"IT IS NOT EASY TO FIND ONE’S PROPER ROLE IN MODERN CIVILIZATION. IN THE OLD DAYS EVERYONE WAS ASSIGNED A POSITION IN LIFE. YOU WERE BORN A SERF AND STAYED ONE. IT IS DIFFICULT TO DEAL WITH FREEDOM. YOU TAKE ME, I WAS INTERESTED IN SO MANY THINGS WHEN YOUNG I COULDN’T DECIDE ON ANY. . . ."

—CARL REINHART

Thomas Berger is hardly the first American author to fall in love with a protagonist and to chart his adventures through a series of books. Generally speaking, the impulse works more successfully in "pulps" (mysteries, cowboy novels, and the like) than it does in serious fiction. Mark Twain, for example, continued to concoct episodes about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn long after their gold had turned to pyrite. In our century, however, the continuing sagas of Nick Adams or Eugene Gant or Studs Lonigan are impressive evidence that the literary sequel need not always be viewed with skepticism. Indeed, we read these Modernist landmarks as examples of the best that the first half of the twentieth century felt and wrote.

I would submit that something of the same case can be made for those books that follow John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman, and Thomas Berger’s Carl Reinhart. Taken as a whole, these radically differing portrayals of the post-World War II landscape rank among our literature’s finest achievements. In Updike’s case, each of the Rabbit books is anchored to the gritty, realistic details of its respective decade and to Rabbit’s continuing quest for grace. For Roth, Zuckerman is a way of reduplicating Stephen Dedalus’s quarrels with family, church, and state in comic American-Jewish dress. Berger’s Reinhart series is harder to characterize, not only because it sprawls from Carl Reinhart’s stint during the Berlin occupation to his late-blooming success as a TV chef, but because Berger packs his novels with droll commentary on a wide range of American mythologies. The result is a dense, Rabelesian texture, as uncompromising in its vision as it is American to its bones. For all its darkness, its black humor, if you will, Carl Reinhart’s odyssey through American folkways and foibles is a testament to the generous spirit and its capacity to survive.

Granted, Reinhart can be written down in a single word: he is a schlemiel. As a youngster, he "was inclined to solid beef rather than the sharp definition of muscle permitted to more wiry types; and he was clumsy, tripping over roots on tardy runs to eight-o’clock classes, tending to enter a doorway with poor aim and collide with its frame, sometimes splintering the wood." At the same time, however, there is a strong metaphysical itch—and more than a touch of the poet—in the young Reinhart:

When in adolescence Reinhart was suddenly overwhelmed with the purposelessness of the bleak journey from pablum to embalming fluid—not for himself, but everybody else; he would somehow, alone, escape . . . because he alone had the guts or intelligence to ask questions rather than weakly submit, just as the power of his will would protect alone, from eyeglasses, baldness, false teeth, poverty, a wife. (pp. 32–33)

In Crazy in Berlin (1958), Reinhart brings both aspects of his schlemielhood to a war-ravaged Europe. He had, from birth, "been a good sturdy German type"—one who lived in "a solid German house," on a diet of "G. potato salad, G. cole slaw," etc.—and now finds himself a medic in a land much in need of healing.

Alas, whatever else Reinhart might be, he is neither Grail Knight nor dying god. His military "home" is a compound that the 1209th General Hospital appropriated for itself, after evicting the German residents. If a novel like Catch-22 took darkly comic pains to demonstrate that "War is bureaucratic hell" and that soldiers are as likely to die from misplaced paper as they are from well-aimed bullets, Crazy in Berlin finds its brand of moral absurdity in representative passages like the following:

The colonel was neither opposed to comfort for his men nor a partisan of pain and deprivation for the owners who would after all one day return; he was nothing, no Savonarola, no crypto-fascist symbol of the military mind, not even, because he was a medic, quite a soldier, nor, because he was commanding officer, quite a doctor—but owning to this he wished grievously to be something, if only a converter of matter from one form to another. Thus he periodically had put to the torch, had resolved into carbon and the immaterial gases, the giant cairn of objects which Reinhart and Marsala now skirted on their way to the south building: couches and loveseats, dining tables, bedsteads, chaises, lounges, sideboards, three pianos, fourteen wind-up victrolas, two thousand records; eight thousand books; rugs, pictures, tablecloths, postcard collections, skis, jewelry boxes, letters, diaries, journals, manuscripts, apologias, Nazi

post cards, memoranda, paper, paper, paper; and one little souvenir plaque from the Western Hemisphere: an electric-pencil sketch of a pickaninny sitting in a Chic Sale, inscribed "Best wishes from Savannah, Ga. . . .

Five men had been busted in rank when caught salvaging items from the auto-da-fe. On the other hand, the colonel did not lack a rude sense of justice: if you could make away with an overstuffed chair or an alarm clock without being seen, it was yours and beyond all future confiscation. (pp. 15–16)

I have quoted Berger at some length because his style—with its dense texture of detail, its penchant for the elaborate "aside" and, most important of all, its unerring sense of rhythm—works to best advantage in paragraph units. I say this realizing full well that Berger can turn a descriptive phrase with the best of them— as he does, for example, when fixing an army dentist with this formulated phrase: "Skinny and fuzzy, as if he had been twisted together from pipe cleaners. . . (p. 98)." But Crazy in Berlin is built on excess, on the specificity and verbal dazzle that Reinhart brings to the moral chaos that is Berlin:

He wished he had a grievance; being without one in the modern world was disabling. How gratifying to be the lowliest Negro in Alabama, with no person alive who was not in his debt. How satisfying to be a Jew, with a two-thousand-year claim or, now, a German who had got his medicine unjustly. He should have been in combat and had his foot shot off, so that when he was brought a complaint he could point to the stump and say: obviously, I can do nothing about it, I can’t even walk. (p. 129)

Nearly a decade earlier, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead tested competing political philosophies against the backdrop of a conventional [i.e. realistic] war novel. By contrast, Berger’s novel has that hallucinatory edge we associate with, say, Thomas Pynchon’s V. By that I mean, double-agents—who are, quite possibly, double-double agents—con-men, and assorted shape-shifters abound. Significantly enough, one of Reinhart’s favorite books is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—a novel in which a character named Reinhart explores multiple identities by stepping outside of Time. However much Ellison may be attracted to the giddy freedom this "Reinhart" represents, mere chaos cannot be allowed the final word.

Carl Reinhart, on the other hand, moves through his "grotesque evenings" in Berlin as an atonement, a way of locating his guilts as both man and German, and articulating the results honestly:

Now the Jews and me. My feeling about them are irrational. Actually the Jews bore me stiff. And so do the Germans. . . . I also hate politics and sociology and all that crap that deals with people as groups. I hated those mobs of idiots screaming Sieg Heil and who didn’t?, but I also dislike those hordes of Russians in Red Square, who in spite of Communism are supposed to be generally good, and also the "starving multitudes" of Asia and the "laboring masses" everywhere. I name these examples in an effort to be honest. (p. 424)

But, as Reinhart discovers, to live without the "lie" is to put one’s sanity in official doubt. It is true—what Reinhart’s army shrink calls a "fact"—that nobody could blame him for Schild’s death—but, as Reinhart puts it: ". . . here comes the joke: no one does but myself (p. 425)."

Moreover, the puzzle of Reinhart’s breakdown has yet another piece, and

. . . when you hear it you will never let me out of Psycho, because I guess it means I really am nuts. When Schild was a boy he read the King Arthur stories. And he still believed them up to the time he died.
    Millet asked lazily: What’s "nuts" about that?
    Reinhart groaned: Because so do I. Really. (p. 425)

Arthur Rex (1978) suggests that Berger, in his fashion, has also retained an affection for Camelot, but, more important, it speaks to the comic angle of vision he brings to his novels. "Serious fiction" and psychoanalysis share the belief that "surfaces" tend to mask Inner Truths, however many brickbats their practitioners throw at one another. A comic novelist like Berger (who is "serious" without being solemn and certainly as interested in tackling Significant Issues as are his pinch-faced counterparts) gives the "surface" a fuller, more complicated weight:

Because if the front is a lie, so are the depths when taken alone. For himself, a hero may be a coward. For you, if he is on your side in a battle you do not want to know what he is in some reality outside yours. A Don Juan may be a fairy, but in practice he will make love to your girl and not to you. Do you see what I mean? The facade, too, has a reality and truth. (p. 423)

Nonetheless, the question that Reinhart in Love (1962) asks is this: After such Middle European knowledge, what forgiveness is possible in Ohio? As postwar America booms its way toward suburbia and consumerism, Reinhart adds his own comic wrinkles to the alienated stance we associate with Hemingway’s returning World War I veterans. Reinhart, for example, has more bounce,

more capacity for survival. And whatever else he is, he is not tight-lipped. Reinhart is a man who paints his reveries Big, and always with a fine brush:

Civilian life had more terrors than even he, who seldom knew a sanguine anticipation, dreamed of. Add to this the distinct impression he had that in America it wasn’t serious either— because all tragedies here seemed to be specific rather than generic; mad little private hopelessnesses—and you had his dilemma. Which need not be permanent, however, because he would go back to college in June, when the next term started, in a year or so get a crash-program in BA majoring in Vagueness, be instantly hired for the young-executive training by Whirlpool Inc., the great detergents empire of southern Ohio, and issued a wife, sedan, and six-room cottage from their stockroom and whatever the quota in kids. (p. 19)

But Reinhart, being Reinhart, finds that his "dreams" realize themselves as comic nightmares: his picaresque adventures in "business" include selling fellow veterans dubious real estate from a man whose motto, "Never sell a man what he wants. . . because that’s not what they want (p. 93)," speaks volumes about postwar America; pinning his fortunes on a movie theatre, just at the moment when television and Uncle Miltie were becoming a fact of national life; operating a service station that, as it turns out, the new interstate just misses; and, in a literary in-joke that Berger could not not resist, Reinhart submits Melville’s "Bartleby the Scrivener" (now retitled "Arthur") to The Midland Review.

A schlemiel’s life is a record of his comic defeats. For him, a piece of bread always hits the floor butter-side down, but that, I hasten to point out, is because he butters it on both sides first. What gives Reinhart something of a different wrinkle, however, is the good cheer, the capacity for survival, that he brings to the assorted oddballs and bizarre defeats that dog his heels. Reinhart welcomes every new possibility with the innocent enthusiasm of an American Adam, announcing his faith in the terms that matter most to Reinhart and, I would add, to Berger as well—namely, languages:

Nothing was worse in my opinion than commerce, economics, exchange, real property, securities, stocks, bonds, finance, annuities, comptrollers, town planning boards, auditors, accountants, ledgers, etc—those are some of the words that just to hear turned my stomach. Now here are a few of the words I liked: paladin, epic, paramour, gourmet, wastrel, mistress, cognac, intrepid, leather, bronze, crimson, alabaster, lance, battle-ax, and so on. Do you know

something? Those two vocabularies are not entirely incompatible. (p. 112).

Indeed, Reinhart in Love could serve as Exhibit A if one were building a case to prove Reinhart’s last contention. Love calls Reinhart to the things of the world; and in a Whitmanesque burst, he accepts and celebrates "everything":

He saw from the side window that a neighbor was broadcasting grass seed near a garage, assisted by, frustrated by a swarm of children who would grow up to be auditors and poets and epicures and sowers of lawns: everything. Reinhart was in love with everything. (p. 112)

Berger’s tone, of course, has its tongue securely anchored in his teeth. The large promises that Reinhart imagines come with the expanding territory of business are rather like the full-blown utopianism spouted by Lorenz T. Goodykuntz, Doctor of Nonchemical Medicine. He is, among other enterprises, the President of the UNIVERSAL COLLEGE OF METAPHYSICAL KNOWLEDGE (Pocatello, Idaho), where one can take courses like the following:

GENERAL ANATOMY

When the Prime Mover (whom some call God, some Allah, Jehovah, Yaweh, Manitou, etc.) created Man, It (which some call He) constructed the human body to make it a integral yet diffuse structure embodying the three principal life energies, Reason, Sympathy, and Passion. Reason=Head, Sympathy=Heart, Passions=the Reins. . . . (p. 64)

Berger’s style is, of course, a function of his deadly accurate ear, whether the object is quack metaphysics or this delightful send-up of modern "packaging":

Having chosen his cookies i.e. Lorna Goons, he closed the box according to the little diagram printed on its wrapper, a complicated mode of closure guaranteed to seal the contents against moisture: Twist waxpaper inner lining, folding end upon itself; insert flap A of outer cover in slit B; shake container vigorously so contents will settle; rush out and buy more when cookie level falls below danger level on See-Thru© index window. (p. 29)

Granted, Robert Benchley, S. J. Perelman and James Thurber—to cite but three examples—had exploited the humor of flange A and slot B in dozens of New Yorker sketches, but Reinhart is "more" than the timid, vaguely incompetent Little Man forever caught in a domestic vise. He enjoys his automatic garage and the ice cream scoop he uses to ladle up tuna salad lunches.²

Even Genevieve Raven, the sharp-talking woman who manipulates him into a disastrous marriage, is less "castrating" than she is simply grotesque.

Unlike, say, the Rabbit Angstrom who "runs: ah runs" from a world of Magi-Peelers and domestic squalor, Reinhart insists on staying. His brand of comic survival celebrates optimism and accommodation, the practical virtues and the solidity his girth reflects:

. . . Reinhart was utterly bored by any kind of wretchedness, suffering, despair, agony, negativism, and failure. There was no reason why you couldn’t be successfully married; no reason why the commonplace could not be enormously interesting, it was where most everyone spent their lives. Normality had been sneered at too long. . . . So long as he was going to be a father, it made no sense to hold out any longer from joining the American Legion, the Masonic Lodge, and the Kiwanis. Let’s face it, you couldn’t support a family and also run away to New York and live in a penthouse. (p. 346)

Vital Parts (1970) is, among other things, a comic scorecard of Reinhart’s frustrations and defeats as a father. He occupies what Peter Clecak calls "the middle range of cultural possibilities,"³ caught between his son Blaine’s New Left radicalism and the mass-mediated vulgarities of his Maw and Paw. In a word, poor Reinhart is a liberal, a man whose "attitudes had been fixed in another era." As he puts it, driven to a white heat by Blaine’s baiting:

The system! What the hell have I ever got from it but debts? Am I a rich exploiter of the deprived? And don’t tell me anything about Negroes. Before you were born I had a colored friend [i.e., Splendor Mainwaring, of whom we shall hear more as the Reinhart series unfolds] whom I helped out of several scrapes. For which incidentally I can’t remember being thanked. I have been pro-Negro all my life, and in a time when it was not exactly popular. (p. 41)

The outburst causes Blaine to rethink his original position—namely that his father is a fascist. He is, in fact, "far worse":

You are a liberal, Northern style. The Southern type wears a sheet. (p. 41)

Blaine’s revolutionary ardor, however, is comically balanced by Bob Sweet, an old school chum of Reinhart’s, who insists that "the real revolution . . . has been, and continues to be, in science" (p. 17). What non-chemical therapy was to Dr. Goodykuntz, Cryonics (the science of freezing us at the point

of death until a cure for what killed us can be found) of dead bodies is to Bob Sweet. At bottom, of course, is his belief that technology can beat Time, can cheat Death. He hectors Remnhart:

Don’t believe the current crap to the effect that the punks are aristocrats because of their youth alone and that the middle-aged are senile. That’s the old shell game. There are the same sixty minutes in every hour for everybody. Don’t take the "generation" gap seriously unless you can make money from it. Suckers come in all ages. (p. 18)

Reinhart is much attracted to the possibility of eternal life, not only because he has a long history of being drawn to wacky schemes, but, more important, because death is the sub-text of the Reinhart series. In Reinhart’s Women (1981), mutability accelerates in dizzying, and ironic, ways: Winona—the pudgy, loving teenager of Vital Parts—has metamorphosed herself into a high fashion model, and a lesbian; Blaine had become "precisely what in his early twenties he had professed to despise most": a stockbroker, an owner of an expensive suburban home (complete with swimming pool) and several gas-guzzling cars, a thoroughgoing capitalist and a philistine. In Vital Parts, Reinhart had this to say about the general loosening of our country’s morals, as he spied on a vampish teenager next door:

To think, Reinhart thought, that this young girl, this daughter of respectability and hard work and enlightened attitudes— both her parents were college graduates—that this young minx had turned whore. In moral outrage he lowered his glasses. (p. 30)

By contrast, in Reinhart’s Women, he greets the incongruity of his reversed expectations (Winona’s lover, it turns out, is a female) with philosophical acceptance:

Of course Reinhart soon admitted to himself that he was exaggerating in his inner sense of high tragedy. For one, nobody had expired of shame in a good century. . . . Nowadays Gay Pride spectacles were commonplace in our major cities. (Good heavens, must he someday salute as Winona and Grace Greenwood marched by?) That it would always be a joke with respect to Nature might be considered as certain, but then so too was flying when you weren’t born with wings, and eating cooked food and reading by electric light, and in fact, simply reading: no other animals did any of these things. If Homo Sapiens in general was a pervert under the aspect of eternity, then why jibe at a subspecies? (p. 21)

The long, bumbling arc of Reinhart’s life leads him to this conclusion: "Whatever the state of the world outside, everything

made sense when Reinhart was with his pots and pans" (p. 12). In Reinhart’s Women, the culinary arts stand in bold relief to the sham and disappointment he regularly encountered in "business." Food does not lie. Moreover, it allows him the control that other enterprises systematically denied, and, as TV’s Chef Carlo, he can even bring "good news" like the following to the masses:

". . . with a souffle, all you have to understand is the basic principle: air. Somebody way back in history discovered that if you take the white of an egg from the yolk you can whip it so full of air that it becomes a kind of solid matter, while remaining feather-light. What a wonderful discovery! And a whipped white is pretty strong, too. It will hold in suspension any number of fillings and flavorings: shrimp, asparagus tips, and even eggs themselves, whole poached eggs. . . . You dig down through the fluffy stuff and suddenly come upon a gem of a poached egg. It’s like a treasure hunt." (pp. 199–200)

Others, of course, take their food less seriously. Blaine, for example, drenches his steak with A-1 and hasn’t the foggiest idea of how divine a Bordelaise sauce can be; and his daughter-in-law, despite her "breeding," leaves notes like the following: Went out for burgurs. Such gross misspelling, we remember, was one of Portnoy’s "complaints" about the Monkey. In Reinhart’s case, though, it leads to the verbal highjmnks that, for better or worse, are Berger’s trademark:

The only thing that really annoyed him, he told himself, was the misspelling. How could anyone who lived in this culture make such an error? Jesus Chryst! (p. 213)

One suspects that the Reinhart series will continue. For one thing, Reinhart, like the Jack Crabb of Little Big Man (1964), is a survivor, but his story is not so much a way of "correcting" history as it is of unfolding what the postwar world has come to. Granted, Reinhart may be a pacifist, a man on the edge of the Big Con, a comic bumbler, a schlemiel, but he is also Us. No doomsayer, Reinhart insists that though things might totter, they will not fall. In short, his is the comic spirit as Tradition defines it—accepting, celebratory, large enough to be generous. As Reinhart puts it,

. . . most enterprises since the Renaissance have necessarily partaken of both the honest and the bogus in equal amounts to preserve the balance known as modern civilization, and a project that managed to do no more than sway, without tipping, could survive at least for a while. (p. 53)

The same things, with justice, could be said about the Reinhart series.

FRANKLIN & MARSHALL COLLEGE

NOTES

    ¹Thomas Berger, Vital Parts, p. 212. All citations to the Reinhart series are to the widely available Delta/Seymour Lawrence editions and pagination is given parenthetically.
    ²The hot-air hand dryers found in men’s rooms are, however, a notable exception. "Better Than Towels," its enamel plate announces. But Reinhart knows better: "In practice Reinhart confirmed what he already knew, and left after ten minutes still dripping" (p. 412).
    ³Peter Clecak, America’s Quest for the Ideal Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 81.