The Line has been Cut

Always suspect anyone who lays a claim on what art is supposed to be. And, as advice is being dispensed, keep an eye out for people in crease-free clothing. As well as any Buddhist monk who smiles sunshine and repeats the word ‘peace’ over and over while handing you a gilded card of Buddha with another peace written across it, rays of joyous golden light leaving the Buddha’s head, and then proceeds by gently shaking your hand. It shall infallibly follow that you will be handed a black leather-bound book with a pen that will ask you to submit your name, your address, and a donation amount. In such a case, wrinkles do not matter. But. Caveat Emptor! on the question of art.

How, however, should one approach a lurid memoir written by an ad man? In the same way as everything else I suppose, with the lowest degree of expectation, a considerable degree of guard (say 73 F) and most of all, without prejudice. It also tends to be best, to generally read introductions as afterwards as life itself should serve as an adequate introduction to any work of fiction, and certainly to that of a memoir. And that, dear reader, is how Augusten Burroughs made his entrance into my life. If there’s one thing that I’ll always have to grant those who work in the ad industry, it’ll always be their repellent way of grabbing people’s attention. How, then, does one avoid falling victim to, Running with Scissors?

And what a cover to boast of as well. Being everything that the conventionally out-of-context blurbs on the back make it out to be, Running with Scissors, ultimately poses the pivotal question: do you or do you not believe Augusten Burroughs? Burroughs himself faced a similar dilemma with regard to his mother in the final chapter of his waning teenage years. And such is the controversy that the book creates for its readership; what can one believe in when the truth is challenged, and in some respects, always remains ambiguous?

Without revealing the spoils of war, let me unequivocally state that my gut is with Burroughs. Let it also be clear that I do not know, nor care to know, if any part of his memoir is embellished or even downright false. I’ve seen enough Fact or Fiction? to grant drama a free reign, relatively. This after all is not some hack like Dan Brown trying to convince us to believe in sensational facts to accept a worldview. This is the story of a man trying to get across the jaded divide between his experiences and our lives, and if he is successful, to uplift and renew our spirits.

So say what one will of Augusten Burroughs, but if being prudent, then whatever the verdict is one must acknowledge that he is a skillful writer. A writer who knows how to craft engaging descriptions, such as this one, “Her white, handgun-shaped blow-dryer is lying on the top of the wicker clothes hamper, ticking as it cools.” Adding to them, however, a somewhat annoying, ceaseless barrage of brand names, whistling down every paragraph, which situates his prose in our, regrettably, commercially-saturated world. So what happens is that we end by encountering a work that, even when set several decades removed from our day, thanks largely to television, feels contemporary, and we, may even feel at home.

At home though we may feel, Augusten’s memoir is still full of riveting and really gross anecdotes and details. Such as the description where he relays to us a visual of an STI, or when he describes his own sexual experiences. But where but in writing can one be that candid? That is what makes the work compelling despite some of its shortcomings. Do we, for instance, really need to hear the clanging of threefold repetitions so tiresome in both poetry and prose? Certainly not. Does Burroughs, admittedly rarely, go on and on over trivial arguments? Yes. And yet as unpleasant as that is to encounter in life and certainly in writing, it is these very details that give his voice that air of authenticity and makes me feel that, in fact, this is a work dealing with life as it really is, going through many of its inane, absurd, trivial moments. Life and death arguments over whose job it is to remove the five-month old Christmas tree? You bet. Deep embarrassment–a crisis of Greek proportions–about the revealing note that he handed a crush? Certainly. And certainly forgivable. Was it a terrible choice to insert an excerpt of his next work after the epilogue? Oh yeah. A disgusting madman tactic with poor literary taste. Uh-huh. But even that I will pardon.

Because Mr. Burroughs has given me a beautiful series of laughs, twisted my heart, which upon its release, let me slide down my own memories of coming-of-age tales and travails that through the space of time and the newly acquired, humorous and lighthearted attitude (which is the real gift that Augusten presents his readers) has made it easy to look back at all that ‘crazy stuff’ and smile. Seriously, my friend, Augusten seems to whisper between the lines, if I made it through all that, and came away relatively sane, you too will be okay. Let us, at the very least, have some fun with the craziness of a dysfunctional family. After all we can all quote the beginning of, Anna Karenina, even those of us that have not read the book, but let us bear in mind that there is in fact something binding the children of unhappy families. And in that respect, they may find a home within the community of scarred individuals, who thanks to the disquiet engagement of writers like Burroughs, can see and overcome the isolating estrangement of individual pain while gaining strength to deal with it and to persevere.

So does Burroughs display the craftsmanship of Fitzgerald, the psychological depth of Dostoevsky, the elegance of Morrison, the . . . you get it. Can a memoir even be a work of art? If it can, was Burroughs successful? Or is his work, as Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times–after providing a lucid summary of the book–coldly concludes,

… lack[ing in] the fire and art that make literature different from life. Here in these memoirs, characters fade, drift or disappear; there is a desultory quality to the action; there are many, many loose ends.

I don’t know about you but to me that sounds like life. Perhaps I’m still too much in Chekhov’s grip, still under the belief that realism in art should strive to be the way life actually is, along with a strong personal preference for loose, ambiguous ends. Chekhov was often heavily criticized by his contemporaries for making his writing of country life boring, to which it was responded that country life is boring. Anything may be dramatized in the hands of a master, and though Burroughs is no Chekhov, his accomplishment should not be diminished.

Namely, sharing with others in a decently crafted, engaging form, the turkey-soup for the soul that his life turned out to be. A lot of the banal dialogue within his writing such as, “Come on, man. I just can’t stop thinking about you” is redeemed by the unique and hilarious experiences that he had, as well as by his knack for descriptions that easily transport the reader into his scenes.

I exhaled, blowing Marlboro Light smoke into the air, an opaque cloud that was the only moving thing in the room. It seemed to drift toward the ceiling, moth to bulb. We sat perfectly still, like we were listening for something.

And what I heard, was a compassionate voice telling stories out of a dire need to share the madness and show the triumph of having overcome it, without any inhibitions of hoping to be rewarded for doing so. And, that too, though vulgar from some aesthetic points of view (Gustave Gustave) is fine.

The Crude State

The boondocks are visible from my window through the faint haziness of toxic air and truck pollution beneath the oxidized nail-brown rust of the Williamsburg Bridge. There they stand: decrepit naval shipyards with rusty cranes sticking out of the oil-stained cement alongside rows of long-ago abandoned factories–my own sweet loft, an illegal conversion of a radio factory from the fifties. Across the street are three nearly monolithic High Rises, one of which is built to actually look like the Sphinx of Cement that Ginsburg once so painfully described, gazing out of the corner of its eyes across the East River at the projects, on the Lower East Side. These monstrosities, in the double-speak lingo of the Real Estate developers, are egregiously called, “The Edge.” They are filled by corporate types with spiky, oleaginous hairstyles, and European models in shared sublets–six to eight to a one bedroom–trying to make their way through New York City’s fashion circus.

This is the new, gentrified part of Brooklyn. The neighborhood is full of independent coffeehouses with names such as ‘Toby’s Estate’ and ‘Blackbird Parlor’ (possibly a surviving relic of the Hipster predominance of the last couple years), a town in which I found a copy of Last Exit to Brooklyn laying on the corner of a table in one of the independent bookstores on Bedford Avenue, menacingly daring me not to pick up and purchase it.

It was in this atmosphere that I fought my way through the three-hundred and four brutal pages of Last Exit, of the Grove Press edition. This was the debut novel by the author on whose book the film Requiem For a Dream was based. The film that turned my stomach by portraying people like those that I also knew–though, fortunately not to such levels of dejection and pain–who were trying to make it through young adulthood in a cold and unforgiving world, or simply trying to survive the horrors of life. The man on whom I watched a breathtaking documentary, Hubert Selby, Jr.: It’ll Be Better Tomorrow, a high school dropout like myself, who felt the need to make a living by making art, and to do it, using what he knew: Life and the Alphabet.

Selby certainly knows life. As for what he did with the alphabet, well, his first hundred and fourteen pages–the encapsulation of “Another Day Another Dollar” through “Tralala”–sounds as if it were made by a classical composer with the turgid force of Hemingway’s straight-forward style and Kerouac’s stream of consciousness delivery coupled with a Chekhovian ear for rhythm and drama and a Dicksonian depth of sense of empathy for the downtrodden.

The range of social malaise is sickening and downright prurient in many places, ranging from child molestation and domestic violence to gang rape and brawls. This is the Brooklyn when the naval base was still in operation and the trannys would suck-off a few drunk sailors while their pals would sock ’em and then drink the night away–as Selby Jr terrifically describes–for a couple lousy bucks. Somewhere out there, beneath the bridge, the projects are still around, and the urban nightmare is rattling and recurring like the Colossus on Coney Island. I remain ever mindful of my uncle’s advice: always carry at least a fifty on you–the price, it seems, of a human life. Maybe the unions aren’t as bad as they were, but everything else that Selby Jr chronicles is still groveling in the underbelly of this metropolis.

Here’s the cut and dry version. Pain and seediness is the overarching structure of the book, binding the disparate stories together. The crescendo of the whole is quite jagged, but each individual story, particularly the early ones, carry in them a fierce musical force that culminates in Wagnerian violence that’ll leave any sane, empathetic human being in need of a good recovery.

The normal routine, going for a walk in the park, seeing a loved one or a friend, drinking a good cup-a-joe is recommended. Maybe some honey and lemon Ginseng. Rest, however, most assuredly that a glass or two of wine will do wonders to get you through the last hundred pages of Last Exit, as the repetitive and now predictable inner-structure of each story with its all capitalized yelling and the endless stream of conjunctions will be very difficult to bear. Of course nowhere near as difficult as those that have to bear with the dark and violent and putrid madness of a world that they cannot close the book on. But I guess that’s his point.  

As far as style goes, Selby chooses to avoid pronouns wherever he’s given the choice. There are a few exceptions such as in the factory scene, which is laden with a few precise brushstrokes. The slang and the drug codes are as precise as one of Chandler’s descriptions. This is a choice faced by all writers and I believe it is a choice that is determined by the subject matter and the overall objective of the writing. In Selby’s case, his writing is dealing with an impoverished and dirty world that needs to convey that world as authentically as it can. 

Last Exit, falls, sadly, into the category of books that I will not be re-reading. The upside of the book is that it is absolutely indelibly imprinted in my mind. Such is also the downside, as well as the fact that it is one of those books that does not render itself to an archeological expedition, as many classics, full of subtlety and hidden dynamics, do. Hubert Selby Jr nevertheless showed why so many people regard this work as a modern American classic, and in doing so, has somewhat hesitantly convinced me to pick up Requiem for a Dream, sometime soon.

Drinking to You, Comrade

This smooth read turned out to be more of an intellectual’s guidebook to life than some mere narrative of a great man’s adventures. With about 40 years worth of experience as a writer, a life journey filled with all sorts of intellectual luminaries that allowed that present man of letters to fill many paragraphs with glorious anecdotes, Hitch had the ability to open himself and his world in such a way as to make his reader feel welcome and right at home–and that he did.

In his moving and wise pages, written with a sharp sense for magazine style journalism that’s been combed in with the vocabulary of many of the great books that he’s read, not lacking in his characteristic wit, Hitchens invites the reader to observe the awful time he suffered at English boarding schools through the somewhat better days of his bisexual liaisons at Cambridge and thereafter. We get to follow him around as we would a close companion (or should I say, comrade) through his brilliant struggle in his fight as one of the Left’s great intellectuals, and through his more endearing stories of growing up with a boring naval officer for a father and a closet-Jew for a mother. He takes his comrades on a tour of living in the East village, NY, in the Seventies, and then Washington, DC, as would any good novelist worth his whiskey–good description and drama touched with genuine life knowledge. He does so, albeit, a touch too quickly in that he does not immerse the reader in the setting as a work of fiction would, which is to be forgiven given that Christopher spent most of his time laboriously at work.

To read, Hitch 22, as just a memoir is like treating, The Great Gatsby, as just a novel. Having finished it in only a few days I cannot wait to go back to the fifty or so dog-eared pages to reread and relish anew what is within them. More than a memoir it is a reference book full of signposts to literature (most of which Hitchens sells like an old loving professor trying to pass down Promethean fire) to keen directions ranging from how to make tea and drink liquor (buyer beware) to how to tip, and in many ways how to be, as Kosinski so wonderfully mixed the cocktail at the end of, Being There, “… a fencer against the wave.”

His great sense of style is really distinguished by his beautifully rendered, true to the beat, voice. A voice that combines an erudite vernacular with a deadpan delivery and a perfectly-timed, spare use of slang and common phrases that often spin out scenes as if they were directly out of the hands of a short story master.

… I hadn’t reckoned with the speed of nightfall and found myself alone in the gathering dark: a crepuscular gloom augmented by the local habit of shooting out all the streetlights. A very sudden bang convinced me that a nail bomb had been thrown at a British patrol, and I swiftly decided that the better part of valor was to drop into the gutter and make myself inconspicuous. Judging by the whistling and cracking of nearby volleys, this decision was shrewd enough as far as it went, and I remember thinking how awful it would be to end my career as a victim of a ricochet. Instead, I nearly ended it as a bloody fool who tested the patience of the British Army. Rising too soon from my semi-recumbent posture, I found myself slammed against the wall by a squad of soldiers with blackened faces, and asked various urgent questions that were larded with terse remarks about the many shortcomings of the Irish. Getting my breath back and managing a brief statement in my cut-glass Oxford tones, I was abruptly recognized as non-threatening, brusquely advised to fuck off, and off I duly and promptly fucked. Graham Green writes…

Only in the last hundred pages does Hitchens slow the show with a tad too sluggish of a report–himself emphasizing the “trudging” through the last phase of his epic life–on the time he spent in (and the politics of) the Middle East, particularly Iraq. Although he redeems himself with an inspiring report of an American hero that was lost to the Iraq war, and through his scintillating arguments on the “Jewish Question”; how, for example, to deal with his newly discovered Jewish identity and with Zionist ideology?

Whatever one thinks of his politics though, or of his public battles and the various stances that he has bravely taken throughout his life, someone with a taste for literature and life would do themselves well to place this spurring beam of a book on their shelves–and to return, often.