Issue #20/101, October 12 - 26, 2000  

The Countdown Begins!
Dr Dolan’s Top Ten No-Talent 20th-c. Writers

By John Dolan

Like a sniper at a G-7 photo op, I’m spoiled for choice. The twentieth century may have been the end for many noble mammal species, but it was Eden for no-talent authors. Here I am with only ten bullets, looking out the train window at a herd of grazing phonies which stretches to the horizon. In a target-rich environment like this, one must practice a sort of triage-in-reverse, saving one’s bullets for the biggest phonies, the bad writers who have most successfully bluffed qualified critics for the longest time.

This means passing up some very appealing targets from the recent past. Does John Irving, for example, rate a mention? He’s rich and famous and wholly without talent. But Hell, the guy who writes Garfield is even richer, more famous and dumber; should I waste a hollowpoint on him? Only fools read Irving’s books, just as only Kelly Bundy and friends laugh at Garfield. I’m interested in bigger game here: writers who are still genuinely revered by people who should know better.

“Genuinely revered”—that’s an important criterion too. It helps dispose of what we might call the affirmative-action nominees: Alice Walker, June Jordan and Toni Morrison, three women of color who occupy a great deal of space in first-year college-course syllabi, deliver many a would-be-Ciceronian graduation speech, and are praised at length by mainstream critics. The catch is that these critics are lying, and know themselves to be lying. Remember what Limonov said: “Everything in America has its mafia.” These ladies form a literary protection racket which allows tens of thousands of white academics to keep their jobs in exchange for requiring millions of first-year students to buy Walker’s, Morrison’s and Jordan’s books. You can verify this by experiment: Get any sleazy, Sovok American English professor alone, pour two glasses of Chardonnay down their throat, and they’ll admit that Walker and Morrison are no more than middling hack melodramatists, while Jordan is much less; after years of eminence, she still writes as badly as anyone this side of Brett Easton Ellis. Sadly, Walker and Co. keep really great black writers like Donald Goines out of the picture, because he doesn’t write bathos like Walker and Morrison, or bombast like Jordan. But that’s what mafias are for, right?

Nodding politely to the mafias, we pass by the easy targets to more worthy victims. And “worthy” is the word; it’s an honor to make this list! It’s my way of showing my appreciation, just like Chapman did. After all, Chapman was Lennon’s biggest fan. In that positive, affirming spirit we start the big countdown, bringing the crosshairs, like a trendy Celtic halo, to rest on our first five frauds.

#10. Graham Greene: the Patron Saint of the cheap reversals which still strike provincial readers as the essence of profundity. It’s to Greene we owe the flood of poems honoring “Saint Judas” and exploring the moral intricacies of child-murderers. Pinkie, the hero of Greene’s Brighton Rock, is a saint—because he’s cruel, stupid, weak, impotent, and greedy. Now that’s deep. It’s all supposed to have something to do with Catholic doctrine as imagined by Greene, a middle-class Brit who staged his conversion to the hated Church of Rome as the Big Twist in his own biography. Greene knew little and cared less about actual Catholicism. He just wanted a platform from which to launch his low-tech Marilyn-Manson schtick: lurid crucifixes and bloody straightrazors erotically entwined. As a Catholic commissar Greene turned out reams of Church propaganda in bad faith and worse prose. His account of secularized Mexico, The Lawless Roads, is unintentionally hilarious. It taught Paul Theroux (a charlatan too silly to merit his own listing) everything he needed to know about artificial bile as a substitute for actual sensibility. Greene attributes every annoyance in Mexico, from the heat to the slow trains, to the suppression of the Church: “In the acrid smoke from the burnt tortillas; in the evil hiss of the refried beans; in the Satanic wink of the salsa; one could feel the absence of Christ.” You want to grab him and scream like Sam Kinison, “It’s MEXICO, you fuck! They were burning the tortillas when Cortez got there!” When Catholicism grew too respectable Greene moved on to celebrate the traitor Kim Philby, who was clearly a saint because he betrayed hundreds of comrades, many of whom were tortured to death in the cellars of Lubyanka. If that’s not sainthood, what is? One could almost wish that the Catholic deity existed, just to savor the thought of Greene’s posthumous interview with that vindictive martinet. What a change must have come over Greene’s carefully-cultivated mask of weary wisdom as the trapdoor dropped and the denizens of the Pit, wholly uninterested in moral paradoxes, dragged him down.

#9. Norman Mailer. Mailer is the farcical sequel to Hemingway: a remake by the producers of Police Academy, with Steve Guttenberg in the lead. There’s no better index of the decline in intellect between the wars than the juxtaposition of Hemingway’s early novels with Mailer’s. The tangled horror of the First World War forced Europe and even some of America awake; the simple horrors of the Second left Europe treppaned, and America so dozy and smug ten years of Nam were required to rouse it. Mailer’s war had no parallels to Hemingway’s, but like the hardworking dummy he was, Mailer sent away for the Sears Roebuck Macho Novelist kit and cut it down from XL to XXXS. Hemingway was absurdly macho, pitifully impotent and flamingly gay all at once; Mailer squinted at that template, and summed up what he learned in a “Note 2 self: take up boxing, lay dames.” Hemingway enlisted as a medic in the Italian army; Mailer was a GI. Hemingway punched out Wallace Stevens in Key West; Mailer threatened to floor Dick Cavett. Hemingway fell from a great height and made a big mess; Mailer started out below sea level, so he just melted into a wider and wider puddle, writing more and more about less and less til by the end he was churning out thousand-page books on fresh new topics like Marilyn Monroe. So why waste time on him? John Kennedy Toole. That’s why. Mailer and friends stole Toole’s oxygen. For that alone I pray that Normie spend eternity being sodomized and edited by the man Mailer’s friends called “Papa”: “I warned you what would happen if you dangled that clause, Normie! Papa has to teach you a lesson—no, no, hands on head! Now hold still!”

#8. C. S. Lewis: There are people in this world, if one may call them “people,” who still mention this swine in the same breath with Tolkien. Don’t do this. I don’t want to hurt you, but just DON’T DO IT. Tolkien’s accomplishment was best summed up by the comment that he “made himself the creative equivalent of a people.” That’s a bit modest, really, because Tolkien became several peoples, became the entire mind of Dark-Ages Europe. C. S. Lewis, who was an unworthy colleague and a treacherous friend of Tolkien’s, is Tolkien’s polar opposite in every way that matters. Tolkien was an actual English Catholic—born to it, doomed to it, unlike the poser Greene. Ever wonder why Gandalf’s named Gandalf, and why God(s) are not mentioned in Lord of the Rings? Tolkien had to be quiet. Tolkien was a man of honor, who married without love because he had made a promise; he and his wife stayed together in the grim Catholic way and raised five children. Tolkien was a true scholar, a preeminent Anglo-Saxonist and pan-European linguist. Lewis remained a little boy, a pompous little prig, all his life. He was a smug Belfast “Christian,” full of the proper hatred and sense of superiority; he lived at home until seduced by a middleaged groupie in late middle age, and when she died, discovered that he’d been wrong to tell everyone that God sent us pain for our own good. Having experienced actual pain for the first time at the age of sixty, this moralizing infant was vouchsafed the epiphany that pain HURTS. He was shocked. He felt that God needed to rethink the whole matter. And let’s not forget that dear old wardrobe, and Narnia. Narnia vs. Middle Earth. Gee, there’s a tough one! Narnia is one of the most sick, inept fantasies ever devised. It has the treacly tendentiousness of a fairytale for a sundayschool course, the sort of thing pedophile curates use to explain the Trinity to the kids they’re cuddling, making up cute animals while letting their hands stray southward. That’s where Narnia lies: Yon, southward! between the child’s legs and the curate’s twitchy fingers.

#7. Thomas Pynchon. I’ll always remember reading Crying of Lot 49 as a first-year at Berkeley. The TA assured us it was a terribly witty novel, and I was sufficiently cowed to go along with the program, until the page on which Pynchon introduced a rock band called Sigmund Freud and the Paranoids. Jeez...that seemed kinda...well, kinda stupid. Probably my fault! Right! Alert for jokes which were accessible only to full Professors, I reread, seeking a hint that there was some triple-crossed irony I’d missed. ‘Cuz if there wasn’t, then naming a California psychedelic band “Sigmund Freud and the Paranoids” was pathetic, worse than Rowan and Martin dressing up in headbands, worse than Perry Como singing with David Bowie. Rereading Lot 49 ten years later, it seemed obvious: the entire book was a buttondown author’s attempt to groove himself onto the guest list at the Fillmore. Like all of Pynchon’s work, it was simply a slowed-down package tour of California for the sort of young academic who likes to talk enthusiastically about “Apocalypse Culture” while spending his or her own life inside a monogamous marriage and sticking to decaf. You’d be amazed how many of these people there are, and they all love Pynchon, because he is his own Cliff Notes, always footnoting the wacky stuff, slowing the beat down to Princeton levels. Compare Pynchon with the writer who actually does actually chronicles the Apocalypse, Philip K. Dick. Does anyone like them both? If so, you’re cheating. Choose. And if you’re hesitating, save yourself the trouble: Pynchon’s the man for you. PKD gets called “the poor man’s Pynchon”; it would be better to say that Pynchon is the tweedy man’s dick.

#6. Bret Easton Ellis: Why should I have to discuss this animate ball of ordure, this Mr Hanky of a novelist? HUH? I told you I wanted to skip the easy targets! But I have to roll up my sleeves and drag this stinking mass out of the toilet, because you IDIOTS are actually starting to fall for him, deciding it’s all tongue-in-cheek, when it’s just plain tongue-lolling idiocy. Bret is a classic trust-fund boy, a dumb rich brat from this very expensive Palm Springs prep school for the not-too-bright where everybody’s daddy was something in Hollywood and even the nerds did pharmaceutical-quality coke between classes. Bret drooled along, a generic eighties gayboy with money, til he decided he’d write a novel, a really searing novel about the “dark underbelly” of the LA Scene. So he picked this really searing title, Less Than Zero, which was the title of a really searing song by Elvis Costello, that wild man of easy-listening New Wave. The first line of Bret’s novel was “Nobody in LA knows how to merge.” It was an allegory, y’see? LA’s Lonely traffic, just like Joan Didion, and, uh, Nathaneil West, and Raymond Chandler, and about a thousand other noir hacks. Bret’s novel, a very slow ride through the Didion theme ride, was made into an even slower film with (and this is the only good part) Robert Downey, Jr. That man’s a hero and I won’t hear a word said against him. But back to Bret. He had connections and a bestseller and not a brain or a trace of the ghost of the smell of an idea in his pretty little head. Oh no! The dreaded second-book dilemma dreaded by trust-fund celebrities everywhere! What would YOU do if you were in Bret’s position? You’d do what Bret did: pour two tons of fake blood over the manuscript so nobody’d notice it was utter crap. If you take the serial-killer cliche, which was by this time so tame that even east-coast publishers understood it, and overdid it badly enough, splattered enough exaggerated gore around, maybe nobody’d notice that you never could write at all in the first place. That’s what Bret did. And thanks to you folks out there, it’s actually working. Well, that’s the American reviewer’s slogan: Hire the handicapped!

Next Week: The Final Five!

Nominations still open—send your selections to

john.dolan@stonebow.otago.ac.nz

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