Page 53 - WTP VOl. XII #1

the in-between stage—mature male—to his stories’ protagonists, though they too ran away from normal adult responsibilities.
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The following day Dan Scherr and I drove back to Tel Aviv and met Fiedler at the USIA building. It struck me that Fiedler—at 61—was the same age as Hemingway when Fiedler met him in late 1960 and described him as a doddering, inarticulate old man. Fiedler, though, was still robust, still pugnacious, still sharp, still ready to do battle against bourgeois conservatism.
After we entered the projection room, Fiedler sat quietly, expectantly. Rather than give him a play-by- play intro, I thought it better to let him experience the show without any advance commentary. The lights were turned off, the room was dark and silent. I could hear myself breathing, and then the audiovi- sual machinery was turned on.
Our audiovisual shows were preprogrammed so that once a button was pushed, everything was in sync. The moment the show was set in motion, using tech- nology available to us in the 1970s, the narration, the literary readings, the slides and the music reinforced and illustrated one another in our attempt to provide an immersive experience for the audience.
In the opening section of “Shifting Gears” the narra- tion pointed out that the U.S. was “the first civilization wholly committed to the machine,”
which was a “central metaphor” in American litera- ture. There were readings from Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, Hart Crane and others extol- ling technology, whether train, dynamo, vehicle or business machine.
The second section featured readings from John Updike, John Dos Passos, E.L. Doctorow, John Barth and others who acknowledged the machine’s ubiqui- ty in American life but took an ironic view of it. There were also readings from Henry Miller and Elmer Rice, who wrote scenes in which a human becomes machine-like, or a machine becomes human.
The most prominent literary source for the last part of “Shifting Gears” was Robert Pirsig’s Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, from which we took several quotations:
“Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial to technical work. It’s the whole thing. I think that when this
“Fiedler had written about him, so
he felt Hemingway was a character in his writing. Meeting him was disconcerting, as if Shakespeare were to run into Hamlet who’d critique the play about him, a kind of dislo- cation that a fantasy writer might invent.“
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