Books Me and My Friends

YOUTH has had such a tyrannical hold over adult America these last few years, it's not at all surprising that there's been little available sympathy for those of us youths who have inwardly cringed each time another self-appointed spokesman has raised his newly-published head. But how do you tell that to the folks back in Winnetka or Scarsdale, how do you explain that not every documented utterance of a Kunen and Kelman, or Mungo and Gerzon altogether matches up with your own private view of the world? The already panicking adult community is not apt to have much patience with our own whining protest that we too are being equally victimized-even if only by our own more vocal peers.

Now given Richard Rosen's credentials (22 years of living, four of them at Harvard) one could only hope for the worst: the last thing we need is another undergraduate holding forth with the truth. Instead, however miraculously, in Me and My Friends, We No Longer Profess Any Graces, Rosen chooses to speak only for himself. The result is-despite the 'umble posturing of its title-a most graceful, and often even gracious, little book.

From the very first, Rosen is careful to isolate his constituency of one as "a kind of white, middle-class child in America who can perhaps be identified in the ensuing pages." The book's essays then, by virtue of carefully plotted personal reminiscence and vividly precise cultural reporting, set about this task of self-definition.

The background is suburban all right, and decidedly upper middle class. Affluence is everywhere, but real, meaningful choice is denied. Childhood and adolescence are a time for learning the poses which will carry one on through a vacuum-packed life.

But while railing at the pasteboard void, Rosen also admits to having learned to play its games with a real sense of bravura. Gassed on the streets of Chicago during the '68 demonstrations, Rosen's mind flashes from childhood memories of cajoling his parent's friends with smiles and jokes and pleasant words to playing the martyr scenes for the sake of the familiar suburban mother-type behind the oversized wheel of the Camaro before which he stumbles in temporary confusion. "I am so accustomed to my mastery of mothers that this sudden and irritating turn of events unnerves me," he admits.

THE POLITICS of the action completely aside, the image is a most appealing one. There's a certain evil tinge to the performance that rings true. For you do learn to be a conman in the suburbs. And while every parent probably envisions their children of the fifties as little Beaver Cleavers. the much more calculating behavior of, say, an Eddie Haskell is probably a lot closer to the mark. To hell with all that Woodstock crap. As Rosen quotes Wilde, "Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know."

Still, Rosen also knows that even the most skillful poseur benefits from moments of self-revelation. His book does aspire, successfully too, towards a correspondingly mannered honesty. And so Harvard tortures him with its promises of success and its undercurrent of failure. "We would have liked, some of us, to escape the richness of Harvard, the concentration of things, the density of thought, the involuted lives observing themselves," he writes. Instead, he finds himself seated at Robert Lowell's poetry seminar, "a whole class yearning for excellence. We didn't see in the resignation and gentleness of his [Lowell's] expression a condemnation of our anxiety and ambition." And so the games go on.

Polities-despite the objective social conditions that intrude occasionally into the book-becomes merely another arena in which Rosen searches for the unconscious, authentic act. But when the Revolution comes-in a keystone Cops version of last spring's trashings-Rosen can only sit amidst the swirling gases, arguing with his friends, debating his proper response, and, finally, dreaming of vomiting on Nixon.

ONE MAN'S angst can, of course, be another's anger, and there will undoubtedly be those who find the self-absorbed debate carried on within Rosen's essays reprehensible. Equally annoying are his rather glib capsule histories of radical revolt, his tendency to view older generations from a present of incomprehension rather than in the terms of their own historical past, and his occasionally ostentatious display of other writers and their work, which-though it illuminates Rosen's own development-is not really all that necessary.

But to quarrel with Rosen's excesses is to ignore the crowded, incredibly detailed excesses of the world of which he writes. For, again and again, he'll turn a discussion of sports, dress, and, most of all, food into a brilliant metaphorical dissection of the quality of American life-or lack of same. Baseball becomes a game for middle America; "a slow, uneventful review of existence, it serves to reinforce the dull." A visit to an artificial flavoring factory is virtually a confrontation with the war makers, while a sandwich at the Harvard Garden Grill turns into an exercise in peoples's art. With the major exception of Tom Wolfe, few American journalists-and this book is a very personal journalism-have payed proper attention to the textures of bourgeois culture. But Rosen was weaned on trade names and has never forgotten it. "And now I write about these objects." he moans, "spinning words around them, weaving arguments through them, clogging their gears with polemics." It's applause, not censure, he deserves for the effort.

Me and My Friends also contains a marvelous essay on undergraduate poetry ("Go Away Richard Brautigan, You're Not Helping College Poetry Any"), in which Rosen asks that "we should appreciate and encourage the struggle that goes on by thinking of the poem not as a flawless finale, but as a stopping point on the way to perfection. The poem is the point at which our strength gave out." His essays themselves are best read in the same light. Each talks to its neighbor, reveals its genesis and goals, sometimes even addresses its reader. As a collection, rarely do they presume to speak the whole truth, and when they take an inadvertent wrong turn, it's only as a way of admitting that a developing talent is at the wheel. Sometimes Rosen gets himself entangled in this web of his own creation ("When a pimple appeared on my forehead, I was immediately faced with a moral decision. Should I treat it with a special cream or encourage it to reach a natural death."), but, gee, when you're only 22, there's still world enough and time to turn to weightier subjects.

For the moment at hand, Rosen's Friends will do quite satisfactorily. The very fact that it speaks for itself, rather than the whole damn generation, is a winning one. On that count alone, this memoir shines with an undeniably saving grace.