Solomon

CHILDHOOD OR CHILDISHNESS: WALLACE MARKFIELD AND JEWISH NOSTALGIA/SENTIMENTALISM

Eric Solomon

First, a quote from You Could Live If They Let You in reference to the protagonist’s attitude towards academics: "Yentas with facts" (p. 5); or the problem with "academic lives and academic wives" and academic parties—"Meanwhile I’m trying, I’m dying to reach the food—those saltines and one mashed-up sardine. But a wife is pulling on me. And they’re strong; academic wives are all strong. Because they do a lot of sanding, they sand down everything. ‘Brandeis! Do you know anyone at Brandeis? Kosher-Kosher. Yeshiva U. Matzo-matzo. Appalachia? Sheepshead Bay? The Dust Bowl? Anywhere!’ She has to get out of here because all the other faculty wives resent her, they’re jealous of her wardrobe: Two babushkas with matching Ace bandages. . ."And then academics go to Casa Wong-Wong to eat, "it’s the finest of Chinese cuisine, the Modem Language Association always eats there" (pp. 120-1). One should take warning. Scholarly sessions can be foolish, and exegeses of Wallace Markfield’s three novels can lead us into his own critical formula for Jewish humor: parody/paranoia.

For Markfield, as for most Jewish novelists, nostalgia for the matter of childhood, for the malomars and egg cream, the movies and radio programs, for the jokes and the food (oi! the food)—sustains the books. Yet the temptation for Jewish novelists from Mike to Herb Gold, from Henry to Philip Roth, from Anna Yerzienska to Erica Jong, from Levin, Fuchs, Rosenfeld to Bellow, Malamud, Heller is to test the laughter part of the laughters-tears formula by employing popular culture desiderata that can lead to a richly nostalgic evocation of childhood but might result in a compulsively trivia-based collection of childish icons. And when the writer is a jokester, a king of one liners (and Markfield is as funny a stand-up comedian as Willie Howard or Groucho Marx or Alan King), then the "novel" may become an anthology of Jewish humor or memories—no more formally cohesive than a Leo Rosten or Harry Golden "book." For all the social, religious, political, psychological interest in the moves from shtetl to ghetto to suburb, for all the alienation and marginality, for all the exile, parental stress,

transcendence, irony, parable, dialectic that qualify Jewish fiction, the desperate comic cry for the candy store and the movie house, for the Horowitz Margareten matzo meal and the Stromberg-Carlson radio, for Ken Maynard and Bobbie Breen, Dick Tracy and Moon Mullins . . . stop me before I remember more! . . . can undercut both the form of the novel and the essential meaning of the text.

Perhaps the dangers of Jewish comic fiction become most clear for us by an examination of Wallace Markfield’s fiction in reverse order of publication (the end is in the beginning). You Could Live If They Let You (1974) uses the demise of a Lenny Bruce-like comedian, told through interviews with a goyish professor who becomes a double, as a frame for wonderful comic riffs. Teitlebaum’s Window (1970) is a Joycean bildungsroman, a portrait of the Jewish intellectual as a smart kid in the Depression and has the feel of a Life magazine montage of Brighton Beach. But To An Early Grave (1964) succeeds as a study of the uses of the past for a frantic group of aging Jewish left-wing cultural critics. In this last-first work, the tension of the novel valorizes trivia to define characters who are dealing with death, of a person, of a body of memories . . . of youth. Here the spirits of Delmore Schwartz and Isaac Rosenfeld reign rather than those of Myron Cohen and Buddy Hackett. Here is trivia for nostalgia’s sake, not pop culture for trivial comic-sentimentality.

You Could Live If They Let You is Markfield’s funniest book. The last days of Jules Farber, stand-up comedian par excellence, distraught father of an autistic child, brutalized, estranged husband of a woman who makes Philip Roth wives resemble Shirley Temple in comparison, guru to the frustrated professor Chandler Van Horton—these final days come in the form of interviews, tapes, shows, conversations, critical commentaries . . . but above all, memories, anecdotes, jokes. And the matter of Farber (and with Farber?) involves his compulsive memory of every Jewish comic routine and every detail of the popular culture of his youth. The book is grand shtick: but, as the narrator questions, is it "truth or triviality?" (p. 14). Markfield’s Farber not only catches the trivial truths of the Jewish experience, he also invents a marvelously rendered sense of the goyish truthful trivia of his protege’s life, "compounded of Dr. Pepper and ham hocks and fish fries and snowmobiles and pickup trucks and Rotary Club bake-offs where lumpen lugs joined on American Legion bowling nights to talk of trailer hitches and creeping socialism. . . . He had me coming ofage. (At nineteen months uttering my first sentence: ‘Trouble at the mill!’)" (p. 15). Yet Markfield is merely playing the game of comic stereotyping—"The way my people carry shopping bags your people carry guns" (p. 16)—not developing theme or character, or making a genuine argument.

From Erasmus High School to Borscht Belt, from the supper table to the television studio, Farber’s jokes fit into Markfield’s biographical form that parodies scholarly explication (by "titans of trivia"). Yet trivia both makes and breaks the book. The most heart-warming rapprochement between the biographer

and the dying comic comes when Farber grunts "‘Where did Dr. Kildare practice? I remember where he practiced—Who can say if he heard my Blair General Hospital!’" (p. 82). Farber’s life and Markfield’s novel, then, consist of ethnic one liners:

My mother hit harder than your mother
We had a crazier girl on our block
My mother was more possessive than your mother
My mother cooked fatter foods than your mother . . . (p. 87).

As is the case for all trivia buffs, for Wallace Markfield and his persona, the past is better, more authentic, less in the hands of modem "ambivalence chaser(s)" (p. 141). The advertisements in the East Flatbush Jewish Chronicle ("From Built-Up Shoes to Built-Up Breasts: You’ll Look Nice with our Orthopedic Device" p. 141) are qualitatively better than those now appearing in the New York Review of Books. So what else is old?

In a reflexive moment that condones—and I think subtly condemns— Markfield’s fictional technique, Van Horton grasps the glory and wonder of Brooklyn memories; "As I might speak of E. E. Cummings’ enormous room or Swann’s Madeline you speak of Dubrow’s cafeteria and Mallomars" (p. 151). And Farber admits to a momentary tension—"What should I say? Should I say you can’t go home again? You can go, but rents are sky-high" (p. 152)—and sentiment—"I’ll send fountain pens and stamp albums in the name of Jeanne Cram and Ann Rutherford and Francis Dee and Bonita Granville" (p. 153). And while the book is too abrasive in its humor to be called sentimental, the novel truly trivializes, as does its protagonist. Jules Farber’s apocolyptic vision of the two last survivors of a World War III holocaust is purposefully reductive, a comment on Wallace Markfield’s creative aim: "Then through the vapor I’ll see him. And he’ll see me. And we’ll walk to each other and feel and pound on each other’s backs. And I’ll go, ‘Wow, oh woweee!’ And he’ll go, ‘Cagney and Robinson played together in one picture and one picture only, and the name of that picture was . . .’" (p. 167). William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Speech it’s not, but for Wallace Markfield, ’twill suffice. No novel, this You CouldLive If They Let You. But—oh, paradox of critics—I loved it! I laughed. Who could ask for anything more?

Well, we at the MLA could. Do. And Teitlebaum’s Window, Markfield’s "big novel," fails by its very ambition to be not only funny but also a fiction that treats character development and linear commentary on the times.

The novel has the familiar post-Joyce innocent-to-experience form: eleven chapters from 1932 to 1942 that start with Simon Sloan’s childhood memories and end with his escaping marriage by enlisting in the army after Pearl Harbor. Each chapter opens with the Depression data in Teitlebaum’s store window—from "President Roosevelt had a hundred days but you only got till this

Monday to enjoy such savings on our Farm Girl Pot Cheese" (p. 3) to "To speed up the Second Front we will from now on be forced to sell our farmer cheese in quantities of no less than half a pound" (p. 379). Like a Brighton Beach Dos Passos Jewish Newsreel appear Workman’s Circle Socialist ads, the sexual mores of Ringelman the dentist, Fat Rosalie’s desire for a Suchard (candy) to comic page trivia: time is when Mary Mixup has her share, when Benny (the tramp) can’t drown his kittens, when Smitty goes to work for Mr. Bailey. From Horlick’s milk, then, to Jewish family sturm und drang, the settings of nostalgia and sentiment prevail. Even the fire escape is a montage of the past—"seltzer-bottle valves, day-old rolls wetted down for the birds, a snip of Octagon Soap on an oyster shell, a beach-ball bladder, a yahrzeit glass . . . a lima-bean plant dying in a Diamond Kosher Salt box. . . ."(p. 6). Counterpoint, yes; background, surely; rich realistic detail, yeah; but the marvelous trivial stuff of the times cannot hide the fact that readers of Jewish fiction must find only too familiar Simon, his parents, his gang, his teachers, his girls. True, Markfield’s—Simon’s—film memories are brilliantly specialized: "Only Yesterday is John Boles . . . they had it with Guns of the Pecos at the Miramar . . . and The World Moves On. . . . That was Paul Muni, that was Aline McMahon. . . "(p. 16). Movies, comics, candies, jokes, jokes, jokes are more important than his mother’s "drooped stomach," his father’s rage, schoolboy fights and romances. Some of the nostalgia is brilliantly rendered as in Chapter 2, Simon’s youthful diary that tells of magazine articles and school assignments (a debate, "If King Kong Could Beat Up Frankenstein in a Fair Fight"—p. 35), character sketches (Hymie the Hitter and his senile bubbee), and conversations that mix convoluted dialect and absurd illogic. The characters are obsessive collectors and list-makers, lists of popular culture artifacts and foods, of relatives and insults. What does a 1930’s Jewish mother dream of giving her prospective daughter-in-law? "A hocking knife, sour salt, my certain polish to shine cut glass, rubber bands galore, two toaster covers, a sponge with a grip on it that you can never get your hands wet, a soap dish, rubber coasters, they’ll fit underneath any bed and the bed never slips, a brick from when Luna Park burned down, it’s the perfect size to put underneath an ironing board" (p. 129). The details are right, comically correct, and, alas, free-floating. The novel is one large showcase filled with Wallace Markfield’s special ethnic memory for life’s externals.

Some of the chapters have humorous flair as fine as appears in any Jewish fiction. Chapter 4 is a tour de force as a furious husband tells his woes to a responsive crowd while he teeters suicidally from a fire escape, argues with his wife and her babushka, explains his need for creamed spinach and a union shop. Simon’s high school and Brooklyn College encounters with girls who demand Marxist purity before they will relieve his sexual pangs are both fine renditions of late thirties doctrinal sectarianism and farcical views of a youth in heat. Time does move, but in details. Simon’s diary appears among his college lecture notes; the motives for anger become more political--Irv the Trotskyite doesn’t mind being

bopped by Simon’s girlfriend, it’s being bopped with PM If Wallace Markfield’s third novel uses the life of a Lenny Bruce to allow the Jewish novelist as stand-up comedian to deliver his jokes, then Markfield’s second novel employs the maturation of a Jewish Stephen Dedalus to permit the author to display his remarkable memory for past settings as reflected in cultural kitsch. Although the tone is tough rather than sentimental, the material is remembered not with the nimbus of childhood glory but with the shades of childish clutching to nostalgia. But his first novel balances an authentic, funky past with characters attempting to make that past usable, and in that act revealing themselves--through authorial control--as mock social historians, mock intellectuals.. . and mock human beings.

As always, plot is of little importance to Wallace Markfield. To An Early Grave traces the wild picaresque wanderings of four Jewish intellectuals: Morroe Rieff, a sympathetic hanger-on to the literary coattails of the New York Jewish critic set of the 1950s; Felix Ottenstein the veteran Yiddish literary journalist; Barnet Weiner, "poet, critic, contributor to the literary quarterlies," a popular culturist; and Holly Levine, blocked serious literary critic. They meet, mourn, and try to find the funeral in darkest Brooklyn of their enemy/friend, critic/leader Leslie Braverman, the literary, literary critic—the leftist Jewish intellectual personified. Perhaps a parody of Faulkner’s already parodic As I Lay Dying, Markfield’s novel works well, partly because of the absurd situations—a comic fist fight with a taxi driver, attendance at the wrong pretentious services—partly because of the wildly witty cultural dialogues, mostly because of the interplay among these brilliantly sketched characters. And the novel’s strength, its unity, comes from the attention to the past. This time Markfield joins the love of cultural trivia to the love for the dead trivia collector. Thus, the past is not sentimentalized, but usable. They weep for the dead critic, for their own failed artistic lives, but mostly they elegize the immediate past of youthful literary hopes and authentic Jewish hard-edged humor. In both cases, the America of popular culture provides frame of reference and basic theme.

The book opens with Morroe remembering "Poor little... schnook. We were just talking about him. . . . How we were all in Washington Square, and how Leslie had a sudden yen, he had to have an egg cream" (p.4). Markfield’s strategy is patent: "It’s funny what a person remembers. A million images to choose from" (p. 4). These images are the stuff of Jewish literary humor, and they work to keep the book a comic elegy, not a sentimental return to childhood. "Like the old days" (p. 5) is the theme, but anti-sentimental acceptance of the presence is the counter-theme. The village was "coming and going, there was a tumult and shouting, and when you could you did a favor. Yes" (p. 7), but also, "You couldn’t take it anymore—the lousy shopping, and whenever we took a walk, bumping into somebody you couldn’t stand" (p. 7).

Mourning is also self-mockery, whether it be for the good old days under the Czar (p. 25), YSPL and Hound & Horn (p. 44), one’s own youth "as he

remembered his photo on the dustjacket of New Critics: 1944, jokes—"about the Jewish intellectual who goes to the midwest so he should feel alienated. Where he has this line: ‘It may well be that God is listed in the telephone directory under the name of Kaplan’" (p. 80). And irony towards the professional culture course, "From ‘Little Nemo’ to ‘Li’l Abner’" (p. 90), so the others query his credentials, and he counters that his piece on John Ford has twice been anthologized; but he must undergo a true flyting, an inquisition from who said "Golly Moses, I got the whim whams all over" (p. 91, Little Annie Rooney) to the nemesis of Bim Gump (Madame Zenda) to the name of the Green Hornet’s driver (p. 92, Kato). All four sing rousingly the Jack Armstrong theme, "Wave the flag for Hudson High, boys . . . Won’t you try Wheaties. . ." (p. 92) as their fellowship is genuine and kitschy.

They are "our gang," and they do recall Leslie whose antics provide a mock-up of Jewish entrance into the literary academic culture—whimsical and ironic; Leslie lecturing on Lorna Doone at a Utah writer’s workshop, making them play the Dostoevsky game (guilt), worshipping the White Goddess (pp. 112-13).

A rabbi’s oratory brings critical responses, "Definitely overblown," a "golden mouthpiece" (p. 119), but also, movingly, reminds Morroe of his mother’s death where he grieved by overstuffing himself with funeral dishes, "cold pickled fish and sweetbreads and tiny meatballs. . ." (p. 120). Even a rabbi, extolling the wrong dead man, draws on the popular past, on "Babe Ruth and the Katzenjammer Kids and Tar-zan of the apes. . ." (p. 124). Stopping for sustenance at a candy store, the four pilgrims seek malteds with Melorols on top; they find a realistic owner: "Go fifteen years back. Go twenty. Find me a President Roosevelt and what I once had in strength, I’ll sell you Melorols" (p. 141). Another trivia contest settles a fierce misunderstanding. And such trivia! The Shadow’s chauffeur (Moey from Brooklyn), Tom Mix’s best friend (Wrangler) . . . but not Popeye and the Thimble Theater with whom Levine could not relate. Then Bogart movies, the horses of Western heroes, nine books by Albert Payson Terhune . . . "and eleven movies where Porter Hall had been featured but not starred" (p. 154).

Why did these thinkers and critics worship the past—even when they were young intellectuals they sang the ballads of Bessie Smith and imitated James Cagney" (p. 159)? Because the present is hard to deal with. Laughter must break through tears and deny sentimental self pity by making even love for the departed days and acceptance of a grim present comic. "Smilin’ Jack is married, Warner Baxter, Richard Dix and Warren William died" (p. 164). Their dead friend, therefore, won’t miss too much. As in the later novels, Morroe can mourn his own past and even (ala Roth with Ann Frank) invent a previous life with a lost Goldie whose name he discovers on a gravestone. He laments his own buried life as well as his friend’s unfinished one. But Morroe can’t weep when the coffin is covered, even though he could when the planes shot King Kong off the Empire State Building or when Lew Ayers reached for the butterfly. Pop nostalgia refuses sentimentality, and To An Early Grave is a stronger novel because of this tension,

this rejection. Dreams of following Leslie through Dublin streets of The Informer searching for egg creams incorporate sentiment into comic reality. The four mourners will survive loss of the past by continuing to lose it. "On Thursday the Griffith is starting their Randolph Scott festival. Coroner Creek and Frontier Marshall. We’ll make a night of it" (p. 206). To An Early Grave, then, remains Wallace Markfield’s most accomplished novel, finding its strength in the shaping of the trivial past to sustain the deadening present. Ultimately the dead film stars and comic-page figures live in the protagonists’ nostalgic memories, and the things of childhood need not be put away.

San Francisco State University