ODYSSEY OF THE SELF-CENTERED SELF (184 pp.)—Roberf Elliot Fitch—Harcourt, Brace & World ($3.95).
This is the agin' book of the season. Robert Elliot Fitch, Dean of California's Pacific School of Religion at Berkeley, is agin' atheism, agnosticism, romanticism, rationalism, humanism, positivism, existentialism and cubism. He is agin' progressive educators. Method actors, permissive parents, Vedantists, Taoists, Zen Buddhists and Bohemians. Getting personal, he is agin' Jean Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schopenhauer. Walt Whitman, Alfred Kinsey. Adlai Stevenson, Aldous Huxley, Jack Paar, Caryl Chessman, Erich Fromm, Boris Pasternak, Charles Van Doren, Tennessee Williams, Françoise Sagan, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Archibald MacLeish, Albert Camus. Samuel Beckett, D. T. Suzuki and James F. Powers. He is also agin' sin.
The sin that presumably links these varied souls, sects and sentiments is worshiping the false god of self, modern man's craven idol. The ammunition that Author Fitch, 59. brings to the neo-orthodox,-neo-conservative battle camp is shiny with polemical wit and brilliance, but his essential targets have long since been peppered by profounder critics, among them Reinhold Niebuhr (The Nattire and Destiny of Man), Bernard Iddings Bell (Crowd Culture), José Ortega y Gasset (Revolt of the Masses'). He seems temperamentally torn between being a Christian critic and playing the Spenglerian doomsayer in tones that resemble that carbuncular Shakespearean scold, Thersites ("Lechery, lechery! Still wars and lechery"). Between the wailing and the railing, some valid points get made.
Dreadful Joy. There has been a kind of five-phase decline of religion via pseudo religion, as Fitch sees it. Man began with God, "the only true faith," and then switched to the surrogate faiths of Nature, Humanity, Society (in the form of nationalism) and finally the Self. Today self-worship is in acute crisis, argues Fitch, and "atheism is at the end of its tether."
Before it went bankrupt, the Self was a proud and preening god. Nearly a century ago, Walt Whitman trumpeted: "I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious." The Self as deity pursued power (Faust) and pleasure (Don Juan). It achieved satiety, the rake's progress "from pain to ennui, from lust to disgust," which Fitch finds symbolically typified time and again in Aldous Huxley's heroes. At the end of Point Counter Point, the lovers, Burlap and Beatrice, "pretended to be two little children and had their bath together. And what a romp they had! The bathroom was drenched with their splashings. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." The logic of self-realization, as Huxley saw it, divided men into two camps-the Good-Timers, who dwell in the City of Dreadful Joy, and the High-Lifers, who "go a-whoring after abstractions, and try to make life fit into some formula."