Big day in Hollywood: Paris Hilton thrown back in jail. Much schadenfreude on all sides.

In celebration, here’s another weird book from the junk shop. A copy of the 14th printing of None Dare Call It Treason by John A. Stormer. Although impossible to read, I’m a big fan of mid-century anti-Commie literature. The books are always fascinating objects– disconnected from the design, printing, and intellectual currents of New York publishing, they’re a sweet fix for the ephemera addict.

This particular title sold something like 7 million copies. While not exactly a rarity, it does have a few interesting highlights, as you’ll see below. I like the HO (for Hollywood) phone number of the original owner.

For reasons bizarre & untold, I’ve been trying to make sacrifices to the Book God via the purchase of  books at full cover, an almost unheard of sin. A few days ago, I acquired the newly released unexpurgated, unedited hardback of Jack Kerouac’s Original Scroll of On the Road. Even now I find this choice inexplicable & can’t explain my actions– I have bad feelings towards the work of all the Beats (except Burroughs, and even then I find his 60s work nearly intolerable) but none so much as Kerouac’s, which I find a mixture of the boring & the offensive.

His personal history– ah, now there’s another story.

Kerouac was a New England boy made on the mean streets of Lowell, MA. He went to Columbia on a football scholarship– and while there, fell in with the dissolute crowd of junkies, queers and 8th Avenue hucksters who contributed mightily to the creation of the Writer of Renown. He died a delusional alcoholic, apparently thinking that Allen Ginsberg was a Nazi agent and trying to fight Kurt Vonnegut’s son, but for a while, Kerouac was the American Dream, what another now-deceased American Writer would have described as “pure Horatio Alger.” He was also French-Canadian; part of an ethnic group of New England immigrants that are often overlooked and forgotten.

So while there’s the Mythic Kerouac, there’s also the Lowell working-class kid who ended up dubiously labeled as a generational spokesman. In previous posts, I’ve written about poor Bob Dylan, Kerouac’s heir in this questionable honor. It’s fascinating that the two midcentury figures saddled with that terrible weight both were of ethnic & family backgrounds as far from the American mainstream as you get could get. (While, of course, remaining a “White.”)

I haven’t gotten through the 100+ pages of critical apparati of the Original Scroll, but the image on the back of the dustjacket is amazing. The most frequently circulated photos of Kerouac play up a young rough with an indistinct, James Dean glamor. The image in question, coming from later in the man’s sad life, was chosen, I assume, because it depicts Kerouac holding one of his famous scrolls. Fair enough, but it’s also the only image I’ve seen of the man (and admittedly I am no student of his iconography) where his ethnic, social, and geographical origins just spill out all over the picture. You can see Lowell, you can see the French-Canadian, you can see the football scholarship.

A great picture:

Last week’s New Yorker featured a review by Adam Gopnik of the Library of America collection of Philip K. Dick’s 60s novels; I read it with much fascination– say what you will about Gopnik’s longer, personal essays, there’s little doubt that he stands (and has stood for some while) as one of the most insightful working critics of books and literary matters. Amongst his many insights is an another attempt to wrestle with what has been one of the overarching concern and bugbears of Dickean studies: yes, there’s something brilliant here, but what is it and is it Literature?

Gopnik’s answer is a tacit yes, with reservations, and done in the best style: he suggests that if any of Dick’s work is to be counted as Literature, then first we must count VALIS. This is the only time I’ve seen, in print, an analysis of VALIS identifying it as a work of profoundly wounded emotion. Yes, there’s a lot of weirdness about pop stars and David Bowie surrogates, but an honest and engaged read turns up the terrible pain of the Horselover Fat/Phil Dick split, with an attempt to wrestle with the consequences of death and sex in a mature, if mad, style.

In a word, Literature.

I’d add A Scanner Darkly (thankfully I’ve not seen the movie) and the dark horse candidate of We Can Build You. (We might also throw in “Faith of Our Fathers,” a novella which first appeared in Dangerous Visions, edited by uh… Harlan Ellison.) The former is pretty self-explanatory; the latter I have found consistently more human and aware than almost all of Dick’s other work. I am probably alone in this: I recall an essay by Jonathan Letham in which he dismisses the novel as not doing Dick’s reputation any favors.

Que sera sera, pal.

Whenever questions of Literature or Good Writing arise, I think back to the American 19th Century. By this late date, there’s hardly any argument that its four greatest writers were Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. (”What about Hawthorne!” cries Arafat Kazi.) Yet at the end of the 19th century, only Twain had been anything like a success– Melville would not be rediscovered until the 1920s, Dickinson’s body of work was effectively a trunk full of papers, and as demonstrated in David S. Reynolds’s excellent book, Whitman was known but had few readers.

This suggests that the only real judge of Literature is time, and that Good Writing and Literature are furthermore hugely expansive ideals. Despite the four being a product of the social ferment of the 1850s and its consequences in the 60s, these writers are so dissimilar it’s hard to figure out how any concept could be wide enough to encompass them.

I think about this a lot– especially in relationship to Phil Dick– because if I were to give an assessment of my favorite 20th Century American writers, at least three would come from the pulp/pop world. These are: Dick, Dashiell Hammett, and the long and dread spectre of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Hammett’s status as a Great Writer was decided almost as soon as he started publishing– the similarity of his hard boiled writing served as a presumedly unintellectual and effortless shadow to the muscularities (so-called) of Hemingway and the modernists. On the other hand, Lovecraft, like Dick, has been subject to a large number of inquiries and weighed many times on the scales of Literature, and most times found lacking.

While it’s pretty egotistical to suggest that My Favorites from the pulp world will end up enshrined in some imaginary Canon of the future, I do think it’s likely to happen– and I think it will happen on their own terms. Every writer creates not only his or her predecessors, but also his or her heirs. There will be a time, say 50 years from now, when the mad world of Philip K Dick is so culturally ingrained that what we now find to be his excesses are going to be common tongue.

And the common tongue is merely a way of describing a universality. And that, kids, is how you end up as Literature.

Faithful commenter Todd C. Murry calls me out on my last post:

I can’t believe you would call Lovecraft one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, but give an “undisputed” list of the greatest of the 19th that leaves off Poe. Anything bad you can hurl at Poe that would dock him off the list is 10 times as true of HP, and he was undoubtely more influentual in that inescapably broad power-of-ideas way.

Please reconsider Poe (I’ll let someone else like David Fiore defend Hawthorne).

I don’t disagree– although it wasn’t my intent to call Lovecraft one of the Greatest Writers of the 20th century. It was more like trying to figure out how these figures which I consider very significant will eventually be incorporated into the Canon. (If any of the three writers that I mentioned will end up being one of the True Greats, I presume it would be Hammett over either Lovecraft or Dick.)

It’s interesting that I, like almost everyone compiling their arbitrary list of the 19th Century American True Greats, forgot about Poe.

I think Poe gets left off these lists for two reasons: #1 is that he was, above all else, dear Edgar Allen, a creature so weird that it’s often hard to consider him as anything other than a being emerged fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. Even when writing about his contemporary period, Poe is always there in his own mind– he seems far more concerned with his own inner landscape and surrounding circle than his exterior world. In short, it’s hard to imagine Poe being of any century, let alone his own. (This is not to reinforce unjust and negative images of Poe as a delusional dipsomaniac; merely to say that, some people, by their natures, are more insular than others.)

The second reason, and one to which I alluded yesterday, is that Great American Literature of the 19th Century can almost be viewed as a genre centered around the unfathomable turmoil of the 1850s and the American Civil War. Seemingly it took a while for this critical opinion to form, but once it did form, it hardened and stuck. Personally, I’m not in disagreement. I recognize that prior to this 15 year period there is work of great quality and significance, but none of it can stand up to the writers trying to hold together a country ripping itself apart. Or trying to piece that country back together with the impotent tool of literature. Sometimes the world does end with a bang.

Poe, not insignificantly, died in 1849. Having missed out on this period of our history, his works, already detached, only seem more so by comparison. One of my favorite Poe stories is “The Murder in the Rue Morgue.” Both the setting of the story– a locked room in Paris– and its conclusion (NO SPOILERS) seem astonishingly disconnected from anything other than Poe’s world of himself. Even its sequel, the Marie Roget story, based on the famous Mary Rogers case– an actual event in New York history– seems somehow of another place. This says nothing of the more fantastic pieces. This is, of course, opinion. No doubt many fine theses have been written making excellent cases for the exact opposite.

Incidentally, compared with Lovecraft, I think there’s no doubt whatsoever that technically, and aesthetically, Poe was the far, far superior writer. Good ol’ HPL himself would have been the first to admit it. However, good ol’ JK would argue that a lot of Lovecraft’s significance comes not from his technical construction but from his distinct, and often prescient, awareness of his period’s big issues. Yes, there’s a lot of crap in there about monsters, but Lovecraft was riding early waves (and was very often on the wrong side) of issues that would come to dominate the 20th Century: racism, class warfare, sexuality and its malcontents, the failure of religion in the face of expanding scientific discovery, paranoia, and the profound alienation of the individual through modernity. These are the Lovecraftian bread and butter.

I would further argue that what I consider to be Lovecraft’s most realized work– The Case of Charles Dexter Ward– has as much insight on the awful influence of money, status and family over a child’s development as any other work of fiction. Again, Lovecraft ends up seeming really of his time and exceptionally prescient of things to come. I’m not being glib when I say this: if you want to know about what creates something like Paris Hilton, you only have to look at Charles Dexter Ward, take account of how little his family even notices what’s happening to him as the novel progresses and ask why.

Okay, that’s enough of this!

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Incidentally, the main site of KOBEK.COM has two Poe related PDF files:

The first is Poe’s Helen by Caroline Ticknor, a biography of Sarah Helen Whitman, Poe’s Providence girlfriend, all around interesting lady of the 19th & a poet in her own right.

The second is the 1853 edition of Hours of Life, a book of poetry by the very same Sarah Helen Whitman. Caveat emptor on this one– some of it is a little dreadful.

I first read of Derek Raymond in 2002 while camping in Glastonbury, burning through Iain Sinclair’s endlessly rewarding Lights Out For the Territory. It was raining. I couldn’t get over my jetlag. There was nothing to do but read and go for soggy, half-awake walks up the Tor. Sinclair’s book convinced me that once I returned home, I must read Raymond. This is exactly what I did. Having procured an Internet copy of He Died With His Eyes Open, I cracked it open and it blew me away.

A few weeks ago, back in RI, life determined fit to remind me of the incredible distance between now and 2002. Since then, my opinion of Raymond had taken a beating. The last three novels of the Factory series, including the praised & reviled I Was Dora Suarez, are significantly flawed. I was curious if my judgment would hold– so I broke out the books of yesteryear and re-read He Died With His Eyes Open and The Devil’s Home on Leave, respectively the first and second books in the series. I’ll write about the first.

So, in short, yes. He Died With His Eyes Open is still great. I’m not going to give a huge amount of plot summary, but basically: each of the Factory books is told in the first person by an unnamed Detective working out of a police building, the Factory, in the Department of Unexplained Deaths, or A14. The setting is the bleakest time in recent English history: London in the years of Thatcher. The protagonist catches cases of murders with no Fleet-street potential– killings of the dispossessed, the poor and the apparently meaningless. But the protagonist is dogged in his job and in his devotion to the dead, an attitude with confuses his colleagues. This sounds like standard GOOD COP IN A BAD DEPARTMENT cliche, but Raymond confers a strange, almost Messianic quality on his protagonist who comes across as a near-annointed avenger of the city’s forgotten and broken-down, an unstoppable force cobbling together a form of inadequate justice. All five of the books feel like they’re happening in another world and the whole series can be summed up thusly: there is no worthless person, there are no meaningless lives.

Although the Factory series was initially, and continues to be, sold as Detective/Mystery Fiction, a feature of the first two books (and possibly the rest but my memory for plots is spotty) are their complete lack of a Mystery. I’m not giving anything away by saying that you know who’s committed each book’s murder(s) by 40 pages in; what the Detective investigates is the identity, and life story, of the murdered, and, to a lesser extent, the murderers. It’s an inversion of the genre– rather than tracking clues and trying to solve a crime where the victim is a plot device, each Factory book is an investigation of the dead. Of who they were, what they done and how they suffered.

In He Died With His Eyes Open, the murdered man, a failed writer who once lived in France, has left behind a series of autobiographical audiotapes recorded on very dark nights of his soul. Throughout the narrative, these tapes are used by the protagonist as his guide through the underworld into which he has descended. Parallels with Dante and Virgil, anyone?

What I missed in 2002, having no real knowledge of the book’s author, is the similarity between the murdered man and Derek Raymond himself. Raymond eventually published a strange autobiography, The Hidden Files, but I don’t wonder if the story isn’t found here in the transcripted audiotapes.

Some word must be written about the quality of writing, which is top notch and above and beyond what is usually found in any novel, let alone genre work. Raymond seems to have ended up a crime novelist almost by default. Under the name Robin Cook, he had a career in the 60s and 70s as a mainstream novelist, but I suspect exiling one’s self to mainland Europe and coming back an alcoholic is not the best way to stay in the upper echelon. Of course, Cook was born upper class and threw it away to become a Chelsea morrie, so who knows if being in the genre ghetto wasn’t what he had long desired.

In summary: this is a novel in which the Protagonist, a nameless, quasi-religious figure bent on avenging the hopeless dead, spends about 50% of the narrative trying to piece together a vaguely-fictional version of the author’s life. Another way of describing this is: True Art.

For reasons beyond cheapness, I prefer my books used. The transfer of knowledge and experience from owner to owner is a thing unique to the grey market, and makes one believe in an Iain Sinclair/Grant Morrisony idea that books, in their layered pages of information and content, are mystical objects radiating power outwards. (The one downside that I’ve encountered was olfactory. My first edition of Alfred Watkin’s The Old Straight Track reeked like an unembalmed corpse. I kept it outdoors and most of the odor dissipated– it remains a noxious volume, but only when opened.)

I bought Blake Nelson’s Exile in 2004– I had either read, or was about to read, his first novel Girl, which turned out amazing despite the atrocious film adaptation, and I was in the Connecticut Book Barn when I saw Exile’s partially lime green cover. It bore hideous ad copy: A DOWNTOWN BAUDELAIRE FOR THE ’90s.

“Well, self,” sez I, “This surely must be awful. You must give yourself over.”

And so I did. I paid $3.

Exile sat for some time. I read it months later, almost 3 years ago, in March of 2005. This was during the first or second week of a ridiculously painful break-up. It’s a far stronger book than Girl, an unsung masterpiece– a third person, year-long and present tense account of a writer’s life. 85% of it felt like reading my biography through vaseline. Like Girl, it’s a true book. Rare enough to write one, let alone two.

It was heavy enough reading Exile, but as I moved through its pages, I was confronted by the marginalia of its previous owner. Poetry and nonsense at first, but then notes directed at the person to whom she had given the book. It was like a second narrative layered on top of the first, what Arafat Kazi, scourge of the Dhaka Theatre community, would have Knowingly called a palimpsest. The second story took shape as one high school girl’s scribblings and lovenotes to her girlfriend, oozing the innocence of being 16 years old and thinking that her Love would last forever. It was almost too much.

The notes have a terrible fatalism. Someone had sold the book. Either the girl who’d written or the girl to whom she’d been writing. It isn’t hard to imagine their relationship crashing and burning, and the ruination and heartbreak that had followed. The book itself remained, a relic and a time capsule that was cast out into the wider world. It waited to consume an unsuspecting sucker with its implicit drama.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet and Myspace, I located a person that I believed was one of the girls. I thought about writing to her, to ask what had happened, to discover why this thing had been inflicted on me, but even in the low ways of 2005, I had a sense that this idea was awful. So I didn’t. But I’ve thought about those notes almost every day.

All I wanted was a crap book about a downtown Baudelaire for the ’90s.

When I was on the Winter Tour, I re-read my copy of Exile (and Girl too), and I decided that I’d scan the pages with marginalia. I’ve only omitted two: one was redundant, and the other was minor, but allowed a person to identify, in total, one of the girls.

And I ain’t that bad. Not yet.

Page 25, First Strike: “one day I was a princess / wearing a golden dress / (14 carat jewel gown) / don’t worry about me / I’m still a princess / I’m just a little tarnished / just a little rusted”

Page 43, Falling: “falling / i’m not sure / where i’m supposed / to be / except maybe / here? / i think so / i think so / i think so”

Page 61, First Note: “Hi / Katy / you / are / reading /my / book / (+my / writing / in the / margin / s”

Page 127, The Heartbreaker: “Katy… i’m writing you a note so that when you get to page 127, you can read a note from me beautiful me. I’m a rose, I’m a thorn growing off of myself. And everyone is talking about the burning sun. Birds fly south in Summer and my star is shining for you, always. 6/10/98 Gina”

Page 156, The Ephemera: “la di la di la”

Page 203, The Absolute Best: “I wanna sink to the / bottom with you”

Page 243, Stupidity: “VANDALISM OH DEAR”

Pages 273 & 274, We’re Definitely in High School: “FOR CHRISSAKE –> YOUR A POTATO”

Page 288, Last Page, The End: “lets drive forever / lets never forget / one day I will know everything”

The first and foremost of my sub rosa publishing efforts, a reissue of the 1926 Freak Masterpiece, The Oldest History of the World Discovered by Occult Science in Detroit Michigan by Benny Evangelist, is now available in handy PDF format. This is an update and total resetting of the 2001 print edition.

Evangelist, a Neapolitan immigrant born Benjamino Evangelista, came up hard knuckle days in the Hex County of York, PA. He moved to Detroit and became an Occult Scientist, a divine prophet and a faith healer. The Oldest History was produced in nightly trances over a period of some years and was intended as the first of several volumes. The other three were never published. Fate intervened.

On July 4, 1929, Evangelist was found in his St. Aubin Avenue home-office with his head hacked off; upstairs the bodies of his wife and four young children lay mutilated in their own coagulate gore. The crimes went unsolved.

The 2001 edition was one of those projects that a person undertakes for good reasons, and then, years later, the effort turns out to have changed them entirely. My typesetting and design on the book were revolting, and the great shame that I came to feel over the layout sparked a total and on-going obsession with Getting Things Right. Another unintended consequence was the slow descent into Archival Madness– which lead, amongst other crimes of love, to the haunting of countless libraries, turning kobek.com into a dumping ground for sub-sub-sub-sub-subcultures, putting up PDFs of incredibly obscure work, publishing old crime novels and the collected works of Theauraujohn Thomas Tany and, perhaps strangest of all, a co-grant from the American Academy of Religion for a project that never materialized.

The present PDF has been retypeset & includes contemporary news reporting on the murders along with photographs I took of Evangelist’s unmarked grave in December of 2001. There’s a few things that I might add later, but nothing of particular consequence.

This is, I suspect, the definitive edition.

Horace McCoy is my favorite writer of the early 20th Century; his first book, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is the single best novel of the Depression– a bleak, short dose of hell centered on a Dance-a-thon– and his last proper novel, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is equally remarkable, though less compact, and achieves the kind of dense Freudian tapestry that (our hero) Dashiell Hammett aimed for in The Glass Key. The other books are variable, but I’m particularly fond of I Should Have Stayed Home, a slight, pre-Day of the Locusts look at life as a Hollywood loser; if nothing else, it has the most applicable title of any book ever written about this here city of Los Angalayze.

I’ve never been comfortable with McCoy’s classification as “hard boiled”; he certainly wrote for the same pulps as the originators and best known practitioners of the style, but I’m partial to the idea that “hard boiled” has connotations as an off-shoot of the mystery genre. Throughout all of McCoy’s work, the only mystery is this: “Why are people so awful?”

In my mind, his work fits more clearly into a tradition of near-hallucinatory, vaguely inchoate narratives of indirect, brutish emotion being kept at bay through force of will and repression.

It is a sub-literature, adapting the developments of genre and modernism to describe the basic inability of the lower class American male to express his desires, and more truly, his pain. When bored, I often taunt women by accusing them– facetiously– of never being able to understand the “awful pain of being a man.” Novels within this school are quite serious about the idea; the shame and the misery of frustrated masculinity are their building-blocks.

The staccato rhythm of the 1920s and 1930s is employed as a distancing mechanism– a way of keeping the male narrator from revealing himself; this mirrors the sexual inadequacy of the protagonist, which is, of course, the source of his many shames. The only question is climax; and when it comes, the novel ends, usual in bloodshed and tears.

Fun fact: of this tradition, one of the most interesting books is You Play The Black and The Red Comes Up, by Eric Knight, the man who went on to create Lassie.

McCoy is an interesting case; clearly his genre designation only came with time, after the failure of his work to catch fire within the mainstream. Below is a collection of varying cover art– arranged by novel and vaguely chronologically– where one can see the passage from novelist to crime writer.

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THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? (1935)

NO POCKETS IN A SHROUD (1937)

I SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME (1938)

KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE (1948)

SCALPEL (1952)

CORRUPTION CITY (1959)