick one. During the ten years since The Lives of Children he has published a number of stories with which he might have fattened his volume, but Dennison is a Perfectionist Of the four long stories and one play that comprise this book, at least two are as good as anything being written in English today, far beyond the shiny manufactures of Cheever, Updike, Barthelme, and Co. At his best Dennison can be corn-pared with three women whose stories have already become classics of our generation, Doris Lessing, Grace Paley, and Tillie Olsen. Indeed, in some ways he excels them, although Olsen's fiction is more intense, her grip on the reader tighter, Paley has an ear for language and a spiritedness unsurpassed by any contemporary writer, and Lessing, like George Eliot, is the great chronicler of our times. Theirs are very impressive gifts and accomplishments, so that even to say that Dennison approaches them is no faint praise; and he is, I think, more daring as an artist, and more intellectual. Let me try to explain why I think

Whether or not there is a basis in human nature or in Western culture that favors one approach to literature rather than another, it is a fact that with a few exceptions like Doris Les-sing our best writers are no longer trying to maintain a facade of photographic "realism". Consider for instance the little circle of Dennison's artist friends, the late Paul Goodman, who was his teacher, Grace Paley and her husband Robert Nichols, and the impressario of the Bread and Puppet Theater, Peter Schumann. Not really a "school" of artists-for their works are idiosyncratic and inimitable, undertaken in a variety of mediums, and ranging over almost half a century-yet they do have in common certain attitudes toward life and art that constitute, it seems to me, a single method or manner. Since each of them-Goodman, Paley, Nichols, and Schumann-has touched Dennison's creative life in important ways, I wish to draw attention to what he has found to admire in them, as a way of considering the nature of his own achievement.

Goodman's masterpiece, The Empire City, was an attempt to invent an alternative to realism -"expressionistic naturalism" in which "the acts and characters are reduced almost to X-ray pictures or schemes" while the "true causes of events, both sociological and psychological," become the center of interest. This was Good-man's own earliest notion of what he was doing, after completing only the first of his four volumes; and here is what Dennison had to say in a review written almost twenty years later, after the last volume had finally appeared:

The figures of The Empire City are drawn larger-than-life-are so firmly drawn and implicitly contain so much experience that they create the illusion of genera' ting the plot independently of the author... the realism of the book as a whole is poetic rather than naturalistic it answers the widely-felt desire to re-establish the imagination itself as primary in the art-act.

Another dozen years passed, and Dennison, writing now after his friend's death, tried to place him in the context of modernism; Goodman was not a realist but a cubist:

The closest formal parallel to The Empire City is actually the Cubism of Picasso.

I mean that Picasso's attitude toward tradition, his use of it (exactly as a second Nature), his overt lyric play with properties abstracted from the history of art. are quite like Paul's in The Empire City. (Dennison gives examplest.] Paul's characters levitate-after Nietzsche and Cocteau. They encounter "the friend downstairs"-after Freud. Plots are drawn from Buber and Malinowski, props from Kafka_ Vet the effect is never one of fantasy, but of true event, clear meaning- and a radical extension of the genre which yet observes structural fidelity to it.

Grace Paley, also an admirer of Goodman's fiction-especially early stories like "Iddings Clark' (1933) and "A Cross-Country Runner at 65" (1936)-has her own way of upsetting conventional realistic expectations.

At a recent public reading sponsored by Black Rose she was asked why she risked "those leaps" in her stories, where other writers put transitions. She replied by comparing her stories to poems: what reader balks at the shifts and discontinuities of lyric?

But "leaps" is too casual a term. Events in Paley's storied move as in dreams, that is, usually with the same verisimilitude as waking life, but sometimes against all experience or common sense, depending instead on an inner logic that makes ordinary plausibility irrelevant. In "The Long Distance Runner," for example, Faith, the narrator, is jogging through the Brighton Beach neighborhood where she grew up, now populated by blacks. Suddenly she finds herself surrounded by a hostile crowd- in a scene that seems at once true-to-life and surreal. Faith boldly converses with the crowd, and the hostility slowly melts into banter and mutual recognition. Next she enters the building that she lived in as a child, and on the stairs she talks about her mother with a young black girl, Cynthia, who begins to cry when she imagines her own mother dying. Faith tries to comfort her, says she will always have a home with her-but this is perceived as a threat. Cynthia's hysterical screams bring the mob into the building and Faith flees to the third floor. where she pounds frantically on the door to the very apartment she grew up in: "It's me! I cried out in terror. Mama! Mama! let me in!"

Structurally this moment is the means of getting Faith from one part of the story to another-a leap from the encounter with the mob to the recollection of childhood which now begins. Behind the door lives a black mother and her two children, who take Faith in as a sort of visiting mother/child. It is Faith's own maternity that she is "running" from in the story, the long distance back to her old neighborhood and the memory of her mother.

All of this resonates in the "leap" of transition, the cry "Mama! let me in!" It would be hard to believe in this sequence by ordinary standards of plausibility: the mob springs up too suddenly, Cynthia grows hysterical too easily, the black mother shelters Faith too readily and too long. Yet it all makes perfect sense at another level-dramatically brought into focus by Faith's pounding on the door of her past.

There is something thrilling here beyond the convergence of meanings and the daring of the leap-it is the thrill of watching the artist in the moment of inspiration. I am reminded of something else Dennison said about The Empire City: "the narrative voice is placed so squarely in the center of the image that the art-act -the act of imagination-is itself one of the liveliest elements of the work." For a fel- low artist, there is nothing so moving as to glimpse the muse in this way.

Bob Nichols has written plays, poems, and stories. His best work is a utopian novel, Daily Lives in NghsiAltai, being published serially by New Directions (the fourth and last volume has just appeared). The trouble with most utopian novels has been that they cannot escape the present, the platform on which the imagination must stand. Some authors have solved the problem by embracing the past-I am thinking particularly of William Morris' News from Nowhere and Austin Wright's lslandia -but Nichols, whose ecological anarchosyndicalism has much in common with these agrarian visions, has discovered a new way to see into-not quite the future, but the possibilities of the present ("It was meant as current events," Nichols has said.)

His technique is basically montage, innumerable glimpses of familiar and unfamiliar sights, drawn from daily experience, from cultural anthropology, from modern technology, from history and literature. This crowded world comes to life in its juxtapositions-monorails and wooden plows, shamanism side by side with progressive education, participatory democracy merged with the racetrack or Yankee Stadium to suggest what a parliament of 80,000 might be like. Nichols invents widely, but nothing is that impossible, or even very unusual.

The surprises come in the connections he makes, the improvisations. This is his formal method, and it is also his utopian message-the mixture is plausible both as civilization and as novel. The structure of neither is "realistic," that is, grounded in systematic verisimilitude, a mesh of cause and effect organized according to conventional expectations. That is what weighs most utopian novels down and makes us dread their coming true. Here we feel the rush of life itself, as full of complexity and obscurity as ordinary awareness.

From Kropotkin to Goodman, the one great virtue of anarchist thought is to accept confusion and human fallibility as a given, and make room for it. Nichols' art does the same thing, by means of his improvisational technique. It was this method that Dennison praised when he reviewed Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai: "It is overtly imaginative, overtly a product of mind, classical in spirit, but drawing freely on the broad repertory of modernism, especially the collage in time of modern poetry, which is handled here with great verve." The comparison to modern poetry recalls Paley's explanation of her "leaps" and. Dennison's description of the "realism" of The Empire City as "poetic rather than naturalistic." But even more than modern poetry, it seems to me that the freedom of imagination displayed in Daily Lives has its analogue in a kind of theatre.

Both Nichols and Dennison have been close to Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre almost since its beginning in the early Sixties. In Oilers and Sweepers there is a quick portrait of the troupe: "Masks were donned. The gigantic figures came to life. A narration was spoken through a megaphone. The trumpets and fiddles were heard again. I won't try to describe the play to you... when it ended there was silence. We could not applaud. It had been like a prayer. Yet finally we did applaud, as there was no other way to break the spell."

I think Dennison is wise not to attempt any closer description of a - Bread and Puppet performance. The faithful description of spontaneity takes the heart out of it. To do it justice one must be willing to renounce one's own art and audience. as another friend of Dennison's has done. (See The Theatre of Vision: Robert Wilson, volume 1 of Stefan Brecht's mammoth history of Original Theatre in the Cityof New York, Mid-60's to Mid-70's (Suhrkamp Verlag). His record of The Bread and Puppet Theatre is scheduled for volume 4.) However thankless his task, Stefan

. Brecht is an excellent chronicler of our non-literary stage, and understands- as well he might-the crucial issues in post-Brechtian theatre: "Schumann's theatre," he has said, "bypasses characterization and motivation. This might be a way for theatre to retrieve its liberty of tabulation, freeing story from the restrictions of plot-construction (as ridiculous nowadays as willful rhyme), and allowing instead the arrangement of dramatic sequence for effective impact, through eyes and ears, on emotions so as to agitate rather than lull creative drive in the audience."

The Bread and Puppet Theatre thus has its analogues in the leaps and improvisations, the larger-than-life characters and the bold display of the creative moment itself, that I have been discussing in Goodman, Paley, and Nichols. Whoever has seen Schumann's group will know what I mean.

The title story of Dennison's new book is dedicated to Peter Schumann and his theatre. When it was first published a few years ago in The American Review, this story was called "Oilers and Sweepers Cantata" - "cantata" in the Bread and Puppet sense, a variation on the form invented by Schumann in works like "The Grey Lady Cantatas," where the interwoven scenes and tableaux make a pattern of superimposed images rather than a linear sequence of events. Some sections of Dennison's story can be imagined as actual Bread and Puppet stagings; others are more literary conceptions that have the feeling of dramatic collage, some- what as in Nichols-tor instance the section on Fred's Feet:

His feet are crippled, the right in such a way that only a shoe meant for the left will fit him.

He remembers how the unworn shoes had accumulated in his closet. and how he had sat at the card table in his furnished room writing phrases and crossing them out until finally, with a curse. he had written: Man with two left feet.. "To hell with it!" he had cried. He had crumbled the paper and hurled it to the floor. Soon, however, he picked it up..

Wanted, man with two right feet, to swap or purchase shoes.

Wanted, man with foot trouble to swap or purchase shoes -and more, until he had fancied he could see figures corning toward him as through a mist, some limping, others walking slowly with canes. still others swinging their bodies like pendulums between crutches.

For sale, eighty-live shoes, right foot only-

But the hobbling figures kept emerging from the mist.

"No. no!" he had cried. clinging to his solitude. He had torn the paper to bits. He had put the shoes in a box and had put the box beside the garbage can. saying to the world at large. "Take 'em! Take 'em!"

The cululative effect of such vignettes, comic and pathetic, sorrowing but without despair, is extremely moving. This power to move is more than a matter of content. The form itself contributes tension and release-not the slow, steady unfolding of human fates that we are used to in realistic narratives, but returning again and again to the same few objects of concern, assembled like a set of snapshots of the same person or scene caught in characteristic moments. This is the difference between anecdotal biography and ethical portraiture, except that here the portraits are multiple, a galley arranged according to a formal conception.

The emphasis on juxtaposition and episodic repetition is what justifies the musical term, though of course Dennison's story is no more a cantata than it is a portrait gallery. Neither is "Oilers and Sweepers" really like drama, in spite of having been inspired by the Bread and Puppet Theatre. To be sure, it reminds one of many theatrical forms-silent movies, mime, circus-yet finally it is simply what it is, a work of fiction that foregoes the overpowering fascination of narrative for the sake of other formal virtues.

But if "Oilers and Sweepers" is not a scenario for a Bread and Puppet play, it is nonetheless strongly influenced by Schumann's experiments in pageant and puppetry. Indeed, every work included in this collection has some deep affinity with the stage, so that instead of seeming out of place among short stories, Dennison's vaudeville play "The Service for Joseph Axminster" fits right in. "The Author of Caryatids" is cast in the form of a monologue-"taped interview"-with a playwright, and the fullblown realistic story "The Smiles of Konarak" is also about a playwright, its crucial scenes all perfor- mances of one kind or another-an organ grinder and his monkey, a poetry reading, Shakespeare in Tompkins Square Park.

Dennison's love of theatre is near the heart of his creativity-as it was, for example, in Dickens-but it does not follow-again as in Dickens-that his plays are his best work. Delightful as "The Service for Joseph Axminister" may be, it is finally just a variation on Beckett. At the other end of the specturm, "The Smiles of Konarak" seems too far removed from theatre even though it is about it. too grimly determined to tell the truth without costume or illusion. Dennison is a poet of celebration. When he has something to praise, he soars. When life does not present him with such themes, but with boredom and pain, he accepts these subjects at a risk. The factory and barracks life presented in "Oilers and Sweepers" does not make the reader despair, because the cantata form reminds us that there is more to life than these doldrums. "The Smiles of Konarak" stays closer to conventional realism, and thereby becomes ensnared in its subject. It is a lament for the Sixties, a dirge for New York City, and the narrative sags under this weight. Only one scene, the murder of the organ grinder's monkey, comes to life with the power of Dennison's other stories; otherwise the imagination seems buried under the world represented, our world. It makes no sense except as a transcription. The plot is invaded by real people out of our own life and times, reality overwhelms art.

To my taste Dennison's own perfect story is "Larbaud." The subtitle "A Tale of Pierrot" warns us to read it as a modern version of commedia dell'arte, full of hilarious and absurd improvisation, but at the outset the manner is as realistic as that of "Konarak." Although we are told that the hero Minot Larbaud is an extraordinary man, his presentation has nothing unusual about it, until on carnival night he appears dressed as Pierrot and wearing a mask of his own face in papier-mache. Then, on the way to the festivities

Searchlights played over a building, and settled on a window two stories above the street, the shutters of which promptly opened. A lovelorn maiden leaned out. She held a paper rose, and while our horns and violins sighed for her lugubriously, she threw up her arms to the moon. Suddenly a handsome prince, a miraculous emanation from the shadow. ascended into the air. pedaling rapidly with his feet. He rose almost to a level with the maiden, and then dropped out of sight. In a moment, to her great joy. and to the joy of the crowd, he reappeared...but I shall say no more of these aerial lovers, except that the prince's flights were powered by twenty bears in the darkness down below, catching and throwing him in a canvas net.

This is the setting for the astonishing events to follow. Late that night, in the dancing crowd, Larbaud's head and shoulders are seen rising above the others:

He dropped out of sight. A moment later he emerged again, and there was laughter and a flourish of trumpets. Many voices called, "Larbaud!" He pretended to sip from his glass. This gesture. and his elevation in the air, made the grave face of his mask seem hilarious. He soared upward again-to a surprising height. The band greeted him with a crescendo, and we dancers, all of us, without ceasing to dance, cried, "Larbaud!" We were no longer a mere social group. We were the dancers of the dance called The Leaps of Pierrot. And our glee brimmed over into joy, confused, disoriented joy, for he performed what one would have thought to be impossible.

By swift degrees that surprise the reader into delighted acquiescence (our own "disoriented joy") Larbaud is swept up into competitive "leaping," and becomes an international celebrity, winning the Olympic high jump with a monstrous leap of nine feet-straight up! for his leaping is as unorthodox as it is superhuman.

His body arced upward in the glare of light, an arc like a motion of the mind, so pure it was, and so free of the restraints of our heavy earth. To the purity of this arc he added. as he soared outstretched across the bar. a gesture of grace, or joy, that swept us all into a delirium of pride: he lifted his head and spread his arms like wings.

We many thousands stood there singing-or so it seemed. There were, in actuality, complex emotions scattered through the mass. A voice cried, "Mein Gott!" Another: "He didn't do it!" There were shouts of rage and indignation. But the torrential jubilation swept everything away. The stands were a waterfall of human bodies pouring toward Minot He was lifted on shoulders and hands, was carried about the field like a banner, was placed alone on the platform on which other victors had received their prizes.

Incredible as its premises may be, the scene of Larbaud's triumph does not fail to move a reader as much as it does his audience in the story. But whereas the crowd cheers him for his leap, we are touched by a more complicated emotion. For us, the meaning of such a feat is not in the accomplishment itself, but in the reflected glory. At the remove of art, we are closer to the significance: Larbaud carries humanity with him when he transcends limitation and becomes, not a bird but an angel. We too are uplifted.

After this miraculous moment, what is there further to say? The effect is very like the breath-taking moments in Bread and Puppet productions, when the huge constructions of papier-mache and cloth suddenly come to life- but in those spectacles the miracle itself has no plot, the events of the story are not intertwined with the artistic medium, and the transmuted masks and draperies are merely the Queen of Spain waltzing with the Viceroy until the actors once more lay them down.

Dennison, having taken his readers so far into willing suspension of disbelief, now does something even more daring. He brings the artistic miracle directly into the plot, by surrounding the central fairy-tale event with more or less ordinary realistic causes and consequences. Without a blink we gaze on the unfolding of Larbaud's subsequent career: he contin- ues to leap until the world finds itself no longer able to believe in his gift-but the reader still believes!-and then, amid accusations of fraud, he retires, changes his name, assumes a disguise, and disappears. The rest of his story- his marriage, illness, scholarly pursuits, death-is told at length. His leaping is not forgotten by the reader, but Dennison makes no effort to remind us of it, nor does he add any new miracles. We come to feel that Larbaud's entire life is a miracle, a greater one after ail than the stupendous flight of hi's youth.

As the story progresses in episodes more and more realistic in content, Dennison moves into the literary manner of "Oilers and Sweepers." The leaps are now the leaps of art especially at the end when the narrator, Larbaud's nephew, recalls a series of childhood memories of his uncle, the final shimmerings of his life. The reader does not feel any basic discontinuity-either between Larbaud's feat and its aftermath, or between the story and ordinary life-but one is aware of a very great distance stretching back to the day when he was carried round the field "like a banner." That victory was glorious for us too, yet it has already faded into myth, and seems small in comparison with the rest of life.

I said at the outset that Dennison's work is remarkable for its combination of daring and intellect. "Larbaud" is the best example of this, for here his experiment in form is clearly based in, and resorted to, for the sake of ideas. The placing of miraculous feats in a context of ordinary human strengths and weaknesses sets up important formal sources of meaning on which Dennison can then draw at will. Larbaud's wondrous ability makes him a mythic hero who reflects human powers and aspirations-and also human cynicism and despair, when the world comes to resent his stature and seeks ways to belittle it. Then, once the miracle has been accepted by the reader but rejected by the world, a special bond exists between author and reader, both of whom know that Larbaud's feats are genuine-because we have collaborated in their existence. This shared responsibility differs from the complicity of realism., where author and reader agree that life is really like that. Here we say rather, this is what life means.

As the story progresses beyond the miracle, all the later events of Larbaud's life turn out to be commentaries on his experience. He buries the past: and dreams of flying. He suffers a breakdown: the result of isolation and loss. He recovers: the first sign of renewed interest in life, reading a book about birds. He becomes a scholar: ornithology. When he dies. his ashes are scattered, the last of his merely physical existence gone: "I mean that I am at home, Jacques. I know you will understand."

As Dennison himself has pointed out in discussing The Empire City, the idea of levitation has a modern lineage in Nietzsche, Cocteau, and Goodman- nor is Breugel the only artist of the past for whom the myth of Icarus has provided a subject. However, Larbaud's transcendence is not in his flight, joyful though it is, but in his coming back to earth, coming back, one might say, to us. After Larbaud becomes a writer, he describes his scholarly work in terms that apply to his whole story: "We take our books for granted," he says, "but you know, they really are magic. I don't mean their replication, though that's quite wonderful, and it's certainly true that my existence has multiples. No, I mean that spirit becomes matter and matter again becomes spirit. Any primitive could tell you that an object capable of such a thing is magical."

This is true of Dennison's story as well, an effect of literary manner as much as it is a matter of plot or theme. The shift back and forth from ordinary standards of plausibility helps the reader understand that all story-telling is magical, because for once the magic is not taken for granted but kept in awareness. This finally, is Dennison's wonderful ambition, and explains his love of theatre, where the magic is often vividly present. It is the imagination itself he yearns to lay bare, and thus transfigure reality.

- Taylor Stoehr

Taylor Stoehr teaches English at UMass Boston. He has published two books this year (Nay-saying in Concord: Emerson Alcott and Thoreau and Free Love in America). He is currently working on a biography of Paul Goodman.