Word: middleman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Kurt Vonnegut, even at his best, is a middleman, but Slaughterhouse-Five is his best by far. He gets rage and desperation into his science-fiction time-space games; for once he deals with an incident of historical importance which he lived through, the fire-bombing of Dresden in 1944 by Allied troops. Because the acrid smell of flesh burning in the biggest civilian massacre of World War II has not left his nostrils. Vonnegut, who was transferred to the non-industrial cultural center as a POW, admits in his introduction that he's compelled for once to do more...
Vonnegut, being a middleman, can't get very far with ideas. He doesn't link up Dresden with any inherent political or social conflicts it symbolizes, implying instead a state of moral squalor necessary for such a catastrophe to have taken place. And his vision is only that of Bill Pilgrim, a stupid if sweethearted protagonist, bumbling between the Ilium upper-middle-class of Vonnegut's present, the Dresden holocaust, and the planet Tralfamadore, where he cavorts with a nubile Hollywood starlet in a fantasy-world designed to protect him from being fatally bound to his depressing earthliness...
Despite his credentials as an outsider, James Baldwin has been a middleman between black rights activists and white liberals. Finely written early novels like Go Tell It on the Mountain sensitized white readers to life under black skin. The moral essays (Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time) personalized the abstractions of racism with passion and high intelligence. Yet a middleman runs the risk of being caught between both ends. Liberals eventually tired of having their noses rubbed in their own hypocrisy. Radical brothers like Eldridge Cleaver charged Baldwin with caring more about personal needs than black liberation. Indeed...
...chairman last month), Miller says that he has "come to know someone, along with the newspaper situation generally, in almost every city and town in this country." That makes acquisitions easier: "So much of this is done person to person. We don't have to work through a middleman...
...village because he was considered dangerous, even though his only political involvement was voting "No" at the same "referendum". But if you sit with him long enough and if you steer the conversation that way, he will tell you with great bitterness how the Ministry of Agriculture supported the middleman in his nearest town by repaying him for World War II losses and yet never gave anybody in the village a single drachma and how the middleman is still paying the same prices to the producer for tobacco, but is now selling at much higher prices to the cigarette company...