Empty Victories

SHORT STORIES ARE BEST when the background can be assumed and the foreground is fleshed out. Henry James, obsessed with inner life to a degree unhealthy for a writer using this form, allowed his short pieces to balloon into "nouvelles", because the psychological world he described in The Turn of the Screw or The Beast in the Jungle was uncharted in the 1890s. He could assume little knowledge and less sympathy on the part of his audience, and thus created his world painstakingly.

Leonard Michaels's task is not so difficult. Writing for a minute market--liberal intellectuals, largely Eastern--he can begin each of his perhaps fifty stories with a literary world presupposed. Marx, Freud, Byron, a Jewish boyhood (familiar to gentile literati from reading Mailer and Roth), and the inertia of the 1950s all loom in the book's background, the author only has to select which allusions to use for each story's point of departure.

The stories are compelling, almost without exception, because they cover familiar ground; and also because they contain a prophetic mixture of anger and sentiment that only a Jewish leftist can cultivate, this "son of Marx enemy of Freud" having lived through the terrorist double-think of the McCarthy and Rosenberg red-hate days. Yet the real horror for Michaels is always inward--he is less concerned with the world than with the hammerlock it holds on the individual, the tortured march that the instincts are forced to undergo in the service of civilization.

Michaels's fear is submission--often unable to face it, he doesn't allow himself as narrator of most of the stories to sublimate, the failures always being homosexual suicides in the upstairs apartment, or men in concentration camps retreating into religious ecstasy, or ten-year-old male children dreaming of running over beautiful women and then nursing them back to willing sexuality. It is always other people who are being emotionally castrated. When the main character of a story is Michaels, fully grown and easily identified, the author is too embarrassed to say what he says about himself, aged ten, and his immigrant mother: "We were defenseless people."

So the adult heroes in the book become weird variants of Groucho Marx, perhaps spawned by Michaels' boyhood watching the Yiddish theater: wise guys who fast-talk on capitalist society's turf and win. In "Reflections of a Wild Kid," Michaels's persona makes it with an ex-girlfriend by removing the woman's present boyfriend, a nerdish college professor. The persona's method: piss out the window of the woman's apartment, hide in the closet and let the police seize the wrong man--the boyfriend--when they come around. Michaels describes this as "genius."

THE SAME THEME emerges in the book's longest and best-written story--"The Captain," in which the Michaels narrator, trying to win a job in a publishing company, goes to a dinner party and makes love with his prospective boss's wife. He tantalizes the boss with his own wife (but does not yield her) and concludes with a feat of manhood, screwing his own wife in the back seat of a cab. The narrator gets the job, while the boss finds consolation only in breaking wind at his departing guests.

Michaels catalogues the degradation in all this, but distinguishes, even in a corrupt social order, between those who are solely degraded--women, children, unlucky timid males--and the young men whose with privileges them to degrade others as well. The book's title expresses this, lifted from a letter of Byron's which tells of the poet's reaction to three executions:

"the second and third [executions]...I am ashamed to say, had no effect on me as a horror, though I would have saved them if I could."

Michaels here seems more interested in the brutalized reaction of the sexually compulsive Byron than in the plight of the executed.

But there is an ambiguity for Michaels. After quoting and explicating Byron in a passage of parodied academic exegesis, he writes:

"Compared to the sneering, sarcastic, bludgeoning verbosity of Karl Marx, who walked in Paris, it isn't easy to believe the latter's idea of humanity as social essence is either witty or attractive."

Michaels, however, says he does believe Marx's idea, not Byron's, even if this theoretical justification for his stories looks like a disclaimer for the cruelty he allows his narrators to display. The author cannot decide whether art should admire the powerful or the moral.

MICHAELS'S STYLE and range partially conceal this tension. The stories run from a page to thirty, at one point in stream-of-consciousness imitation of a bourgeois psychotic and at another, in the ostensibly reasonable tones of a well-read intellectual. Humor is consistently sardonic: clever when discussing the posturing of a talentless college professor in his quest to publish his book and vindictive when describing a dinner of the haute bourgeoisie ("Nothing tasted. From course to course I'd swallowed textures, not tastes, like a cat gobbling kill."

At the heart of Michaels's anger and accomodation to society is present powerlessness--the book opens with an early remembrance of Uncle Moe dropping dead of a heart attack, and the subsequent death of a friend. The loss of the narrator's virginity is compared to sinking a difficult jump shot from the corner; there is no feeling, only the contest. Brilliant craft alone does not give this book its force, which flows from those occasional passages where Michaels makes clear that the winners of the game end up with nothing.