Sunday, April 6, 1'969 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five Sunday, April 6, 1969 THE MICHIGAN DAILY No, but I read his books Poo-tee-weet? By TOM BROERSMA Editor's Note: Peter DeVries will de- liver the annual Hopwood Lecture on Wednesday, April 9 in Rackham Audi- torium. Winners of this year's Hop- wood Awards will be announced at the lecture. ETER DEVRIES was once referred to in the New York Times as "the most reliably funny comic novelist now at large." Considering' the enormous quantity of verbal comedy-puns, parodies, parodoxes and epigrams-in DeVries' fourteen novels this claim would seem justified. In addition to verbal comedy DeVries has created a rich assortment of comic characters and has de- vised numerous scenes of brilliant comedy. Nevertheless, it would not have occurred to me to call DeVries a comic novelist. Perhaps the early DeVries novels can appropriately be termed comic, but in the later novels comedy and tragedy are mixed together in a world of Absurdity. Looking back on the early DeVries novels and short stories from the vantage point of the present it seems clear that the comedy of the early novels arises from the same sense of Absurdity found in the later novels. In the early novels the central concern is the absurdity of everyday life in the com- munity of Decency.; In the later novels the central, concern is the Absurdity of Life. The early DeVries comic characters (found in the collected short stories, No, But I Saw The Movie, and in such novels as The Tunel of Love, Comfort Me With Apples and The Tents of Wickedness) are Charlie Chap- lin comedians making social /pratfalls. They invariably end up prone-with another woman-thereby jeopardizing their marriage and their standing in Decency. The Absur- dity of the characters is their inability to remain upright and the desperation with which they react in falling. It is not that they are prone to evil, but rather than they are prone to fateful collisions with the stanadrds of Decency. They are victims rather than 'masters of it. The Blood of the Lamb breaks the con- ventions of comedy established in the early novels. In this novel the dark face of trage- dy is introduced into the world of unsuffer- ing comedy. The Blood of the Lamb is a modern tragedy and in the development of DeVries' fiction it stands as a landmark between the early comedies and the later novels of Absurdity. It is the story of a man named Wanderhope-"despair"- a man who is stripped of love and hope by the successive deaths of everyone he loves. His final loss is the death of his daughter. The child is his "lamb," and in her death by leukemia--the blood of the lamb-DeVries re-creates the passion of Christ. With the death of the child occurs the simultaneous death of God, for Wanderhope realizes that an innocent child cannot suffer in a universe created and controlled by a perfect and all-powerful God. In despair Wanderhope. turns to Christ-and hurls a cake into his face. Wanderhope and Christ are portrayed by DeVries as actors in an Absurdist drama. The man of despair is a modern Everyman who has faced the summons of death and learned through death that Christ is a clown, the universe is without meaning and man is nothing more than the grass of, the- field. The later novels have developed the no- tion of the Absurd. In Reuben, Reuben the central character, a Scots-Welsh poet named McGland, attempts suicide by eating Seconal capsules with a gallon of his favorite ice cream. His suicide is thwarted when a woman calls hiM on the telephone and ad- monishes him to arise and witness the romantic beauties of the evening-"The stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels, blosom one by one in the infinite meadows of heaven." Such poetry he cannot stomach, causing him to vomit up the drug. Later that evening McGland hangs himself, just to be safe. In DeVries' latest novel, The Cat's Paja- mas, we are presented with the pilgrimage of a Prufrockian professor of English. He is drawn away from the citadels of wit and erudition towards an irresistable des- tiny with the Absurd. During the pilgrimage the professor assumes the role of a Madison Avenue ad-man writing Kafkaesque com- mercials for television. Later he plays the role of an immigrant banana huckster sing- ing his schmaltzy heart out for the great American television family. He ultimately discovers his destiny in the company of an idiot boy and an alcoholic dog. For an oc- cupation he sells cans 'of fresh air, a pro- duct which he describes with an air of satisfaction as completely and utterly use- less. The Cat's Pajamas is DeVries at his blackets. The professor is not a man at all but a construct which DeVries uses to pre- sent his world of the Absurd. He gorges himself on Nothing. He cannot forgive God for not existing. His sole purpose is to dem- onstrate the purposelessness of life. The final scene of The Cat's Pajamas summarizes the Absurd world of DeVries. The professor spends the evening discours- ing to the idiot about the work of James Joyce Later, he takes the reluctant dog for a walk in the winter night. Returning to the house he finds himself locked out and sends the dog into the house through the dog door to rouse the idiot. Once inside. the alcoholic canine falls asleep. After sev- eral attempts to rouse the dog and the idiot the professor sticks his head in the dog door in a final attempt to rouse the idiot. The idiot, like the universe, remains silent. Finding his head stuck and his body be- ginning to freeze, the professor reflects with wry humor that "his end is in sight". This image of man, his head caught and body protruding into a cold and silent universe, captures the assence of Peter DeVries' Ab- surd world. Po o-e-eet? I, Let me hear a' rock& roll poem Cf 2 0 0 C/2 0 0 Cf 2 0 0 II, C/) 0 0 ~mJ CL? By JOHN GRAY Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Delacorte Press, $5.95. "Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn't science fiction. He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky. 'But that isn't enough any more,' said Rosewater." LISTEN: Kurt Vonnegut has written his famous war novel and he says that it's a failure. He's wrong. It is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a scrawny lad who goes into the army, goes to the front, gets captured, lives through the fire-bombing of Dres- den, marries a fat rich girl who later dies, gets kidnapped by a flying saucer and 'exhibited in a zoo on Tralfamador, its home planet, comes back and finally is shot and killed while giving a lecture., The thing is, though, Billy has come "un- stuck in time." He lives his life at random, sometimes forward, sometimes backwards, some- times jumping thirty years forward or back. This doesn't make much sense to Billy, or to anyone else except the Tralfamadorians, who explain it to him as best they can. Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians see time as we see distance: It's all there, it doesn't change. When they see a dead man, they don't feel bad; they just note that he seems to be in pretty bad shape at that particular moment, but after all, there are plenty of other moments when he feels just fine. To the Tralfamadorians, everything, and every moment in time just is. There's no reason for it, Poo-tee-mweet By JIM PETERS Tonight at Noon, by Adrian Henri. McKay, $2.95; Snaps, by Victor Hernandez Cruz, Random House, $4.95 (paper- bound $1.95); The Boy from' the Green Cabaret Tells of his Mother, by Barry Mac- Sweeney. McKay,f $2.95. IT IS HARDLY news to anyone that a lot of people write poetry; there are the girls be- moaning lost loves on paperso that they can forget their trou- bles, the old woman using the page as a psychological release, and a whole world of lonely people who find poetry a very helpful crutch. But these days the young people who have found expres- sion in political and social ac-r tion have thrown away the crutch and are using poetry, as "cultural' expression. This cul-r ture has passed through many phases, beat, mod, hippie, etc.; and each era has had its poets, men and women who sing of themselves as groups of people, who find their poetry in the movements and rustlings of their age. So it is not surprising in the mixed-media age to find an es- tablished artist trying his hand at poetry. In his second book of poems, Tonight at Noon, British pop-mod stylist Adrian Henri tries very hard to make the poet a public star and performer as well as the introspective indi- vidual of past generations. He tries very hard; and his book, in its strange progressioh of poetic forms, is filled with reader-involving tricks.. But it is precisely in this at- tempt that he fails, because in *concentrating on what I am tempted to call "rock 'n' roll" poetry appealing to the young, he ends up with tired poetry in new words. The freshness is there some- times. In the startling "Commer- cials for 'Bomb' Event," in the several "Poems Without Words," he hollers at his audience to wake up and do more than read. He demands an environmental experience a la the renaissance in theatre today. "Summer Poem I" is very short and specific, a series of performance directions, "A. holds up a plastic (or real) rose." "Love Poem IV:" "A. gives out shockingpink hearts painted on squares of white paper to the prettiest girls in the audience." But how does one' react to these "poems" printed in books? The reader is made to smile quite easily, as in number 10 from a second section of "Sum- mer Poems Without Words:" "The next time you clean your teeth think about what you're doing." But this and number 1 which invites us to "try to imag- ne" our next hangover seem more appropriate for wooden (or plastic) plaques inscribed with some vista of Niagara Falls or Yellowstone, or for the front of amusing postcards. Perhaps this is exactly the bitter. I suppose Cruz's destruc- tion of English grammar fits this well; there is no punctua- tion and very little subject-verb agreement, significant of the conflict between the city, the megalopolis (the title of an imagistically bloody poem) and the frustrated individual. Cruz realizes there is no hope, but he is not content. Compared to the scathing an- ger and violence of Cruz's work, the poetry of Barry MacSwee- ney, The Boy from the Green Cabaret tells of his Mother, seems naive; but it stands strong. because of MacSweeney's superb use of language, language which makes us smile or mourn, but never curse. Having read the three books of poetry together, one after the other, I think more of Cruz as a stylist than Mac- Sweeney, but I prefer charm to stark ugliness, no matter how justifiably real it is. There is bitterness and the fear of the encroaching sterile city; but the book is primarily love poems, perhaps more un- derstandably pleasant. The book is divided into three sections, including the "Vivienne Poems" and the "Green Cabaret" sec- tion. MacSweeney would be "deep," would be intellectual as in the beginning of "Wlen Van Gogh," but his boyishness usually gets the better of him; and the end- ing of the poem is comically cute as usual. It could be said there is no substance here, and often it is true. Poems such as "Foun- tains," "We," and "Drums" offer no more than friendly conver- sation. But it is always good talk. Whereas Henri aims at writ- ing song poems and even uses the folk-rock format, it is Mac- Sweeney who is the singer, who is the warm lover with an in- nocent smile. is just is that way: If something's going to hap- pen,'it does, and so- what? Anyway, what Billy Pilgrim learns from the Tralfamadorians, and what Vonnegut seems to have accepted as the only sane course of action to take in this world, is that you should concen- trate on the good moments, because there's noth- ing you can do about the bad ones. Vonnegut is an American writer, a very Amer- ican writer because he speaks to the American Slob, the comic-book-reading simpleton that we would all be if we didn't have to worry about the bad moments in life, the times of war and massacre and death. He offers food for the desire to find an answer, an answer no more complicated than an Ann Landers colum or a Dale Carnegie friendship course, an answer to all the questions that louse us up. He offers us the kind of answer that we would find at the end of a Batman comic book and we grab for it because we're starved. Dostoevsky does tell you. everything there is to know about life. But, unfortunately, everything there is to know doesn't answer the question "Why?" And Vonnegut does, with all the wisdom of Johnny Appleseed or Superman. "What else?" is the reply. Slaughterhouse-Five is not about fire-bombing of Dresden. The horror of the air raid that killed twice as many as Hiroshima's puny bomb is only hinted at. Slaughterhouse-Five is about dealing with Dresden, and dealing with genocide, and dealing with death and life."Vonnegut has dealt with it in the American tradition: he has ignored it, talked around it, found the simpler way. And while he was doing it, Vonnegut succeeded in writing his famous war novel. He succeeded because he said the only intelligent thing that can be said about a massacre like Dresden or perhaps about anything, and he has said it at the end of his book. It is this: "PoO-tee-weet?" I I 1147- Today's writers ... I effect he is setting out to achieve, but I think it is, rather, significant of a basic lack of maturity. When he settles down a little into the more normal poem-framework, he exploits triteness Ato its 'outer limits. I quote a few lines from "Car Crash Blues," but this type of language is used in the poems "Without You," "Don't Worry/ Everything's Going to be All Right," and in the fantastically cliched "Love Is:" "You make me feel like/someone's driven me into a wall/baby/You make me feel like/Sunday night at the village hall/baby/You make me feel like a Desert Rat. .. When he is successful he is s t r a n g e 1 y exotic. "Galactic Poem" and "Salad Poem" are executed with a color and inten- sity which are rarely found else- where. Perhaps the best poem of this collection is the long "I Want to Paint." Here is Henri the artist writing a painting on paper; one can feel the texture of the emotion. William Burrough's books may have a few chuckles here and p there, but the reader's laughter is usually an escape from the horror presented on the page. So it is with Snaps by Victor Hernandez Cruz: ". . . or like they/all retarded/why don't I/ just cut one and/see if they for/real they for/real lord they/for real. .. Here is the dirty hopeless New York City, real but very scary. The "snap" could be that of a switchblade, or of a neck being broken; or a heart. Perhaps I'mn more afraid of what Cruz is say- ing, than disliking his work in terms of literary accomplish- ment. Unlike Henri, he knows his medium; the poems writhe within this framework Cruz has constructed. He writes about children without parents, wives without husbands, and himself without his beloved Carmen. People are in his poems, people and drugs., Despite such frantic lines as "you bang them people/up/blow them up/snap their neck/eat their brains out/burn their eyes out/knuckles away," (from "dead man is"), his drug poems, specifically "Cocaine Galore," "white powder iV" and "Coming Down," are more tender, the language is less harsh, and the reality presented certainly less stark. Brooklyn and the winding subways run smoothly, the pick- pockets operate automatically in some dreamlike ritual which really affects no one. Drugs and music are the key- stones. His rhythms near the end of the book take on the pulse of blues. It is never whin- ning, but hard and driving and TOM BROERSMA is a grad- uate student in English who is currently preparing a thesis on the works of Peter De Vries. JIM PETERS is poetry editor of Generation magazine and a frequent contributor of music reviews to The Daily review pag6. JOHN GRAY is editor of BOOKS. He writes reviews whenever he gets up the nerve. Hopwood Lecture, Peter Do Yries, Novelist Author of: THE TUNNEL OF LOVE, COMFORT ME WITH APPLES, THE MACKEREL PLAZA, THROUGH THE FIELDS OF CLOVER, THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB, THE CAT'S PAJAMAS, WITCH'S MILK, and others. Member of the Na- tional Institute of Arts and Letters. Frequent contributer to THE NEW YORKER. I Peter De Vries "EXPLORING INNERSPACE" Announcement of Hopwood Awards for 1969 will follow the lecture Wednesday, April 9, 8:00 P.M. Rackham Lecture Hall Blow Yourself TO POSTER SIZE 2 ft. x 3 ft. Send any Black and White or Color Photo, also any newspaper or mago- zine photo. We will send you a 2 It. x 3 it. BLO-UP...perfett POP ART poster. A$25 $3 50s 3 ft. x 4 ft. Bo-Up...... $7.50 OPEN TO THE PUBLIC WORLD CAMPUS AFLOAT Representatives for World Campus Afloat, Chap- man College will be in the Union, International Center, April 3-7 to distribute information about an accredited semester of around-the-world travel and shipboard study. Slides will be shown for all inter- ested students and faculty. MONDAY, APRIL 7 International Center 5:30 p.m. For additional information contact World Campus Afloat, Chap- man College, Orange, Calif. 92666. F i r I Photo Jigsaw Puzzle 350 1lIt. x 11/ ft. $ 5 Send any B & W or color photo. Moiled in 40 easy to "ssemble'pieces. --, The University of Michigan Center for Russian and East European Studies! and Your original photo returned undam. aged. Add 50c postage and handling for EACH item ordered Send check or M.O. (No C.O.D.) to: PHOTO POSTER, INC oept. O-374 210 E. 23rd St., New York, N.Y. 1 Department of Economics presents a lecture by 11 The University of Michigan GILBERT and SULLIVAN SOCIETY ANNOUNCES PETITIONING for its all-campus summer musical THE MUSIC MAN, ALEKSANDER BAJT Professor of Economics, University of Ljubljana (Yugoslavia), and Visiting Professor of Economics, University of Virginia 11 on "MARKET SOCIALISM AND ECONOMIC REFORM IN YUGOSLAVIA" TIME: 4:10 p.m. Tuesday. 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