THE VOICE OF OUR CULTURE:
THOMAS BERGER’S REINHART IN LOVE

When Thomas Berger’s Reinhart in Love appeared in 1962, its comic element alone was distinct enough a feature to cause remark. That year, for example, a New School writing teacher, aware of Berger primarily through his early stories, asked him if "he knew of the other Thomas Berger who wrote comic novels, one of which has just come out."¹ The comic aspect of Reinhart in Love, indeed of all of Berger’s work, has received the larger portion of his readers’ attention in the subsequent twenty years. In 1975 William Heath, speaking at the MLA convention, summed up this response to the novel by saying that "page by page this is one of the funniest novels in American Literature."² Berger himself has called Reinhart in Love "the only comedy I have ever written."³ Nevertheless, as Marjorie Ryan has noticed, the comic is not the only energy that pulses here, as is registered in the "increasingly sombre tone as the book progresses."⁴

This darker tone is worthy of our attention, for it is never entirely absent from Berger’s work and, in fact, is a major component of the early fiction and nonfiction, emerging most directly in passages such as the following from Crazy in Berlin (1958):

the vast trenches of slack human skins, the bones inside all loose from their connections, and oven-grates of human ash . . . that bouquet of burned men which for recognition it is unnecessary ever to have smelled before, and for sleep impossible to forget after.⁵

In this first novel, Reinhart expresses to another character his regard for the crushed rubble landscape of Occupation Berlin, where "all the crap has been blasted away, leaving something honest" (p. 358). Reinhart in Love, by contrast, is mired in the plenitude of post-war American mass-culture, and nothing honest is to be found anywhere. This situation gives rise to both the bright and the dark tones of the novel; however, the somberness emerges to the degree that the central comic figure, Reinhart, seems engulfed by his environment, victimized by its values.

Looked at in this way, Reinhart in Love may be considered as part of a continuing criticism of American culture by our own writers of the past hundred years, a tradition frequently manifesting itself in the business or success novel, popularly represented by the

Horatio Alger stories, but more prominently exemplified by such books as Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, Norris’s McTeague, Dreiser’s Cowperwood books, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. All of these books, in spite of their vast differences, have inspected and found wanting the values expressed in American material culture, especially as those values are promulgated by and through American commerce.

In Berger’s presentation, the material culture has virtually taken on a life of its own, and most of the controlling forces in Reinhart in Love devolve from and subsequently sustain a world not of ideas or feelings but of things, products, consumer goods, which have come to exercise their unique form of tyranny. Reinhart, for example, finds "that more authority and more possessions paradoxically diminish true responsibility, for a man tends to worry about these rather than himself; thus, they stay sleek and he gets flabby."⁶

Berger’s subject matter shapes not only the themes of his novel, but also its form. In a world glutted with things, a book about that world will make a copious inventory of personal possessions and of the fears and struggles of those caught in their mesh. Thus Reinhart in Love abounds in lists, more than a dozen of them, lists of furniture, noises, odors, contents of drawers and garages and garbage cans; lists of supposed sexual aberrations and "women had." All of these lend a texture to the novel that validates Reinhart’s horror at civilian life: "He was going down, down, down in the quicksand of suburban faeces" (p. 72). [The excrementary image is not incidental: Cosmopolitan, of course, is a sewer company, and the base note in the novel is Reinhart’s judgment early and late that "Civilian life was shit" (p. 394).]

The weightiest list of them all is that which inventories the contents of Reinhart pere’s linen closet, a cornucopia of medicaments and devices for every human surface, limb, and orifice: eye wash, atomizer, throat swabs, leg splints, enema hose, suppositories, and so on for over a hundred items. Reinhart’s mock-heroic encounter with these arrayed forces ends, if not in defeat, then in a compromise which might be taken as the generative core of the novel: "When, beaten, Reinhart ceased to struggle, it grew very quiet under the melange, except for certain siftings when he breathed; a kind of existence might have been feasible there" (p. 74).

The notion that some kind of life might be possible in this environment is the active base of all of Reinhart’s efforts towards assimilation into postwar American society. And the milestones

of his progress—the larger organizational pattern of the novel—are set, fittingly enough, in terms of material gains, especially in terms of clothing, homes, and jobs, as Reinhart rises from Army khakis to blue serge, from cellar laundry room to Vetsville Quonset hut to suburban Tudor, from apprentice salesman to chief executive.

In our own century the values that threaten Reinhart received their first concentrated and unabashed expression in the decade just after World War I. Calvin Coolidge’s pronouncement that "the business of the United States is business" is well enough known, as is Harding’s dictum that "we want a period with less government in business and more business in government." Late in the decade Earnest E. Calkins wrote in his essay "Business the Civilizer" that "the work that religion, government, and war have failed in must be done by business. . . . That eternal job of administering this planet must be turned over to the businessman."⁷ It was an age in which the folk-figure of the Yankee trader became a corporate manager, in which business as an institution became sacrosanct, in which metaphors conjoining business and religion abounded. Coolidge compared the factory to a temple and the workers to worshippers therein. Roger Babson wrote a series of books on religion and business. His Fundamentals of Prosperity tries to show how religion can be used as a prime market indicator, but more remarkable is the skilled interweaving of business and religious dictions in Prayers for Businessmen and Religion and Business.

All of this is indicative of the cultural matrix, scarcely changed after World War II, out of which Reinhart in Love comes. Its direct expression is found mainly in the outrageous rhetoric of Claude Humbold, who, if one judges by his frequent references to "the Big Boy Upstairs," might himself have authored a book called Religion and Business: "‘He’s the greatest bidnessman of them all, bud, and knows a bad property when he eyes one. Don’t forfeit your Big Commission’"(p. 99). Or he might have written an encomium on Business the Civilizer:

"Organization! Where would we be without it? If our public men don’t channel our efforts in the right directions, buddy boy, we’d be no better than them poor benighted coons in darkest Africa, with only a little rag around their tail. Recall Trader Horn, bud, or uz that before your time? Yeaou, roaaaaaaaarrr, screeeeeeech"—he simulated the cries of certain wild animals—"life in the raw, bud, it ain’t no laugh." (p. 306)

Most of the struggles in the novel are enlivened by the contrast between the divagations of Reinhart’s mind and the orderly, inexorable push of Claude’s claims on Reinhart’s life. Claude begins as a figment of Reinhart’s worst nightmares, emerges as a power idol and surrogate father, and then recedes to a gratulatory voice on the telephone. Especially in the latter stages of the novel, Claude runs in counterpoint to Reinhart’s growing presence in the world, divesting himself of office, car, and home, retiring to a room over a grocery store, his chief means of communication the telephone.

For beneath all of Claude’s transformations, there is always the Voice. More than the voice of a character, it is the voice of a culture. Its strident tones were already in Reinhart’s mind in Crazy in Berlin when Schatzi "brought forth one of those American fountain pens that profess to last a lifetime—Reinhart wondered if he had owned it in Auschwitz: ‘Mr. Schatzi of Berlin, Germany, used this Superba Everlasting Masterwriter for three years in the living death of a concentration camp. Yet when he was liberated it still wrote good as new!’" (p. 275). This voice is the impulse behind those forces of which Reinhart’s father is a willing victim, Reinhart himself a less docile one. Its mode of influence is the various forms of coercion by which it has shaped and now sustains a whole culture.

The problem is of long-standing interest to Berger, and may be traced as far back as the nonfiction writing that he did in the early fifties, a Berger that is pretty much lost to us now thirty years into his career. The image that emerges from the pages of such periodicals as The New Leader and The Socialist Call is that of a man profoundly disaffected by the temper of his times. In brief, the source of his disaffection is that we live in an age of terror, chaos, apocalypse, and total ideology, whose aim it is to render men superfluous not only through physical extinction but also through neutralization of the moral, critical, and aesthetic intelligence. The great enemy of the human is not, as so many had feared, science, but politics, total politics that "has increasingly become the movement of human masses, with its aim the extinction of the complexity, variation, and possibilities among men."⁸

By the time of Reinhart in Love the locus of this devaluation of the individual had moved from the political arena to the market place, from government to commerce. The effects are no less insidious. In fact, Reinhart might well be described in the same terms that Tony Tanner has used for one of Saul Bellow’s figures: "Augie is constantly running into great blocks or swarms and mists of words

which seek or threaten to pre-empt his consciousness, replacing his unique subjectivity with an alien version."⁹ Similarly, Reinhart’s consciousness turns frequently on half-remembered allusions, "the detritus of a year and a half of university" (p. 170), quotations that he can no longer complete but which govern his vision. In addition to mass education, many of the popular and commercial arts have conditioned the style of thought, feeling, and expression in characters throughout Berger’s fiction, often to the extent that, as Frederic Jameson says in another regard, "There no longer exists anything like a personal or individual speech, like a private thought: [they] merely practice conventionalized formulae whose form dictates its own content."¹⁰ In Reinhart in Love this influence derives largely from advertising. Thus, if Reinhart’s father, at the dinner table, begins his praise of the canned fruit in mere paraphrase of commercial advertising—

"First pick of the crop. You never get a tinge of yellow towards the end of a DelPonte pear. Inspectors follow every inch of the canning process. They find a bit of the core on one pear, they disauthorize the lot—and I don’t mean your one can but your whole carload"—

he ends in verbatim use of mass-ad diction: "‘Because of this their product costs a few pennies more, but is well worth it to discriminating consumers’" (p. 29).

One of the most far-reaching illusions in the novel is Reinhart’s sense that he, in the midst of this environment, can be a free agent, a creature of will. When, near the end of the book, he exhorts the tent-show audience to "Do, instead of Look. Act, rather than Imagine. Move, in place of Talk" (p. 425), he is speaking out of a deeply felt inadequacy of his own: the sense that his own power to do has been usurped—by human passions, by material objects, by the sewer scheme, by Claude Humbold. It was a gesture of defeat that he went to Claude for a job at all, and his sense of loss was immediate: "He felt distinctly deprived of something he had with him when he entered the office." A bit later we are told that "Reinhart collected himself—which was what had turned out to be missing" (p. 91).

Indeed, it is in his relationship to Claude that Reinhart’s relative impotence is best represented. In this respect, one need only recall that even at the apex of success Reinhart mans Claude’s office, lives in Claude’s house, and drives Claude’s automobile. That car, the Gigantic, embodies both Claude’s very spirit and Reinhart’s surrender of his own, for it is one machine that he clearly never masters:

"The Gigantic sounded a Bronx cheer very similar to Claude’s, as if he were under the hood, in fact; and stepped on its own gas" (p. 386). The automobile scenes in the novel, the most conspicuous examples of Reinhart’s loss of control over his movements, and by extension, his life, are symbolic of the controlling forces residing outside the self.

Reinhart in Love presents us with an image of the individual struggling in a web of public determinants on an order "making concentration camps and secret police a sport" (p. 72). That this entrapment is a fertile source for slapstick, farce, satire, and plain comedy, Reinhart in Love demonstrates more than adequately. But from within all of the comedy, the larger human implications cast a long shadow, indeed.

HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY

NOTES

    ¹Letter to the present writer, dated 5 March 1975.
    ²William Heath, "Human, All-Too Human: Thomas Berger’s Reinhart Trilogy," paper presented at the MLA annual convention, Chicago, 1975, p. 3.
    ³Letter to the present writer, dated 28 August 1975.
    ⁴Marjorie Ryan, "Four Contemporary Satires and the Problem of Norms," Satire Newsletter, 6 (1969), 44.
    ⁵Thomas Berger, Crazy in Berlin (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), p. 48. Hereafter cited in the text.
    ⁶Thomas Berger, Reinhart in Love (New York: Richard W. Baron, 1970), p. 338. Hereafter cited in the text.
    ⁷Earnest E. Calkins, "Business the Civilizer," The Atlantic Monthly (February 1928), p. 115.
    ⁸T. L. Berger "Ideology and Literature," Intro, I, Nos. 3–4 (1951), 171.
    ⁹Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 68.
    ¹⁰Frederic Jameson, "Wyndham Lewis as Futurist," Hudson Review, 26 (Summer 1973), 300.