Richard Kostelanetz
Irvin Faust (1996)
The name Irvin Faust first appeared in American little magazines in the early sixties above stunning stories that dealt with crazy narrators in New York City. The accompanying biographical note revealed that Faust, then in his later thirties, had not only received a doctorate in social psychology, but he had also authored a book of individual case studies, Entering Angel’s World (1963). By trade, however, Faust was not a psychologist or even a university professor but a “guidance counselor” at a suburban New York high school, where his major job has been getting the more ambitious students into choice American colleges.
His psychology book advocates that the therapist assume “wherever possible, the character and personality” of those with whom he deals. Perhaps the most striking quality of Faust’s first collection of stories, Roar Lion Roar(1965), is the sheer variety of madnesses apparently not the author’s own. His narrators include a Puerto Rican boy whose mental existence becomes so entwined with the fate of the Columbia College football team (known as “The Lions”) that when they lose to Princeton, he commits suicide; a rather stupid, dreamy fellow who sets out, accompanied by his Sancho, to be the Albert Schweitzer of New York’s Central Park; Calvin Coolidge Delaware, a psychopathic egomaniac who regards himself as “The World’s Fastest Human”; a fourteen-year-old who takes movies far too seriously and concomitantly suspects he possesses “a magical substance” that makes him immortal; a lonely stockroom boy so pathologically attached to his portable radio that a girl who makes a pass at him must first destroy the radio before she can gain his unobstructed attention.
Probably the greatest story here, if not one of the masterpieces of recent short fiction, is “Jake Bluffstein and Adolph Hitler,” which describes, from the vantage point of an intimate third-person narrator, a mad aging Jew who fondly remembers the time around World War II when Jews found good reason to hate gentiles. After trying to stir anti-gentile sentiment among his neighbors by scribbling late at night the word “JUDE” on the window of his neighborhood butcher, he comes to believe that all Jews who do not hate gentiles, like his own rabbi, are fundamentally Nazis. In an unforgettable conclusion, Bluffstein imagines himself the messiah of the Jews and then collapses in a psychotic breakdown. The idea of a Jew inventing anti-Semitism, much as the vulgar anti-Semite fabricates imaginary Jews, struck some Jewish-American critics as offensive, needless to say perhaps; this story was singled out at the time for particularly denunciatory criticism. Faust would always be a Jewish novelist excluded from the promotional packages of those flacks trying to make writing by Jews more acceptable to book-buying Americans. The resulting scandal is that his name appears in few critical books about modern American fiction, implicitly raising questions about contemporary literary intelligence.
Roar Lion Roar not only dealt quite profoundly with various cultural milieus of New York City but these interests in individual madnesses and urban life appear not only in Faust’s subsequent novels, but also in such stories as the brilliant “Dalai Lama of Harlem,” which was published first in Sewanee Review and then in his second collection
His first novel, which remains his best, may well be the most perspicacious and sustained portrait of a psychotic breakdown in all novelistic literature. The protagonist of The Steagle is Harold Aaron Weissburg, an English professor at a New York City college — ambitious enough to live above his means, yet not particularly devoted to either his work or intellectual pursuits; and the novel relates the fortnight-plus preceding his fall. As in “Jake Bluffstein,” which this novel structurally resembles, the theme of incipient breakdown is evident from the fiction’s beginning, and the “plot,” so to speak, lies in its elaboration to an expected conclusion. However, Weissburg’s disintegration is more gradual and various than Bluffstein’s, as well as more sensitively portrayed. Indeed, what is especially impressive is Faust’s shrewd and subtle portrayal of a psychotic who, unlike a neurotic (say, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Roquentin or Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger), is barely aware of his imminent fall. As a psychotic, Weissburg externalizes his fantasies, really believing that he is a movie star named “Bob Hardy” (of the same family as Andy) or a gruff Italian capable of making a stripper fall in love with him. As in “Jake Bluffstein,” Faust is also especially adept at rendering with unfailing similitude how an hysterical consciousness distorts the lines between fantasy and reality so that the reader is never fully sure whether certain actions take place in dream or in life; for deeply embedded in Faust’s fiction is the psychological truth that the wish can be as significant as the act. Nonetheless, his characterizations are never theoretically mechanical enough to provide “textbook cases,” as neither psychological terminology nor conspicuous symbols mar his perceptive descriptions. The deficiencies of The Steagle stem from historical perspective—an increasing preoccupation of Faust’s later fiction — that is inadequately developed, as in the amorphous background in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Certain petty details of characterization—Weissburg seems more of a high school teacher than a college professor—remain unconvincing.
Faust’s next project was an historical novel based upon Marinus Willett (1740-1830), a chronic loser who was Mayor of New York City for a year at the beginning of the nineteenth century—he sided with Alexander Hamilton, opposed the development of the steamboat, etc. This Faust work has so far remained unfinished. In 1970 appeared The File on Stanley Patton Buchta whose protagonist is a fairly sensitive Long Island WASP, who, after serving in Vietnam, decides to become a policeman. Being college-educated and more sophisticated than his colleagues, Buchta is enlisted to become an undercover agent assigned to spy upon both a militant right-wing group and their leftish antagonists. This more “newsy” subject seems to popularize Faust’s earlier virtues — the intimate feelings for New York City, the appreciation of ethnic diversity and language, and occasional passages of acute psychological understanding; but just as the plot here is needlessly confused and less credible, so is the style considerably thinner than before.
Its successor, Willy Remembers (1971), has another Middle-American for its narrator, Willy T. Klienhans, now well into his dotage, whose opening sentences indicate that his recollection is, to say the least, hopelessly scrambled: “Major Bill McKinley was the greatest president I ever lived through. No telling how far he could have gone if Oswald hadn’t shot him.” This novel is richer in literary excellences than Stanley Patton Buchta, and it resembles The Steagle in its portrayal of insensitive psychosis. However, though Klienhans, in Faust’s portrayal, becomes more imposing than the silly old fool he seems to be at the novel’s beginning, he is scarcely as compelling, or resonant, as Weissburg or even Buchta; and the portraiture is extended far too long, suggesting perhaps that the material of Willy Remembers would have worked better as a short story or a novella.
Of Faust’s last four published novels, the best is Foreign Devils (1974), which begins as a first-person narrative by another of Faust’s inspired madmen—Sidney Benson (born Birnbaum), who imagines himself a war reporter named Norris Blake covering the Boxer rebellion in China at he turn of he century. This fantasy is mixed with another of Birnbaum as a jazz musician playing with Benny Goodman in the late thirties. From time to time intrudes present mundane reality, as we learn that he is separated from his wife and currently working as a teacher at Washington Irving High School. (In the background are the May 1968 riots around Columbia University.) The novel concludes with the cinematic image of Birnbaum’s wife running toward him, but this too might be illusory. Here, as in other later Faust, the reader often gets lost.
Nonetheless, Faust’s best stories along with The Steagle clearly establish him among the strongest psychological novelists of the last third of this century.