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Painting by Jacob Lawrence, Courtesy Terry Dintenfass, Inc. Private collection. 
"Hell is other people."


States of Mind, of Soul

THE SYSTEM OF DANTE'S HELL. By LeRoi Jones. 154 pp. New York: Grove Press. $3.95.

By EMILE CAPOUYA

We have grown fairly accustomed to the idea that hell is a city much like Seville, but we may need to be reminded that Seville in turn is South Newark or Shreveport. LeRoi Jones, already well know as a most original poet and playwright, has written a novel that induces us to make that necessary connection in our imagination. Borrowing features of the moral geography of Dante's "Inferno," Mr. Jones is nevertheless scarcely concerned with allegory. As befits the poet of a secular age, he abandons the idea that hell is a fixed department of the cosmos. He is rather inclined to follow Jean-Paul Sartre's suggestion that hell is other people-and ultimately, one's self.

Accordingly, the episodes of "The System of Dante's Hell" tend to be representations of states of mind and states of soul rather than sections of conventional narrative. Especially in the earlier portions of the novel, the author's method is less novelistic than lyrical - fragmentary, allusive, private. The general theme is his childhood and youth in the slums of Newark, developed in static set-pieces whose sign is one or another of the Dantean categories: incontinence, violence, fraud, treachery and their subdivisions.

The prose is poetic or simply telegraphic, but not out of a desire to represent the Joycean stream of consciousness. That innocent naturalism has been left far behind. Mr. Jones rejects the formal logic of exposition; he invites verbal and emotional accidents, willingly or wilfully [[willfully]] connecting ideas and impressions that

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Mr. Capouya, a New York critic and editor, is currently teaching at the New School

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have no common focus outside his own mind. Thus, he puts into practice the essential program of contemporary art—to find esthetic value in chaos, accidental juxtapositions, happenings. The difference between Dante and Jones, in this respect alone, is an absolute measure of the distance between two epochs in the development of a single civilization.

To Dante's fierce certainties the 20th century opposes its despair of any certainty. It is remarkable, in this connection, how reverting to older patterns of thought has an immediate tonic effect—at least when a powerful imagination is doing the reverting. Two of the episodes in this book have more nearly the texture and temporal sense of conventional narrative. One is a terrifying account of a gang rape attempted in an automobile. In the other, the speaker (a Negro airman on the liberty in a Southern town) gets drunk, makes love and betrays love, and is set upon and beaten by three mindless toughs. The paradox is that in these appalling stories the author has ordered his materials as if man were still the master of creation, and the effect on the reader is close to exaltation.

The static and fragmentary lyricism of much of the novel, then, is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age. Here, Mr. Jones chooses rather to embrace than to defy it. This is not true of his plays, which are concerned with social, almost (Continued on Page 42)


How to Go to Hell in Style

THE LOCKWOOD CONCERN. By John O'Hara. 407 pp. New York: Random House. $5.95.

By WEBSTER SCHOTT

JOHN O'HARA is America's most distinguished out-of-date novelist. His world ended circa 1945. He knows nothing about the post-atomic literary convulsions: hero bums, sainted criminals, the whole existential carnival of nightmare and a quick fix behind the calliope. He still thinks adultery is shocking enough to write about and that America is a creditor nation. Like a man on a couch searching for an explanation, he keeps repeating the same story with wondrous invention: how to go to hell in style, usually in Pennsylvania in the early 20th century, and after attending the right schools, making or losing a bankroll, getting into the spiffy clubs, and working out with a team of women.

"The Lockwood Concern" is super-O'Hara. He hasn't told this story better since the first time, in "Appointment in Samara" 31 years ago. Somebody in the right spot should declare Be Good to O'Hara Week and give him the psychic compensations (Pulitzer prize, foundations grants, honorary degrees from Princeton 

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Mr. Schott is poetry and fiction editor of Focus/Midwest Magazine.

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Yale and the Iowa school of Modern Letters) he has lusted for, ever since he couldn't raise the Ivy League entrance fees and had to take up newspapering. Sniping at him from chairs endowed by washing machine manufacturers, the Creative Writing professors miss the marvel of O'Hara. It takes a special genius to write as well as he does and get rich at it. We usually reserve his kind of rewards for hacks.

O'Hara is a man of quality. Reading "The Lockwood Concern" is like riding in one of those big black Cadillacs with high-pile upholstering, eight-inch chrome and a phone in the back seat. Its plots, subplots, social accoutrements, and genealogical directory of characters could outfit six novels by anyone else. Just where we're going or why isn't always clear. But what a ride!

O'Hara takes us through three generations of a Swedish Haven (Pa.) family, and into a fourth. The "concern," a Quaker expression meaning a "command from the inner spirit," grabs Abraham Lockwood after he returns from Princeton and the Civil War. He commits his money, his intelligence, his progeny to the creation of a dynasty. By 1960, it should preside over the social and economic life of the town and extend the Lockwood influence into the chambers of state.

Working against formidable disadvantages—two mad sisters, a college record as a whore-house athlete, an ex-crook father who shot two men en route to his small fortune in credit and transportation—Abraham Lockwood gets the concern off to a fast start. He marries well, connects with Philadelphia and New York. He plans his son George's life as if he were laying siege to a European principality. But the concern fails—even though George tightens the Lockwood grip on Swedish Haven by another several million dollars and proclaims the dominion by building a 1928 chateau surrounded by an eight-foot, spike-topped brick wall.

Poorly tutored in the mystique of the concern and inadequately conditioned to its stresses, Bing Lockwood, George's son, breaks the code. Expelled from Princeton for cheating, he takes off for California to wildcat oil. The New Man of America, he makes it big, like all the Lockwoods, playing angles and women. Nouveau riche, not the stuff of dynasty and symptomatic to O'Hara of a moribund society, Bing carries a gun and speeds through the oil fields in a Rolls Royce loaded with pipe joints and Stilson wrenches. The concern fails because acquired traits cannot be transmitted genetically.

The flaws in "The Lockwood Concern" are pure O'Hara. George's death—alone and in the dark, fractured skull on the secret stairs of his new house after a threatening conversation with a workman—is too easy a way out and blatantly moralistic. End of the old order. Threads and lines to events and characters lie around unknotted. Romantic realism makes insatiable demands for more explication: this behavioral encyclopedia of suicides, murders, big deals, sexual catastrophies and social maneuvers passes as observation but not analysis. O'Hara is a class novelist with social ambition. His misanthropy leaves his characters incapable of love, tenderness, humility. All are missing several moving parts. His symbols read like signposts. He has an undertaker's sense of humor.

No Bucks County Kazantzakis, O'Hara is as mean and straight as a nail. His narrative gift drives on in cold blood. Anti-intellectual, he deals instinctively with ideas. Caught in psycho-cultural rhythms, "The Lockwood Concern" is Kinsey and Veblen with dramatis personae—and an intriguing theory of dynasty as man against evolution. He tells us about money, status and power as if nothing else (expect fornication) moves his characters, and as if we had nothing else to do but indulge John O'Hara.

In fifty years O'Hara will be a great writer. At present, he's out of it, and a joy to read.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
[NOV 28, 1965]

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