Jock v. Paddy

By Melvin Maddocks

CONFESSIONS OF A FUTURE SCOTSMAN

by PAUL REB

127 pages. Braziller. $5.95.

The American novelist narrating an identity crisis is getting to be the Ancient Mariner of fiction. It is a brave man (or somebody from out of town) who doesn't cross the street when he sees this wild, hoary figure loping at him with the sandwich board reading: "But who am I--really?" Only a novelist who is intense enough or funny enough can continue to hold an audience with his glittering eye when he stabs a finger in the air and cries: "Once upon a time there was this not-so-little lost ego...!"

Paul Reb happens to be both intense and funny, and he writes with the odd, angular originality of an author who has been talking to himself at the typewriter for 25 years--mostly in Anchorage, Alaska. By all conceivable point systems, Confessions of a Future Scotsman must win the Most Mature First Novel award for 1973. Reb is 48, and he has lived out quite an apprenticeship: he studied photography with Ansel Adams; he prospected (long and unsuccessfully); and he filled a trunk "with ten to fifteen books half written, quarter written, or firmly in mind." Surely he has earned the right to say a man is what he makes himself? Instead he says pretty much the opposite: that a man does not invent his identity; he is born with it, and his only options are to recognize it or not.

Reb's "future Scotsman" is a fairly fantastic bucko named Jack, who believed himself to be an Irishman until he was 20 and played the part to the Abbey Theater hilt. Though he grew to only 60 3/8 inches and had to dye his hair red, Jack strutted through life indulging in "imitation Irish ultimating" (like his 6 ft. 3 in. father), gloriously using the world as his straight man. "An Irishman," Jack concludes, looking back to lost innocence, "can get by with things another man can't."

When he learns his life has been no more real than a Paddy joke--that he is Scottish on both sides--the news affects Jack like expulsion from Eden. What is a Scotsman? Jack undergoes a case of nine-year shock trying to answer. First he becomes a non-Irishman--a "neutral man," practically evaporating in the arms of his girl Elizabeth, a perfect colleen stereotype with "about seventy-six brothers and sisters, and a drunken no-good father."

But is not-to-be-Irish enough? Can one make a career of being nobody, the "Mr. Pulp of All Existence"? A lot of people do, Reb suggests. Actors of the latest lifestyle, they call it being contemporary. Count Jack out: he has been somebody once, and he must be somebody again. He meets his first Scotsman, "a moody sort" who wears tweed pants and smokes a pipe. The new hoot-mon studies his archetype and buries himself in Scottish history until his eyes throb. At the end of this surreal little journal of tribal transfer, not only Jack's heart but Jack's body--packing a volume of Robbie Burns--is en route to the Highlands, preparing for rebirth at 29.

Author Reb has no Irish ancestry that he knows of. His father was a Hungarian-born German, his mother part Scots with a little bit of Cherokee. In the book he is witty as a stock Irishman and dour as a stock Scotsman. But his ethnic comic strip is essentially a fresh argument for the most ancient (and the most forgotten) truism: that man is an act of nature as well as being his own artifact. Ah, begorra, laddie, nobody can build the case for nature like a self-made artist.

--Melvin Maddocks

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