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Show Anting Alone Page 246 among the flies and dirt and rock and roll? Is he so burningly bored with Fort Carson life that he has actually developed a strange sentimental urge to return, one way or another, to the so-called life of the mind? Has he taken up the Bic four-color pen and the Sony micro-cassette recorder for the first time in months? There, on his raunchy canvas cot, has he written the first installment of what promises to be a long and distinguished writing career? Is he really in print now on the respectable pages of the Kansas Review of the Collective Humanities, even though, like a stupid motherfucker, he forgot to enclose an SASE or even a return address when he submitted? A developing young author like Sam, consciously cultivating a "reverberating style," naturally desires more than anything else to learn to exploit the complete resources of our syntax and vocabulary. This desire inevitably overrides any need to communicate clearly. So, as it were completely by random chance, Sam apparently wound up lionizing rather than mocking Spikey, as he'd intended to do in the piece. For one thing, in the fistfight scene Sam allowed his own vestigial male ego to run rampant in presenting himself as a formidable opponent, while his lust for verisimilitude made Spikey win the combat hands down in a single heroic stroke, as though Right were on his side. Why lionize a fascist? comes the rich, deep, prophetic voice of old Elijah, betraying tones of delight and mild amusement and even a little envy, the courageous tones of a Jew about to print, for the pure sake of Art, a pro-fascist piece of - - what? A short story or other such work of the imagination? An essay? Might |
