The Sins of Three Generations

T

HE BOOK OF DANIEL is an incendiary work, it deals with crucial socials issues thoughtfully and passionately, But it failed to raise much of a stir when it first appeared two years ago, and the reasons for this are not irrelevant to a consideration of the novel's worth.

Certainly, critics could not have expected the quality of E.L. Doctorow's writing and the complexity of his novel's conception. His previous books. Welcome to Nerd Times and Big as Life, displayed his concern with ethical difficulties without giving indication of the novelist's ability to whip observations and emotions into an intellectually compelling, deeply felt, unified narrative, Critics who did praise Daniel applauded. Doctorow`s new found control and intensity, Still, even thought Stanley Kauffmann and Peter Prescott called it in the novel of the tear, the New Yorker didn't consider it at all, and any treatment it received in supposedly serious literary journals was cursory.

Reviewers simply weren't prepared to deal with fiction which seriously examined what, in one form or another, should concern us most--politics, and the effects it has on society and culture as a whole. Doctors begged the treatment he received from sheltered quarters. For, not only did he attempt a history of the American Left; he used the trial of the Rosenbergs (in Doctorow, the "Isaacsons") as a jumping-off point. If Julius and Ethel received harsh treatment from the U.S, Government, they were really drawn and quartered by young Jewish literati in the pages of cultural journals still influential today.

THE ROST ENBERGS were tried in 1951 for conspiracy to commit espionage. They were sound polite and were electrocuted after spending two years on death row. At the time of the trial relatively little protest was raised on their behalf. Even when the Courts verdict linked the couple to a pair of state's witnesses as fellow members of a sustaining which (supposedly) delivered nuclear society to the Soviet Union, no liberals or CP members disputed the judgement expect for the Rosenbergs themselves. Only after the trial's impression of conclusiveness wore out did many left politicos take action. They tried to associate the Rosenbergs with Sacco and Vanzetti and Major Drevtus, rhetorically capitalizing on the couples politics and Judaism. They petitioned the governments for leniency, and staged mercy pageants featuring the spectacle of the Rosenberg children. But they neither Kept the husband and wife from trying, nor convinced the politically unconverted of judicial illegality. What was remarkable about the Rosenbergs` "defense committees" was their complete ineffectiveness. Former fellow-travelers took the case as a last straw: even Hiss defenders decried the Rosenbergs` alleged treachery.

The Rosenbergs probably were guilty of some clandestine activity, to be sure. But this in no way explains the depth of the reactions they drew forth. Leslie Fiedler (Encounter, Oct. '53) correctly portrayed Rosenberg defenders as thirties CP members who either had lapsed in their beliefs and thought they needed to guarantee innocence in the ranks, or those who still believed in the Soviet way and claimed the Rosenbergs' innocent in an extralegal sense.

But Fielder also went on to criticize the Rosenbergs' attitudes towards art, sports. Literature, and Judaism, and the couple's statements on these topics in their posthumously collected letters were, in fact, typical of a warped agit-prop sensibility. Both Fiedler and Robert Warshow [Commentary. Nov. '53] contended that the Rosenbergs lived an existence governed solely by their Communism, and that this was somehow disgusting. But even though the critics' background held traces of the Rosenbergs' Bronx roots, they weren't concerned at all with the process by which the couple's beliefs invaded the very marrow of their lives. The spies made adult choices, the wrong ones; to know they are wrong said Warshow, is all that counts. Fiedler at least thought revocation of the death sentence in order.

TO E.L. DOCTOROW, even the lives of the Rosenbergs are sacred, and the Warshows of the world are merely scared, effete liberals, "mistaking education for character", made prideful by their genteel perceptions, but underneath, afraid of the questions that people like the Rosenbergs asked. His Isaacsons are the Rosenbergs as a committed critic would have drawn them. They may be guilty, but they are not aberrant, they are motivated by a simplistic analysis of abhorrent social conditions, but those social conditions are real.

The Book of Daniel is not, however, a mopping-up operation for a "Save the Rosenbergs" Defence Committee. The novel's most persuasive appraisal of the case comes from a "New York Times reporter" who feels that the Isaacsons were probably framed on the A. Bomb secrets case, but must have been guilty of some two-bit local operation which in a sane society would have cost them five-years behind bars. What concerns Doctorow is the cause of the couple's Communism, and the effects of its unexamined nature.

Paul and Rochelle Isaacson are initially repellent. Except for a raw sexuality which actually cements their marriage, they are intellectually self-conscious without being intellectually independent; they adhere to CP ideology in a manner which restricts their ability to live constructively' even though in their own eyes it is what saves them from being victims of U.S, capitalism. They place their hope in the Marxist ideal of classless society without possessing Marz`s Knowledge of how that ideal must take root in a specific historical content. They join with the religion of Sovietism, and subscribe to the irrelevant mystique of working class revolution. And this leads ultimately to a more than paranoid view of American politics; to a rejection of the entire American culture, expect for the pseudo-folk or transcendental-poetic, No Bogart movies for the Isaacsons, only Paul Robeson at Peekskill or Barbirolli's Philharmonic at the Lewiston Stadium.

OUR DISTASTE for the Isaacsons, increases as the effects of their children's upbringing becomes apparent. The older child, Daniel, is thrust against his parents perversities. Paul and Rochelle parade in the nude to show their children the natural beauty of the body, or drag them to a concert where reactionary demonstrators break Paul`s arm. When his parents die, Daniel assumes responsibility for his sister all too readily, as if he has been a parent-in-training all his life, Little Susan can think of her real parents only as gods, and all American institutions as similar to the jails which held her apart from them.

Slowly, However, we do gain compassion. The Daniel who narrates the book is a married Columbia graduate student, guilt-ridden, sick of his bourgeois complacency; his tensions surface in offbeat sexual acts and professional inertia. His sister feels she keeps the political flame of the Isaacsons alive by participating in Radcliffe radicalism; she acts with confident reflex, but she lacks a real family and when her brother and certain radical friends do not co-operate to form a revolutionary foundation with an Isaacson trust fund, she begins to crack. Her attempt at suicide in a Howard Johnson's wash room--an attempt which ends in schizophrenia and leads to her death-- finally causes Daniel to investigate his roots.

He begins to understand how a couple of thirties CCNY kinds could find drama and purpose in romantic radicalism, and how their social lives never allowed that brand of radicalism to mature. Paul and Rochelle did hold just complaint. Their poverty and their struggle to conquer it had to bemuse their pride and sensitivity; only their occasional college freedom, and radical larks could give them the belief that they were free to live as they pleased, within economic limits, whether or not times were propitious. If their sins afflicted their children, so did those of their parents afflict them. They were only a generation away from the experience of pogroms, and their mother and father still reeked with the hate Cossacks aroused. "The Isaacson" Communism was composed of articles of faith; they used it as a way to feel superior to the world, rather than as a basis for social change, But their right to keep faith with it was earned in sweet and suffering, and it was not at all clear to Daniel that keeping faith meant to trade state secret.

DANIEL passes judgment on all concerned with his parents. Their religious lawyer's sense of ethics made his integrity unquestionable, but his defense strategy played into the hand of the prosecution by accepting the government's grounds of argument-that espionage had been committed at all. The minor party members who sucked up to the Isaacsons had as superficial social reasons for their socialism as the major party figures had shrewd ones, Liberals sell out their heritage with efforts to assimilate, and only the conservatives they placate have a clear idea of their political interests.

As Daniel pens the last pages of his record, student radicals close down the Butler Library. An all-encompassing resolution is ever reached, but we have more than a clue to Daniel`s purpose. He has already stated that his sister died "of a failure of analysis". Daniel`s book has already been a system of analyses, sermons and exhortations, designed to show how political lives are shaped far outside of what we've come to think of as political channels, Who knows if the bourgeois radicals who surround him have considered the imperatives of their past; if they haven't, their revolt will prove short-lived, Daniel has shaped a new kind of historical inquiry-an honest kind. He uses both Freudian psychology and Marxian sociology, but they don't contradict each other; because he understands his parents strength and failures on both levels, he doesn't resort to violence to prove his commitment, and he's not convinced that the heritage of industrial uprisings must be followed in order to best attack capitalist societies. (At one point, an Above Hoffmann-type radical says that the media are what must be invaded in order to influence the nation, and Daniel is considerably moved.)

DOCTOROW'S book has a creative weight to match his historical content. He intends his book to be read as if it were being written in front of use we feel we are present at a first, groping recollection of submerged memories, but that is only Doctorow's cunning. In effect, our reading becomes an act of participation; this both dares Doctorow to match his craft against our knowledge of his trickery, and challenges us to delve into ourselves as deeply as does his narrator. Daniel's honesty accuses us: we have shied away from confronting our compromised selves and foreshortened social roles. And we have given government--no, all social and cultural public life--over to the entertainers and idiots.