WHAT AM I DOING HERE

by A bner Dean'31. Simon and Schuster, 1947. Pp. 160, $2.75.

What Am I Doing Here? is funny, but, like the D'Urberville family struggling back from a Saturday night's drinking, taking one step towards London and two towards Bath, not quite so funny as it might appear at first glance. The title alone is enough to tell the reader what the main theme of the book is, and when Dean uses this same title as a caption for more than a half-dozen of his drawings, it is a broad hint that the author-artist is probing at what is probably the most oppressive disease of the American mind today, anxiety.

"It is pointless to try to 'explain' Abner Dean," says Clifton Fadiman in his prefatory note to the book, but a glance at those halfdozen drawings might give us some idea of what lies behind it all. For his hero, Dean has chosen a poor, naked little man who flounders through the world in a state of complete puzzlement, and in the first drawing we find him at a cocktail party, not sipping cooling drinks and chatting with the other naked guests, but meditatively looking out of an igloo which has miraculously sprung out of the floor. Surrealist? Perhaps, but at the same time giving rise to that terrifying, gummy feeling which comes over so many of us at so many cocktail parties: "What am I doing here?" We next see the hero asking himself what he is doing on a raft which is floating down the streets of a deserted town. An equally terrifying drawing shows the little man, loaded down with a tray full of papers, sloshing his way through a hundred-yard tank of sludge towards the dais on which is seated "The Boss." A few pages later he is asking himself what he is doing as he tumbles and cartwheels in front of a grandstand filled with, well, people. One of the more nightmare-ish drawings in the book reveals our hero pumping his way on a hand-car down an endless railway track which runs across an endless desert; the only relief furnished here is a couple of cow-skulls slowly turning into dust. A last bizarre picture shows him standing outside a brilliantly lighted Macy's window, holding a mallet behind his naked back. Inside, a group of corpulent nudes are stuffing themselves with all manner of food.

And there it is! The little man is always alone, always frustrated, always finding himself in an untenable position. He is very close to the hero of Satre's first novel: " 'What a hell of a time I'm having!' thought Matthieu with a strange, grinding thrill of pleasure."