The American Scene; Golk

This is Gulk, Gulk, a novel by Richard Stern. It is the art form we are going to talk about today, the art which we are going to view. This is Howard Vincent viewing the art for Illinois Institute of Technology and the American scene. We have talked about biography. We have talked about ballet and music. But we have not talked about the novel as such. And we sat off with a bang today with this novel Gulk, which is by a man out of the University of Chicago, Richard Stern. And we have him here today with us to explain it, to defend it, and while we praise it. Richard Stern is a assistant professor out of the University of Chicago. He is Secretary of the General Studies Committee in Humanities at the University. He is well known as a literary critic, having published a widely in magazines like The Canaan Review, The Western Review. And he's sharp stories have appeared in several of those periodicals. But this is his first

novel, Gulk. What does it word mean, this is Stern? Gulk. Well, it means an awful lot of things in the novel. It's basically the pseudonym, which the hero, whose original name was Sidney Pomeroy, adopts a crucial stage of his career. And it begins to stand for the sort of thing he does, which is to put people into scenes, put into television scenes, when they don't know they're being televised. And this fashion Gulk's Pomeroy feels that he brings them out. He establishes their humanity in their way, which it is an ordinarily established. It's therefore a kind of Gulk is therefore, in that sense, a kind of rigged epiphany to use the famous word Joyce employs in portrait of the artist, as a young man. Gulk is also a verb, which I think

the hero says means to look with a critical and skeptical eye at things. It means a number of other things. He invokes drinks and stuff. It means to Gulk. It means to Gulk too. And to Gulk and to talk and to examine the pry and so on. Yes, it means all of those things. But you say this man films people in their off moments and their casual moments and then puts them on TV programs. It's said in the TV world, but once you say this is not a TV novel as such. If I understand a TV novel, the mercenary practices of the people in the TV world know it is not a TV novel. There is quite a bit of talk about TV though, but not from the inside. I don't know much about TV technically. But TV does, is an easy way of talking about the post -war American world. It's the entertainment

which has, in which everybody is immersed. The madness that you find there prevails in the world outside. Of course. Yes. And the delights of TV, for the delights of the world. So it's a study of this man and his career, his rise to national network and his fall and the opportunists, are they opportunists? Surely they are, make him fall or help his fall. And the presence of like Caesar and the fourth and fifth acts of the fifth act of the play, where he's not present, but his presence has felt all the way through. That's a marvelous analogy, a very nobling one. When I like very much, just Gop is supposed to be a man of power, a man of creative gifts, but I didn't want to write about a musician or a painter. And I just wasn't thinking about generals or Romans. Well, now in this world of the TV world, the program of this, what's this program called? You're on 10. I don't want to get the wrong

one. You're on camera. Reminiscent about my fun stuff. Yes, yes, yes. But you're on camera is a, there is a nightmare quality about this. Of course, being written from a satirical point of view. It, at first I, as I first started to read it, I thought of Kafka and then I thought of all this Huxley and I thought of this and then the other. What motivated your writing? Let's get at that crude question. Of course, that's, as you know, immensely difficult question to answer. I, it may well be that one writes to put down other people or one has excess energy and it goes into writing. I trust the latter is closer to the motors behind writing. But this particular novel springs from my delight fascination with this program invented by Alan Funt, called Candid Camera. It was originally Candid Microphone. Yeah, microphones into post boxes and have these post boxes conduct conversations with passes by who would, and things of that sort. At any rate, it springs from that and from, and then

it's nourished by all sorts of feelings that I have for such things as New York or for the difference between amateurs and professionals and life, nourished by ideas about people who, who progress by bearing them, themselves, eliminating the aggressive juvenile selfish attitudes or people who impose themselves upon the world who remake the world in their own image. And so on, there are lots of ideas which I feel more or less passionately about which go in here and then lots of feelings about places and about people which get into the novel. Well, there's a curious thing about the hero himself, Gulk, a satiric portrait of a type of operation and yet he becomes rather, I won't say it, yes, rather attractive. Well, that's my intention. The intention is to

let you see Gok, a thick of Gok, a bit as a type to start out with. The sort of type who appears in TV novels, the big man who's going to get knocked off his perch because he's arrogant. But I want really to write about a creative person, a person who's full of life and energy and is an imaginative, well, if not genius near genius. And I'm quite sympathetic to Gok and therefore unsympathetic to other reviewers who regard this as a satiric picture of it. He is the man of genius who does trip himself up and who's, and who, when he does trip himself up is brought to his knees by his disciples, is a pig and he's the people whom he's brought to life. But the very tripping up is to his credit because what he's doing is, what he's been doing is tripping up some people who very well needed tripping up on the people behind him didn't have the courage to back him up in his program. It was really a creative idea he had there and he wouldn't carry through with it. Yes, it seems

to me a very useful idea, though in the format of the book, I better say what the idea is, Gok decides that he's dissatisfied with just revealing ordinary people. He's dissatisfied with making marvelous, funny, brilliant scenes. He decides that he's got to be the education of the public. He goes to Washington and he exposes the assistant of the president of the United States, exposes his arrogance, his snobbery. He slips the camera into a conference between a labor leader and an industrialist. Or rather, he masquerades as an industrialist himself and has this conference with a labor leader and so on. And then the program gets into trouble. The network people are terrified in the classic fashion of network people and Gok is on the way out. In a sense, I feel that he's perverted as mission but under the pressures which so many artists have suffered in the 20th century are

failing that they are irrelevant to social action, that they don't have immense effect on life and on the way people act. It wants to take over too much power. It wants to become God. It wants to become, yes, a man of power. Yes, but still it's a very good series of exposures on the gangster, the exposed, very brilliant idea. By the way, did Alan Funt ever get that far or not? Oh no, Funt has been more of a purist than Gok and in fact, he's not very much like Gok at all but I only deal with him and I admire him a great deal. We went to add Funt imagining lots of these programs, you said, if you had to go into TV. Well, that is one of the pleasantest things about writing a novel which is not a Picker S novel which is a kind of French novel as far as it centers around a tight situation. But using the Gok, I can spread out a good deal. It's a short novel but I'm unable to write about

fruit vendors or people in hardwares, there's no sorts of people that I wouldn't ordinarily get to write about unless I was writing a huge novel kind of Dosed Passes, John Dosed Passes panoramic novel. Yes, well, you slip in a lot of New York in there. In fact, there's several names and places I want to ask a couple of later. Now, how would you place it in? I asked you this question before and I didn't get an answer and you probably thought I was being very impertinent and I am, but how do you place it in the sense of John? Yeah. It doesn't place well, huh? I think that's a very good question. I'm troubled by its placement. I don't consider it as I set a satire. I don't consider it a picturesque novel. A friend of mine who's a distinguished literary critic says that he doesn't think it's quite like any book he's read but he'd be hard put to define it now. Of course, every book that pretends to be serious is an escape from a classic type, from a genre as well as an exemplification of it. But it's

perhaps the mixture of the, treatment of scenes which are not rigidified, or classified by ideas, plus the rather passionate interest in ideas, which I hope saves this novel or prevents this novel from being either a satire on the one hand, a pure satire on the one hand, or a novel of scene, a novel of character. So it's not a novel of idea, nor a novel of character in that sense, I think. I think I can place it better by glancing at the jacket here. I'm going to read from Saul Bellow's comment on it. Gulk is fantastic, funny, better, intelligent without weariness. Best of all, gulk is pure. That is to say necessary without hoax them. Now, that's a very nice tribute indeed,

but what interests me is that if it's in any genre, it's in that curious genre that Saul Bellow writes in. Augie March, a man that people moving around, it satirizes this, and yet it doesn't have that distance that satire often has. That's sort of that the author himself didn't concern with these things, that he's above and can laugh and mock, but there's a feeling, feeling for people as well as a laughter at people. Is that proud? I'd be very proud. It's very nice of you to say something like that. I can sitabello in the best -rider going, best active writer, perhaps, in the Western world, of prose fiction. And I do admire that marvelous ability to soak up detail and give it back with shine and glitter. And then that remarkable feeling for people, I'm afraid to have it certainly not the way he does, but we have let yourself go on in here. I mean, you take, you need more space in time, you have to let yourself go more than you did, but you've got the feeling there if you're ready to loosen a little. The novel was influenced in

a sense by Bellow, in this sense, that I used to write a kind of tight, well -made, tailored fiction, a fiction which was influenced by the sort of story writers who were celebrated in textbooks like Brooks and Warn, story writers like Peter Talon, J .F. Powers, and my still -admire, a story writer like Catherine and Porter, but I began to feel a little too cramped there. I began to feel that I'd like to let my characters be explicit, let themselves go, break out, and open themselves to the world as characters in Bellow do. Well, the reason Bellow is doing it, certainly, I would, one reason I would think would be the, it's a form, that kind of open form, loose form, is much more suitable to the society in which you live, which is become a loose, although there are certain tightnesses in the society, but there is a kind of looseness to a chaos, a multiplicity, which a novel like this, or like you might lend itself to better a form. Yes, I think that's a very nice thing to say, because it's usually said of all society that the

pressures of the mechanical age have tended to mechanize humans, that there is far less variety than there was say in the Middle Ages, or let's say in the Renaissance, which is the opening chapter of modern individuality. But I agree with you, I believe that in this country, that underneath the series of gestures, which most of us give to types, the gestures which identify us as members of a class, of a group, of a sect, there's a great deal of kind of underground, secret, nomadic life in which we treasure those things which separate us from others, which characterize our individuality. Too much of this is done, of course, in terms of goods and possessions. Yes, but at any rate, perhaps then the Yogi March novel

is an attempt to celebrate individuality and preserve that which counts in it. Now one thing about this candid camera approach to as being a, as a belittling of human beings and showing them in their pettiness and their nonsense, as a matter of fact, I found the opposite. The way people respond, they have the grace and the decency, a lot of them to take it and to go along with it, and not be over -proud. And I admire the people more than I do, the people doing the work. I'm very glad, again, that you're saying that. It, the, the, the, the, Creighton, literary Creighton, reviewed this for the Sunday Times and he talked about the way in which the Orwell Big Brother spies on us all and how this novel is aware of this, the viciousness of, of surprising people in their intimate moments. Now I, I am, would of course be, would be

against this sort of thing as I'm sure you would, but no, a galk is, is interested in letting people flower under his cameras, taking them out of the automatic, mechanical, routine motions of their daily life and letting them display what is grace and capacity for pity and sympathy and anger and so on. Well, there's a very fine bed in there which maybe he's making this point. Papa, Papa Hondarp gets taken in one of these kind of scenes and Papa Hondarp is just TV addict. He's glued in front of that hypnotic eye hour after hour after hour and when he finally becomes a victim, he sees it as another world. He's not, he's not personally involved in this. He's fascinated and it helps his ego. Great to go too. I think it's like, it's making the point there very well. The Papa Hondarp is a character who's kind of separated from most of the people in the book and he does figure in another kind of idea scheme. He does, and I do, as you

say, use him as the TV addict. And you use him to bring him into impact with this TV world and that last scene, next and not the last scene, but one of the last scenes at party, a big party, a wedding party and which Papa Hondarp sees as these wild people are throwing fruit around. He just can't take it. It's bourgeois sense of violence. Yes, it's, he's the epitome of the bourgeois life which is sun -herbid rejects. After 37 years being under poverty, sun becomes a bohemian or a dog. A gulk. A gulk, that's right, a gulkite. And of course, the outrage of the father at first and then the pride later, then the pride of the pleasure. So he's a kind of type warmth character and I didn't have to work too hard to get him but he was very precious to me. He'd give him a couple of traits, this lipoma, this fatty deposit which keeps growing on his neck till it becomes a kind of auxiliary head. He looks like a two -headed man and so on.

But he figures in the novels as the antagonist of Herbert Hondarp, who's interested in life is experimentation, his values on nobody else's. There's a kind of wolf on the land and yet the wolf whom I also have a certain amount of sympathy. Yes, but one of the fastening is Jenny Willoughby or Hendricks. You know, Hendricks, her real name, Jenny and Willoughby. Jenny and Willoughby, where'd you pick her up? I mean, what did you want to do with her? Well, the core of Jenny and Willoughby is her hatred for her secondary status as a woman, her resentment of being cast in clean -up roles and not having a career, the sort that a man has, the pressures which Western life, of course, or perhaps earthly life, have put on women to make them into what Simone de Beauvoir calls a second sex, an auxiliary and helpmate sense. So this is the energy which drives her through the book and it's only at the

end when she sees that she too that her rebellion has become rebellion, not for its own sake, for the sake of experimentation that she quits, she gets off, she gets converted. In fact, all the characters at the end kind of slip off into or resume a more traditional role where experimentation ends. They bury the self which has caused them to create the works of art, which the galks are supposed to be, the works of pleasure, of imagination, of comedy, and they get back into a role in which they're in a sense saved according to, say, somebody like Schopenhauer. What are you saying here about the role of the artist in society then? Well, of course, I purposely don't write about a traditional sort of artist, but I am writing about a creative man in a contemporary world and I am mostly talking about the limits of his

achievements and his feeling of being thought of as somebody irrelevant, somebody attached to the world of entertainment, somebody who is not a prophet, a world moralist, a social moralist, a preacher, a social preacher. These are various roles which I think artists have had throughout. Did you go in plotting and planning your novel? Did you say, I wanted a certain character pattern here, and you selected certain character types out of your experience and your imagination? Yes, well, of course, I started with galk and I wanted somebody to create it. Then I had to have a couple of secondary people. Yes. And I chose and hung up somebody who I don't think is, was familiar to me in literature, but who? Hans Kaskark. No, it's the Kaskark type. But hung up is put in a special situation, namely a man who's never worked in his whole life, whose

idleness stands for his own father's success. He's an item of conspicuous consumption. But then, who becomes suddenly and quickly under the magic touch of the galk, a rebel, an experiment. But the minor characters who come through the book are not people I know, just people who fill in places in the book, occasionally summer treated more energetically than others. Some of them are just type. Well, that stresses all the more than that you chose them, not because you had known them, and they forced their way into the book just out of you had a certain delight. But they fit at certain thematic patterns and metaphysical structure, if you wish, symbolic structure. Yes, symbolic or rather thematic and plot structures. There's no character in there whom I think of as a symbol. There is one character I'm a little unhappy with, but I've even found a kind of function for him. That's the

fisherman who's out on the aisle who just has eight years' worth of life magazines to read on. He was the least convincing of all. I mean, he seemed planted there. He is planted there. I suppose he's there. For those seven years of life magazines, I'll, yes, and fishing in the Atlantic. But not for first, just for some fish mean enough to take a bear hook. And I guess he's somebody who just rejects a social life. And who, in a sense, is a preparation, a harbinger of the release of Galk himself and eventually of Hendricks and Hunderb, and of all the other Galks from social life. They disappear into the mass. Well, I'm glad you pointed out what I felt. I hadn't been so aware I felt it. But I think also that I kept expecting Galk to go back to him, for some reason. If you remember, Chekhov says somewhere, if you bring a cannon on stage, fire it. Yes. Well, you didn't fire that man. No, I didn't bring a fire in again. He actually is

mentioned once again. Yes, he's mentioned later. Yes, and that stands for the kind of objection I think can be brought against him. He perhaps should be used again. I don't know how he got in there. I think in a part, I wanted slightly, and this may be a legitimate, a cosmological dimension, a little cosmological shadow of the book. I know I like Thomas Mann very much mostly because he always knows what he's doing. And you know how his novels are variations on themes and you have a situation which has talked about in human terms and then vegetable terms and then cosmological terms, sometimes a little uninterestingly. And I may have been influenced perhaps for the badly by this interest of Mann in Mann's expansiveness. Well, Mann, of course, is another dimension of a book and you would have to write it twice, three times the length. But I didn't say you can't do it, but I would say that I've finally found after this groping here for several minutes, the equivalent

West and Pangol West. Well, the West has been mentioned two or three times, but very intelligent critics. I have never been a fan of West. I don't like Miss Lonely Hearts. I do like the day of the Locusts more. The day of the Locusts is the one I was thinking of today. It's the one I lately read. But I, well, I don't know, it may be that way, but my own feeling is that West dislikes people more than I do. That's true, he does. Gulk, Gulk inspired that hard, wonderful title. Mr. Stern, Gulk is a much more humane book, yes. There's something a little bit fingernail about the West. I hope it's differentiated from West in that way, though he's a man I love. You even like your character so that when they are traders, when they are treacherous, you don't make them into black villains completely. After all, it's part of the system they're trapped in, and they allow their conscience to twinges, but they aren't, you don't over -ground with that. It's very hard to write a

villain in art times. It's easy. It's hard to write a hero, but people like Thorken and Hemingway and the now Bellow have worked at it and come up with something very close to heroism. But I can think offhand of no convincing villain in a modern novel, the, the, the, who modern may alliate them as the theme song of modern novelists. I'm sorry you made that statement because it's gonna bother me for the rest of the week, trying to find a villain. It's true that it's been made about heroes. We don't have heroes anymore, and the decline of the hero in the novel in the last 75 years. But also the decline of the villain. In other words, things are just moving in together. We know too much about people. To understand all is to figure all. That's what I'm saying. That's right, surely. But it might be worthwhile to work out a kind of mammoth villain and do it in any way. Well, if there's any villain in this and these other novels that we've been talking about, it's the society in which they are. The society itself becomes a

character, it becomes capital S. And it takes a role in the work. I hope that I don't make society a villain in this, but that is what one can say. There's a villain in this element there. If you're going to try to find a villain, then you could find it there more than you would in any of the characters. Anything which suppresses individuality without returns is an asense villainous, though, of course, maybe some of the greatest things in the world exist in order to suppress individuality and to bring one into some kind of collective salvation, even though the salvation may be personal. I take it you have another novel on the way now. I finished a novel called Europe, which is very different from this one. I'm running a third, which is still more different and much more a novel of more feeling. Well, I'm confident that this novel, Gulk, Mr. Sturry, is doing well. It's had good reviews, except for two or three of the leading magazines who were crazy. They were really off base on their reviews. I know that because it is an excellent work. I'm going to call it

satiric work for lack of a title. It's a satiric work. It's fantastic, funny, bitter, intelligent without worryness. Nobody can go wrong reading this, and he will profit immensely. I think that you all ought to go out and get a copy of Gulk by Richard Stern, who has been with us talking about this fascinating book. Thank you, Richard Stern, for coming and being with us this half -hour. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you very much, Dr. Bence.