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I agree, but that whole generation of American writers were like that. Early promise, too much alcohol and socializing, and not enough work, especially the hard work of revising to the point of throwing it out. Most of the them didn't grow. One good early shot and that was it. Part of it was the way their sensibility bounced off their own formative period, which was usually irreverent, comic, and serious all at once, a conflict of youth that didn't age or transform into something else, something or some direction that should have been unexpected, much finer and more comprehensive.
It was as if their imaginations were not big enough, which sounds ridiculous since Mailer, Southern, Burroughs, Eric Heller and others were nothing if not imaginative or so it seemed. They relied on their enormous intensity to carry the same weight it did the first time I read them. But it didn't carry. They had to move on, but there was no place to go.
I could already feel it was over when I read them through the 60s. They were out of phase with the period. They were witnesses to Chicago, but they were not part of Chicago. They fit the post-war 50s much better. That was their time, that's when their raw power fought the good fight against the mind numbing stupidity of the larger society---like Lenny Bruce who managed to put menace and combat into his comedy. The FBI moral police never laughed.
As it turns out the United States is not funny. It is grim in purpose and deed and nobody laughs about that any more. Too bad, because it is far more absurd than Lenny Bruce, Terry Southern, Eric Heller or Norman Mailer ever imagined---and just as psychotic as dirty old Bill Burroughs always said it was. And yet, I miss them, especially now when George Bush needs a new asshole ripped for him almost every single day. Where are the meaty paws to turn this motherfucker out good and proper night after night?
This is a nasty fucking place. So then, reflecting back on Mailer, or any of the others, it seems simple now to see they couldn't live on writing, especially writing that stabbed at the heart of a regime that has no heart. The economic pressure just got worse and worse and worse. And then too, like rock and its successor so-called music, they only had a style or attitude or a great look and not a supreme narrative. But style only goes so far. It becomes a problem of how to nuance a style into larger and larger dimensions so that it embraces more and more of the human condition. Being pissed off isn't enough. It's hard to imagine beauty for example, or tenderness emerging from the rocketing hammer of their typewriters late at night, soaked to the gills in some dingy apartment in a city that never sleeps. Just go out, get lost and forget it.
Trouble was, they couldn't just forget it. Must go on. Something crazy about that kind of drive to nowhere. They got infected somehow and it didn't seem to matter whether they had anything to back it up or not, so when they didn't it, whatever it was went to alcohol, drugs, sex, something else until the fire burned out.
I knew these kind of people. I grew up in that scene and later watched the toll it took on my stepfather and his friends. They were all WWII vets out to take the world of art and writing by storm, living off the GI bill in other countries until that ran out, then back here. It just ground them down, no matter how much heart they started with.
What they never seemed to see quite, was they were the story they were trying to write about. For all their soul, they just didn't see it coming, hoping I suppose against hope that it would eventually turn around. It never did.
CG