Heller's Gold and a Silver Sax
by Benjamin DeMott
Bruce Gold, hero of Joseph Heller’s third novel, GOOD AS GOLD (Simon & Schuster, $12.50), is a forty-eight-year-old English professor with problems. Unable to cover his children’s tuition bills on academic pay, he has been piling up debts in the form of advances for unfinishable book projects (“a study of the contemporary Jewish experience in America” ). He also suffers, intermittently, from doubt about his professional worth. The published cultural commentaries and political observations that support his modest reputation seem to him cheesy stuff (he “thought much less of his work than even his fussiest detractors” ), and lately his opportunism has bothered him. Audiences of pious elderly reactionaries love him, but so do fire-eating teenaged Maoists, and the reason for this isn’t pretty: Gold shifts his pitch according to the sympathies of whatever crowd is at hand. (He once exploited, in two different ways, within twenty-four hours, a news story about a Texas official who had escaped trial on some counts for which he had been indicted. First he used the story “to confirm the suspicions of an audience of millionaires that the federal government had it in for all rich Texans, [second] to insinuate convincingly the next, afternoon to an assembly of college students just thirty miles away that justice, in the presence of rich politicians, was not blind but merely looking the other way.” )
Finally, there’s some trouble with his close relatives —a status problem. Gold’s father, stepmother, older sisters, brothers-in-law, even his own younger daughter, all see him as a loser. “Whatever he does is wrong,” is his father’s contemptuous assessment.
Hard times, but comes a chance to break out. Gold reviews, in the waffling manner he has made his own, a volume by the incumbent Chief Executive (the title is My Year in the White House), and in doing so hits upon phrases that entrance the not undim presidential eye. A White House aide named Ralph, known to Gold from graduate school, suggests he consider joining the Administration, probably with Cabinet rank. There are catches in the invitation—so many, indeed, as it turns out, that the hero’s effort to cope with them becomes the main narrative business of the tale. But Gold’s optimism is unfaltering and his pliancy matchless, at least for a while. The Pennsylvania Avenue inner circle decides that, stylewise, he would do well to divest himself of dumpy Belle, his wife of twenty-odd years. Gold takes steps. The inner circle decides he ought to pursue, as a substitute for Belle, a tall millionairess with Potomac Establishment connections and a startlingly promiscuous nature. Further steps. The inner circle recommends sucking up to a famous antiSemitic Washington fixer who has lied under oath to Congress fourteen times. Gold sucks up.
So it goes, for a time. At length, though, the hero notices a certain lack of movement. He’s grateful for compliments and continues to snap up unconsidered trifles. White House staffers revere his standard idioms (“boggles the mind,” “I don’t know” ), and he’s granted a place on a presidential commission run by a Connally-like Texas governor. But the governor proposes quick adjournment so that the group can accomplish “in just two meetings what [has] taken [other presidential commissions] as long as three years: nothing.” And in addition, the governor is rude to Gold (“Gold, you a Jew, ain’t you?”).
Slights begin accumulating. Appointment after appointment at the Oval Office is canceled. Gold’s sponsor, Ralph, grows steadily more equivocating. Gold is stimulated to recall his hostility to a former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger (State is the post Gold covets), and the memory diminishes his awe of the office. Potomac fever, in short, is wearing off, and in the end Gold returns to Belle and the contemporary Jewish experience in America.
As a send-up of Capital conventions and clichés, Good As Gold is sometimes funny. The hero asks a White House aide what jobs are open and learns there’s a spot for a “spokesman” from which one would move up in a month “to a senior official. . . . free to hold background briefings any time you want, every time we schedule them.” The presidential commission that adjourns upon formation resembles a thousand such executive bodies— assemblages of token blacks, widows, football coaches, ambassadors, mayors, doctors, English professors, token everybodies. And Heller casts a rightly cold gaze on the “organizations with Brobdingnagian names [that are] sprouting like unmanageable vines and spreading like mold with sinecures and conferments for people of limited mentality and unconvincing motive”—such real-life enclaves as the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research or the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace.
The representation of Jewish family life in Good As Gold isn’t bare of stereotype, but several episodes achieve a likable zaniness—for example, a crazily heated family debate on the meaning of the term “north” in relation to the term “up.” And there are moments of refreshingly straight talk, as when Gold’s baby sister, Joan, who has renamed herself “Toni,” answers Gold’s question about the meaning, in her mind, of their common heritage: “If you want to know what my Jewish experience is, I can tell you. . . . It’s trying not to be. We play golf now, get drunk, take tennis lessons, and have divorces, just like normal Christian Americans. We talk dirty. We screw around, commit adultery, and talk out loud a lot about fucking. . .”
Yet despite all this I found Good As Gold, billed as a “major American classic,” unsatisfying, and I believe I know why. It’s this simple: the author can’t decide how disturbed he is (or whether) by his hero’s troubles and the world’s, hence can’t make the troubles consequential to the reader. Bruce Gold appears persuaded most days that the country is finished: “. . . he knew there was no longer anything legal to be done under the American system of government to discourage crime, decrease poverty, improve the economy, or nullify the influences of neglect. . . . [he] knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there.” He finds proof of collapse in the continuing eminence of Henry Kissinger: ours is a “society in which ... a blundering, blathering, shoddy hypocrite [is] honored as a celebrity instead of shunned and despised. . .”
But the author himself is at pains to assure the reader that Gold is completely of a piece with his contemporaries—meaning he’s a coward, a lazy, exploitative teacher, an envy-ridden competitor, and a match for Kissinger at doubleness (Gold “realized also that he was not just a liar but a hypocrite”). The hero’s characteristic response to the collapse of civilization is unembarrassed pleasure at being furnished with an article idea:
Multitudes witnessed the avalanching decline. Gold’s spirits were improving tremendously as this vocabulary of degeneration and decay coursed through his head. It was the Shoot the Chutes into darkness and dissolution, the plunging roller coaster into disintegration and squalor. Someone should do something. Nobody could. No society worth its salt would watch itself perishing without some serious attempt to avert its own destruction. Therefore, Gold concluded, we are not a society. Or we are not worth our salt. Or both.
Gold had his article
Yet he’s never raked over by his creator for this cynicism: as the title hints, in these pages none but the Gold standard applies.
Would this count if high levels of novelistic energy were sustained in the book? Conceivably not. Good fiction, dark views, and judgmental ambiguity often coexist. But the case is that in Good As Gold ambiguity infects, inhibits, and ultimately depletes the energies of creation—wears things down. An example is the treatment of Secretary Kissinger. For a novelist this figure presents opportunities seemingly too rich to waste. Agility, slyness, persuasiveness, vanity, humorous self-awareness, plus the evident condescension to ordinary folk who bring only uncosmopolitan American-ness to the conduct of foreign affairs—these features of character beg for imaginative penetration. What is such a human being to himself? In this book we’re offered— instead of an answer—a section of direct quotations from lifeless, objective newspaper dispatches about the former Secretary of State, excerpts from columns by Anthony Lewis, and the like. Nothing in the lot is freshly imagined.
It’s the same story with the presentation of life in the executive bureaucracy. We smile when the author points mockingly at familiar outward behaviors, expecting a probe that will show the insides of the deeds and talk, thereby demonstrating, incidentally, the difference between a first-rate novel and a first-rate Russell Baker column. But the probe doesn’t come. This novelist seems to have concluded that the essence of life at the bureaucratic top can be delivered by repeating several dozen times a single oxymoronic gesture as a symbol of administrative inaction:
We’ll want to move ahead with this as speedily as possible, although we’ll have to go slowly.
We want everyone in government to read it, although we’ve stamped it secret so nobody can.
He [the President] probably wants you here as soon as you can make the necessary arrangements, although he probably doesn’t want you making any yet.
Internationally renowned, Mr. Heller stands forth just now as the author of only three books, therefore overviews of his oeuvre aren’t yet in order. Even so, it’s perhaps worth recording that his career thus far has helped to clarify the limits of comic apathy, or stylized unresponsiveness, as a resource for writers whose subject isn’t war. At some moments in history—the Catch-22 moment was among them—the tones and gestures of indifference are, paradoxically, energizing; they light up, by shocking, hellish, absurdist strokes, the conditions that quicksilver phrases such as “consciousness dulled by horror” can only obscure. But at other moments indifference and related postures lack dimension, adding up to little beyond themselves. The themes of Good As Gold are by no means negligible, and it’s possible that the author conceived the novel as an ambitious cultural inquiry into the state of America now. But the finished production struck me, I’m afraid, as a rather listless and dispirited piece of work.
I should quickly add, having said this, that if your taste is for fiction that energizes—work that freshens the world, or banishes moral sluggishness for an evening, or both—your chance is slim this season of casually coming upon the perfect read high-piled on the new-novels table at a neighborhood bookshop. As it happens, I did come upon such a work the other day: a pair of novellas by a Czech author, Joseph Skvorecky, published under the title THE BASS SAXOPHONE (Knopf, $8.95). But purest luck was responsible. (“Purest luck” means that I noticed a blurb on a dust jacket —a claim by Graham Greene that Skvorecky, of whom I’d never heard, “stands comparison with Chekhov.” Any book set in Chekhov’s league by an author of significant achievement obviously has to be read.)
Like Joseph Heller, Josef Skvorecky is alert to the harsh political and cultural realities of life in his native land. After having experienced two totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Soviet, he emigrated to Canada a decade ago, following the Soviet invasion of his country, and now teaches at the University of Toronto. And, again like Heller, I think, he finds a certain universal worth resident in the historical Jewish experience. (He approaches the Jewish experience through music—minor keys, the blues, jazz, Hitler’s hatred of the “Judeonegroid” beat and sound; this seems less odd when you’re acquainted with his notion of jazz as a vital mode of alternative consciousness in totalitarian societies.)
But resemblances to Heller end here. Josef Skvorecky’s key subject—few on earth are more enlivening—is moralimaginative awakening. “Emöke,” the first tale in this book, is about an encounter, on a vacation tour, of an averagely sensual, averagely skeptical young man with a physically attractive woman not much older than he—a person who’s elevated by her religious vision. Playfully yet seriously the woman, Emöke, leads the young man forward from the self-trivialization of promiscuity toward an inkling of the rewards of discipline, and as this happens the reader actually feels the birth of self-respect—disorienting, mysterious—in the chap’s mind. The other story, “The Bass Saxophone,” is about an equally accidental encounter, one that results in a would-be jazz musician, a teenager, playing a concert for Nazi officialdom with a broken-down, Fatherland USO oompah group sent out to entertain occupation troops. On the bandstand, comping in a mechanical waltz style that he despises, the teenager learns what it would be like to be Them, The Enemy, and once again the effect is an inner transformation.
Skvorecky has no illusions —the transformations I mention don’t last— but neither, it should be admitted, has he enormous humor. While I understand why Chekhov came to Graham Greene’s mind (the combination in Skvorecky of technical deftness and an admirable character), I’d argue that if the author of Brighton Rock had known American writers better, he might have mentioned Faulkner. (Skvorecky has a Faulknerian intensity, as well as a weakness for pell-mell, nonstop, occasionally off-the-wall sentences.) And — last quibble—knowledgeable jazz lovers are bound to be troubled, here as always in European writing, by the uncertainty of continental taste on this front. (Pedants will wince at minor errors—for instance, refashioning the Milenberg of “Milenberg Joys” into “Milneburg.” )
But quibbles aside, The Bass Saxophone is an exceptionally haunting and restorative volume of fiction, a book in which literally nothing enters except the fully imagined, hence the fully exciting. Toward the end of the work the musical instrument named in the title turns up—an object of wonder to the teenager, himself an alto man who’s played a tenor and touched a baritone and heard (on ancient, worn 78’s) a bass, but has never glimpsed The Thing Itself. The rendering of the horn is extraordinary. It’s variously a “silvery fish,” the imagined black past in Africa and America, an entrancing woman, and an object calling up everything in the universe that can’t be produced in a wartime economy or respected by practical minds.
“Ja,” I said, “Das ist sensationell.” I . . . reached inside the case and raised it the way I would help a sick friend to sit up. And it rose in front of me. A mechanism of strong, silver-plated wires, the gears, the levers, like the mechanism of some huge and absolutely nonsensical apparatus, the fantasy of some crazy, mixed-up inventor, It stood in my hand like the tower of Babel, a conical shape, the valves reflecting my face full of respect, hope, and love—and faith (it was ridiculous, I know, but love is always ridiculous, like faith: the mechanism interested me more than any philosophy ever had, and I admired it more than any Venus possible). . . . It stood like a blind silver tower, submerged in a golden sea, in a beige and gold room in a town hotel, touched by timid fingers, and behind it [Adrian] Rollini’s ghost at the other end of the world in Chicago.
The kid fits a reed to the mouthpiece and, embracing the “immense body,” his eyes misting, runs his fingers down the valves and blows a note. The sound that comes out at that instant is breathtaking.