January 31, 1981

one widens the openings for antidemocratic politics. There is, finiilly, one additional, rather extraordinary dimension to The .Time Falling Bodies Take to Light that s new meaning to the phrase oral h story. Thompson seems,well, obsessed with oral sex, and he makes the most ingenious, tortuous explanations for why oral sex is the wondrous thing that itis. If I understand him correctly, he winds up equating cunnilingus and conversation. His argument goes something like this: he begins by connecting the tongue through the spinal column to the penis. There is a symmetry of as above, so below. For the woman this symmetry makes identity of the an female lips of the mouth which can pronounce the magic name of God, andthe female lips of the vulva . . . which can receive the semen of Adam. Language and sexuality distinguish us from the angels (thats what he says) and they come together i n myth and physiology. Higher and lower are fused, areonean?the same, though there is an important sex differknce here as the spinal polarity in women

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is not between the genitals and the, brain, but between theheartandthe womb. By the time Thompson has reached page 22 of his book, onediscovers what is really the burning issue here: a defense of ora1sexuality as the way people in the know do it. The marvelous thing, given Thompsons mythopoeic genealogical account and celebration of the practice, is that aficionados of the oral art, in sating their individual lusts, are simultaneously going down on history. He writes: Y n Kinseys original studies of American sexual behavior in the nineteen fifties, he foundthatin general the working classes did not indulge in oral intercourse, but that the intelligentsia reveled init. The more ,conscious and intellectual the individual, the more the face literally confrontedthe genitals ina mysteriously compelling act that seemed to touch the very foundations of consciousness. Who knows? In a country as sexually driven and beguiled as this one, Thompsons revision of what class consciousness is all about may have a future.

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enough on nice, clean-cut former New York editors who get you elqually absorbed in your body. At the iame time, it turns perfectly innocent and casual pastimes into all-absorbing careers. Put an -irrg on the end ofcertqlin simple words and you can create a new pseudodiscipline of an ordinary human activity. Parenting. Birthing. Running. These are then converted from some1hing one does or is into something one Gan get into. The damage is- not simply to language but to the pressing collective neeas of humankind that these,forms of into-it-ness help one get out of. Most damaging, they totally undermine selfconfidence in ones own abilitjr to cope without expert advice, without the right equipment, .the right credentials, the right clothes, all in thename of increasing it. They create subjects of nice things that dont deserve to besubjects, and thus destroy most of the si!nple virtues they once had. The prime exhibit at hand is John Jeromes The Sweet Spot in Time, -a book about recent discoveries in the biomechanics of sport that links a vast amount of anatomical detai1,about aerobic and anaerobic pathways, about stereogenesis and proprioception, about
I

This Sport-ing Life

PETER SGHRAG
THE SWEET SPOT IN TIME. By John Jerome. Summit Books. 348 pp. $13.95. a SPORTSMEN AND GAMESMEN: American Sporting Life in the Age of Jackson. ByJohn Dizikes. Houghion Mgflin Company. 339 pp. $15. work out forhim-or for Cousins-and the last time I saw him in the flesh, back in 1969 or 1970, he had been unjobbed. One cant, of course, blame everything thats happened sinceon Jim Fixx, but he is as good a symbol as any. He may still be a nice fellow running around the hills of Riverside, Connecticut-he certainly seems like a nice fellow in those commercials on teIevision, pouring his family their Quaker 100% Natural Cereal. And yet its hard to forget that afterthe thousands of years humans have been running without selfconsciousness or premeditation (largely, of course, for survival and not pleasure) this nice young man would not only help convert running into an industry but, much worse, help make the sniffing of ones own jock into arespectable and sometimes all-absorbing activity for large segments of the middle class. There are two troubling aspects about this self-consciousness. Most obviously it is a major element of the new narcissism, something that has been blamed too nxch on the human potentialists, the encounter gurus andthe various psychobabblers who encourage you to get into your head, andnot

Kollontai
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Bolshevik Revolution

Beafrre Fnr~sworth As revalutlonist, oppositron leader, highest-ranking woman

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AN OUTSIDE CHANCE: m a y s on Sport. By ThomasMcGuane.Farrar, Straw h Giroux. 243 pp. $10.95. liked Jim Fixx when he was fat. That was long before he became the complete runner and author of what I assume is now the alltime best seller on the subject. In those days Fixx was just a magazine editor in NewYork-a nice, bright, overweight f w trying to figure out what the read McCalls would think w men who interesting (or, more to the point, what Norman Cousins, who was Fixxs boss, might think the women who read McCalfswould think interesting). It didnt

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Illustrated $28.50

Peter Schrag,editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee, IS the author, most recently, of Mind Control (Paytheon).

Stanford University Press

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120 the isotonic: contraction of muscles-to athletic performance. Jeromes central question, als thejacketblurbputsit,

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deals with moment the of physical perfection, when the ball sings off the racket, when the putt rolls inexorably toward the cup, when the dive knifes into the water. But how do the& miracles happen?Why do they occur so rarely for some, yet so effortlessly for others? There is, of course, no answer. Jerome piles detail on detail-about training, about blood chemistry, about body mechanics-without ever making it clear what the argument is. The chief benefit, he suggests, is that, after researchingallthedetails and gaining some degree of understanding of the mass of complexities involved in the athletic process,I now cry at track meets. . . . Working on this book has so expanded my appreciation that almost athletic any performance is immeasurably richerfor me. This view the human as body of sports-of athleticmstrument, of sports as ex pressions of the finite limits o the f body and as -means of exploring the mechanisms at work to set those limits-positively illuminates great athletic performances,at least for me.

This special issue of The Nation devoted entirely to E. P. Thompsons profound and eloquent es7 say on the present danger of nuclear war is available at bulk rates. Handsomely illustrated y i t h the brilliant drawings of F(Iarshal1 Arisman, it is a scathing refutation of those teach who that nuclear war is survivable -,-even winnable. Schools, politic@ groups,clubs and other orgianlzations may take advantage crf the following discount rates.
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Not for me. I do notrequire thatlsort of illumination, nor, I suspect, do most others. I find it positively destructive of whatRolfeHumphriesmeantbythe beautiful mystery of a sport like baseball-its .poetry, its rhythms, its fantasy, its exquisite timing. I ,do not want to trouble myself with Willie Mayss synapses when contemplating his catch of Vic Wertzs towering fly in the 1954 World Series, or Wertzs either. I donot give a hootaboutthe biomechanics of Tug McGraws pitching arm last fall in Philadelphia; enough to know whether he was tired or not, something I can generally tell without understanding a great deal about muscle circulation of oxygen tissue or the through the body. Jeromes real point, one suspects, is made covertly at the very end of his Americans have always had a diffibook: cult time just having fun for the fun of But theres another result of all this it. John Dizikes, in his absorbing investigation whichis much more imhistory of what might be called the portant for athletics-and for the American style of play, shows howfrom species-than any wholesale revision the beginning it was necessary of the record books. This great swellAmerican sportsmen-particularly the ing of understanding is spreading far promoters of horse races-to find the beyond the limited world ofathletics, of into the general public consciousness. chink in the armor the Puritan Party, which regarded amusements all and It is doing so at the same time that the pastimes as frivolous, at the least, and public is learning, by direct physical presumably at theworst as unprofitexperience, of the optimism of the cell. able. Thus, from the time of Andrew The ecologists keep telling us that Jackson, people like William T. Porter

January 31, I981 there is nofreelunch. In a finite , universe infinite growth is impossible. . : Wemust accept limits; we . must begin to think small, reduce our , appetites, cut back. For decades weve devoted great portions of our massive resources to nothing more ennobling thanthe reduction of physical effort in our lives. One result has been the construction of a society around the lawsof entropy, around the eventual running down the uniof verse. A kind of paralysis of despair is the perfectly reasonable response. After all, there IS the entropy of aging, too, a running down of the organism that is irreversible. No thanks, says the cell Only lest it-just require of it a little more than its existing, steady-state capacityand it responds by thumbing its meta-. phorical nose at the laws of entropy. In fact, the more you reqyire of it, the more it gamS in response. . . . What is truIy indomitable about us is this characteristic of all living tlssue, this capaclty of the cell tofloutthe . lawsof entropy: to steaI energy out of stress, and with it to construct new health. Free lunch. The only free lunch there 1s. Yes, yes, he does say it. Where RonaldReagan will abolish economic limits by finding oil in the ground that isnt there, Jerome will do it by massaging the cell. We will save clvilization, create new possibilities, discover as yet our unsuspected liorizons by tuning bodies, examining anaerobic thresholds and revolutionizing human performance. Thus whathas seemed, at best, unrelated t9 the social problems of our times andmore likely egocentric and antisocial, becomes the greatest of social acts. We will run not just for hunger or myscular dystrophy or crippled children (the logic of a11 of which I have never understood either): wewill study our bodies and run for God, for country, for the future ofcivilization as we know it.

sk

January 31, I981

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121
e

than might be described Where todays hlghly tralned naval pointed out that sport was potentially other what archltect wdl descrlbe some negatlve an important business and therefore (badly) as the harmony of man,activity trait In a boats performance in terms and environment, and the self-comprenot frivolous. From the beginning, the of, say, sectlon and flow, Herreshoff hension that comes from thecompreAmerican way was to favor games and w ~ l slrnply note that It is annoying l styles of play in which as little as possi- hension of expenence: it 1s avolded. The andtellyouhow ble was left to chance-that is, to real Ivebeenklcked,stepped on and annoying is to be avolded Just as the #y in the other sense of the wordbitten.Bitten I liked least. Mymost vacation 1s to be spent in pleasure. and in which everything could be trusttvorthy saddle horse leaned over The best thmg when you are out at planned from the start. Americans, he once while I was clnchlng hlm up and night in a strange anchorage is not clamped on my upper leg, turning the argues, dont mind that there isnt conto be worned. That sounds smple thigh Into what looked like a Central tinuousactionintheirfavoritesports enough, but the sallor who has American sunset. I threw him down watched the compass shlft sllghtly because they dont want action, they on the ground, half hitched hls feet with a dragging anchor in the darkwant analysis. . . . Its the time between together, and put a tarp overhim. I ness and the ocean rumblmg spooklIy the plays that they value, the time they let hlm up .two hours later; he on a lee shore knowsthat to deep can use to fit whats just happened into thought I was the greatest man In the withoutworry is a conceptclogged the context of their strategy, adjust their world, one he wouldnt thmk of bitwith meaning plans for the next move, and guess and . m g . Horses only remember the endof predict. There is as much interesbin the I quote these two passages partly the story game plan as in the game. Dizikes has a little trouble with the theory when it comes to games like basketball (which, in the years since it was first played wlth a peach basket in Springfield, Massachusetts, has devdoped into precisely the kmd of continuous-flow game that Dlzlkes regards as un-American). Yet In general the argument is sound enough, both in what it explains about integration of the sports ethlc with the capitalist ethic and in its persuasivedescriptlon of theirshared corporate abhorrence of chance. Which brings us back onceagainto people like Fixx and Jerome, and to prodFiction ucts like The Complete Book of Runnrng and the scores more llke it now available. The real pmnt (as alreadysuggested) was never to run, certalnly not THE TRANSIT OF VENUS Vlklng for fun, but to contemplate and analyze oneself running. If it was not to create General Nonfiction an important business of oneself runningthus the (andto ,silence , Puntan), the ObJect certainlyincluded the elevadon of whatever fun there WALTER LIPPMANN AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY Atlantic-Llttle Brown might have been into a project, a discipline in which one becamea spectator to Poetry ones achievement. own As Dizikes I points out, the logical resting place of i American sports is the Astrodome, SUNRISE where no windblows and allerratic VikmgPenguin bounces are (almost) eliminated. Just as logically, it is also In the.running-shoe Criticism store and in the scientific tests measuring the Adidas against the Nike.

Winners of the 1981 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS

Shirley Hazzard

Ronald Steel

Frederick Seidel

Helen Vendler
Harvard Universlty Press

%f course it doesnt have to be that way, either in America OT anywhere else, as scores of athletes and writers about sportshavemade magnificently clear, amongthem,ThomasMcGuane. His An Outsrde Chance is a lovely book of personal essays about hunting, fishing, sailing and riding. Theres no way fairly to summarize this book;it has notheme

PART OF NATURE, PART OF US: . MODERN AMERICAN POETS

The NBCC is an independent, non-proflt organization of 300 rofesslonal c r ~ t ics and book review editors founded In 1974 to enhance stanfards of criticism and encourage appreciation of quallty literature. These are the sixth annual NBCC awards.

22 because I likethem and partly because they demonstrate how harmony is ,the essence of,the experience. We lose ourseIves in ,the moment and thereby find ourselves: looking by away from the

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distant star we see it. I said Americans havealwayshad a difficult time just having fun for the fun of it. McGuane is one of the people who proves that that 0 isnt always true.

WeHave Not Far To Go

THOMAS FLAPJAGAN
BADENHEIM 1939. B Aharon Apy pelfeld. Translated by DaIya Bilu. David R. Godine Publisher. 148 pp. $10. he imaginative literature of the Holocaust seeks to imagine the unimaginable, and artistic failure is therefore a condition of its enterprise. Indeed, the reality is so monstrous that artistic success might well have the effect of blasphemy, its order and harmony an affront to what we know from reason and experience: the horror of deaths in numbers beyond reckoning, of chaos yoked to efficiency. Which should not at all be taken to mean that art can escape the responsibility of attempting a task which would seem to be, by definition, incapable of fulfillment. Art will always find strategies, partial successes, failures which authenticate their intentions. The strategy employed by Aharon Appelfeld, an Israeli novelist whose own childhood was grievously assaulted by the Holocaust, is an extraordinarily daring one, and it has produced a short novel that is elegant, resonant anddeeply disturbing. Its power to shock is embedded in its very elegance, an elegance of structure, image, voice. Seemingly, the novel records the days and seasons of an Austrian resort town patronized by middle-class Jews, their hours given over to rich pastries, concerts, innocent flirtations, pink ice cream, readings from Rilke. Thereis an impresario, Dr. Pappenheim, who each year organizes the festival that is Badenheims great event. And a professor of history and his frivolous young wife, a child prodigy, the divorced wife of an army general, fragile_ twin youths who give readings from the poets, a much sought-after musician who has agreed to perform. The weather of mildskies, strawberry tarts and fragments of idle conversation, is the weather of European social comedy, and at times, by its intention, the novella seems a pastiche of dozens we haveread-cool, shapely comediesof life in a genteel resort, But disturbing notes are struck. The Sanitation Department, within the town but not of it, steadily extends its authority, meticulously registering 4the summer visitors and preparing genealogies. Its walls are festooned with gay travel posters: The Air in PoIind Is Fresher, Sail on the Vistula, (Get to Know Slavic the Culture. The Department stays open at night; you can sit in an armchair, listen to music, leaf through a journal and dream of Poland, which comes gradually to seem an idyllic, pastoral place to which, mysteriously, the visitors may one day be traveling. And on the periphery of the town, Porters unloaded rolls of barbed wire, cement pillars, and all kinds of appliances suggestive of preparations for a public celebration. Our disturbance is generated less by our knowledge of what surely must be happening than by the seemingly bland, narcotized acceptance of the monstrously bizarre. The vacationers accept it, and so too does the voice that reports their days, a voke which at times is cozy, comfortable, but at other times stands back, almost to tease them. But our disorienting puzzlement finds here only its beginnings. How is it that these cultivated savorers of Rilke and white strawberries are unaware that their entire culture is being destroyed? (The present title, incidentally, points us rather too hFlpfuliy toward the puzzle. Nowhere in the novel are we given a date, and the title in Hebrew, characteristically bland, says only Badenhaim, ir nofesh, Badenheim, resort town.) There are elementsof allegory, to be sure, but the textures of scene and language, the particular stance of the narrative voice, resist allegory. To assume allegory would be to trivialize. Neither, of course, are we given the assurances ofrealism, not in a novel where random, brief, inexplicableyet

Thomas Flanagan, author of The Year of the French (Holt, Rinehart & Winston), 1s now at, work on his second novel.

January 31, 1981 historically prophetic images of disaster flicker like mirages upon the imaginings of the characters. Flickerings only, casually rejected by the,reason, shunned by the will. What Appelfeld has done, I think, is totake as his very subject the imaginations inability to comprehen disaster at once senseless and total. T inability was as present then, when terror and annihilation were unfolding themselves, as it is now, in historical retrospect, if in far different form. He has created the landscape of imaginations limits, a landscape peopled by those whom culture both nourishes and narcotizes, for whomeverydaypleasures, sights, fragrances, annoyances, create the illusion of a reality more dense than that to which the imagination refuses to give a name. At the railway station, Badenheim distant now, the conductor of the resort orchestra says expectantly, Soon well arrive in Poland. New sights, new people. A man must broaden his horizons, no? An engine arrives, coupled to four filthy freight cars. Get in! yell invisible voices. And the people were sucked in. Even those who were standing with a bottle of lemonade in their hands, a bar of chocolate, the headwaiter with his dog-they were all sucked in as easily as grains of wheat poured into a funnel. Nevertheless, Dr. Pappenheim found time to make the followingremark: If the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go. The final resonances of the novel are muted, ambiguous, at once melancholy and sardonic. That final paragraph moves suddenly and savagely to fact, butfact which has beenstylized, cut down to invisiblevoices and a brutal simile. Frozen-framed at the veryinstant ofhis fate, at thedoor of the freight car, Dr. Pappenheim speaks his own epitaph, indomitable in his feckless assertion of a rational and benevolent universe. In his final moments, he is Dr. Pangloss, but Appelfeld has made calculateduseof the complexity of our response: We have known from thefirst pages what will happen to the people of Badenheim, but it is a knowledge which we impose upon the text, and the text exists therefore as a kindofdoul@writing, a mannered and elegant comedy which dramatizes a reality in which words such as elegance and comedy are weightless,meaningless. He has compelled form to express the formless, the void, the black night in which culture, art and civility serve only 0 to betray us.

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