Depressing!
BobW
--- cgrimes at rawbw.com wrote:
> ``... Gore Vidal, with whom he frequently wrangled,
> once wrote:
> "Mailer is forever shouting at us that he is about
> to tell us
> something we must know or has just told us something
> revelatory and we
> failed to hear him or that he will, God grant his
> poor abused brain
> and body just one more chance, get through to us so
> that we will
> know. Each time he speaks he must become more bold,
> more loud, put on
> brighter motley and shake more foolish bells...''
> Charles McGrath
>
> ---------
>
> 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
>
>
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>