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Ezra: Pound for pound, one of the worst

Rushdie: stuff stuck in his beard
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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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