Word: satirists
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Esquire again gets the prize for unusual choices. In 1968 the magazine recruited Playwright Jean Genet, Novelist William Burroughs, Satirist Terry Southern and Poet Allen Ginsberg. This time the Esquire group is to include Guenrikh Borovik, 43, former U.S. correspondent for the Soviet news agency Novosti and writer for Izvestia and Pravda. He will team with Jack Chen, 63, a Eurasian who travels on a Trinidad passport and wrote for Peking Review and People's Daily while living in mainland China from 1950 until last year. To round out this summer's roster, Esquire will have the services...
Haunted. At such moments, Ol denburg is death's buffoon. The wind shield wiper will never be built. But the mere fact that it has been designed reminds one of Dean Swift's A Modest Proposal, in which the satirist suggested the fattening and roasting of infants as a solution to the Irish famines. Indeed, allowing for the limits within which an artist can resemble a writer, there is something very Swiftian about the whole cast of Oldenburg's imagination - haunted by death, fascinated by the elaboration of fantasy worlds in which the uses of objects...
What comes especially clear in Wanda June is that Vonnegut is an easy kind of satirist. His writing is full of engineered whimsy, empty of rage. He is so eager to ingratiate himself with his audience that he seldom takes on anything more substantial than tentative heroes, canting psychiatrists, fumbling representatives of Mencken's American booboisie. A couple of heavyweight opponents are indeed invoked throughout Wanda June (the war in Viet Nam, the Christian religion). But Vonnegut dances around them like a kid from the Golden Gloves unwilling to risk even...
From this prominence, unfortunately, it is all downhill. Condon was never a satirist: he was a riot in a satire factory. He raged at Western civilization and every last one of its works. He decorticated the Third Reich, cheese fanciers, gossip columnists and the Hollywood star system with equal and total frenzy. Since the foaming manias of The Oldest Confession and The Manchurian Candidate, Condon's fine, random wrath has aged until it is nothing more than irritability. Once he could have picked up the Republican and Democratic parties by their tails and swung them around his head like...
Aristotle and Jeremiah. But who is the mysterious satirist, himself apparently a veteran of the Kennedy years? The names of Theodore Sorensen and Pierre Salinger somehow do not come to mind. Could it be the midnight penman, John Kenneth Galbraith, who last struck in 1963 (with his pseudonymous The McLandress Dimension)! Prescott's editor at Doubleday, which also happens to be Galbraith's publisher, replies: "Why don't you ask him?" Last week, unfortunately, Galbraith was unreachable in Austria; his secretary said that he was "driving slowly" from an economists' meeting in the Tyrol toward...