The Battle of Algiers
Finally got around to seeing The Battle of Algiers (1966), Gillo Pontecorvo’s black-and-white, quasi-documentary-style classic set in 1954, during the uprising that led to Algeria’s independence from France eight years later. It is stylishly shot and does not suffer — quite the contrary — from having a cast of nonprofessional actors. It retains its power, and it is amazingly relevant today. At a time when most U.S. troops are finally coming home from Iraq, when there are rumblings in some corners about a similar — and similarly rock-headed — adventure in Iran, this film should be required viewing; in fact, I’m told that Donald Rumsfeld screened it for troops heading into Iraq, though the good secretary himself would appear to have learned the wrong lessons from it. The Battle of Algiers, while not leading the viewer to condone indiscriminate slaughter committed by some Muslims, will make one reconsider what prompts violence against those whom the insurgents can see only as occupiers — whatever the occupiers may call themselves.
The film’s most pertinent point, for me, is made not by an Algerian freedom fighter but by the French lieutenant colonel in charge of rooting out the revolutionaries. At one point the lieutenant colonel is grilled during a press conference about his troops’ use of torture. (The film’s torture scenes are none the less powerful for being mercifully brief.) The colonel’s reply, in essence, is that if you accept that France should be in Algeria, then you should accept what follows from that. That was exactly my reaction several years back, when the photos from Abu Ghraib came to light: Why is anyone surprised by this? No, I do not condone torture. But if you supported the Iraq War (I’m proud to say that I took to the streets to protest it and dragged my children with me), if you turned on coverage of the “shock and awe” and thought it made for good TV, then you should not have been shocked when the war played out as wars do. Iran? Let’s think this through.
* * *
I concluded a recent post on John Updike’s fictional creations Rabbit Angstrom and Henry Bech by writing that both characters “live, and let live.” Imagine my embarrassment, then, on discovering in the third and final Bech volume — Bech at Bay — that my man Bech becomes a murderer! Once you get over the shock, the whole thing is pretty funny.
Pointing the Way, Obscurely
I’m fascinated by artistic movements whose seeds are found in earlier genres or works that, on the surface, do not resemble those movements at all. One example is from pop culture. The original Star Trek series is thought of (at least by me) as ringing in the modern era of science fiction, but take a look sometime at those old episodes with Kirk and Spock: the clunkiness of their futuristic gadgets, the papier-maché look of the rocks and boulders on the distant planets, and the high heels worn by female crew members bring to mind nothing so much as 1950s sci-fi “B” movies.
But there are also examples in areas under the purview of this here blog:
LITERATURE. Think “New Journalism,” which brought dialogue, short-story-like description, metaphors, intrusion of the author’s viewpoint, and other elements of fiction to reporting, and you think of Tom Wolfe. But Wolfe himself cites a magazine piece by another writer — one that today remains interesting but hardly seems revolutionary — as pointing the way toward New Journalism: a 1962 Esquire article by Gay Talese, “Joe Louis: The King as a Middle-Aged Man.” The piece begins with (gasp) dialogue between Louis and his fourth wife, which is followed by a kind of flashback, a description of his first wife’s living room — leading Wolfe, raised on a diet of who-what-when-where-why-how news stories, to wonder in his Wolfean way, as he wrote in The New Journalism, “What inna namea christ is this?”
ART. I learned in an art-history class that the paintings of Cezanne, those wonderful still lifes with their occasionally playful approach to perspective, had a large influence on Cubism — an idea that seemed to me more abstract than visual. And then, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, I saw Picasso’s “Carafe, Jug and Fruit Bowl,” from 1909. Here, plain as day, was the link between the overwhelmingly — if eccentrically — representational style of Cezanne and the multiple-angles-at-once craziness of Cubism most strongly associated with Picasso:
"Carafe, Jug and Fruit Bowl," by Pablo Picasso, 1909
JAZZ. To listen hard enough to the piano work of Duke Ellington is to realize that Thelonious Monk, revolutionary though he was, did not in fact come from outer space. The dissonance with which Ellington often spiced his playing served as a point of departure for Monk’s keyboard style, described best by Frank Rich, who called it “splintery.” For a truly interesting listening experience, then, check out Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington.
Tradition dictates that I write something pithy here, sagely revealing the larger point of what you’ve just read. I’m not coming up with much, though. I leave it to you — feel free to build on my ideas . . .
The Mail-Order Santa Claus of Jazz
I listen to a lot of classic jazz. (Anyone who knows me is now thinking, “This is news?”) But I have a friend – I’ll call him David, since, actually, that’s his name – who makes a concerted effort to expose me to more living and breathing players. We’ve been to clubs together, and three times now, I’ve gotten CDs from amazon.com that I didn’t remember ordering – turned out they were from David. It’s probably no accident that all three are by trumpet players, since David is a particular fan of the instrument and takes lessons on it. I hope he’ll let me hear him one day. In the meantime, here are thoughts on those records:
Introducing Triven (2010), by Avishai Cohen (trumpet), Omer Avital (bass), and Nasheet Waits (drums). Cohen plays a grounded, balanced line, a base from which he occasionally takes fast flights into a high register or launches sustained, commanding single notes; he gets good backing from Waits and especially from Avital, whose two-strings-at-once passages evoke thoughts of Jimmy Garrison from that celebrated Coltrane quartet.
Jim Rotondi Quintet Live at Smalls (2009), with Rotondi on trumpet, Eric Alexander (tenor sax), David Hazeltine (piano/Rhodes), John Webber (bass), and Joe Farnsworth (drums). Unlike Avishai Cohen, Rotondi often trades balance and clarity for urgency, a little like the late Lee Morgan – and, like Morgan, he gets the good end of the bargain. Alexander’s tone on sax calls to mind Joe Henderson.
Terell Stafford: This Side of Strayhorn (2011), with Stafford on trumpet, Tim Warfield (tenor and soprano sax), Bruce Barth (piano), Peter Washington (bass), and Dana Hall (drums). This album consists of interpretations of nine classics by Duke Ellington’s master tunesmith, Billy Strayhorn. Stafford’s precise lines often have a lightness and reflectiveness reminiscent of Bix Beiderbecke’s; Warfield on sax, meanwhile, is a chameleon, sounding here like Stan Getz, there like Tina Brooks, and, on slow-blues numbers, a bit like Ben Webster. On “Multicolored Blue,” Stafford and Warfield in unison somehow manage to re-create that creamy sound of Ellington’s big band.
These three very fine works, which I look forward to exploring more deeply, are all from trumpeters who began recording in the late 1990s. It’s possible that their future records will have more of what separates great jazz from good jazz: the merging of player and instrument, whose result is not just technique but voice. For a latter-day example of that, listen to a work from a trumpeter who got a recording head-start on Cohen, Rotondi, and Stafford: Amongst the People – Live at the House of Tribes (2005), by Wynton Marsalis. Here, the iconic Marsalis – who had released plenty of good records – makes a breakthrough, playing with looseness and fire on one of the swingingest records I’ve ever heard.
Rabbit Resumed, Bech Begun
When I was in college I read (instead of whatever I was supposed to be reading) the first two novels in John Updike’s Rabbit series, Rabbit, Run (1960) and Rabbit Redux (1971). One of my literature/writing professors, the estimable David Young, had reservations about those books; the prodigiously gifted Updike, he said, could describe a peanut butter sandwich more eloquently than you ever would have imagined possible, but in the end it was still a peanut butter sandwich, and you felt cheated by it all. Well, I thought, if that’s being cheated, this is one time I don’t mind playing the sucker. The beauty and wonder in those books lie not so much in Updike’s observations and similes themselves as in the reaction they inspire in the reader — which is not “How did he come up with that?” but “Why didn’t I think of it?”; we have the almost certainly mistaken sense that the comparison Updike has made was under our noses the whole time, ready to be made by us, if we could only have gotten our thoughts in order. “Harry can’t stop studying, in the cold kitchen light, the old woman’s skin. The dark life of veins underneath that gave her her flushed swarthy look . . . has been overlaid with a kind of dust of fine gray threads, wrinkles etched on the lightstruck flat of the cheek nearest him like rows and rows of indecipherable writing scratched on a far clay cliff.”
Odd, then, that I stopped in the Rabbit series after the second novel; I guess I became fascinated by other writers, and knew, after all, that Rabbit would be waiting when I was ready. In that way nearly three decades passed. This year, when I read Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and — written in the interim — Rabbit At Rest (1990), I was amazed at how easily I picked up where I had left off, a testament to the vivid impression the first two books had made on me. The four novels follow the blue-collar, seemingly average former high-school basketball star Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom at ages 26, 36, 46, and 56, respectively, as he observes some things about himself and the world changing while others stay the same.
Hungry for more Updike after reading those books, I checked out the adventures of another character, the famous though not-recently-heard-from novelist Henry Bech. Bech: A Book (1980) and Bech Is Back (1982) contain interconnected stories. (I’m still waiting for Bech At Bay from paperbackswap.com, a site you should visit if you haven’t.) In several ways Rabbit and Bech could not be more different. Bech runs in literary circles, while Rabbit is a gadget salesman, then a Linotype worker, then a car dealer; Rabbit, a onetime athlete, was (like Updike) born and raised in Pennsylvania, beyond whose boundaries he barely strays, while Bech, a native New Yorker and nonathlete, travels the world; Rabbit, a father, is in a long if sometimes severely strained marriage (strained largely by adultery), while the childless Bech marries for the first time, briefly, at fifty; Rabbit is Protestant, Bech Jewish. ((Updike, the only gentile among the so-called Big Four writers of his generation — the others being Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow — had to have seen Bech as a way of including himself among his Jewish brethren. Interestingly, when the semi-retired Rabbit begins spending half the year in Florida, he has a regular golf game with three Jewish men.)
The styles of the books differ, too. Through his close-third-person narration of Rabbit’s life, Updike is an exhaustive observer of detail, landscape, and American culture — Laugh-In and the moon landing at the end of the ’60s, George H. W. Bush and The Cosby Show at the close of the ’80s. In the stories about the somewhat more inward-looking Bech, also written in third person, glimpses of the outside world are more selective. (Jazz fans: think Coleman Hawkins vs. Lester Young.) That selectiveness leaves room for a new element — humor: “Ann’s and Judy’s boyfriends struck him as a clamorous and odorous swarm of dermatological disasters . . .” Like a bright light pointing up shadows, the humor in the Bech books brings home the unspoken sadness at their core.
Those things aside, Rabbit and Bech are oddly alike. There is a pronounced passivity to both characters. Rabbit becomes a Linotype worker because that’s what his father is, and then, when his job is eliminated, joins his father-in-law’s car dealership. Bech works on a new book only when his new wife all but physically sets him down in a chair; before that, unable to summon the will to write, he traveled the country and the world, making author appearances wherever anyone asked him to go. In each character, passivity is inseparable from his most endearing quality: an openness to people and things. For all their prejudices, they are both, each in his way, accepting of those different from them. Both are too skeptical to embrace other cultures (or their own) wholly or blindly, but both are too gentle to intend any harm. They live, and they let live.
Cliff, Film Hunter
My wife likes to use the red-flag-in-front-of-a-bull metaphor to describe what happens when I see a mention of a well-regarded book, film, or jazz record I’ve never heard of. I plead guilty with extenuating circumstances, the circumstances being that I’m, well, me.
So there I was, reading a New York Times article about a film from 1970 I planned to see, Hal Ashby’s The Landlord, when I came across a mention of one from the same year by Brian De Palma: Hi, Mom!, starring Robert De Niro. What was this? I can now tell you that it is a very odd, slightly misshapen, and frequently hilarious little movie in which De Niro shows the comedic skills he would display again decades later. He plays a young man trying to interest a porn-movie producer (a very funny Allen Garfield) in the footage he secretly shoots of his across-the-street neighbors. Halfway through Hi, Mom! the porn plot gets scrapped as De Niro becomes intrigued by one of his unwitting performers, who has organized a band of black actor-revolutionaries; that is how De Niro lands a part in an ultimately funny if rather horrifying black-and-white film-within-a-film that has to be seen to be appreciated.
Red Flag #2 was waved when the Mrs. and I saw Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which I thoroughly enjoyed. (A side note, though: I could just about hear some of Wilson’s lines being spoken by a young Woody, who would have made them funnier.) In it, Owen Wilson plays a writer who happens onto a way to visit Paris of the 1920s; there, he meets the creative geniuses of that time and place, including the Spanish filmmaker Buñuel. “I have an idea for a film for you,” the Wilson character tells Buñuel, going on to describe a story about a fancy dinner party at which the guests find that they can’t leave. “But why can’t they leave?” a confused Buñuel asks the departing Wilson. The subject of that in-joke turns out to be Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), an intriguing take on unexplained aspects of the collective human consciousness that feels a little like an extended Twilight Zone episode — but hey, I always liked that show.
Sometimes I charge at the flag a little slowly. There are three films that I have long associated with one another, even though they have almost nothing in common beyond the facts that (1) they came out within a few years of one another and (2) I never saw any of them — until recently: Gilliam Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979), Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985). Brazil is equal parts brilliant and, from the perspective of 2011, dated; that is the risk run by any dystopian story set in the near future. The parts that hold up, though, hold up very well, including some funny bits where Bob Hoskins and De Niro — him again! — sneak in. The standard-issue political drama Year of Living Dangerously is worth seeing for one thing: Linda Hunt’s heart-rending performance as a (male) photojournalist in Indonesia. My Brilliant Career has similarly good work from a very young Judy Davis as an aspiring writer in early-twentieth-century Australia, and it’s good for once to see a female character whose ambition disrupts her relationships, which makes it frustrating that this film is so, well, dull at times.
On that topic: for better or worse, I’ve found that the speed of contemporary life — and contemporary cinema — makes some older films harder to sit through. I was excited, for example, when elder daughter and I sat down to watch John Sayles’s Brother from Another Planet, which I had remembered fondly; all I could think this time was how slow it seemed.
Were these films always slow, or has our new pace just made them seem that way? You know whom to tell . . .
Memoir Was the Rage
Recently, in working on a long nonfiction project of my own, I sought inspiration and insight by re-reading three books I remember loving: Stop-Time, by Frank Conroy, Kafka Was the Rage, by Anatole Broyard, and The Devil Finds Work, by James Baldwin. Each is a memoir (with the arguable exception of Baldwin’s book), and together they illustrate how many different kinds of works the word “memoir” can emcompass.
Published in 1967, Stop-Time has the most traditional form of the three, covering Conroy’s life from early childhood to the age of eighteen, a period he spent alternately in the Northeast and Florida with his mother and his amiable ne’er-do-well of a stepfather. Maybe for that reason it is the most hermetic of the three, focusing on Conroy’s life rather than his times; and, paradoxically, for that reason it is the most universal, too, as it concerns something everybody has one of – childhood, in all its aimlessness, terror (there is one passage that, as a father, I found terrifying), and wonder:
“Is it the mindlessness of childhood that opens up the world? Today nothing happens in a gas station. I’m eager to leave, to get where I’m going, and the station, like some huge paper cutout, or a Hollywood set, is simply a façade. But at thirteen, sitting with my back against the wall, it was a marvelous place to be. The delicious smell of gasoline, the cars coming and going, the free air hose, the half-heard voices buzzing in the background – these things hung musically in the air, filling me with a sense of well-being. In ten minutes my psyche would be topped up like the tanks of the automobiles.”
By contrast, Kafka Was the Rage provides both vignettes from Broyard’s life and snapshots of a different era – the late 1940s,when Broyard was in his twenties and trying to find his footing among the intellectuals and lost souls of Greenwich Village. Broyard was to become a book critic for the New York Times. He was also, as absolutely nothing in his memoir indicates, black – a fact he went to fantastic lengths to hide in his personal life as well, at least partly because he wanted to be a writer and not a “black writer.” (His badly kept secret inspired both a New Yorker piece by Henry Louis Gates and Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain, and it grandfathered, you might say, the film based on the novel. Once, at a writers’ and artists’ salon organized by the redoubtable Martha Southgate, I found myself talking to Broyard’s daughter Bliss. The conversation turned to books, and without thinking, I mentioned one I had enjoyed recently: The Human Stain. “Did you like that?” she asked. “Yes!” I said, “I – um . . . uh . . .”)
But as for the memoir itself: for someone who loves good writing, Kafka Was the Rage is like a box of chocolates. Broyard’s live-in girlfriend in the late 1940s, he wrote, had “something striking about her. She was a preview of things to come, an invention that was not quite perfected but that would turn out to be important, a forerunner or harbinger, like the shattering of the object in Cubism or atonality in music. When I came to know her better, I thought of her as a new disease.”
Your memory plays tricks on you, which is why I remembered The Devil Finds Work as being devoted equally to Baldwin’s life and his takes on movies. After a while, and somewhat regrettably, Baldwin stops writing about himself and focuses purely on films. That said, his analyses are compelling. For the most part he sees the movies as sad reflections of the American state of mind. There is, for example, his conclusion about The Exorcist: “The mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying thing about the film. The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any black man, and not only blacks – many, many others, including white children – can call them on this lie; he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet.”
Another trick played by my memory: I had forgotten the way that Kafka Was the Rage doesn’t so much end as stop. That was because Broyard became ill when he was writing it, began work on another book that was about his illness, and never returned to Kafka (hence its brevity), which was later published anyway.
But then maybe Kafka has something in common with all autobiographical writing. Once, talking to a Cineaste editor, I mentioned a draft of a novel I had written. “What’s it about?” the editor asked. “It’s sort of autobiographical,” I said. “Then,” he replied, “it’s not finished.”
The Other Me: a True Story
Turns out you don’t have to be Superman, Batman, or Captain Marvel to have an alter ego. A book/film/jazz über-nerd like me can have one, too, as the following story proves:
It is ten years ago, give or take, and I’m standing in Last Exit, a second-hand bookshop, one of three in Park Slope during that era — this one run by Alan, a bearded white guy whose voice shouts, along with whatever else he happens to be saying at a given moment, I’m from Brooklyn! There is one other customer: black like myself, though of a different shade and build. We get to talking; he’s looking for a book related to a scholarly piece he’s writing on Ralph Ellison. Around this same time I have written an essay that appears in The Threepenny Review — a piece about Ellison. Two black guys in a bookshop, both writing about the author of Invisible Man; no big deal. But then . . .
It is a year later, maybe two. I am in Holy Cow!, a second-hand record shop, one of two music stores in Park Slope at the time — this one run by Steve, an easy-going, olive-skinned fellow with short black hair. I have picked out a CD by Lennie Tristano, a pianist well-known in the jazz world but very far from being a household name. There is one other customer near the register: the Ellison scholar. He looks at my CD and says matter-of-factly, “Lee Konitz plays on that.”
Okay: so this guy, who is black, hangs out in places where I alone (of the people I know) hang out, he writes about things I write about, he listens to music that I alone (of the people I know) listen to. So what? Ralph Ellison — very popular writer; a lot of people read him, and some of them write down their thoughts. The music of Lennie Tristano — yes, that’s a little specialized, but hey, a niche has room for two people. No cause for alarm; the Twilight Zone theme music is premature.
After all, if you really want to talk obscure, we should talk about another magazine I’ve done a lot of writing for: Cineaste. This is a publication for serious film geeks. Two or three years after the Holy Cow! episode, I am invited to a party at the Cineaste offices, hosted by the magazine’s friendly, grizzled veteran hard-core movie-guy editors. Standing among those good souls when I show up, calmly holding his drink, as if he expects to see me, is . . . the Ellison scholar/Tristano fan.
This is too much. I walk up to him and say, “What are you doing here?”
He says with what I consider to be, given the circumstances, outrageous calmness: “I write for Cineaste.”
And so he did. His name turns out to be Geoffrey Jacques; he is an accomplished essayist, poet, and college teacher.
Every so often, in the years that follow, I run into Geoff on the street in Park Slope. We say hi, chat a minute or two, keep going. I write a novel and publish it myself. To publicize it, I produce a YouTube video of its first scene; I need someone to play the father in the story, someone with the look and bearing of . . . Geoff. I ask him. He graciously agrees. We’re both in the two-minute video (though not together — just as Clark Kent is never around when Superman shows up . . .).
This summer Geoff moves to the West Coast (keep that geographical designation in your mind) to be with the woman he loves. I am invited to his goodbye party. He invites the guests to go through the boxes of CDs he can’t take with him. I come away with good stuff, all, of course, jazz: Charlie Christian, Antonio Hart, Phineas Newborn . . .
. . . and Stan Getz. Now we’re up to yesterday: I listen to one of the Getz records, a lovely work, and find myself transported to the world shaped by his warm, mellow but sinuous tone. I pick up the CD case to remind myself of the name of the world where I have been taken: Stan Getz – Best of the West Coast Sessions . . .
Films of Hal Ashby
In the post “The Unsung Hero of the 1970s,” I wrote about the movies of that decade — my favorite period of American filmmaking — that for all their success in tossing the formulaic out the window, their one predictable element was the unhappy ending. But there is an exception to that general rule: the films of Hal Ashby (1929-88).
There aren’t that many of them, but, as Spencer Tracy once put it (on a different subject altogether), what’s there is choice: The Landlord(1970), Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Coming Home (1978), Being There (1979) . . . there are a few I haven’t seen, and of those, I hear Bound for Glory (1976), with David Carradine as Woody Guthrie, is very good.
What I appreciate about Ashby’s work is that, in his determination to avoid sugarcoating the human experience (a mantra of the era), he did not — as his contemporaries sometimes did — throw out the baby with the bathwater: the genuine sweetness of the characters is not always punished as a matter of principle, and while the films’ endings are poignant, sometimes downright sad, there is something to take away, and someone left in good enough shape to do the taking. (For contrast, see Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow, from 1973, with Al Pacino and Gene Hackman, or the same director’s Panic in Needle Park, from ’71, also with Pacino — very good films, but don’t expect to come away feeling high on life.)
Ashby’s films are chock full of fine actors giving memorable performances as honest-to-God human beings, in big and small parts. There is Beau Bridges’s starring role as a good-hearted but naïve brownstone owner in a black neighborhood in the somewhat-hard-to-find but wonderful Landlord; Pearl Bailey as one of the tenants; Randy Quaid as a pitiful Navy thief in The Last Detail; Carol Kane as the prostitute to whom he loses his virginity, sort of; and I hardly need add to what’s been written about Harold and Maude. Give ’em another look.
Confessions of a Poetry Dunce
Literary scholars talk about various kinds of poetry — Romantic, modernist — but for me poetry falls largely into these categories: (1) The Head-Slappingly Obvious and (2) What in God’s Name Are You Saying?
Here is a not-untypical example of my experiences with poetry:
For Christmas my younger daughter, knowing my musical tastes as she does, gave me a small book called Jazz Poems. I liked some of the verse in the latter part of the book, but I confess that the first pages had me worried, containing a remarkable number of variations on, “Play that horn, you / jazz man, you.” (My response, had I been that jazz man: “Thanks, I will / You no-talent boob.”)
Here is another, from the opposite end of the spectrum:
Last month I saw the film The Tree of Life (which I greatly enjoyed), and afterward I read A.O. Scott’s very fine review of it in The New York Times. Scott acknowledged that parts of the film might seem extraneous but argued that those portions were inseparable from the fabric and overall ambition of the whole — an argument, he wrote, that also applies to certain masterpieces of literature; one he cited was The Bridge, a book-length work of poetry by Hart Crane. Inspired, intrigued, never having gotten around to The Bridge, I picked it up. A few pages later I put it down, saying aloud, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
That’s how it tends to go for me. The second example, of course, bothers me more. I feel I am a reasonably intelligent person, I love books, and I’m willing to work as a reader, and yet the work of so many acclaimed modern and contemporary poets leaves me scratching my head; I feel as if I’m trying to climb a wall that has no dents, cracks, or ledges. (I write this as someone who led college introductory writing workshops, which included poetry, a quarter-century ago. I did my best.) I could, if I wanted, blame some of my teachers. In my Introduction to Poetry class in college, after we poor students had spent an hour trying to make head or tail of Wallace Stevens’s “Emperor of Ice Cream,” our professor said, “I didn’t expect us to have so much trouble with this poem. So, for next time, please read . . .”
What I seek, and so seldom find, is poetry that strikes a balance between the impenetrable and “duh” — poems with lines of clarity, originality, and beauty that make me want to tease out the meanings from their equally interesting but more murky neighboring passages. I have found some: I enjoyed what I read of Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, and my old Enlish professor David Young, and I absolutely love T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; I liked the work in Jazz Poems by Cornelius Eady, William Matthews, and Catherine Bowman.
But where’s the rest?
Tell Cliff!
They Went Thataway, Tom: On Tom Wolfe
In the 1985 Western film Silverado, in an unusual bit of casting, the British comic actor John Cleese played a small-town sheriff who takes a philosophical approach to his job. The townspeople value him, the sheriff tells the movie’s good guys, because he maintains peace and order, even if that means placing them above fairness and justice. And so when the good guys threaten that peace, the sheriff and his men move to apprehend them. During the chase, one of the pursued, played by the black actor Danny Glover, opens fire, not hitting anyone but leaving no doubt about his ability to do so; when the sheriff shows signs of abandoning pursuit, his deputy reminds him that Glover is still in their jurisdiction. “Today,” the sheriff replies, his hat having just been shot off, “my jurisdiction ends here.”
That line came to mind as I read Tom Wolfe’s 2004 work I Am Charlotte Simmons, the third and most recent of his novels. Like the sheriff, Wolfe has a mission and a philosophy. He has urged others to take them on as well, most famously in his 1989 Harper’s essay, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” in which he chided his fellow American storytellers for spinning anemic tales from the comfort of the study rather than facing the challenge of capturing, and stuffing between covers, the spirit and vastness of their great nation, of seeing American life up-close and personal in all its dizzying diversity and sending reports from the front. And like the sheriff, Wolfe has abandoned the task he set for himself, after coming face-to-face with a black character. In I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe — having successfully taken on the challenge of getting inside a black man’s head in his second novel, A Man in Full — falls back on the evasive maneuvers he got away with in his maiden voyage, The Bonfire of the Vanities, creating two-dimensional black cut-outs in place of flesh-and-blood people and staying as far from their thoughts and feelings as Cleese did from Glover’s sharpshooting. Wolfe is, of course, free to write about whatever and whomever he pleases, but his evasion is puzzling given his apparent fondness for covering the areas in which black and white worlds intersect in uncomfortable ways, and it is disappointing given the thoroughness and fearlessness that characterizes his larger body of work.
What a body of work. It started back in 1963, when Wolfe was sent by Esquire to California to cover the Hot Rod & Custom Car show. There, finding what he later described as “all these . . . weird . . . nutty-looking, crazy baroque custom cars, sitting in little nests of pink angora angel’s hair for the purpose of ‘glamorous’ display,” he knew he had stumbled onto something significant. Try as he might, though, back in New York with his deadline staring him in the face and Esquire editors demanding an article, he couldn’t seem to write the thing. Finally, Wolfe agreed to type his notes and send them to the magazine so someone else could write the actual story. From eight in the evening until shortly after six the next morning, typing “like a madman” with his radio tuned to an all-night rock-and-roll station, Wolfe recorded what he had seen; when he was done he had forty-nine pages, which were not only published as he had written them but served as the spark — and the title essay — of his first collection, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. As he recalls in the introduction to that book, what he realized partway through his “manic” writing session was that in California he had had a clear view — however odd the angle — of a new societal order, according to which a more and more pervasive culture was being created not in the usual top-down fashion but by a decidedly non-aristocratic class that suddenly, in the prosperous postwar era, had the money and time to devote to its interests. This was one of many instances in Wolfe’s career of what he would come to call “Aha!” moments, lightning flashes that illuminated for him some aspect of how America operates.
In those terms, the “Kandy-Kolored” essay is as representative as any of Wolfe’s work, but other pieces in his first collection better illustrate the uniqueness of Wolfe’s contribution to American letters. In the “Kandy-Kolored” essay Wolfe views his subjects, however skillfully, from the outside. But in “The Fifth Beatle,” about the deejay Murray the K; in “The Secret Vice,” about hotshot professional men quietly obsessed with the finer points of tailored clothing; in “Purveyor of the Public Life,” about the scandal-sheet publisher Robert Harrison, Wolfe nearly becomes the people he is writing about, signaling with exclamation points his “Aha!” moments of insight into other’s viewpoints, expanding journalism to include elements of two other professions: acting and fiction writing.
Actors inhabit characters, of course. Fiction writers do, too. Fiction writers also paint the scenery through which the characters move — description and imagery, to resort to the usual terms. Consider a line from the Kandy-Kolored essay “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t hear you! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!!” (A number of Wolfe’s titles perform the trick of being both memorable and hard to remember.) In his description of a St. Louis gambler, Wolfe does not come off as a frustrated novelist so much as a fiction writer in journalist’s clothes: “Big Sid Wyman . . . is there, with his eyes looking like two poached eggs engraved with a road map of West Virginia after all night at the poker table.”
Wolfe’s acting and fiction writing continued in his two nonfiction books of 1968, the essay collection The Pump House Gang and the full-length work The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In the Pump House piece “The Mid-Atlantic Man,” for example, he describes a faux-English men’s club as “a wonderful dark world of dark wood, dark rugs, candy-box covings, moldings, flutings, pilasters, all red as table wine, brown as boots, made to look like it has been steeped a hundred years in expensive tobacco, roast beef, horse-radish sauce and dim puddings.” In “What If He Is Right?”, about Marshall McLuhan, he describes an advertising executive’s laugh as coming “in waves, from far back in the throat, like echoes from Lane 27 of a bowling alley, rolling, booming far beyond the immediate situation. . . .” Wolfe inhabits one character, or character type, per essay in The Pump House Gang; for Acid Test he applied that approach to a whole movement, the outlaw LSD squad whose public face was that of Ken Kesey.
By now Wolfe had fully established his style, one that was symbolized by and even enhanced by — but did not depend on knowledge of — the way his physical appearance contrasted with the nature of his work. This was a man who, in his ever-present white suit, looked as if he belonged to the British-wannabe club he portrayed so vividly in “The Mid-Atlantic Man” — but who wrote about an encounter between Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and the Hell’s Angels. That juxtaposition found a counterpart in his writing: into grammatically sound sentences of exquisitely chosen words and almost musical flow, Wolfe tossed ellipses, exclamation points, sound effects, repeated words and nonwords (see Acid Test for the coinage, so far as I know, of “molly fock”) — managing the kind of poetic incongruity achieved in the past by Juilliard-trained jazzmen playing their beautiful sounds amid the shouts and laughter of bucket-of-blood joints in the small hours of the morning. Wolfe brought that high-low style to the documentation of a changing culture, one that he felt was the natural territory of a generation of novelists. Then, in 1973, declaring the novelists to have abdicated that role, Wolfe claimed it for himself and his fellow nonfiction writers, whose works he and E. W. Johnson excerpted in The New Journalism.
In the meantime, he had written the two pieces published together in his 1970 book, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, whose one-hundred-thirty-odd pages signaled three new dimensions of the Wolfe oeuvre. He still inhabited characters, adopting their viewpoints, but in the long essay “Radical Chic” — about a fund-raiser held by wealthy New Yorkers to benefit the Black Panther Party — he laced the viewpoint with irony, which is as good a definition as any of satire; the actor was also an impressionist. (He found something fascinating, he would say later, in the notion of New York’s upper crust donating money to a Marxist group dedicated to taking away all they had.) In his satiric role as the collective consciousness of the condescending rich encountering the Panthers, Wolfe writes,
These are no civil rights Negroes wearing gray suits three times too big —
— no more interminable Urban League banquets in hotel ballrooms where they try to alternate the blacks and whites around the table as if they were stringing Arapaho beads —
— these are real men! [Italics Wolfe’s]
That passage and others like it set the tone for two subsequent Wolfe books: The Painted Word (1975), his evisceration of the art world, and From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), which performed a similar service for architecture.
The above passage also signaled a second new element. If American race relations were a human body, then such lines as “these are real men!” would be sharp pokes to that body’s rib cage. Hearing the heroes of the civil rights movement dismissed as being less than men stirs up anger (in me, anyway), the more so because the anger cannot rightly be directed back Wolfe; he is not saying he feels this way, but that others do, and there you can’t argue with him. He leaves himself open to attack in Radical Chic, though, with the prototype of a stock Wolfean figure, the third new element: the black character described so vividly from the outside that one nearly forgets Wolfe’s usual practice of going inside, inhabiting, adopting a point of view (even a satirical one), a service he does not extend to the Black Panther we meet in these pages.
More nonfiction followed: the essays in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976); The Right Stuff (1979), Wolfe’s magnificent full-length work about the space program; and the collection In Our Time (1980), which weighed in at all of one hundred forty-four pages, half of them filled with the author’s drawings. The most significant thing about In Our Time may be its title, which it shares with a volume of Hemingway stories. This was vintage contrarian Wolfe: alluding to Papa, with his manly codes of behavior, right at the peak of the Alan Alda–led “sensitive male” heyday. History seems to have sided with Wolfe this time, since reverence for manly behavior has never truly gone away (see Silverado, from the same decade), while the notion of the sensitive male has a place in the time capsule between the Pet Rock and Rubik’s Cube. (Rightly so, perhaps — not because there is anything wrong with touchy-feely men, but because, as a female friend of mine, the short-story writer L. E. Miller, once said to me, a lot of your so-called sensitive males are sensitive mainly to their own needs and wants.) Mauve Gloves & Madmen is notable for being the first book to contain Wolfe’s fiction. Nestled among the essays are the title story (a misfire — I had finished reading it before I realized it was fiction) and “The Commercial,” in which Wolfe, for the first time and fairly credibly, inhabits a black character. That character’s encounter with an Irish-American has rib-poking, blood-pressure-raising powers that make Radical Chic’s look mild by comparison.
And then came . . . drum roll, please . . . brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . . the novels. In this trio (so far) of seven-hundred-page works, Wolfe the fiction writer has thrown off his disguise, while Wolfe the actor has made the declaration that everyone in the profession makes sooner or later: What I really want to do is direct. That is, rather than concentrating on a single performance, Wolfe the novelist oversees whole casts, rotating among their points of view. His first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), is on one level about what happens when a successful Wall Street trader tries to escape the consequences of his actions; on another level it concerns the ambiguity at the heart of much if not most human interaction, and the dangers of building notions of absolute truth on such shaky foundations. The trader, Sherman McCoy, a husband and father, is having an affair with Maria, a woman as long on sex appeal and as she is short on morals. After picking her up from the airport one night, Sherman gets lost in the Bronx and encounters two black males whose intentions are unclear; with Maria at the wheel of his car, Sherman escapes the scene — if indeed there is anything to escape — but not before Maria slams into one of the black males, leaving him in a coma. Thanks to pressure to pursue the case — including televised demonstrations — spearheaded by a black activist, the Reverend Bacon, the net tightens around the not-exactly-innocent, not-entirely-to-blame McCoy, who sweats dimes while a high-minded D.A., an opportunistic assistant district attorney, and an alcoholic journalist ignore any facts standing between them and their prey. McCoy is sacrificed at the altar of preconceived ideas, just like the boy in the coma (Henry Lamb, ha ha). Facts may be inconvenient or hard to determine, Wolfe is saying here, but when ideology, be it that of racism or political correctness, tries to ignore or do without those facts, people suffer — usually the wrong people.
Ambiguity, then, is a necessary element of The Bonfire of the Vanities, which may explain Wolfe’s reluctance to reveal too much by exploring the consciousness of Henry Lamb or his companion. But what about Reverend Bacon? He is the character, after all, who sets in motion the events that lead to McCoy’s undoing, and is thus an important force in the story; it would seem worth the reader’s time to know what he is thinking. At the same time, that knowledge would not compromise the ambiguity, since Bacon knows less than McCoy — or even the reader — about what happened on the night Henry Lamb was hit by a car. Is the charismatic Bacon a Man of the People, a ruthless, cynical con artist, or both? The question is, pleasingly, left unanswered, but it might well remain unanswered if Wolfe revealed his thoughts, which he declines to do. We spend a considerable portion of the book inside McCoy’s head, after all, yet in the end we could give any number of answers to this simple question: Is he the victim or the culprit?
In the 1998 work A Man in Full, though, Wolfe gives us a fully realized black character — perhaps mindful of the omission in Bonfire, or perhaps in an attempt to compensate for the effect of the second novel’s central character, for whom Wolfe has obvious sympathy: the unreconstructed white southerner Charlie Croker. Charlie is the last man’s man, a sixtyish, gregarious, balding but strapping former college football star, a financially overstretched plantation owner and real-estate developer who catches snakes and says “lat bub” for light bulb. Charlie is the kind of guy who says “niggers” not out of anger, and not out of racism (at least as he would define it), but because — unless you are talking to a prissy New York liberal or happen to be one yourself — that’s just what you call black people, much as you might call your Volkswagen Beetle a Bug, with something approaching affection. It is through a case of alleged rape, involving the (white) college-age daughter of one of Charlie’s best friends and a (black) college football star, that Charlie comes in contact with the novel’s major black character, the lawyer Roger White II — referred to in most of the book by his college nickname, Roger Too White.
It must be said that in A Man in Full, the seams — the areas where Wolfe the journalist/essayist meets Wolfe the novelist — show in a way they don’t in Bonfire. In his essays Wolfe can supply nuggets of scrupulously dug-up information, or his own opinions, in a straightforward way, but in his novels he must (or so he seems to feel) delegate the task to his character-surrogates, often by having one explain a term or concept to another. Wolfe is still directing here, but with his surrogate approach, the movie becomes sort of like a scene in Being John Malkovich, the one is which the title character enters the portal leading inside his own mind and thus sees himself in every person around him. He manages to transcend that effect, though, with three characters: Charlie Croker; Conrad Hensley, an unemployed laborer turned prison inmate turned Stoic philosopher; and Roger White. Roger is a complex individual: a fortyish, culturally conservative man, he is torn between a nagging if ill-defined sense of loyalty to his own and an aristocratic individualism, between defiance of mainstream society and conformity with it; as he looks at the uninhibitedness of blacks half his age, one part of him wants to set them straight, another to join the fun. Roger is, in other words, a human being, the central figure of what John Updike was moved to call (in an otherwise largely negative assessment) a “strange but honorable” attempt at “a Great Black Novel.”
Maybe that makes I Am Charlotte Simmons a Great White Novel. Roger White, after all, is a black man negotiating his way professionally and psychologically in a white world; his opposite number in Charlotte Simmons is Joseph J. “JoJo” Johanssen, the only white starting player on the basketball team at an Ivy League university. JoJo is one of three male students (the others are a dweeby Jewish intellectual and a blonde, handsome, monstrously self-absorbed frat boy) who vie for the affection of the title character, an upright high-school valedictorian from the hills of North Carolina struggling to maintain her selfhood in college. If the seams show in A Man in Full, they positively rip in Charlotte Simmons, nowhere more loudly than the passage in which JoJo delivers a soliloquy to a fellow white team member on the discrimination faced by nonblack players. We are not privy to the black players’ thoughts on this issue, or on anything else, though we are given to understand — repeatedly — that in a place otherwise devoted to the life of the mind, the (nearly all-black) basketball players are scornful of academic achievement when not just plain mentally deficient. No doubt aware of what he is opening himself up to, Wolfe gives us an exception to this rule in the form of Charles Bousquet, a black player who manages to excel in the classroom as well as on the court. Surely this would be rich literary territory: the mental balancing act of a young man who finds acceptance in two worlds — one black, one white — that are not only separate, as in the case of Roger White, but antithetical to each other. But Wolfe leaves it unexplored. Charles’s thoughts are unknown to us; he is just part of the background.
In this background the Being John Malkovich effect is again present, though this time one of the Wolfe-faces that flash by in the author’s sweeping gaze may really be his, at least as he views it. Charlotte Simmons has a philosophy professor, Mr. Starling, whom she thinks of as a “slender and surprisingly debonair figure . . . who must have been close to fifty.” It is given to Starling — a minor character — to articulate the novel’s central idea, which is that what we think of as the self may be nothing more than a marriage of biology and environment. (Just ask poor Charlotte, a deflowered “C” student by the end of the book.) Consider this passage from Professor Starling’s lecture: “The new generation of neuroscientists—and I enjoy staying in communication with them— . . . laugh at the notion of free will.” Now compare it with this passage from “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,” an essay in Wolfe’s 2000 collection, Hooking Up: “The new generation of neuroscientists are not cautious for a second. In private conversations, the bull sessions, as it were, that create the mental atmosphere of any hot new science—and I love talking to these people—they express an uncompromising determinism.”
Determinism: So, maybe Wolfe just can’t help himself. I prefer to think, though, that the man who gave us The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, Roger White, and all those dazzling essays could turn out better, more fully realized novels if he tried hard enough, if he kept up the chase.
