Issue #21/102, Oct 26 - Nov 9, 2000  

The final Five
The Mark David Chapman Literary Tournament

By John Dolan

We’re halfway through the hunt. Five bullets gone and five to go in the quest for the twentieth century’s top ten literary fraudsters. Last week caps were busted upon the following literary gentlemen:

#10: Graham Greene

#9: Norman Mailer

#8: C. S. Lewis

#7: Thomas Pynchon

#6: Bret Easton Ellis

It still irks me that Ellis made it onto that list. It’s like coming back from safari with a tally of four elephants and a goat. But if people will persist in treating goats as elephants, I must confer upon them the Order of the Dum Dum—actually quite an appropriate honor for Ellis.

Last week I compared my situation to that of a man on a train looking out at a herd of phonies which stretched to the horizon. Well, when you blow away one of the herd bulls, a space opens up—and into it step new targets, shouldering their way to the front of the herd, begging to be put out of their misery—or mine, rather. Just now I saw a novel by E. L. Doctorow, a tedious seminar writer and a very bad reason to kill trees. But is he worth a bullet? Had we but caps enough and time/I’d gladly stop and do the crime—but we have to stick to the big brutes, the ones who block out our sun and use up our oxygen.

It’s a terrible responsibility, choosing that last five. Buck fever: hands shaking as I load the rifle. Luckily, I didn’t have to make the choice alone. Lots of readers sent in the names of writers they wished to honor by inclusion on the list.One of the most popular was Thomas Wolfe—the ancient novelist, not the merely old journalist. I must confess that I’ve never read Wolfe the Elder, because his novels sounded like dreary WPA Americana. I have read Tom Wolfe, though, and would gladly pitchfork him into the flames as long as I don’t have to make him one of the top five. Wolfe the Younger represents another softcore homeopathic remedy. Pynchon is a homeopathic remedy for PKD; Wolfe is homeopathy for Hunter S. Thompson. Wolfe never made the New Yorker crowd nervous. Even when describing chaotic violence, he focused on what the perps were wearing—always a reliable source of titters for his epicene readers.

Hunter S. was also nominated by a couple of readers, but I can’t go along with that. The line on HST has always been that he’s blown his cortex, he’s not a shadow of his former self, blah blah blah. And of course this is always attributed to The Drugs, O The Terrible Drugs, What A Waste. Hey, folks, the man’s OLD! He wrote well for one Hell of a long time. How many clean-livin’, decaf and wheatgerm writers write decently when they’re sixty? Besides, HST did something most writers could never do: he wrote bravely. And he was funny, very funny. Even in the eighties, his “Generation of Swine” columns were occasionally good. I remember the one spitting on Julian Bond for letting his girlfriend take the rap for the coke they were caught with. It burned like Alien blood. Why was everyone so eager to report HST’s death so prematurely? Well, nobody likes a sinner who succeeds and won’t pretend to have reformed. HST kept doing the drugs and writing well and not getting caught, and everybody hated him for it: Nixonians for getting away with it, and would-be HST’s… well, for the same reason but with more envy in the mix: How come he can do it and I can’t? I’m speaking from experience here, having spent a year in Las Vegas doing speed and playing with guns. What I found is that I just don’t have the constitution for it. This is something not fully appreciated: being a good writer requires the stamina of a timber wolf. Balzac, PKD, HST—they all went without sleep for decades. Most of us could no more emulate them than we could make ourselves into Olympic marathoners. HST held it together for a long time, and really hurt the Manhattanites. For that, he must be praised.

Some readers said I was too rough on Norman Mailer. They claimed that Mailer’s political journalism for 1960-75 was truly distinguished, even if his fiction was not. This claim is—how may I put this tactfully?—utter crap. Mailer’s most famous literary journalism for this period is The Armies of the Night (1968). For the refutation of his defenders and the amusement of the sane, here’s a typical passage from that book. Let me stress that I’m not making this up or even quoting selectively; this paragraph is quoted in full, without elisions. So take a deep breath, and down we go:

“Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death and the dream of love give promise of sleep.”

See what happens when you give pharmaceutical-quality drugs to teeny little minds? And you complain about Thompson! This laughable pastiche of Whitman, Blake, and Ginsberg, which reads like the musings of an insurance agent on his first acid trip, is a fair sample of Mailer’s so-called great journalism.

O woe, O wee, O bunch of morons!When shall thy coronaries deliver us, giant baby fearsome pregnant girl that we is, from your stoner idiocies, O generation of New York Review of Books Plathdaddies? For we writhe beneath thy giant flatulence, and lo, we are not comforted. For verily it be dangerous to pretende that thou art William Blake when thou have notte ye tallente—for thou endest up sounding like unto Tony Curtis when he saith, “Yondah lies da castle of my fodda” in that Viking movie.

Well, I think that takes care of Mr. Mailer and friends. Now I’ll just wash my hands four or five times, and we’ll get on to the final five.

5. Seamus Heaney.

Twiddle-dee-dee, twiddle-dee-day/Let’s get the Irish out of the way. It’s not easy picking the most overrated Irish author of the twentieth century; there’s a whole field full of them jigging about and waxing witty. The promulgation of the Irish literary myth is an early example of reparation by transfer of cultural capital. Having extirpated the Irish people in the Famine, that most discreet and successful of genocides, the Brits decided to make reparations in a way that cost no actual money, by pretending to find the survivors most cuddly. Extinction makes you cute. Some quite repulsive literary figures were included in the cuddle, notably Sean O’Casey, a fake in every conceivable way. O’Casey became the template on which Seamus Heaney scratched his own name: an exaggerated Gaelicism in culture combined with a bitter hatred of Irish nationalism. O’Casey’s hatred was an old and private one, born of the rather sick romantic triangle at the top of the Citizen Army, in which the Nationalist Countess and Marxist Mr Casey bitch-slapped each other for the ideological favors of James Connolly. When Connolly went the Countess’ way on Easter Monday, Casey devoted the rest of his long, bitter life to smearing everyone who died fighting the British. Wonder of wonders, his plays were a hit on the London stage.

…Welp, another half-century, another rebellion—and another Casey. This time the sellout would have to be a Catholic from the Six Counties, preferably a presentable lad who could wear the Yeats mantle without looking too silly—a lad who would talk a lot of the oul’ blather while snuggling up to the SAS. Enter Seamus Heaney, and it’s all downhill from there to the Nobel. The man never had an ounce of talent; his poems are stolen in their entirety from Ted Hughes’s early works. In fact, Heaney’s complete work could be synthesized in a lab using the simple formula: Hughes’ poetics plus Gaelic local color plus tone of vague regret plus betrayal of ghetto Catholics equals Seamus Heaney. Heaney does everything badly and successfully. After a few volumes of weak Hughes, he ran out of invention, and turned to translation. He translated “Sweeny Astray” so badly that his translation brought new glory on the wonderful excerpts translated by O’Brien in At Swim-Two-Birds. He did Beowulf so badly it was a coffee-table hit. But for me, the primal scene in the career of Seamus Heaney was the speech he made accepting a British literary prize just as the hunger-strikers were dying. Rather than apologizing for letting his vanity override any sense of community, Heaney actually went out of his way in his acceptance speech to say that he was making the speech instead of attending the wake for his neighbor’s son, Francis Hughes, second hunger-striker to die. He was proud of that. Even O’Casey, I think, would have hesitated to gloat in public over his slighting of a neighbor’s death.

4. Ezra Pound

Once you start naming bad twentieth-century poets it’s hard to stop. Who can now read Eliot without laughing? Who can read Auden without wincing at his complete incompetence:

In the burrows of the Nightmare

Where Justice naked is,

Time watches from the shadow

And coughs when you would kiss.

“Where Justice naked is”? Only a socialist poet of the thirties like Auden (or a Vietnam-protest poet of the sixties, like Bly) would have been allowed to get away with a line as awful as that. And he warped syntax that badly just to get the non-rhyme is/kiss? How could anyone have mistaken this clunky rhymester for a poet? Time, which Auden hoped would pardon his friends, has sentenced them all to death.

It’s clear now who the real poets were: Stevens above all, then Yeats (much as I hate to admit it), Thomas, Hughes, Larkin, O’Hara. The rest is dross. And of the dross, the drossiest is the the Great Ezra. Quick: name a Pound poem you like. “In A Station of the Metro”? Yeah, the man wrote one nice haiku. And, of course, The Cantos. Mustn’t forget The Cantos. There are about two pages worth of good poetry in The Cantos. That’s somewhat better than the proverbial monkey-chained-to-typewriter might have produced; but then Hugh Kenner never wrote a book called The Monkey Era. Pound the Ringmaster, the publicist, deserves respect: Ezra P. T. Barnum Pound, literary entrepreneur. But Pound the poet? Like mi barrio, el no existe.

3. Henry Miller, Joseph Heller, and Other Celine Ripoffs

At the heart of twentieth-century literature is the man they’d rather not talk about: Dr Destouches, aka Celine. Most twentieth-century literature is ruined by pedantry, but Celine took his novels low and outside, into talk. Not talk-with-footnotes, not chant, but stories the way the funniest of your friends tells them, with gory exaggerations and huge moaning. Trotsky himself said that Celine had entered great literature as other men enter their livingrooms. Then Celine went bad—genuine bad, not the cute kind. And he was written out of the histories. When a major figure is erased from literary culture, his whole bag of tricks can be stolen without penalty. This is what happened to Celine: his works were rewritten without even a thank you by Joseph Heller (Catch-22) and Henry Miller (Tropic of Plagiary). Heller stole the early Celine, the Celine of Journey to the End of Night. That template was good for only one book; not coincidentally Heller, having squeezed that one Celine novel for every ounce of invention, never wrote anything even halfway decent again. I mean he was BAD. He made Mailer look good. It was embarrassing; even his friends knew that Something Had Happened. What happened was simple: nothing left to loot. Miller, the more cunning thief, stole Celine’s later prose style and substituted for Celine’s truly dangerous, truly outlawed political rants that safest and blandest of rebellions, fucking. And there was nothing a twentieth-century audience loved more than softcore porn with footnotes (witness the entire career of Peter Greenaway).

There’s a French story in which an old man realizes he is being robbed of everything he owns by the relatives who have taken him in. He leaves a note in his last remaining item of value: “Petty thieves, I despise you.” The note is addressed to Messrs. Miller and Heller.

2. Salman Rushdie

So much for the Ayatollah. All talk! A million people in the central square of Tehran waving pictures of Rushdie’s jowly supercilious face, giving the bum free publicity and the chance to be a hero. That’s no way to kill somebody. What did they think, that Allah was going to drop him out of the sky for them to chadoor to death? Chafe him to death with their beards? Whop him with flat bread til he keeled over? There are times when one cannot help but feel proud to be an American. Contrast to the silly throngs of Tehran the lone, smiling plump figure of Mark David Chapman—Saint Mark, as we have begun to call him. Now THAT is how one should show one’s appreciation to a writer.

Rushdie, like Heaney, exists because his niche needed filling. There had to be a nice Indian writer who did the whole Garcia Marquez magical-realism bit with a tabla beat. Of course there already was a great writer of the Indian diaspora—but Naipaul was not really what the TLS had in mind. Oh, they enjoyed his Anglophilia, but this was no tame Theroux or posturing Greene or Conrad: this was a voice from the Pit. What the TLS needed was a sunny Indian, clever and chatterjee. Enter Rushdie, who did a Reggae Sunset version of India in Midnight’s Children, then went on to write some of the very worst, most pretentious and silly prose of the century to great acclaim. What a hick! What a credulous peasant, lured to town and awed by every critical-theory monte man on the sidewalk! It’s an outrage that the man came so close to martyrdom for a novel as utterly worthless as Satanic Verses. Did Rushdie plan his death as a career-revival strategy? It’s been done before (see Empedocles) and let’s face it: it worked. He didn’t even have to die. That’s what rankles: he got the martyrdom bit without the dying part. There’s a truism I’m finding in tracing these careers: scratch a bad writer, find a great entrepreneur.

And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for, the award for biggest literary fraud of the twentieth—

No, it’s not going to be that easy. You’re going to have to wait another two weeks for the great unveiling. I’ll probably be murdered by unknown assailants before I can reveal the name, of course. So I’ll give you a clue. Go do a Net search of the Modern Library’s Top 100 novels, and ask yourself: What’s wrong with this picture? Not so much “what,” actually, as “who.”

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