l Sunday, October 13, 1968 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five You search, By WILLIAM BARR Morning Noon and Night, by James Gould Cozzens. Har- court, Brace and World, $5.95. It is not unusual for a man in his sixties to undertake to ans- wer the question, "Who am I?" by a review of his life. At least in this respect Henry Dodd Worthington, the narrator in James Gould Cozzens' first book in four years and first novel in 11, is no exception. Old Henry, the most prestigious management consultant on the East Coast, is a walking data processor, correcting his cli- ents' difficulties, as he perhaps too freely admits, by pointing out that two and two usually equal four. On the basis of success in his work, he considers himself a "great man" of the order described in Shakespeare's 94th sonnet, the first eight lines of which poem func- tion as the novel's very appropriate epigraph. Worthington firmly believes that there can be no separation between philosophies of occupation \and of life in general: "The job rules the man." Consequently, manipulation in the business sphere demands corresponding activity in the personal. Obviously, management of people is ethically questionable since it demands that those who are to be so handled must be considered purely as objects; as well, such activity requires that the manipulator him- self be "as stone, unmoved, cold." Emotion has value only in that the manipulator can exploit it to produce a particular response. Whether Henry has always been a manipulator is open to ques- tion. True to his modus operandi, he prefaces his confessions with a well-considered discourse on the fallibility and selectivity of memory. How much his having persisted for over 60 years and es- peciplly how much his last few years on earth have further dis- torted his necessarily subjective visions of the past, are questions which are not and cannot be answered. The now-Henry can be described, at least in part, by his manner of expression and the material he-chooses to set down; the then-Henry must remain an unknown quantity. Ar. Worth inon, but Summarizing Henry's life is an exceedingly complex task, since the organization is associative rather than chronological. One touchstone and point of departure for Henry's thought is a recur- rent, formally dramatic dialogue, which seems to have occurred in the fairly recent past, between Elaine-his only daughter-and himself. Our hero also feels that a history of his New England fam- t ily is indispensable to an understanding of himself, and according- ly, enthusiastically traces his forbears through five generations. Resultant data include considerable wealth; belief in the old, quasi- aristocratic Puritan ethic of obligation; a strong tendency ,among males towvard professorship at a small, family-dominated college; and a good deal of inbreeding: his father and mother were, for ex- ample, distant cousins. The totality of these observations imparts significant limits to Henry's world view. Henry's two marriages have failed. The first has terminated in divorce, although both parties maintained enough amity to allow his sound advice regarding her failing antique shop to have been readily accepted. The second, to his secretary, has ended abruptly with her escape through suicide. Elaine's life partially parallels Henry's in businesslike outlook, and she outdoes his marital results: she is twice-divorced, with the third parting imminent. The reader clearly gains insights about these experiences from the narrator's descriptions. Looking back, Henry is disspasionate, aloof, watching puppets with his customary scientific detachment.. His own seduction, accomplished by an older, married, distant cou- sin, is explicitly dramatic. He considers it a "low comedy," with Young Henry totally incompetent in his role, an instrument by which Mrs. Van den Arend can gain revenge against her hyper- sexed, philadering husband. Although other motives for the ,se- duction are at least as plausible, Old Henry chooses the one most consistent with his own philosophy. The seduction of his first wife (daughter of the college chap-. lain), described in the present tense, is likewise pseudo-objective and cynical, not least because Henry snappily refers to his partner as "Miss Conway" througout the episode. He later manages to bed down his secretary (daughter of the college bursar) by using his knowledge of her need for a father-substitute. Marriage, in his view, is the most efficient and the most socially acceptable manner of satisfying pure physical desire. Attempting to satisfy Elaine's requests for advice, Henry can only produce a collection of cliches. Although he realizes his scraps are useless, they are all that remain when his usual procedure has already, obviously failed. Dealing with personal problems, Henry is out of his depth. Indeed, those problems are in a totally alien sphere. Because he can no longer feel emotion, he has no links with its realm: "To pantaloon nearing impotence, screwing is all that loving is." Whether Henry ever did (or could) feel-all he can now say is that he must have felt the conventional emotions-one cannont know. Since Henry can only describe his younger self through an old man's eyes, and since no one who knew him as a young man re, mais alive to tell the tale, has a younger, differentHenry ever, ex- isted? Henry's use of dramatic description is indicative of his overall technique. Management being his prime concern, he characteristi- cally tries to manipulate the reader. He invites one to become a man of the world, tough, fed up with sentimental nonsense, just as-he is. The confidential, beckoning tone flatters and seduces the reader-and uses him. Henry's apparently humble admission of probable falibility softens and soothes-the reader, diminishing his wariness and penetrating his defenses. These general attitudes al- low Worthington, despite his constant assurances to the contrary, to pretend to objectivity, and to increase, to his mind, the prob- ability of success of his minor, more particular maneuvers.. One of the most brilliant of these techniques is his ability to change his use of language without changing tone. The beginning of a bed scene with his first wife is ornate, pseudo-romantic, high- ly and consciqusly pretentious, but the description quickly meta- morphoses, post coitum, into a matter-of-fact, sordid naturalism; o ou feel? both extremes. partly because the mean is non-existent, maintain a profoundly cynical tone and more than a note of the voyeur. Elsewhere, a lush depiction of Mrs. Van den Arend's beach paraphernalia, possibly an attempt to describe through Young Hank's eyes, yields to an abrupt shift in viewpoint, and the reader finds himself in Mrs. V's ruthless soul, or, more precisely, back in Old Henry's vision of that woman's mind. The deceptive, apparent omniscience of the narrator is in- tended to lead the reader to accept a highly rhetorical passage without question: A writer's writing, whether fiction or nonfiction; is to serve as a weapon of persuasion, an exercise in ten- dentious dialectics, an instrument of calculated pro- paganda. Whomever else this diatribe may apply to-and in a sense it does apply to every author-its tone is surely consistent not only with Henry's memoirs, but with his life (as he sees it) as well. If Henry's real objective is not to answer "Who am I?" but rather to convince the reader that "Henry is a great man," Coz- zens' theme, and the results of his admirable and highly complex technical craftsmanship, are quite different from the aim of his character. The book requires that the reader use his brain; it is, in the most approbative sense of the phrase, a "cerebral novel." One must see, despite the incessant posturing, that Henry is the In- complete Man, and, to this end, Cozzens' considerable use of irony is very effective: Henry believes that "by temperament (the writer) is concerned only with himself, and how to express himself." Of his grandfather, about whom numerolts undeserved legends have taken root, he can say, I see now that my grandfather lived the life ... of that rare happy man who can't see error in himself ... My grandfather would have owned at once to numer- ous daily-life faults of ommission or conmmission-but in what he did, not in what he thought. -sbooksbooksbooksbooksb The By FRED LaBOUR Beatles re-emerge between hard covers The Beatles: The Authorized Biography, by Hunter Davies. McGraw-Hill, $6.95. When #the Beatles stopped touring in 1966 to concentrate on recording and leisure time, they, predictably sank partially from the sight of the world's publicity corps. The frantic, screaming, hair- pulling days of Beatlemania were over. The mobbed concerts, the pictures in Life of the little girls throwing "jelly babies" at Paul in Royal Albert Hall, the thousands who nearly destroyed every airport around the world, lucky enough to receive the Bea- tles, all of this was dead. But even before the good old days were properly laid to rest, the rumor machines began their work, and the public was in- formed that not only were the Beatles going to break up, but that even if they stayed together they were finished as musicians and composers. But John Lennon, Paul Mc- Cartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, the four "moptops from Liverpool," failed to dis- appear into predictable semi- ob'scurity, and they began to rise again fro mthe dead in periodic flashes of publicity or recording advancement. The first of these rebirths was the' smallest, and was precipi- tated by the release of Rubber Soul. A few people remarked on the new direction the Beatles' music seemed to be taking ;and "What's a sitar?" became a con- temporary saying. But still, it wasn't an earthquake. Yesterday and Today caused a bit of furor in the spring of 1966 with reports of an alleg- edly "obscene" album cover which featured the Beatles cov- ered with blood a d holding pieces of meat along with hack- ed-up dolls. The cover was with- drawn from the shelves, and re- placed, of course, with an inno- cuous group picture. But then it really hit the fan with the release of Revolver and the concurrent Famous Lennon- Jesus Statement. Now the music issue became important, and ev- erybody from Leonard Bernstein to your corner pharmacist found it crucial to analyze,. discuss, and generally praise the new Beatle sounds. This period perhaps marked the, true beginning of the Ignorant Rock Critic. But the group submerged again, and again the rumors of break-up. John made a movie. Paul scored a film. George visit- ed Ravi Shankar, and Ringo collected things. It appeared to many that they were finally in- dividualizing and going their separate ways. Then, Zap! Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and it happened again. Newsweek, Time, Life, everybody jumped on the bandwagon. The Beatles were now pure and unadulter- ated geniuses, the darlings of the flower children, the epitome of contemporary culture. Grad- ually the uproar' subsided, after the repercussions of Paul's LSD statement, and things settled down to the average daily press report on the Beatles' meetings with the Maharishi, Mia Far- row, and Mike Love of the Beach Boys. But they got out of that scene, top, after their Magical Mystery Tour fiasco, both film and al- bum, and into something new. "Lady Madonna" rated a page in Time and got the people talk- ing, and now "Hey Jude" and "Revolution" are stirring things up. Most of the publicity of this latest move, however, is going not to their music but to the plethora of Beatle books that have popped up this autumn. There is the "authorized" ver - sion of their biography, the "unexpurgated" version bf their biography, and an intellectual "commentary." We are concern- ed here with the "authorized" version. When an author attempts to chronicle the history of his con- temporaries, there is a large trap waiting to snatch tis foot: the trap of rather vainly inject- ing his personality into his work in a particularly obnoxious man- ner. It has always seemed to me a safer course to bio graph those. who are dead, because the dead lend themselves to a greater de- gree of detachment and objec- tivitk for the author than do the living. The trap can be espec-, ially stickytw i t h real-live, trend-setting pop-hero figures like the Beatles. Hunter Davies, creator of Here We Go 'Round the Mul- berry Bush, gets trapped in The Beatles: The Authorized Biogra- phy. But other than that. it ain't a bad book. The meaning of the "Auth- orized" in the title is that Dav- ies was allowed to extensively interview the Beatles, their f am- ilies, associates,, and old.-time Liverpool friends without fear of censorship and under a supposed Truth agreement so that Dav- ies could tell us every little thing they've done.- As a result, we're bombarded with a lot of irrelevant crap, (Paul getting laid when he was 15), some interesting crap (Rin- go's report card), and some val- uable information. Valuable in the sense that from studying their past, we can understand some of their present, and .per- haps even prepare for their fu- ture. Davies weaves together the in- dividual stories of each of the Like grandfather, like grandson. The incomplete man must live in just that manner: his very incompleteness makes it impossible for him to see how he is incomplete. Henry's particular incompleteness makes it impossible for him to be concerned with others, since his outlook does not allow for other people as people. Far from being without illusions, Henry has his own brand. In By Love Possessed Cozzens, concerned with unearthing hid- den emotions, uses a great number of references to Shakespeare's works. The multitude of paraphrases of and quotations from Shakespeare in Morning Noon and Night acts as a central and con- tinuous irony. In Henry's mouth the passages become clever, sterile cliches. He can detachedly note that in the 94th sonnet's octet "Empson and then Spender detect equivocal substances," but he thenproceeds to misinterpret the poem, disallowing Shakespeare's viewpoint. lago, whose sole passion is to glory in a reason based on a perverse world view, cannot understand relationships between people. Henry's sole passion is similar although not identical to that of Iago (and of Henry V, for that matter), for Henry does not and cannot accept people as intrinsically valuable. If the ironic sense of the epigraph to the novel describes Henry Worthington, in another non-ironic sense it describes Cozzens, Shakespeare, and any other good or great author. All authors are, like management consultants, manipulators. At least at the outset they control their characters. A theme, usually reducible to a "two plus two" type of statement, presents a "solution" (more an ob- servation) to (or on) a problem. But authors, unlike management consultants, are concerned with expression and communication of experience, are interested in, sympathetic towards, concerned about human beings: people, in a very real sense, are their business. There is a certain barr'en quality to Morning Noon and Night: the closing "Good night, ladies" echoes The Waste Land as well as Ophelia. The barrenness-perhaps unavoidable, doubtless inten- tional, possibly but not necessarily connected with more than Hen- ry's existence - renders Cozzens' landscape, if wondrously corplex and technically. dazzling, still cold and forbidding. As such, this cerebral work forces the reader not only to use his reason, but also to bring his emotion to the novel. cl Hamburg: Pounding the instruments and screaming at Germans . */enough, already By 'JOHN GRAYF The Beatles: The Real Story, by Julius Fast. G. P. Put- nam's Sons, $5.95. William F. Buckley once compared the Beatles to a sliced ba- nana and kidney sandwich. Julius Fast's new "biography" of the Beatles demonstrates less taste than Buckley and worse taste than his sandwich. The book is a disorganized, disoriented, anecdotal, atrociously written, non-informational mess. It is a greatly expanded Classics Comic Book, Mr. Fast, who stands to make a good deal of money off of people who don't know any better or who confuse his fiasco with Hunter Davies' authorized biography, is either a terrible wri- ter (which I doubt he has won an award for mystery writing, of all things) or an unashamed opportunist who turned out this book in a week in an attempt to pocket lots of money (which I believe-I quote from the dust jacket: "Among his most recent books is What You Shoul Know About Human' Sexual Response"). Fast's book contains no new information for an avid reader of 16 magazine or the Saturday Evening Post. His critical observa- tions are limited to the reading level of a nine-year-old. His factual'( material is limited to that which has already appeared in print or on tape or film. He has never met any of the Beatles. The style is interesting as an example of how to write a book fast. It is essentially a long, string of quotes from magazines and published interviews, connected by some of the most outrageous fluff that ever passed for insight. Example: "While Time heard their songs as mainly 'Yeh! screamed, to the accompaniment of three guitars and a thunderous drum,' The New Yorker was more perceptive. 'Their music is marked by a strong rhythm that has come to be known variously as the Liver- pool Sound and the Mersey Beat'." Mighty perceptive, isn't it? Occasionally Fast apparently loses his place in his file of clip- pings and enters an entire paragraph of scintillating commentary nn t 4he Amer'ican Scene norTLife In General Beatles into a, somewhat co- herent whole, taking them from their childhoods to the skiffle groups to Hamburg to the Cav- ern to the United States, Ed Sullivan, and the world. It is even a generally inter- esting story, I suppose, to some- one who does, not give a damn about rock, but Davies makes it mildly naddening by falling into the trap I mentioned be- fore. Example: "The relation- ship between Paul and Stu, the petty jealousies a n4d rows, is not too difficult to explain. In a way they were both competing for John's attention:" Davies' arrogant br.nd of pop psychology peppers the book, but it can be overlooked. The direct quotes from the Beatles and Co. are easily the most sat- isfying part of the story because they don't have, the press-release or analyzed aura around them, In letting the Beatles speak so much for themselves, Davies has done us a true service. The development o f the Beatles' music from skiffle to "I Am the Walrus" is report- ed rather fabtually, with a cer- tain emphasis on t h e years that came before fame: those" sweaty months in Hamburg pounding the hell out of their instruments and screaming at the Germans, the informality of playing at lunchtime at t h e Cavern They were a tough Today's writers,.. . WILLIAM BARR, a graduate student in English, is an in- structor in English 123. FRED LaBOUR and JOHN GRAY are juniors in the liter- ary college who regularly write on rock music under the names Little Sherri Funn and Little Suzy Funn, respectively.. young group of men in those years u n t 1 Brian Epstein smoothed out the rough edges. They played loud, raucous, ob- scene, delightful music. (Per- haps the best recorded example of what The Beatles probably soun,,ded like in Hamburg, where, they really started coming of age musically, is an album called "Johnny a n d, the Hurricanes. Live at the Star Club in Ham- burg"). Davies later relates some neat stuff about the circum- stances surrounding how t h e group has written some of their songs, especially the Sgt. Pep- per things, and how John and Paul in particular feel about people "analyzing" their songs. Finally, we're treated to an encapsulated view of the Beat- les today, which is now the Beatles six months ago. It seems to me that at that time, with the Maharishi's moon on the wane, they entered a time of transition, much like the times of Rubber Soul and "Straw- berry Fields Forever," a time between modes and directions, a time to sort things out. "Lady Madonna" seems to have come just as the transition was end- ing, and now "Hey Jude" has marked a new era. The Beatles are definitely into -something new which their forthcoming al- bum-set should clarify great- ly for us. As evidenced by the book, the Beatles have spent a large por- tion of the last two years get- ting themselves together a n d I believe the result will be found in the rejuvenation of their mu- sic that has just begun. And now, with Variety reporting the possibility of live Beatle per- formances in London before Christmas and television ap- pearances soon after, it appears as if the cycle has reversed, and they are ready to come out into the world. DON'T MISS FOLLETT'S. PAPERBACK BOOK DEPT. on, the MEZZANINE 500 TITLES IN STOCK r/ NEW ARRIVALS EVERY DAY IT'S A BROWSING MUST! PAULSENi11 "We have nothing to fear but fear itself .. . and the boogy man." - Support this simple savior of America's destiny. Buy his official, profusely illus- trated campaign manual. biography-platform -- at bookstores now. $2.95 .THIIE.CI RCILIE Zen, Yoga, Tarot .Alchemy, Astrology, Theosophy Tarot, Magic, Parapsychology 215 S. STATE .. . 2nd Floor f ESCAPE FROM REASON. Man is dead. God is dead. Life has become meaningless existence, man a cog in a machine. The only way of escape lies ir a non-rational fantasy world of experience, drugs, absurdity, pornography, an elusive 'final experience,' madness . . . If this is the twentieth-century mentality, how did it come about? And how can the Christian faith be made meaningful today? In this highly original book Dr. Schaeffer traces the way in which art and philosophy have reflected the dualism in ,Western thinking intro- duced at the time of Rennaissance. Today the dualism is ex- pressed in a despair of rationality and an escape. into a non- - _ - - READ 'BOOKS' Everyr Sunday A used to be for Apple... Now it's for Annihilate!