Chrome Jell-o

“For if one had an imagination vivid enough and a sympathy sufficiently sensitive really to comprehend and to feel the sufferings of other people, one would never have a moment's peace of mind... One is always alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world.”

--Aldous Huxley

Crome Yellow

The problem for the author who writes a landmark novel is that once he or she has departed and is thus no longer capable of putting out new work, it is all too easy for posterity to associate him or her with that single legendary text. Herman Melville might have believed it all right we revere Moby Dick but it hardly stands to think that Jack Kerouac— who published eighteen novels in his lifetime and who disassociated himself from the Beat Generation—would be pleased that outside his small, committed fan base, anything not titled On the Road is mostly yellowing, dusty, forgotten, unread. It might be said that for any author who desires immortality, a beloved masterpiece is the ticket, but a caveat of oblivion for the remaining oeuvre is fair warning.

Aldous Huxley was one of those great geniuses who wrote one of the twentieth century’s masterpieces, Brave New World, which with its test tube babies, soma addiction, and sexual promiscuity predicts the pleasure principle of our contemporary times. It deserves its place in the literary canon but like said conundrum for many writers, most readers stop right there, as if all there was to know of Huxley and his godlike omniscience of the human condition was in that small, lovely book.

Published in 1922, Crome Yellow, Huxley’s first novel, demonstrates his unique gift for language, theorizes some of the blueprint that would become Brave New World, and vaguely predicts the Second World War as well as the eventual apotheosis of the machine as man’s best friend.

Crome Yellow is a quietly subversive parable, the whole of which takes place on the eponymous castle estate in the English countryside. It is less a story and more a forum for Huxley to air his many social theories regarding history, politics, reason, madness, love, and poetry. Not much really happens: a small party from Britain’s leisure class has congregated for the season to banter, create, review, discuss, and feast. The reader enters and leaves this tableau with Denis, a young, middling poet with a few published broadsheets and a modest book of verse to his name. His hosts, the Wimbushes, have a niece, Anne, whom Denis is hopelessly in love with (in the desperate, maddening vein romantic poets are wont) but whom treats Denis cynically as she would a kid brother for whose best intentions raise only snickering. She is more drawn to Gombauld, an artist of some repute and Byronic handsomeness.

Among the other guests, the primary character of interest is Mr. Scogan, who looks “like an extinct saurian… his nose was beaked…the skin of his wrinkled brown face had a dry and scaly look; his hands were the hands of a crocodile.” A friend and contemporary of Henry Wimbush, he is something of a pedantic, a bore, a philosopher king and, conjecturally, a mouthpiece for Huxley. He also has many of the novel’s choicest lines. Upon learning Denis is at work on a novel, in Scogan’s assumption of the plot he indicts nearly every writer of the 1920s, including, one supposes, Huxley himself:

“I’ll describe the plot for you. Little Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever. He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and comes to London, where he lives among artists. He is bowed down with melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe upon his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the luminous Future.”

His spot-on assessment humiliates Denis who vows quietly to tear the pages to pieces when he unpacks later that night. It’s a bad start for a young artist of marginal confidence and it’s a slippery slope from there. When alone with Anne he often contextualizes their time together by quoting poetry, an affectation which his muse calls “a bad habit.” In a setting of larger-than-life personalities at home with confirmed belief systems, the work-in-progress Denis inevitably flubs his lines (his social ineptness and half-cooked awareness is not dissimilar to Huxley’s more famous punching bag, Bernard Marx.) However, due his ingenuousness, Denis is an ideal sounding board, especially for the talkative Scogan, who often pins him down with breathless soliloquies.

Huxley would not publish Brave New World for another decade but here are the seeds being planted by Mr. Scogan, a self-described realist in an age of madmen. Anticipating the Greek alphabetical hierarchy of Huxley’s imagined future is a rough sketch of what would become the human organizing system of his greatest novel:

“In the Rational State, human beings will be separated out into distinct species, not according to the color of their eyes or the shape of their skulls, but according to the qualities of the their mind and temperament. Examining psychologists…will test each child that is born and assign it to its proper species. Duly labeled and docketed, the child will be given the education suitable to members of its species, and will be set, in adult life to perform those functions which human beings of his variety are capable of performing.”

This so-called Rational State consists of three distinct groups: the Directing Intelligences, the Men of Faith and the Herd. The breakdown is self-explanatory: the Intelligences devise the system, the Men of Faith sell it and the Herd follows orders. Of Denis’ role in this future society, Scogan is at a loss. Denis being independent but neither persuasive nor clearheaded, Scogan “can see no place for you; only the lethal chamber.”

Huxley before the Future

Denis’ host, Henry Wimbush, is a scion of some fortune. His magnum opus is a history of the village of Crome and especially the castle where they reside. On two occasions, Henry reads from his historical tome. One story involves an ancestor named Hercules, a dwarf, while another relates three sisters feigning an anorexic appetite as pseudo-spirituality. The first story is decidedly tragic, the second comic, which seems true for the novel as well. Although Huxley’s narrative voice is sportily sardonic, the philosophical musings on the future reflect an anxiety about the end result of technology intertwining itself with the worst instincts of human nature.

When the consequence is not deadly, it may be simply alienating. Even the affable Wimbush isn’t very much interested in mankind. Being a character in a Huxley novel, he is thoughtful, given to intelligent musings with some remarkable capacity to witness the distant future. Confiding with Denis the night of the country fair, Wimbush describes his own utopian vision:

“Perhaps, in the future, when machines have attained to a state of perfection—for I confess that I am, like Godwin and Shelley, a believer in perfectibility, the perfectibility of machinery—then, perhaps, it will be possible for those who, like myself, desire it, to live in a dignified seclusion, surrounded by the delicate attentions of silent and graceful machines, and entirely secure from any human intrusion.”

Huxley is not describing television, video games, and the Internet, or any of the quotidian appliances that guarantee a self-sufficient existence. But he knew human nature and its pull over us like moths to the flame. Would the descendants of Henry Wimbush bother hosting a party of individuals for the summer season if it stood to interrupt their online presence?

The answer is difficult to say. Denis might disagree. Humiliated multiple times he nevertheless needs other people to exist himself. He has no true form without recognition from others. In his own words:

“The individual is not a self-supporting universe. There are times when he comes into contact with other individuals, when he is forced to take cognizance of the existence of other universes beside himself.”

If we are to survive as a viable, energetic, empathetic species, may it always be so.

Time Has Come Today

“You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”

--David Byrne

“When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know when it’s happened?”

--Rhea from A Visit From the Goon Squad

I believe it was in my mid-twenties when I began downgrading my artistic aspirations from ‘the voice of a generation’ to what it has become ten years later in its more or less present incarnation, ‘a voice.’ It’s embarrassing looking back but there was a certain point of my life when I truly believed I would be one of those authors— the few, the proud— who would survive posterity not only as one of those writers whom people wanted to read but also whom they wanted to be. Hey, there’s still time and you never know but I’ve had to adjust my expectations into a more modest outlook. Sometimes I’m okay with this. Sometimes I’m not. I’m only human.

As you roll into your thirties, you should be hitting your career stride. When you aren’t, you can’t help but observe those who have. Particularly friends and acquaintances. If you dare go there, the route is peppered with questions, like, what is it about the neighbor’s grass? What makes it so green? Is it a human folly to envy the qualities of others or is it Madison Avenue marketing that has created this general dissatisfaction? Is the difference between happiness and discontent the difference between having chosen the life we lead and the life we have having chosen us? It doesn’t seem fair, does it? The way we are compared against the way we were supposed to be?

Whoever said introspection was for weenies never took a long, hard look at the mirror. ‘What if…?’ is the worst kind of self-interrogation since it almost always consequences in regret. This self, this person that we are leading now may be hard-won but isn’t necessarily the best person we could have been. Invariably something went wrong somewhere and this life we lead is the one we got stuck with, for better, for worse.

Disheartening this is, we can self-medicate. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll are viable options (but don’t they often mislead us away from our ideal selves?). Or one can read good literature that utilizes sex, drugs, and rock and roll to frame these questions. A worthwhile book need not answer the unanswerable— it’s enough that it reminds us that failure and humanity are cut from the same cloth and that this might be a beautiful thing.

It is certainly beautiful the way Jennifer Egan writes about it in her novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, the closest a book has ever come to the literary equivalent of a solid mixed tape, rewinding and fast forwarding across the years, or perhaps ‘skipping’ over generation gaps, as the story—it travels between New York City, San Francisco, Naples, and Italy as well as from the early 1970s to the 2020s— is as much about the progress of technology as it is culture. The truth whether or not new technology is good or bad, necessary or distracting, safe or dangerous, nearly always depends on who’s asking. For those holding onto some yesteryear ideal, change is something to be despised, as Bennie Salazar, a record label owner who came of age in San Francisco’s late 1970s punk scene, wearies once the direction of his company changes after a corporate takeover:

“The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitalization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust!”

Just as our relationship to music and musicians evolves with technology (shrinking considerably from LPs to cassette tapes and CDs, disappearing totally as a tactile thing with the rise of the mp3), so does the way we communicate with one another. As Bix, an NYU student doing his postgrad in computer engineering in early 1993 tells his friends, “This computer-message-sending is going to be huge—way beyond the telephone…” But though Egan touches on facebook, google and how “the days of losing touch are almost gone,” she goes further: a preteen using Power Point slides to describe her family’s dysfunctional faults and then later to the near future when Instant Messaging has become the medium for our more difficult words as when Lulu shares with Alex on their “handsets” that she “Nvr met my dad. Dyd b4 I ws brn,” texting him this even though they are sitting across from each other in a café.

But now you’re wondering who’s Lulu? And who’s Alex? In 2021, they are working together using Internet bloggers called ‘parrots’ to word-of-mouth the upcoming concert of Scotty Hausmann, a publicity-shy, burnt-out slide guitarist who played in The Flaming Dildos, the same High School punk band Bennie played with in the 1970s. Scotty had unsuccessfully pined for Jocelyn, a girl who learned the fast life as Lou’s teenage mistress. Lou is a super successful rock and roll producer-cum-hedonist that mentors Bennie. Bennie marries Stephanie, a one-time protégée to La Doll, Lulu’s mother and a PR titan who falls from grace. Stephanie’s brother, Jules, is a journalist who goes to jail for assaulting a movie star named Kitty Jackson. Meanwhile, Bennie makes a name for himself in the music business discovering and recording a punk band named the Conduits. Around this time his factotum is Sasha, a beautiful redhead who euphemistically calls her shoplifted things, “found objects.” She survives a druggie stint in Naples and leaves New York and the music business when she reconnects with her college sweetheart, Drew, moving to Arizona to start a family. She has an autistic son obsessed with great pauses in rock and roll songs and a daughter who expresses herself with Power Point slides. If it seems very six-degrees-of-separation, it is. One story’s peripheral character is another’s hero.

And heroes they are in a very rock and roll sense of the word: interesting people making catastrophic mistakes, sometimes large, sometimes so small it is hard to know exactly where everything went wrong. Once The Flaming Dildos disbanded, why did Bennie wind up with his own record label and a corner office on Park Avenue with a fantastic view while Scotty performed janitorial functions and fished for his lunch in the East River? It doesn’t bother Scotty too much when he goes to see his old friend again because, “there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park.”

Like the incremental movement of continental plates, pressures mount in our own lives to a breaking point, in which an inevitable seismic shift leaves a trail of victims, most especially ourselves. For Jules Jones, Bennie’s brother-in-law, once a promising, young writer who had come to New York full of ideas (“Who isn’t, at twenty-four?”), his decline began when he’d become another hack celebrity journalist. This is the late 1990s now and some are getting spectacularly wealthy while most are being left behind. His feeling is common to many of us, that sense of not belonging, of having missed some boat that’s not coming back for us. In a young, ingenuous film star, Kitty Jackson, he witnesses everything he will never be: beautiful, rich, successful, loved. His sole advantage over her, the one card he can play, is the knowledge that time, though slow and deliberate, takes no prisoners:

“Because Kitty is so young and well nourished, so sheltered form the gratuitous cruelty of others, so unaware as yet that she will reach middle age and eventually die (possibly alone), because she has not yet disappointed herself, merely startled herself and the world with her own premature accomplishments, Kitty’s skin—that smooth, plump, sweetly fragrant sac upon which life scrawls the record of our failures and exhaustion—is perfect.”

In a very confessional meta-me article for Details Magazine, he describes his attempted rape of Kitty in the canny, ironic prose so typical of magazine writing today, but briefly he too considers what went wrong:

“At what precise moment did you tip just slightly out of alignment with the relatively normal life you had been enjoying theretofore, cant infinitesimally to the left or the right and thus embark upon the trajectory that ultimately delivered you to your present whereabouts—in my case, Rikers Island Correctional Facility?”

It seems no accident then that the album central to this story should be called A to B, offered up by the Conduits’ former frontman, Bosco. Bosco was once a skinny, manic redhead known for his explosive live shows but he didn’t age well. As he explains to Stephanie, Bennie’s wife and his publicist, “The album’s called A to B, right? And that’s the question I want to hit straight on: how did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about?” But A to B is not a comeback album— for Bosco it’s the only dignified way out of his messy life. It is his belief that this farewell tour should be a rock and roll suicide, “I want out of this mess. But I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away— I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.”

Bosco believes his tour will be a success because of the public’s infatuation with “Reality TV.” Reality, of course, has everything to do with authenticity and is at play in the characters’ lives. It’s extremely important, yet somehow elusive, as being real is knowing oneself. As Rhea says enviously of her friend Alice, “I can’t tell if she’s actually real, or if she’s stopped caring if she’s real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?”

It’s not an easy question, but there might be some connection between authenticity and happiness, at least in this literary world. We are always in the act of becoming: artists, doctors, drug addicts, hookers, lovers, husbands, fathers and mothers— and some roles work better than others. It often depends on who you’re partnered with. Jules’ sister, Stephanie, knows that Bennie is unfaithful and she suffers to keep their marriage intact. Witnessing the flabby, tragic mess of Bosco, once a promising singer, now a joke on her hands, is a straw-camel’s back revelation: her life is a sham and an unhappy one at that. Helplessly she thinks of the old days: “premarriage, preparenthood, pre-money, pre-hard drug renunciation, preresponsibility of any kind…going to bed after sunrise, turning up at strangers’ apartments, having sex in quasi public, engaging in daring acts that had more than once included (for her) shooting heroin, because none of it was serious. They were young and lucky and strong….”

… And perhaps, real.

* * * * * * *

Published in 2010, Jennifer Egan has already won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Two days after receiving the Pulitzer, she inked a deal with HBO to adapt A Visit From the Goon Squad into a television series. It’s no surprise. Like very few novels, it succeeds on visceral, literary, and spiritual levels. It’s bold: besides the Power Point chapter, her point-of-view shifts between the third person, close first person and even the second person in a way that the ‘you’ is not directed at the reader but at the self-critical narrator himself. Skipping around between years, places, and heroes does not feel jarring in the least bit. Each story feels self-contained, yet integral, not to the greater story, but the unifying theme, that which relates to the inevitability of personal change.

Perhaps nowhere in the novel is this exemplified better than when Sasha disappears to Naples and her stepfather sends her Uncle Ted out to search for her. Instead of looking for her, Ted, a tenured arts history professor at a minor university, spends most of his time wandering museums, the ruins of Pompeii, and labyrinthine alleyways. He is away from his family and unusually pensive. Why had he sexually disengaged himself from his wife, Susan, to the point that there could be no more true intimacy between them? From an initial rage, Susan mellows into a “sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible without death to give it gravitas and shape.” What is so tragic about this turn of events is that he didn’t abandon his desire for any other reason than because he could. He had ruined her and now having found Sasha and trying to win her confidence to come back with him to America, he helplessly recalls a happy moment before everything was irrevocably ruined. Herein may be the saddest paragraph in a bittersweet book:

“On a trip to New York, riding the Staten Island Ferry for fun, because neither one of them had ever done it, Susan turned to him suddenly and said, ‘Let’s make sure it’s always like this.’ And so entwined were their thoughts at that point that Ted knew exactly why she’d said it: not because they’d made love that morning or drunk a bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse at lunch—because she’d felt the passage of time. And then Ted felt it, too, in the leaping brown water, the scudding boats and wind—motion, chaos everywhere—and he’d held Susan’s hand and said, ‘Always. It will always be like this.’”

Perhaps Ted was caught up in the moment but he was certainly not disingenuous. At the time he believed it was true. As Bosco says, “Time’s a goon.” The novel’s boogeyman is as invincible and irrepressible as any villain in literature. Time sets the booby traps and we’re the ones clumsy enough to step on them— yet it might not be our fault. We can’t be so hard on ourselves as we don’t always have as many choices as it may seem.

Fucking up is a life process as universal as birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, aging, and death. Being inevitable thus, we can only hope that when it happens to us, it a) is not lethal and b) perhaps we learn something.

Not all of us are lucky enough to balance self-destruction with redemption. A comeback is not always in the works. But sometimes it may be enough to learn from our mistakes and carry on the best we can.

Sasha speaks for the novel, if not a good percentage of the human race when comforting her friend, Rob, after a failed suicide attempt she reminds him:

“We’re the survivors.”

This originally appeared in Heso Magazine

One Order of Freedom Fries Two Security Sodas Please

“Everywhere you look—Britain, the States, western Europe--- people are sealing themselves off into crime-free enclaves. That’s a mistake—a certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation."

--J.G. Ballard

One of the great conundrums of a democracy, especially during a political era defined by a so-called War On Terror, is how to balance freedom with security. Like the mechanics of a seesaw, any action, whether it be the government’s or the individual’s, disequilibrates, favoring one value over another. It is not surprising that most governments choose security; what surprises is that the barbed wire walls, homeland bureaucracy, detention centers, security cameras, tapped phones and no-fly lists are proclaimed as tools to “protect our freedoms.” This argument— security as a means to freedom, an end— is a canard. In practice, there is no bargaining, it is one or the other, the seesaw going up or down. So for all the talk of freedom in America and elsewhere, it is a more frightening state of existence, one that is better dreamed than lived. That we should, in general, favor security over freedom makes me wonder if this is human nature or an evolutionary development made comfortable by the pleasures of Chinese takeout, wireless Internet, and three-hundred channels on cable TV.

I had not expected these questions to emerge when beginning a book called Cocaine Nights, but then I’m new to the dystopian fiction of J. G. Ballard. The narrator, a middle-aged travel writer named Charles Prentice, arrives in the small resort town of Estrella de Mar in Spain’s Costa Del Sol after his brother, Frank, pleads guilty to the murder of five individuals, setting fire to their cottage during a party with half the town in attendance. Charles is flabbergasted by his brother’s willingness to incriminate himself; he doesn’t believe his guilt is authentic. He moves in to his brother’s apartment, beds his paramour and takes on a job with Frank’s former colleagues.

While the titular cocaine may be in short supply firsthand, the drug’s inherent paranoia governs the storytelling. Charles is there to ask questions, to get at the truth and the truth being truth, especially when murder charges are involved, is a dangerous thing. He learns that Estrella de Mar is quite unlike most sleepy Costa Del Sol resorts in that people are actively participating in a cultural and intellectual life—taking sculpture classes and putting on Harold Pinter plays. There are sailboats rigged to the wind, waiting lists on the tennis courts and a busy nightlife centered around Club Nautico, where Frank, Charles’ brother, had worked once as manager. It’s a lot of activity for a strip of coast most famous for sitting around the pool or television, knocked out on pharmaceutical depressants.

But with artistic endeavors come criminal ones— seems the bored housewives are into cocaine as much as they are ashtanga yoga and not a few get mixed up in the local porno ring. In his search for the true culprit responsible for the deadly fire, Charles becomes involved with Bobby Crawford, the town’s blonde, beautiful, hyperactive resident philosopher-clown. Crawford is the mad social scientist responsible for Estrella de Mar’s cultural flowering. The problem with so many of the little resort towns of the Costa Del Sol, “people locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems,” has an unorthodox solution: inject a little petty crime into a community— vandalism, burglaries, car theft (victimless crime more or less) –- and its residents respond by coming together as a civic unit, forming committees, film clubs, and softball teams. Thus, if you take away a bit of security, you get freedom, or as Bobby Crawford puts it: “Sadly, crime is the only spur that rouses us. We’re fascinated by that ‘other world’ where anything is possible.”

If there’s a can of worms lying around, Ballard’s packing a Swiss army knife. Like many interesting novels, Cocaine Nights is a philosophical question tested in a narrative format. That crime is a catalyst for art— Ballard cites Shakespeare’s London and the Medicis’ Florence as examples— is an interesting idea. Moreover, the premise that men see this connection and will behave like gangsters in order to guarantee its flourishing is the stuff of good fiction. The only problem, as I see it, is that Ballard doesn’t successfully persuade me that crime inspires civic pride and the arts. It’s a nice try but the stuff of hardboiled fantasy.

We can assume that Bobby Crawford is Ballard’s mouthpiece, a Devil’s Advocate arguing a cloud’s silver lining. The logic at work is that crime causes individuals (some of them at least) to reflect on the precariousness of existence, concluding that as life is finite, it must be enjoyed and that this is best done by pleasuring in social taboos and expressing one’s creativity. Creativity, after all, is a strong expression of individualism, which of course is the essence of freedom, Mr. Hyde to security’s Dr. Jekyll.

Mr. Ballard--

the idealist dystopian or dystopian idealist?

For every Jazz Age with its bootleggers and masterpiece makers, there’s a dozen vice-ridden metropolises in which nothing beautiful developed. With all due respect to the artists of Washington DC and Camden, New Jersey, these two cities have consistently produced torrid crime and very little culture (at least little on a national level). Ballard’s thesis is provocative but it doesn’t hold up to logic. The Costa Del Sol is populated by the retired white-collar crowd. It does not follow that a middle manager or retired bank vice president would spontaneously develop an aesthetic vision just because his garage door is vandalized or some burglaries are reported in the neighborhood. Some aesthetic background and artistic energy are more important than a line of coke or a broken window.

Cocaine Nights was published in 1996. Had Ballard procrastinated on the book and witnessed the consequences of September 11^th, would he have even bothered giving form to his idea? In the novel’s view, the more spectacular the crime, the greater the stimulation to live. But that did not happen after 9/11. There was very little reflection on the reasons behind this great theatrical work of horror, no reevaluation of America’s role in the world and the enemies we’ve created in a foreign policy bent on total self interest. There was no renaissance in the arts. Instead pop culture witnessed a superhero boom in cinema, Harry Potter led the publishing industry into blockbuster dependency and no real innovative movements developed in pop music.

One could argue the terror of 9/11 engendered isolation and ennui and that the naughts were the true lost generation. What could have been a 1960s utopian outburst puttered out in Twitter feeds and blogs no one would bother to read. Our retreat is not wholly complete. Still, someone may yet discover the magic formula that produces an engaged, intellectual, artistic society. Until then, watch out for pickpockets. Should your wallet get pilfered, it’s a logical fallacy that from this inconvenience you may pen the Great American Novel.

Why the Disenchanted Enchant

“Fame, romance, success—these things were so precious that no one could be entrusted with their possession for more than a moment.”

-- Budd Schulberg via Manley Halliday

If we are to employ the old standby, “There are two kinds of people in the world…” to Americans, we would say there are winners and losers, but it is not a black & white world of course and there are permutations to the categorization— what about losers who come to win and more spectacularly, winners who come to lose? What is it about déclassé failure that makes us feel better about ourselves? Are Mike Tyson, Richard Nixon, Michael Jackson, and Mark McGwire, to name but a few great legends that received their comeuppance, more famous today for their declines than their greatness? Are they not interchangeable? For example, can you talk about Nixon without mentioning Watergate or McGwire without steroids? It’s fascinating that the term for taking pleasure in others’ pain, schadenfreude, is a loanword borrowed from the Germans, since, with all the pleasure we take in our heroes’ downfalls, you would have thought by now we could have come up with our own Americanism for the blissful joys reaped from the public disgrace of others.

One of the greatest novels ever written on the subject is Budd Schulberg’s The Disenchanted (1950), which is a dramatization of Schulberg’s experience teaming with the legendary F. Scott Fitzgerald, who by the time he was hired out to work on an inane studio script was more legendary for his boozing than The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald died before he could finish his comeback novel (from whose notes for The Last Tycoon include the famous, clairvoyant line, “There are no second acts in American lives.”) But Schulberg, most celebrated for his screenwriting credit for On the Waterfront, made the most of this opportunity, developing a story that not only indicts Hollywood, but the Jazz Age itself, the generation that spawned Fitzgerald and the excesses that would create the Great Depression.

Budd Schulberg

In The Disenchanted, art imitates life: it is the winter of 1939, the world is heading towards another war (“how calmly they floated towards the falls”) and Shep Stearns, a lit-grad and idealist leaning towards Marxism, has taken a low-level screenwriting job because he believes movies are “the great new folk art.” Shep is youthful, enthusiastic, and can talk the talk, even though he knows Hollywood-speak is “a world fenced in with exclamation points… a world where hyperbole is the mother tongue.” But he’s accommodating since he desires to marry his sweetheart and avoid a regular job, i.e. inheriting his father’s studio car rental business. So Shep’s written a stinker of a college romance called “Love On Ice,” which he knows bears no relation to realities or art but “is the most convenient of apologetics: the means to an end.”

The studio head, Victor Milgrim, a rags-to-riches nouveaux riches aristocrat emblematic of the early studio founders, sees potential in Shep’s script but wants to polish it so he’s hired Manley Halliday to work on the script. Halliday is a legendary but mostly forgotten Jazz Age novelist. He is also a recovering alcoholic trying to glue himself back together long enough to finish his final literary masterpiece. Milgrim wants them to travel cross-country together to Shep’s alma mater, the fictional Webster College in New Hampshire, to shoot background scenes at the Mardi Gras festival. He believes the adventure will inspire their writing endeavors (though Halliday is sure that Milgrim, an intellectually insecure millionaire, is pushing for an honorary degree and wielding Halliday as bait for the prize). Manley, dependent on his live-in girlfriend, Ann, agrees to go in spite of grave misgivings regarding what might befall him on the journey. His fears are perfectly ground. The great novelist soon falls off the wagon and the consequences are disastrous.

The problem is that screenwriting is all wrong for Halliday, an idiot savant, prolific with the most exquisite prose but incapable of correctly folding his suits. Screenwriting “wasn’t writing; it was diplomacy” and as a younger man, powerful, free and a bit of the snob, “he’d been able to indulge in a lofty contempt for movies.” But Halliday needs quickie cash and lots of it— he’s paying down the debts racked up from the wild living: back taxes, back alimony, back rent, his ex-wife’s analysis, his son’s prep school education. As in the case of Shep, the lure of Hollywood money is more powerful than pride or convictions.

But the young screenwriter turns out to be a tonic to the old artist: Shep has not only read all of Halliday’s books, he quotes liberally from them and whose generation he inexplicably, guiltily, envies and admires. On the flight to New York, Shep shares with Halliday a few bottles of champagne, which is the first burst of the floodgates. The taste of booze is the flavor of memory and once they arrive in New York, Manley operates in a twilight consciousness revolving around a glorious past, a catastrophic decline, and an inebriated, less than elegant present. And rather than writing, Shep is compelled to live up to his name, shepherding Manley safely through numerous crises, mostly of the self-inflicted variety.

Like Fitzgerald suffering his beautiful Zelda, Halliday’s bête noir was a flapper named Jere. Much of the novel’s thick middle is close third person stream of consciousness covering the couple’s witty banter, bad behavior, terrific parties, and wholesale crack-ups not dissimilar to the Fitzgerads’ very own. It’s a life of gay yachting parties on the Riviera and grim sanitariums in Upstate New York. And though we veer from the plot (will Manley get it together and solve the damn cipher of this silly movie?) the digressions provide some of the most exquisite prose in the novel. After falling in love in Paris, Armistice Night, 1918, Jere “made his young manhood a time of bewitchment, when springtime was the only season and the days revolved on a lovers’ spectrum of sunlight, twilight, candlelight and dawn.” As long as Halliday had the Golden Touch they thrived vivaciously: “we weren’t a-Freud of anything.” But neither Manley nor Jere could transition to the austere 1930s, as “the trouble with both of them… was that they thought youth was a career instead of a preparation.”

The Good Old Days:

Two Flappers and a Gentleman

Failure has embittered Halliday, who can’t help but loathe the new generation. Jealous of the youthful love between Shep and his girl, he comforts himself with the knowledge that “the happiest of people were machines running down.” Pressured by Milgrim and Shep to produce something usable pronto, Halliday fortifies his incapacity to create with his condescending view of writers that churn out material by demand: “Writing comes easy… when you’re a natural hack an’ haven’t got any self to express.”

Nevertheless, Halliday sees himself as a professional. When it’s sink or swim, Manley can riff on the plot, adding poetry and dimension to the staid college romance formula. Shep’s impressed, but dubious, for “it was much too good for what they needed. But for what they needed, not good enough.” Unfortunately for them (but felicity for the schadenfreude-happy reader) when they finally reach Webster, Halliday is “too stupefied to tell day from night, gin from vodka, love from hate.” When the great writer humiliates himself at a college mixer to the delight of colleagues and students, Shep is furious: “Manley was drunk and he was a spectacle. But they seemed glad this had happened to him. That is what galled.” It’s that damn devil, envy, working itself into a fit again, expressed in shits and giggles. Halliday knows the source of their spiteful laughter all too well, as from a time when he nearly conquered his own demons through self-reflection:

“Ruthlessly he made a list of all his faults and found them all to be the same fault, an over-supply of vanity, an over-developed concern to hear his name at the end of the cheers. The wish to be publicly admired. To be a Success. Like the others he had sneered at the Babbitts with their ordinary business success, their abysmal bourgeois ignorance that passed for ‘being a smart operator’ and yet inadvertently he had allowed himself to be caught in the great American net.”　

Thus written is the central dilemma of living in a consumerist society: this is the mother of our disenchantment and our insatiable appetite for the new and the next. It may even be defined by that vague catchall word, “cool.” We have an unfortunate tendency to compare our fortunes to those of others, whether it be money, knowledge, gadgets, or style. When we fall short, for we inevitably do because there is always someone better, faster, cooler, loathing is the default emotional reaction. There is only one great truth to salve such insecure feelings, true then, now, and forever and for a moment, Halliday nearly grasped it:

“Men as far apart as the Bible poets, the Elizabethans and the French symbolists all seemed to agree that if there was a single wisdom it was simply To thine own self be true… All he had to do now was decide what was his own self.”

Manley Halliday only seemed to really understand Manley Halliday in the process of writing, in great confessional prose that excoriated his blunders and romanticized the things that were worth making beautiful. In a difficult culture where morals are compromised and pride despised, art is the single greatest outlet afforded the honest man. In Halliday’s own intoxicated language, “No good work of art I mean there’s no good work worthwhile work of art without the artist exposing himself.”

The Great F. Scott, circa 1938

In the end, Halliday has exposed too much in real life and it destroys him. When he is dying in a hospital at the end of the story, Shep, in spite of the promise of his hero’s unfinished manuscript, believes that only in death will his friend reach immortality: “Let him be lowered into his grave so that disciples may begin to worship, so that readers may savor the pleasure of rediscovery. Let us bury the remains. Let the Halliday revival begin.”

Sometimes life follows the inspirations of art. F. Scott Fitzgerald died at the young age of forty-four. Posthumously, he has become a larger-than-life success, The Great Gatsby being quite possibly the most beloved book of our culture, the so-called Great American Novel. Death, it seems, can save a reputation. Schadenfreude has only so much emotional reach before sentimentality overwhelms it and we Americans are more famous for being maudlin anyway.

Unfortunately, forgiveness comes too late but at least it does arrive in time for posterity.

The Long Egyptian Night Coming

In his novel, The Yacoubian Building, author Alaa Al Aswany employs a clever literary technique: a single, crumbling edifice and its population within serves as a metaphor for the decline of Egypt. Literature works well with restrictions and better with the ghosts of nostalgia and this trick could be well disposed for use among other residential landmarks with storied pasts (the Beverly Hills and Chelsea Hotels with its long-term guests come to mind, as does the Chateau Marmont Hotel on the Sunset Strip, a setting that could strip rock and roll to its essence, and perhaps, its popular decline). Decline is a popular theme in literature and for the fictional residents of the Yacoubian Building old enough to remember, change is not usually a good thing. Present circumstances, at least (the novel’s setting is the winter of 1991 during the onset of the first Gulf War), prove intermittently corrupting, debilitating, and horrible—those of a delicate cast, it seems, do not fare very well in modern Cairo.

Built by an Armenian businessman in 1937, the real life eponymously named Art Deco structure once housed Cairo’s elite but Third World capitals have their own kind of ‘white flight’ not dissimilar to ours (the rich gravitate towards greater space for their golf courses, swimming pools, manicured lawns— not so different from their Long Island or Montecito counterparts— it is a flat world, after all) and the inhabitants within Al Aswany’s novel represent various paradigms of contemporary society: political wannabes, Francophile dipsomaniacs, gay journalists, scheming tailors, and Islamic terrorists. Okay, perhaps not exactly. Rather than being an honest survey of urban Cairo this description of characters might appear handpicked at prima facie but Al Aswany has written a great book, one to my mind, is very nearly to his Cairo as Salmon Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is to Bombay, The Master and Margarita is to Mikhail Bulgakov’s Moscow and What Makes Sammy Run is to Budd Schullberg’s Hollywood— a novel that is so evocative of time and place it defines a society as well as its culture’s plight, better (and certainly more poetically) than any history is capable of. And like these other great novels, there’s a lot of anger there. Its stand against a social system, with which it finds fault, is a brave one.

There is no central plot in The Yacoubian Building— Al Aswany weaves between characters, whose stories do not always intersect: Zaki Bel el Dessoui is a wealthy, aging, alcoholic womanizer reminiscing over the glorious pre-revolutionary past; Taha el Shazili is the doorman’s son who fails at his policeman’s test and is politicized enough to become a suicidal terrorist; Malak is a shirtmaker conspiring to hustle himself into a better apartment; Hatim Rasheed is a gay journalist who’s in love with a married soldier from the country, whom he bribes with gifts to woo his affection; Hagg Muhammad Azzam is a self-made millionaire opportunist aspiring into politics, an individual whom betrays his religious averring when he drugs his concubine mistress in order to force an abortion against her will.

But to my mind, the hero of the story is Busayna el Sayed, a young, beautiful woman who has to work to support her family, which involves indulging the sick petting of her boss for a mere ten Egyptian pounds reward (about two dollars worth). Like another character in the building, Abashkharon, a factotum to the philandering fleshpot el Dessouki wielding a prosthetic leg as “moral blackmail,” Busayna is compelled to use her body for whatever tiny, if not shameful, gains available to her. Inspired by her fetching figure, the charming lecher, el Dessouki, hires her as his assistant but eventually falls in love with her integrity. With his fond memories of an elegant, pre-revolution Cairo, El Dessouki might despise the impoverished, insular, religiously fundamentalist nation Egypt has become (Al Aswany’s prose describes drinking alcohol in Cairo as very nearly a speakeasy affair) but the old gentleman flinches when Busayna mocks his nationalism in the most important speech of the novel:

“You don’t understand because you’re well off. When you’ve stood for two hours at the bus stop or taken three different buses and had to go through hell every day just to get home, when your house has collapsed and the government has left you sitting with your children in a tent on the street, when the police officer has insulted you and beaten you just because you’re on a minibus at night, when you’ve spent the whole day going around the shops looking for work and there isn’t any, when you’re a fine sturdy young man with an education and all you have in your pockets is a pound, or sometimes nothing at all, and then you’ll know why we hate Egypt.”

Busayna is speaking of her own hardships, but she may as well be reporting for all the world’s fellaheen, whether they are Indians, Africans, or even Americans. The language resonates, particularly in its locale and environs: The Yacoubian Building was the decade’s biggest selling Arabic novel. It’s remarkable that such a book could be published and popularized in a country notorious for its censorship (it’s even been adapted into a film and TV series though in sanitized forms). As a work of art that challenges the status quo, the novel spits in society’s face: the government is portrayed as corrupt, barbarous, nepotistic, irreligious, and despotic— torture is described vividly. Malice, perversity, and cravenness pervade the motivations of much of the remaining characters. Egyptian society, here at least, seems to be tearing itself apart.

But how does one of the country’s annual seven million tourists perceive this? Well, he or she doesn’t. Although the Egyptian government fails to provide for the poor, an infrastructure catering to the needs of tourists is very well established. And why not considering the profits? High admission prices, luxury hotels, comprehensive tour programs are big, big business. In the popular press, Egypt is safe enough to visit but dangerous enough that individuals are advised against doing so on their own, a happy medium for a government quite enthusiastic to exploit a rich heritage they had absolutely no part in creating. This concern for travelers’ safety is a fallacy predicated on Egypt being a Muslim, and therefore dangerous, nation. Handholding becomes de rigueur so that in their ten-day ‘adventure,’ the average tourist’s interaction with Egyptians is limited to souvenir peddlers, waiters, concierges, bellboys, drivers, and the ubiquitous tour guide, an air-conditioned experience filtering the traveler’s participation to a culturally predetermined test formula.

Another way of looking at the Cairo skyline

It’s often the case that in the interests of tourism a country’s glorious history will overshadow present-day realities. In perhaps no other country is the disconnect between myth and reality so vast as it is in Egypt. Moreover, the historical gap between the marketed fantasy and the onerous reality is equally prodigious. Between the New Kingdom and modern Egyptian state, the fellaheen have suffered incompetent and taxing governments under Persians, Greeks, Romans, Circassians, Turks, and the British. Even religion has a long and varied history so that between Aman Ra and Allah, believers might have prayed to Zeus, Jupiter, and Jesus Christ— you can witness this textured history in ancient temples where stone-cut reliefs of Horus have been plastered over with painted Last Supper scenes, the facial features chiseled out by Muslim iconoclasts.

In most countries, it’s common to see as many locals as tourists at famous monuments, but not in Egypt. In fact, in the interest of state-sponsored tourism (and thus tourists) whole neighborhoods are being razed in order to recreate the glory of ancient Egypt, as in the Nile Valley region where the Sphinx road between the Luxor and Karnak Temples is being restored, displacing entire neighborhoods and thousands of people who are not being adequately compensated for the loss of their homes. For the casual tourist or amateur Egyptologist, the government’s initiative may seem a matter of course. After all, when the scales are weighed between the visual recreation of a glorious dynasty and the miseries of a few thousand peasants, which side do you think the majority of Nefertiti fetishists will find purchase?

Tourism: an inexhaustible machine

Egypt’s President Mubarak came to power in 1981 after the spectacular assassination of Anwar Sadat. Egyptian society has been in a “state of emergency” ever since. What this means is the suspension of habeas corpus, civil rights, and an impartial justice system. Dissidents, radicals, journalists, religious fundamentalists, and free thinkers are routinely jailed and tortured. Yet, Egypt is often held up as a model of the region’s potential for democracy. These tone-deaf proclamations as well as financial support (Egypt is the second highest recipient of U.S. aid— two thirds of which goes to military spending and police espionage used to oppress its citizenry) reveal the utter depths of American hypocrisy. Mubarak is eighty-four years old and expected to die soon. One of his sons, his rapacious reputation preceding him, is being groomed as the heir apparent. This is not a happy prospect for the impoverished Egyptian and in the cafés, many Egyptians, even those in middle-class positions who have benefited from the regime’s policies but whose moral instincts are disgusted by its behavior, are open to a people’s revolution. The land, so fertile with history, may burst into the international spotlight yet again.

As for fate of the characters in The Yacoubian Building, most end tragically, but the final scene finishes the novel on a happy note, one of love redeemed and survived in spite of the brutal reasons it shouldn’t. It may seem maudlin to some after so much tragedy, tagged on by a publisher’s recommendation, softening the political hammer but in its own way it works. Because readers, and by that extension human beings, need a reason to hope.

That's the Way the Tortilla Crumbles

Although globalization has sped the process that colonialism began, integrating and importing different cultures and people into foreign lands, America remains foremost among the world as a nation of immigrants. The indigenous excepted of course, all Americans come from somewhere else. The ancestors that founded our American lines thus once upon a time endured a very brave journey to be here. There is no shortage of mythologizing these romantic origins and my family is no different. Collecting and adding up various stories of apocrypha, my great grandfather and progenitor of the American Lotmans was born in the Ukraine port city of Odessa. An army captain stationed in the Black Sea during the First World War, when the Russian empire collapsed into revolution, civil war and a pogrom against Jews, Captain Lotman went AWOL, gathering his wife and his brother’s family and fleeing the violence. It took nearly three years for them to walk across Europe—a Europe at the time devastated by war, revolution and the Spanish influenza— three years sleeping in barns and stealing chickens before they made it to the South of France where there was a little money and a ship to take them to New York and beyond, to Chicago, where lived a cousin with a tailor shop. Was this really how my American line was born or was it much more ordinary, bureaucratic, sanitized? I prefer to celebrate my great grandfather’s adventure regardless of disputations. As the famous line from the John Ford western advocates, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Even the most hard-line, bigoted nativist waxes starry-eyed fables about the time his or her ancestors came over, glossing over the fact they were once aliens, maybe illegal, probably culturally and linguistically confused and likely despised for their efforts in trying to make a better life. The hatred reserved for Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorians and the bulk of our South-of-the-border neighbors was once reserved for Wops, Micks, and Pollocks. Immigration is one of those issues that will never go away. Just last month, the Arizona state government passed Arizona SB1070, legislation also known as Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, which proposes police activism in interrogating suspected aliens regarding their papers and facilitating punitive measures for those in violation. Boosters of the bill deny any kind of racial profiling involved but it’s hard to imagine a white guy driving a Lexus being asked to provide proof of citizenship. Elsewhere this week an Alabama gubernatorial candidate in his TV ad proclaimed sanctimoniously that if elected he’ll make sure that Driver's Ed. tests are administered only in English and in California, a Republican congressman wants to deport U.S. born children of illegal immigrants, defying the Constitution.

Even those sympathetic to our melting pot heritage have precarious loyalties in moments of national crisis. Just look at attitudes towards Germans during the First World War, the Japanese at Manzanar, and Middle Easterners and South Asians after the terrorist attacks on September 11^th. In normal times as well fear has been the catalyzing agent for the proclamation of draconian measures. While it may be true that immigrants commit crimes, you could argue just as exhaustively that it is poverty, more than culture, that is the inspiration. What is nearly always missing from the talking heads in the bully pulpits is some compassion and desire to understand the roots of the problem. It does not require tremendous common sense to realize that a human being will seek out his best opportunities for food, shelter, and work. What’s a thinking man with a strong body to do when his country suffers forty percent unemployment and his country’s biggest source of revenue is work remittances from the United States? It’s a problem, all right, and always it seems the solution is the reflexive ‘kick ‘em out, build a wall,’ answer. Never mind that California and the whole Southwest was once Mexican territory until an imperialistic war of the 1840s saw it ceded to the U.S. for a paltry sum. Never mind that we’ve damned the Colorado River and built so many aqueducts that by the time the river reaches Mexico, it’s so small and insignificant farmers are going bankrupt by the thousands. Never mind that without illegals picking lettuce out in San Bernardino farms for three dollars an hour, we couldn’t enjoy the very cheap produce we love drenching our low-fat Ranch dressing over. Never mind all that. It’s their fault, not ours, that people are scared, starving and killing each other.

It is not the artist’s responsibility to put the issue in perspective, but he or she can dramatize it in such a way that creates a sense of powerful empathy. T.C. Boyle does this admirably in his novel, The Tortilla Curtain. Published fifteen years ago, it feels as contemporary, relevant and urgent today as it did then. Compared favorably with John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a similar story of migrants, prejudice and their tragic trajectory, Boyle quotes Steinbeck’s character in the lead-in to his novel, “They ain’t human. A human being wouldn’t live like they do. A human being couldn’t stand it to be so dirty and miserable.”

Dehumanization is omnipresent in Boyle’s story, beginning when Delaney, a liberal white naturalist, runs over Cándido, an illegal alien crossing Los Angeles’s Topanga Canyon road at an inauspicious moment. Delaney doesn’t speak Spanish, the injured Cándido knows no English, and the unfortunate action is resolved by Delaney’s handing over twenty dollars to the battered Cándido. Explaining the resolution to his incredulous wife, Kyra, later, Delaney says, “I told you, he was Mexican,” as if that reduces the transaction into its simplest terms.

Nevertheless, their lives are herein interwoven and Boyle adroitly switches chapters between his characters without ever losing momentum. Delaney and Kyra represent the wealthy liberal’s contradictions. They live in a gorgeous, secluded enclave named Arroyo Blanco. The neighborhood, which owes its name and architectural style (Spanish Mission) to the culture of the undesirables it aspires to keep out, decides to put up a security checkpoint and when that doesn’t seem far-reaching enough, a steep wall is erected to enclose the community to the exclusion of others— Arroyo Blanco works as a fair enough metaphor for America itself and the futility of preventing the outside world from coming in. Kyra, a hotshot realtor, is particularly sensitive to the clustering of Mexican day laborers in certain convenience store parking lots and its inverse relation to property values. Although, she must have awareness such an action will have dire repercussions for those doing what they can to eke a living, she makes a phone call to immigration to “clean up” the streets. She doesn’t even feel guilty about this nor does she appreciate the choice of language. For Delaney, whose sympathies are always with the natural world he writes about, it doesn’t take much— a stolen car, a piece of graffiti, a low rider with tinted windows and rumbling bass speakers ominously encountered— before his feelings towards illegals are destabilized so that a personal vendetta develops in his mind between himself and the man he hit to a degree that violence becomes a rational solution.

As interesting as his psychological descent may be, what makes Tortilla Curtain so powerful is Boyle’s compassionate portrayal of Cándido and his young, pregnant wife, América. Cándido has been coming to El Norte for years to do backbreaking work, from Idaho’s potato fields to West Hills landscaping, never managing to secure that elusive tarjeta verde. América has come with him on the premise of a better life, which in her estimation is as little as a small apartment and three meals a day, not the stuff of Horatio Alger riches, but then Cándido, though clever, industrious, and diligent, is working in a cruel, violent world, which is one in which an individual, no matter how much his efforts, good intentions or small contributions to the local economy, runs the risk of deportation and the loss of everything accumulated and saved.

The Tortilla Curtain

Cándido is a victim of bad luck and the capacity of human beings for greed, thoughtlessness, and self-absorption. Promising América a better life, he is ripped off in Tijuana, humiliated at the border, reduced to squatting homeless in a creek bed, hit by a car, robbed in Canoga Park, and when things are finally beginning to improve for him and his pregnant wife, Cándido unwittingly sets off a catastrophe that not only ruins everything he’s worked for but nearly kills him. It is not for a lack of effort that prevents Cándido from getting ahead but a complex social structure that despises him for his efforts:

“Cándido was a sinner like any other man, sure, but no worse. And here he was, half-starved and crippled by their infernal machines, bounced from one to another of them like a pinball, first the big jerk with the Elvis hair and then the pelirrojo who’d run him down in the road, the very one, and his gangling tall awkward pendejo of a son who’d hiked all the way down into the canyon to violate a poor man’s few pitiful possessions. It was too much. He needed to go to confession, do penance, shrive himself somehow. Even Job would have broken down under an assault like this.”

Of course, there is some symbolism suggested in the choosing of a character’s name such as Cándido; a point is being made, an apologue being wrought and an interesting one at that. His namesake, a character created by a secularist in pre-Revolution France, leaves his native village behind in order to discover if it is true as his mentor Dr. Pangloss teaches, that this is the best of all possible words. Like Job, like Cándido, he discovers it to be a violent, soul-stricken place. In the end, the Candide of the French imagination returns home reassured that though the world may be horrible one can run a clean, lovely garden— your joys and ambitions will not fail you if they remain small scale. The big difference between the Candide of French literature and the Cándido in America is that our Cándido doesn’t need philosophy or its gratuitous hypotheses—his goals have always been a small home, food, maybe some house plants, and a woman and children to love. Of course these humble dreams are not uniquely Cándido’s own but remain a universal value to nearly every brave, hardscrabble immigrant who has ever strode boldly into the unknown world.

The Bottom of the Bowl

“Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass.”

One of the worst transformations undergone in the publishing industry over the last generation has been the elevation of the personal memoir. Self-centered celebrity tell-all books notwithstanding, it is the testimony of former addicts, alcoholics, sinners and the apologetic like whose personal anecdotes of shame and redemption that tend to be very popular with an inquisitive public. These stories of decadence share a typical trope: wanton excesses are laid out for our prurient (and natural) curiosities, which are then incontrovertibly condemned by a puritanical (and programmed) morality. Other than refuting Blake, Huxley and Jim Morrison’s cause-and-effect advocacy regarding excess and wisdom, these books do not reveal the reason why some of us are destroyed by substance abuse while for others drugs and alcohol remain an indulgence, if not an occasional delight.

If you’ve read one 12-steps recovery tale of self-aggrandisement, you’ve read them all and, yet, you’re still no closer to understanding what was the point of all this embarrassing solipsism. Generally, it is understood that addiction is a terribly personal affair, a lonely misadventure so desolate that for the addict lost in lostness, “sunlight could not share his burden of conscience of sourceless sorrow.”

You will never find the above quote— so exacting in its prognosis of alienation—in any contemporary memoir. It belongs to literature, specifically Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, published in 1947, during a time when alcoholic and drug fiends—if they wanted to be published— transubstantiated their brutal experience into an exquisite poetry that demanded from the reader a severe attention if he or she decided to go along for the ride. For Lowry, an alcoholic who never beat his demons but exorcised them in this literary masterpiece, the devil doubled as the muse.

Under the Volcano is the story of Geoffrey Fermin, an ex-British consul drinking himself into oblivion in Quauhnahuac, Mexico. The story, like Joyce’s Ulysseus, comprises a single, eventful day, the Dia de Las Muertes, November 1^st, 1938, a day that begins with his estranged wife, Yvonne, an American B-actress past her sell-by date, returning from California after a year’s estrangement. Along with the Consul’s half-brother, Hugh, they decide to travel to the nearby town of Parain. En route, they witness a crime that has later tragic repercussions.

The setting and time are important, related as they are to the major global event at the time, the Spanish Civil War, which, ideologically, had been a contest between anarchy and communism against fascism and, industrially, a testing ground for the weapons of mass destruction that would follow within a year, once Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland. The progressive ideas coming out of communism, particularly that of nationalization of resources, was a testy subject in Mexico, beset with its repressive Catholic heritage as well as its own Revolution’s legacy and the State’s very recent takeover of its oil reserves.

The best novels feature an interconnectedness between the greater world and the interior one and this complex relationship is evoked within the characters in different ways. Hugh, a failed commercial troubadour and utopian-minded drifter-dreamer, feels guilty that in spite of his convictions and the knowledge that the Spanish Republic’s defeat is a fait accompli, wonders if he has missed the one opportunity to do something honorable and meaningful in life. Of course, he disagrees with the Consul’s self-destructive apathy, yet he is not unaware of man’s survival instinct to let well enough alone what is not his battle to fight. This is eloquently expressed following the incident of the crime and his witnessing of the other passengers’ reaction: “Death they knew, better than the law, and their memories were long… in these old women it was as if, through the various tragedies of Mexican history, pity, the impulse to approach and terror, the impulse to escape, having replaced it, had finally been reconciled by prudence, the conviction it is better to stay where you are.”

The Consul, well aware of the benefits of isolationism, has his own contentions. His alcoholism is not a pleasure nor is it a form of escapism. It is a sickness, and the drinking is necessary for him to reach a physical and psychological equilibrium. The DTs strike whenever he attempts to empower himself any degree of free will over his disease. Just as bad is the sense of doom that pervades sobriety, liable to wipe out any sunshine or cheer. Sitting at a café, in view of a fair celebrating the holiday, the setting “had suddenly become transcendentally awful and tragic, distant, transmuted, as it were some final impression on the senses of what the earth was like, carried over into an obscure region of death, a gathering thunder of immedicable sorrow; the Consul needed a drink…”

Malcolm Lowry

Mexico, which Lowry once wrote in a letter to friend was "the most Christ-awful place in the world in which to be in any form of distress, a sort of Moloch that feasts on suffering souls," is a grandiose theater from which this tragedy plays out: Mexico and its ruined palaces, Gothic churches, hideous ravines, pullulating flowers, clandestine scorpions, and canvas-like skies where "high overhead sailed white sculpturings of clouds, like billowing concepts in the brain of Michelangelo." There is also its tequila and its mescal, the sad-eyed drunks and the corrupt police. In the turning point of the novel, when the Consul, Yvonne and Hugh encounter a brutalized Indian lying injured on the side of the road, one of the other passengers not only pockets the man's money and pays his fare with it but shamelessly keeps the pelf on his lap conspicuously for all to view. Was it any wonder then, that Europe was rushing headlong and heedless into another great war and that for those who knew better, the human race would not be worth dying for?

But in the end this is a love story and it is the Consul's tumultuous relationship with Yvonne that is the real source of his despair. Yvonne, having come to rescue him from Mexico and its addictions, has agrarian dreams, one in which they withdraw from the world onto their own farm, in the country, a place where Geoffrey would be able to write (he is working on a book on Mayan ritual, the Kabbalah, and other occult matters) while she tends their living space, looking after him, being his friend, his housewife, his lover. It doesn't matter that she knows nothing of the day-to-day affairs of such an endeavor, for after all, it is but a dream and one that can be easily discredited by reality. Though they never discuss it outright, Geoffrey suspects it's on her mind and though he loves the novelty of such an enterprise, he believes more in futility than fruition. Early in their reunion, he hints at the hopelessness of her schemes, his query, “What’s the use of escaping from ourselves?” quickly forgotten. There was not even real regret that this inevitable failure was something to feel bad about: “the past was irrevocably past. And conscience had been given man to regret it only so far as that might change the future.”

That the Consul may be pessimistic about his predestined perdition doesn’t make the reader any less sympathetic to Yvonne’s cause—her imagining of the farm comes as a contrast to a brutal sporting event—since the marriage, in spite of its flaws and blemished disgrace seems worth saving, as these two people, for all their mistakes, need each other desperately. The novel's greatest substance comes from the construction of the small details communicated between a man and a woman with a long tragic history, beautifully evoked in Lowry’s prose: “…as he approached she turned this hand palm upward…like an unconscious gesture of appeal: it was more: it seemed to epitomize, suddenly, all the old supplication, the whole queer secret dumbshow of incommunicable tendernesses and loyalties and eternal hopes of their marriage.”

Yvonne is no innocent: her affair with M. Laurelle, a childhood friend of the Consul is what makes it so hard for them to reconcile. It is not clear whether his alcoholism was responsible for the affair or the affair responsible for the alcoholism. This chicken-or-the-egg argument has no bearing for Geoffrey and Yvonne in their current predicament. They are doomed lovers, a Romeo and Juliet denied any future union of consummation not due to external parties but from deep within themselves. Being responsible for so much unintentional pain upon the other, is it any surprise “how alike are the groans of love to those of the dying…?”

The Consul understood the inarticulateness of his debilitation and that though every drunk’s tragedy might be as mass-produced as the liquor he drank, his very real pain was personal in its broken-tongued head-spinning downfall, a sui generis descent into a forgettable void. People might help you, they might care for you, but in the end, you were on your own: “In the final analysis there was no one you could trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl.”

This may be true. But as an old barkeep consoles Geoffrey on his long day’s journey to the end, there can always be a sense of companionship among the lost nevertheless, for “I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours.”

Burning Billboards and Other Literary Matters

Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang begins with “the aftermath” of the novel itself, the detonation of a bridge in the Four Corners Region of the American Southwest. Like an inspiration born of yippies or Al-Qaeda, the bridge is a high-profile target, sabotaged during a media event with officials glad-handing, local TV news crews videotaping, and the public witnessing: the bigger the spectacle, the larger the message, which is more or less, neo-Luddist.

It is generally a risky move to make literature overtly political (as opposed to presenting your polemics with subtlety, which is the greater trend; done right, nuance can be just as powerful). Fictional agitprop generally does not sell well with the public nor does it charm the midlist critics. Notable exceptions would be Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, both of which went on to affect the public conscience on such vigorous levels that their narratives entered the national debate over slavery and food safety, respectively.

Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang was published in 1975, a fascinating period in liberal dissent, in which some radicals had more or less abandoned sit-ins and peace marches in favor of violence. Members of The Weather Report and the Symbionese Liberation Army really did believe that terrorist acts against institutions that promote or profit off the industry of war and oppression were fair targets and through their destruction would come significant change. Putting down the love beads and picking up the Molotov cocktail, they were fearless, if not misguided individuals operating in a social climate that was moving comfortably towards The Hustle and cocaine on pleather love seats.

Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang is not a clan of hippies indoctrinated by the burgeoning Earth Day celebrations but are men of the earth who have soil in their fingernails and the wherewithal to live by their philosophy, that is that technology and industry are incompatible with the pristine beauty of nature. As Seldom Seen Smith, the polygamous, blonde, lanky, good-humored Mormon whose living, livelihood and life is the marvelous Colorado River, says:

"The river, the canyon, the desert world was always changing, from moment to moment, from miracle to miracle, within the firm reality of mother earth. River, rock, sun, blood, hunger, wings, joy-- this is the real... all the rest is androgynous theosophy. All the rest is transcendental transvestite transactional scientology or whatever the fad of the day, the vogue of the week."

Philosophically, he is right on with Doc Sarvis, a middle-aged surgeon with a pathological antipathy regarding highway billboards, of which he indulges in his pyrotechnic habits. Doc Sarvis views man’s fate through fiery-tinted apocalyptic goggles, the Devil’s Advocate in any conversation related to man’s inherent goodness:

"The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life. Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness... then the madness becomes universal. And the universe will go mad."

Over a campfire of rations, whiskey, and beer, they discuss possible targets, Doc Sarvis working himself into a rage as he lists nature’s worst transgressors due a mean reckoning:

"And don't forget the billboards. And the strip mines. And the pipelines. And the new railroad from Black Mesa to Page. And the coal-burning power plants. And the copper smelters. And the uranium mines. And the nuclear power plants. And the computer centers. And the land and cattle companies. And the wildlife poisoners. And the people who throw beer cans along the highways."

Doc Sarvis’s secretary and chauffeur-cum-lover, Ms. Bonnie Abbzug, is a Bronx Jewish beauty who is the Patty Hearst of the gang, a city gal politicized by charismatic company and the delight of detonating bulldozers. As the men get carried away with their visions of sabotage, she reminds them that prudence would be key to survival. She’s the voice of the 1960s, bright, lovely, idealistic, meditative, and yet she can see the more clearly than the others:

"But they have everything. They have the organization and the control and the communications and the army and the police and the secret police. They have the big machines. They have the law and drugs and jails and courts and judges and prisons. They are so huge. We are so small."

Her philosophical rival within the group is George Washington Hayduke, a hairy, squat, muscular, vulgar Vietnam Vet with itchy trigger fingers and an incapacity to resist any kind of sabotage, as much for the fun factor as for the environmental statement itself. Though told in the third person, it’s clear that Hayduke is the story’s protagonist, if not Abbey’s altar ego, as he is the most offended by the pathetic turn in materialist America. Hayduke is a kind of rampaging Greenpeace Rambo whose end-all pastoral vision of America is compromised by his ingrained pessimism:

"When the cities are gone and all the ruckus has died away, when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways, when the Kremlin and the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for the generals, presidents and other such shitheads, when the glass aluminum skyscraper tombs of Phoenix Arizona barely show above the sand dunes, why then, why then, why then by God maybe free men and wild women on horses, free women and wild men, can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom--goddammit!--herding the feral cattle into box canyons, and gorge on bloody meat and bleeding fucking internal organs and dance all night to the music of fiddles! banjoes! steel guitars! by the light of a reborn moon!-- by God, yes! Until... the next age of ice and iron comes down and the engineers and the farms and the general motherfuckers come back again."

Take or leave the politics, this is passionate prose, and the story flows with energy and humor. Progress of the narrative is simple and inevitable: after forming the Monkey Wrench Gang (also called the Wooden Shoe Conspiracy as the word sabotage is derived from the French sabot or ‘wooden shoe,’ as in “from damage done to machinery by sabots (Webster’s)), they progress from simple to complicated operations that lead to evermore close calls with the law, including some extraordinary chase sequences that would make great cinema (though it’s very unlikely corporate Hollywood would spend the big bucks financing such a piece). Throughout the Four Corners region, they have supplies cached for regrouping, survival, and the next act of mayhem. In case you were wondering, the typical inventory was such:

“The stores consisted of (1) food: tinned goods, dried meats, fruits, beans, powdered milk, sealed drinking water; (2) field equipment: medical kits, tarps and ponchos, fire starters, topographical maps, moleskin and Rip-Stop, sleeping bags, canteens, hunting and fishing equipment, cooking gear, rope, tape, nylon cord and (3) the basic ingredients: monkey wrenches, wrecking bars, heavy-duty wirecutters, bolt cutters, trenching tools, siphon hoses, sugars and syrups, oil and petrol, steel wedges, blasting caps, detonating cord, safety fuse, cap crimpers, fuse lighters and adequate quantities of Du Pont Straight and Du Pont Red Cross Extra."

If Abbey is political, he is also poetic and oftentimes funny. The Gang’s enemy, the representatives of industry are the kinds of people that "can hear a dollar bill drop on a shag rug." No institution is safe with Abbey, even cartoon characters suffer embarrassing acts of vandalism:

"Bonnie unbuttoned Smokey's fly, pictorially speaking, and painted onto his crotch a limp pet-cock with hairy but shriveled balls. To Smokey's homily on fire prevention Hayduke attached an asterisk and footnote: "Smokey the Bear is full of shit."

Mr. Abbey

Would you play with dynamite with this man?

In the copyrights page, Abbey declares that though the novel is “fictional in form,” it is “based strictly on historical fact.” Mischievously, he adds that “it all began just one year from today.” It seems then that his novel is a call to arms for all environmental warriors to take up wrenches against industry. As we all know, such a Neo-Luddite revolution never occurred but that is not to say it might happen yet with Abbey some smiling godfather angel poet.

Abbey, who had an FBI file going back to the 1940s, was a fringe thinker with a golden pen, but is not known to have engaged the system as his fictional characters had. But he was at the right place at the right time, as it’s hard to believe that he could get away with his politics in our contemporary and endless War on Terror. Finding an empathetic editor and courageous publishing house would have been extraordinarily tedious. When the character Hayduke speaks for Abbey, “Because freedom, not safety, is the highest good," he is contradicting the literature of our age, with its sanitized, whitewashed machinations. Had he lived long enough, maybe the author would have gone rogue in his eighties. Abbey was too aware of what was at stake to stand by idly. Best to let the bard enjoy the last word:

"That ultimate world... the final world of meat, blood, fire, water, rock, wood, sun, wind, sky, night, cold, dawn, warmth, life. Those short, blunt and irreducible words which stand for almost everything he thinks he has lost. Or never really had..."