Books: Anti-Youth Movements

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TO ABOLISH CHILDREN AND OTHER ESSAYS by Karl Shapiro. 288 pages. Quadrangle. $6.50.

THE PATCH COMMISSION by Frederick Crews. 173 pages. Dutton. $3.95.

Edsel Margin III and Karl Shapiro agree with millions of other solidifying citizens that America is in the sticky clutches of its children. It makes these two men angry; it makes them nervous; it gives them sour stomachs.

They do, however, differ in an important way. Edsel Margin III is Author Frederick Crews's caricature of a conservative political commentator who confronts the world as if it were a meet between the Yale and Harvard debating teams. A member of America's processed aristocracy, the third Edsel not only has the courage of his convictions but the confidence of his accent and vocabulary as well.

Karl Shapiro is Karl Shapiro, poet-professor (University of Illinois) and former Poetry magazine editor who won the hearts and votes of the 1945 Pulitzer Prize Committee with V-Letter and Other Poems, a collection of tough-but-oh-so-gentle verse that balanced war disillusionment with hope for a humane future. The conviction behind Shapiro's courage has long been that organized cultural activities subvert "the fine arts"; he sees the latest threat in a corrupting coalition of irresponsible youth and commercial clowns. In To Abolish Children, the title essay in his assortment of literary trade pieces wrapped around "a fragment of a novel in progress," Shapiro quakes about "these freewheeling organisms equipped with electric guitars." But his arguments are smothered by his indignation.

Sloganeering. At 54, Shapiro feels that he has been back-stabbed by "the heirs to the kingdom of Wall Street—the latest generation of betrayers and destroyers . . . that practices infantilism on a scale which has never been seen."

He finds hippies under every bed. He accuses them of mindless sloganeering, but then goes on to scrawl his own slogans: "Negro jazz is masochistic"; "This is the generation that uses the word Love as a synonym for Hate."

When he says that "dissident sartorial fashion" is a form of transvestism that blurs sex differences, it seems that he has never looked beyond the long hair and junk jewelry to the girls in miniskirts and bikinis, or the young studs in beards, creeping sideburns and tight jeans. And when he claims that "the Underground" in the U.S. (which he does not define beyond the suggestion that it is a vague association of malcontents) never raised its voice against the Russian suppression of Hungary, he is simply indulging in a naive bit of conspiracy theory.

Less than Swiftian (though not without an occasional flicker of appeal) are Shapiro's modest proposals, which include raising the minimum age for drivers' licenses to at least 30, denying foreign travel to children unless granted as a privilege from their school, putting dissidents on reservations, and destroying all concepts of adolescence. He cannot be serious; yet one pokes vainly through Shapiro's overcooked simplifications for a scrap of wit or irony. Finding none, the reader concludes that To Abolish Children is little more than a late-middle-age temper tantrum.