P. and His Times

[davemarc]

Let's go to the text (Slow Learner):

Influence of Prior Writings:
"Apparently I felt I had to put on a whole extra overlay of rain images and
references to "The Waste Land" and *A Farewell to Arms*." (4)

Conscious attempt to capture Period Dialects:
"Equally embarrassing is the case of Bad Ear....My sense of regional accents
in those days was primitive at best.  I had noticed how in the military
voices got homogenized into one basic American country voice.  Italian
street kids from New York started to sound like down-home folks after a
while...." (4)

Highly relevant meditation on the relationship between Time and Sexual Episodes:
"You'll notice that toward the end of the story, some kind of sexual
encounter appears to take place, though you'd never know it from the text.
The language suddenly gets too fancy to read.  Maybe this wasn't only my own
adolescent nervousness about sex.  I think, looking back, that there might
have been a general nervousness in the whole college-age subculture.  A
tendency to self-censorship.  It was also the era of *Howl*, *Lolita*,
*Tropic of Cancer*, and all teh excesses of law enforcement that such works
provoked.  Even the American soft-core pornography available in thsoe days
went to absurdly symbolic lengths to avoid describing sex.  Today this all
seems like a dead issue, but back then it was a felt constraint on folks's
writing." (5-6)

Time-Specific Paradigm Shift (vs. Prejudice?) Within the Language
"Although cast in literary terms, Lardass Levine's conflict in this story is
about where to put his loyalties.  Being an unpolitical '50's student, I was
unaware of this at the time--but in hindsight I think I was working out of a
dilemma that most of us writing then had, in some way, to deal with.
        "At the simplest level, it had to do with language.  We were
encouraged from many directions--Kerouac and the Beat writers, the diction
of Saul Bellow in *The Adventures of Augie March*, emerging voices like
those of Herbert Gold and Philip Roth--to see how at least two very distinct
kinds of English could be allowed in fiction to coexist.  Allowed!  It was
actually OK to write like this!  Who knew?  The effect was exciting,
liberating, strongly positive.  It was not a case of either/or, but an
expansion of possibilities.  I don't think we were conciously groping after
any synthesis, although perhaps we should have been.  The success of the
'new left' later in the '60's was to be limited by the failure of the
college kids and blue-collar workers to get together politically.  One
reason was the presence of real, invisible class force fields in the way of
communication between the two groups.
        "The conflict in those days was, like most everything else, muted.
In its literary version it shaped up as traditional vs. Beat fiction...." (6-7)

and

        "A collateral effect, for me anyway, was that of Helen Waddell's
*The Wandering Scholars*, reprinted in the early '50's, an account of the
young poets of the Middle Ages who left the monasteries in large numbers and
took to the roads of Europe, celebrating in song the wider range of life to
be found outside their academic walls.  Given the university environment of
the time, the parallels weren't hard to see...." (7-8)

and

        "We were at a transition point, a strange post-Beat passage of
cultural time, with our loyalties divided." (9)

The Possibility of Swimming in an Ocean of Playboys Prejudiced
"At that time I had no direct experience with either marriage or parenting,
and maybe I was picking up on male attitudes that were then in the air--more
documentably, inside the pages of men's magazines, *Playboy* in particular.
I don't think this magazine was the projection, exclusively, of its
publisher's private values:  if American men had not widely shared such
values, *Playboy* would have quickly failed and faded from the scene." (10)

Admission of being a Product of His Time, Prejudices Included
"Modern readers will be, at least, put off by an unacceptable level of
racist, sexist and proto-Fascist talk throughout this story.  I wish I could
say that this is only Pig Bodine's voice, but, sad to say, it was also my
own at the time.  The best I can say for it now is that, for its time, it is
probably authentic enough.  John Kennedy's role model James Bond was about
to make his name by kicking third-world people around, another extension of
the boy's adventure tales a lot of us grew up reading.  There had prevailed
for a while a set of assumptions and distinctions, unvoiced and
unquestioned, best captured years later in the '70's television character
Archie Bunker.  It may yet turn out that racial differences are not as basic
as questions of money and power, but have served a useful purpose, often in
the interest of those who deplore them most, in keeping us divided and so
relatively poor and powerless.  This having been said, however, the
narrative voice in this story here remains that of a smart-assed jerk who
didn't know any better, and I apologize for it." (11-12)

Too tired to go on...but there's more...in *Slow Learner*...and elsewhere....

da v e ma r c