The Significant Self

Ego wastes the land, says the culture critic, the Others are disappearing: is the trend reversible? can the mysteries of self-regard be plumbed?—Miriam Scheinman, “smart Jewish girl,” heroine of Alan Lelchuk’s second novel, Miriam at Thirty-Four (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $7.95), begins her student days (Cleveland Heights H.S., Chicago U., Ann Arbor) with career fantasies and aspirations. But grad-student Stan, a biochemist ablaze with brilliance in his twenties, obliterates them at a stroke. Miriam marries the man, nurses his children, keeps his house, lives for others, tutors herself for thirteen years in the unimportance of her former hopes, declines into housewifely provincialism, and almost fails to register that the lord to whom she’s sacrificing has entered on a decline of his own into boring sanctimonious careerism.

But she wakes in time, helped by a miracle call it the sixties, call it the Movement, what you will: she saves herself. Multilayered, the salvation brings changes both situational and psychological. Alter divorcing, Miriam places her kids in school and day-care center, and brings off a liberating analysis; she takes three lovers simultaneously, wins a fellowship in photography at the Radcliffe Institute, begins preparing a one-woman show of her pictures. “Divorced and semi-free (did you ever get further as an adult?), Three men, a studio to work in, and streets to roam through; no great debt, financial or otherwise, hanging over her head. Still in her thirties, health intact, and the energy to do the work she liked. Was this [she asks herself) the emancipation business?”

A piece of it, surely but less than the whole. For this “new woman” has serious intellectual ambitions and is prepared to dare. Once a neutral utensil, appendage of a stolid bourgeois, she transforms herself into an adventurer in the dark mode of Celine and Genet, confronting life as it is when stripped of order and ethical imperatives. Her starting point is personal sexual experiment; later she inquires into the fantasies of the respectable (couples hire her to photograph them during intercourse); later still she probes, through lens and shutter, the sexuality of the outlaw, the pervert, the “diseased”; at length she opens herself fully to the nightmare of sexual violence.

At every stage Miriam is “learning"; at every stage her ego swells. And in time she comprehends the full meaning of her enterprise, the making of a significant self:

. . . what she had been pushing herself for, for the past year directly and the past live years indirectly, had been realized: herself alone eonsidered Not friends, not children, not a movement, not an ideology, not a husband. For herself. It was like a crystal formed at an exact moment out of chemicals and conditions working over a period of time. This bolder woman out of a host of good, proper, timid, frightened, respectable girls.

For herself. But the hosts of the good and proper—male and female together—are also for themselves, and their power isn’t negligible. At six and three, Miriam’s children are charmed by their mother’s lovers; her liberated friends admire her bold speech and action. Yet even round about Harvard Square, society or some illusion thereof periodically, ritualistically calls its rebels to account. Miriam’s ex-husband concludes she’s humiliating him and endangering the children. Denouncing his former mate as “the whore of Cambridge,” he sues to recover custody of son and daughter. And the suit, together with Miriam’s decision about how to represent her new self publicly, precipitates the crisis of the tale.

One mark of Mr. Lelchuk’s ingenuity is that he succeeds in laying down his heroine’s challenge to orthodoxy in terms commensurate with her highest aspirations rather than with her basest behavior. At her hour of crisis, Miriam Scheinman stands forth not as a “mere” promiscuous woman but as a bold and beleaguered artist (no such option open to, say, Hester or Tess). But success in dignifying this character’s rush to freedom probably won’t enable the author to escape censure in Ms., whether for reducing the women’s movement to a gesture on behalf of sexual license, or for failing to condemn outright his heroine’s conviction that liberation cannot occur in a context of adaptation to norms of familial and social participation, or simple for ripping off a body of experience, woman made new, that ranks) among the most interesting now available to women writers.

Sounder complaints could be lodged against Miriam at ThirtyFour. The author’s commercially successful, slightly overbright. unfairly reviewed first novel, American Mischief (1973), an examination of another thirty-four-year-old sexual experimenter functioning in the riotous university subcultures of the sixties, was in some respects a formulaic work—The Hipster in SocioMoral Crisis. And the book at hand is no less open to that charge. (When once you have thought of a female Raskolnikov, how much remains to be done?) There are touches of sensationalism (a lively sex episode featuring marmalade as tasty unguent). And there are evasions of moral analysis. Given the suburban rage for “personal growth groups,” Polaroid sex, and the like, and given the heroine’s acquaintance with these experimenters, might she not be expected to recognize herself in parody, or to be troubled by suspicions that her heroism is in reality the closet cliche of the day? The reader speculates; the writer is silent.

Yet gratitude is more in order than carping. If Mr. Lelchuk doesn’t possess his heroine absolutely, he does know to its core her sense of newness at the moment self-importance descends. Utterly absorbed in her blooming, oblivious to other minds, Ms. Scheinman is shown, convincingly, to have no purchase on herself from outside, no faint inkling of how her self-transformation appears to hostile or indifferent eyes. Enclosure is ecstasy. Here or there—once at a support-group meeting—dim, distant voices hint at the existence of assessments unlike her own, but closed in the glass bell of self, promised continuously more life, more life, she cannot hear. And because of the impressive authority of the novelist’s performance, we, as readers, are inside the thunderclap of rebirth, taking the full enveloping force from within.

What is laid bare, speaking flatly, is the very process of privatization as it unfolds within a single ego. What exactly is the thing? I come to construct my shame as nobility, my carelessness of my children as inspired originality, my self-indulgence as brave struggle: how exactly does it happen? As follows, the novelist answers, with fine control and compassion. A nascent sense of superiority beckons alluringly to me from within: in one or another sudden patch of astonishment I discover the clumsiness or meanness of my mate; at the instant the world strikes me for my presumption as Miriam’s husband finally strikes her with his open hand—I know the meaning of the blow: the enemy has at last recognized the truth I possessed all along, the truth of his own inferiority. Mr. Lelchuk is never endorsive of fatuity, but neither is he unaware that the surge of ego which brings Miriam’s destruction isn’t evil unalloyed, is partly powered by idealism, has courage in its blood; the miserable and exalting complications of our quandaries are, in other words, allowed throughout to breathe. Miriam at Thirty-Four is swift and clearheaded, a serious book about serious things; at his present rate of development the author could shortly become a national resource.

Bob at Forty-Five

A gorgeous high at the outset, flight from other minds can be, in the aftermath, a downer. In Joseph Heller’s second novel. Something Happened (Knopf, $10.00), it is fearful. The book’s hero. Bob Slocum, husband father corporation executive, describes himself as “one of those many people . . . who are without ambition already and have no hope.” He can remember a time of genuine desire and even of neargenuine human connection when he was young and virginal, starting his first job, and being alternately teased and educated in back corridors by an openhearted clerk named Virginia. Quivers of appetite still rouse him briefly. He paws a fellow worker (“This fiscal period, I am flirting with Jane”), spends afternoons with a colleague in the company of whores (charged to the employer as a business expense), endures the embraces of his oversexed wife, and is moved periodically by an odd, overprotective, almost sickly feeling for his nine-yearold son. But the world outside seldom seems substantial enough to touch him. He wants “to continue receiving my raise in salary each year, and a good cash bonus at Christmastime”; he also wants “to be allowed to take my place on the rostrum at the next company convention in Puerto Rico (if it will be Puerto Rico again this year) . . . and make my three minute report to the company of the work we have done in my department. . . But caring at levels deeper than these is beyond him. Something happened indeed, namely the death of the heart.

Such events don’t often lend strength or tautness to narrative lines, and Bob Slocum’s story is badly lacking in drive. Organized as a series of monologues detailing the nature of the nonrelationships prevailing in his work and family life, it recounts only two completed actions—a promotion and a fatal car accident each perceived as totally random and meaningless. The tone is uniformly plaintive-depressed: witness the chapter titles—“My wife is unhappy,” “My daughter’s unhappy,” “My little boy is having difficulties,” “My boy has stopped talking to me,” “Nobody knows what I’ve done,” and so on. The writing is marked by a tic of parenthetical deflation:

[My boy] always seems to know much more about everything than he is disposed to reveal. (He thinks a lot. I can’t always make him out.) He fathoms privately, his clear face grave and remote. He worries. (Or seems to. . . .) It is impossible for us to tell anymore whether he likes school or not (he used to like school. Or seemed to). . . .

Even when the angle of vision widens, the manner remains determinedly uninflected:

More and more things seem to be slipping into a state of dissolution, and soon there will be nothing left. No more newspapers, magazines, or department stores. No more movie houses. Just discount stores and drugs. . . . The world is winding down. You can’t get good bread any more even in good restaurants . . . and there are fewer good restaurants. Melons don’t ripen, grapes are sour. . . . You don’t find fish in lakes and rivers anymore. You have to catch thtMii in cans. Towns die. Oil spills. Money talks. God listens.

Impassivity isn’t, to he sure, presented as a value in this novel. Bob Slocum regrets the absence, in himself and other parents, of concern for their young: “More and more of us, I think not just me really don’t care what happens to our children, as long as it doesn’t happen to them too soon. . .

At one point in the book, watching immobilized as his son’s relayrace teammates set upon the lad for refusing to compete seriously, Slocum actually manages to experience his self-enclosure as terror:

Again my boy staggered backward a few steps from the force, recovered his balance, and just waited. He would not fight back; he would not defend himself; but he would not run away, and he would not ask anyone for aid or pity. . . He would not move to save himself, (I do not move to save myself.)

Yet no summons to solidarity ever sounds in these pages; the case for human mutuality is ultimately dismissed as a bitter joke (“God is good, a real team player”).

A “long-awaited second novel” that proves disappointing inevitably raises questions about the worth of the first. Are the defects of Something Happened a static and mechanical quality, dependence on a single trope (sustained unresponsiveness) really surprising? Did not the author’s reliance on a single comic paradox in his first book grow wearing before the end? Readers who remember Catch-22 as a work of nerve and humor are well advised not to permit that memory to shape expectation as they approach Something Happened. Mr. Heller’s probe of isolation and feelinglessness adds a little to knowledge of the pathologies of privatization, but this investigation of the “end of affect” is almost uninterruptedly unaffecting.

Farewell to “We”?

Novels present, essays explain. The most interesting current rumination on contemporary ego explosions is Martin Pawley’s The Private Future (Random House. $7.95), an essay on “the causes and consequences of community collapse.” Several theses argued by this young English architect and editor will seem familiar to readers of Philip Slater or of Vance Packard’s A Na-tion of Strangers, among them the notion that blame for the loss of aptitude for “dependent personal contact” falls squarely on the profitand-technology-based consumer society. But the voice in which Mr. Pawley states the case has uncommon edge and force:

. . . there is now only the isolated resource-user and energy-expender: not the altruist but the self-regarder, not the lover but the orgasm-hunter. Every washing machine, every automobile, every deep freeze, every mortgage for every private house, every television set. every marriage, every affair, every policy (even insurance policies), all conspire to prove to us that our dearest wish is to flee the web of obligations for which the term “community” is merely a euphemism. Affluence and wisdom born of the self-image of television and record have destroyed the need and the desire for human interdependence: not in the manner of a sorcerer’s tools run amok, but in the form of a sudden public demonstration of a secret wish. Today “we” find ourselves doing in the road what we could not previously believe that “we” did at all. Shocked, embarrassed and horrified “we” deny what I as an individual know that I have always wanted—to be irresponsible in the truest sense, to be without obligations, to be for myself alone.

More important, in developing his theme of self-obsession as the key guilty secret of the age, the writer creates a pointed and original critical language with which to assess contemporary standard-brand thinking. Chapters on sport, counterfeit reality (the media), environmental terrorism, and the decline of left politics open a view of contemporary life as a set of interlocked strategies of evasion designed to mask from ourselves our deep disbelief in “the public good.” (One item in the set is the socio-political rhetoric of problems and problemsolving: “To see poverty as an anomaly, a ‘problem’ and to try to sort it out by finding an ‘answer’ to it is to deny its existence in the real world, to pretend it is some sort of accident and not the predictable result of things being arranged as they are. As an excellent French proverb puts it. when a thief is not actually stealing, he considers himself an honest man.”)

Mr. Pawley is shrewd on so-called invasions of private life endured by celebrities, contending that they are far more correctly understood as glorifications of privacy than as violations:

The life of an entertainment legend is incomprehensible because what is scrutinized and loved, what millions of people pay to see is the unprogrammable, indefinable essence of the private person who agrees to live in public—not to live a public life, butto live in public the life that is otherwise hidden away in the impenetrable otherness of other people. The achievement of the recording media has been to find a way to expose this privacy, to examine it and glorify it above ail public things. . . .

He’s equally suggestive on the meanings of the countercultural demand for the “liberation of irrationally denied pleasure,” on pornography and photography, on nude theater and public sex (“the idea that nude theater and public sex mark the end of privacy is diametrically wrong: they represent its celebration”).

Unremittingly partisan, sometimes shrill, The Private Future “places” the legions of the self-absorbed with a fierce confidence that very nearly banishes—for a minute—awareness of the complementarities of self-regard and self-respect. Are we overnight to despise the concept of selfrealization that once was understood as a national growing-point? Were not the framers of the concept of self-realization inspired by a generous social ideal, and persuaded that labor and schooling could forge wholly new links between personal and public weal? Could not thut ideal be freshly energized? Answers not to hand. All that is clear is that the framers are gone and that the Slocums and Scheinmans abound and that the abundance is best seen not as doom or glory but as challenge.