Dr David Stephen Calonne is an Eastern Michigan University professor specialising in Beat Literature. He has is the author of William Saroyan: My Real Work Is Being, The Colossus of Armenia: G.I. Gurdjieff and Henry Miller, and most recently Bebop Buddhist Ecstasy: Saroyan’s Influence on Kerouac and the Beats (with an Introduction by Lawrence Ferlinghetti). He has lectured in Paris and elsewhere, including the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Berkeley, the European University Institute in Florence, the University of London, Harvard and Oxford. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan. During Spring Term 2009 he taught a seminar on William Saroyan at the University of Chicago and he presently teaches at Eastern Michigan University. He has edited three Charles Bukowski books for City Lights, including Portions From a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays 1944-1990 (2008), Absence of the Hero: Uncollected Stories and Essays Vol. 2, 1946-1992 (2010) and most recently More Notes of a Dirty Old Man: The Uncollected Columns (2011). He also wrote Introductions to the first two volumes and an afterword for the latter. He has recently completed his own book on Charles Bukowski, which will be published sometime next year. Here he talks about his forthcoming work and the writer who continues to fascinate him.

I know you have just finished a book on Charles Bukowski, could you tell me a little bit about it?

Yes, I just completed writing Charles Bukowski for Reaktion Books based in London. It’s part of their Critical Lives series, which so far has included major cultural figures such as Wittgenstein, Bataille, Picasso, Foucault, Borges, Genet, Neruda, Burroughs, Beckett, Nabokov, et al. I was very happy to do it because I have long believed that Bukowski is, in fact, a great writer and belongs among the Olympians. The book is a literary biography – that is I write about both Bukowski’s life as well as interpret his prolific production of poetry, short stories, novels, essays and letters. Most of the books written about him have concentrated on his colorful life at the expense of treating his work in the manner it deserves. I have tried to set his achievements within the context of the writers he admired – Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Gorky, Artaud, Nietzsche, Saroyan, Fante, Hemingway, Celine, Li Po – in order to show his originality in both poetry and prose.

There’s been quite a lot written about him in the last few years. Why do you think there has been such an upsurge of interest?

There has been a steady stream of his posthumous books from Black Sparrow and then Ecco/HarperCollins so I think his name is still very much in the public domain. I’m not sure there has been a particular upsurge; I think rather that there has been a steady show of interest since his death in 1994. But there have been recent events – such as the Levi-Strauss jeans advertisement in which his poetry is recited against the backdrop of various incendiary activities – that perhaps caught the eyes and ears of people in the past year or so.

As you say, there have been several posthumous books. Can we expect any more?

The last Ecco book of poetry, The Continual Condition, came out in 2009. I have edited three books for City Lights… I wrote Introductions to the first two and an afterword for More Notes in which I provide background information concerning Bukowski’s life during the time he was writing the works included in the aforementioned. If More Notes does well, I plan to do another volume of uncollected Notes of Aa Dirty Old Man. Bukowski composed hundreds of these and many are very good indeed, although only 40 were published in the original volume back in 1969. In the new volume I’d like to include some of his art work too – he was a very fine and humorous cartoonist – as well as his poetry.

You said you think Bukowski is a great writer. What to your mind makes him great?

My grandfather Vagharshak Galoostian was an Armenian poet who lived in a small town called Sanger, near Fresno in California’s San Joaquin Valley. When I was an adolescent and was first discovering great literature and music, I remember talking to him about art and recollect him saying: “David, de gustibus non est disputandum – you cannot argue about taste.” That has stuck with me. I think either you get Bukowski or you don’t. For me he’s great because he speaks to me, the way Saroyan, Salinger, Thoreau, Miller, Dostoyevsky, e.e. cummings, Hart Crane spoke to me in my teens and still continue to. He speaks to the heart, to the yearning for love and meaning, to the suffering of being human, to the existential choices we face every day. I think he does all these things in an utterly fresh and original way. He achieved Ezra Pound’s counsel and “made it new.” He learned from Hemingway – the short, pared-down, fat-free, muscled sentences with subject-verb-object syntax; from Saroyan a loose, easy, casual humorous style (compare Bukowski’s long, funny titles with Saroyan’s); from Fante a lyrical, direct “carving on the page” (as Bukowski put it). Saroyan was Armenian-American, Fante Italian-American and Bukowski as a German-American identified with their sense of immigrant grief and the feeling of being an outsider. Bukowski is included in several cult writers encyclopaedias, and inspires the same kind of loyalty as some of the greats (Tolkien, Salinger, Burroughs, Kerouac) seem to: a fanatic devotion, in some cases. I’ve seen several examples of tattoos of Bukowski’s poetry etched on the bodies of both male and female fans. So, I guess a great writer is someone who speaks to you.

I think you’re right his work does seem “fresh” not only that it also seems effortless. Do you think he revised much?

He did revise. You can see some examples if you visit Bukowski.net. There are many of his manuscripts on display there. His revisionary tendencies have caused some issues concerning the “authenticity” of his work, in particular his published poems. But the posthumous texts have also often been heavily edited by John Martin, sometimes with several lines removed and others added. This is an ongoing controversy, which is just now being aired. I think the poetry was more heavily revised than the prose. I do think his work was largely “effortless”, as you say, but he also often laboured very hard over it. He was very disciplined, very Germanic about sitting down and hitting the “typer” (as he called it). But in interviews he claimed he drank and wrote simultaneously and often spoke of his creativity as a gift bestowed upon him without all the sturm und drang we expect to hear about – the “agony and ecstasy” of being an “artist”. He seemed much more down to earth about it all, and I believe we can trust his testimony on that. Thinking about it in another way, I think he was closer to J.S. Bach than to Beethoven: my sense is that Bach pretty well just wrote it all out in a continual stream of unfathomable genius and Beethoven sort of struggled away at it measure by measure.

He was very talented indeed but like Henry Miller and a few others, achieved success in his 40s, which is quite late. Do you think a certain amount of maturity and life experience helped make him a better/more worldly/ insightful writer?

Bukowski often said that he was fortunate that he did not become known when he was younger. He said that often writers would burn themselves out, and it is true that in American literature, there are “no second acts” in some cases. He probably had in mind figures like Hemingway and Saroyan, whose work Bukowski felt in later life did not match that written at the beginning of their careers. So Bukowski felt glad he wasn’t known earlier. And he did say that he had not known enough yet. As for “maturity”, I do think that Bukowski’s work shows a clear “progression” – that his “late work” shows a philosophical depth which is obviously the result of much hard experience. Although it is also the case that one could argue that Bukowski’s psychological orientation had been set by adolescence: he knew at age 18 what he knew at 68. And I think Henry Miller would have said something similar: that he was an “old soul” in a young body, and that experience in some way simply confirmed what he had felt from the beginning. Perhaps I am not expressing this very clearly, but you raise an interesting question when you use words like “worldly” and “insightful”. Perhaps with essentially “Romantic” writers – their vision is their youth – they constantly go back to childhood to either the primal sense of wonder or the primal wound of their early years and examine and reexamine their experience – a bit as is the method of psychoanalysis – to find what is there. One thinks of Wordsworth and the role of memory of “something far more deeply interfused” which he struggles throughout his life to express.

Speaking of Miller, I know the two were passing acquaintances and the former disapproved of Bukowski’s drinking. Do you happen to know the exact nature of their relationship?

Bukowski had published a story ‘20 Tanks From Kasseldown’ in 1946 in Portfolio, edited by Caresse Crosby. Henry Miller was listed as a co-editor of the magazine at that time. Bukowski was also published by Loujon Press which was the creation of Jon Webb and his wife Gypsy Lou. The Webbs also began to publish Miller in the mid-60s, producing Order and Chaos Chez Hans Reichel and later Insomnia. Bukowski and Miller had crossed literary paths over the years and corresponded during the 60s. Miller praised Bukowski’s poetry but also cautioned him about his drinking. Bukowski was apparently rankled by this because he wrote a humorous poem about it published in Kauri 11, November/December 1965. It was humorously entitled: ‘I Am Afraid That I Will Continue to Drink Myself to Death For These Small Reasons Mentioned Here and for Other Reasons That Neither of Us Has Time for Because I Have Need to Get Drunk Now’ – another of those Saroyan-inspired long titles! He also refers to the incident in several interviews and letters. The poem begins: “I am mad like a dead angel/a great man of artistic renown writes me from Beverly Hills:/’don’t drink yourself to death. especially, don’t drink while/you are writing – it’ll ruin your inspiration’/my nights would be hell and my days unbearable without/drink./the streetwalkers, the whores, the one-night stands the/one-week stands the/one-month stands the/winos the mothers…” (Miller actually lived in Pacific Palisades, not Beverly Hills). Bukowski was often asked about Miller as an influence. He claimed he liked his sexual writing, but was irritated when Miller went off onto metaphysical flights. He mentions this in an essay I included in Portions From a Wine-Stained Notebook entitled ‘Henry Miller Lives in Pacific Palisades and I Live on Skid Row, Still Writing About Sex’. Miller had a deep interest in esoteric and Eastern philosophy, reading Madame Blavatsky, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda whereas Bukowski had no interest in these matters, although he deeply appreciated Li Po and himself had, I think, a basically Zen Buddhist aspect to his personality and work. He is very much about paring life down to its barest essentials, rather like Henry David Thoreau. Bukowski and Miller were both German-Americans, Miller suffering with an unloving mother and Bukowski with an abusive father. And they both loved Dostoyevsky, Céline, Saroyan. Miller admired a French writer no one reads anymore but whom my 91-year-old father Pierre Calonne adores: Jean Giono.

Do you personally think the two were actually influenced by one another even if somewhat unwittingly?

I don’t think there was any influence of Bukowski on Miller at all. And stylistically, I don’t think Bukowski took much from Miller. Bukowski wrote a much more muscular, simple, Anglo-Saxon, subject-verb-object, Hemingwayesque prose. But there is a surreal element in Bukowski as in Miller. And you quoted a passage from one of the columns I included in More Notes of A Dirty Old Man in which Bukowski’s character has a sexual encounter with a red-head which he closes as follows: “And then BANG the walls shook, a man on the street stepped on a grease spot, fell and broke his ankle and we slid apart like worms going in different directions, and she stood there and said, “ooooh oooooh oooooh I liked it, I liked it I liked it, you filthy greasy pig…” This reminded me a bit of Miller’s Sexus: the odd shift to the man stepping “on a grease spot” (which obviously echoes the sexual action which is simultaneously occurring”, the seemingly absurd and unrelated fact of broken ankle, and then the typical Millersque “slid apart like worms”.

Another influence on Bukowski was alcohol as he once confessed never having written a poem sober. Do you think that’s true and if so you could perhaps tell me a little bit about how alcohol affected his writing/shaped his work?

One never knows how much is mythic or real in Bukowski, but I would guess that this is true. He would joke about whether he was a drinker who wrote or a writer who drank. Since he did both throughout his life, it is likely the two activities constantly overlapped. He was incredibly prolific. I think his output accounts for over 60 books so far, and there are more to come. We should also take him seriously when he says he wrote to avoid total madness. It was indeed his salvation. There are many books on alcohol and writers, so this probably somewhat of a pedestrian subject by now. There are many abstemious writers: Nabokov and Borges come to mind. I myself don’t believe it has anything to do with making you more or less “creative”. But the inner psychological pressures some humans labor under make alcohol a pleasant way to overcome the anguish for a while, to stretch time, to reach Dionysian ecstasy. The ancient Greeks called it “ex-stasis” meaning to “stand outside the self”. Bukowski frequently invokes the ancient Greek idea of wine as “the blood of the gods”. I think he was really a kind of pagan, elemental, pre-Western-logical-Aristotlian. He was a kind of mystic gnostic, finding meaning in the self, finding many “gods”, not one punishing, furious, judgmental Big Daddy with a Long Beard on a Throne God. I also find similarities in his work – particularly in the mid-60s when he drank but also experimented with various drugs – with the shamanistic idea of shape-shifting spiritual voyaging. Linda Lee Bukowski, his widow, has written about the long talks they had about spiritual matters and I think it is clear that although he “seemed” from the outside to be “just” a “dirty old man” to those who have not read all of his work (i.e. not just the more “sensational” works but also the essays and particularly the wonderful letters which I think are on the same level as those of D.H. Lawrence’s) that he was in fact always deeply trying to answer the fundamental existential questions. Alcohol was another facet of his quest, and I do think that he couldn’t have borne his suffering without it. Long answer. But it’s a difficult question really. Anything can be either an “escape” or an “entrance.”

You mention some of Bukowski’s love affairs, his wife, which brings me to the subject of women. He wrote about them extensively, sometimes in a positive, more often in a negative, light. This has caused many to accuse him of being a misogynist, any truth in that?

If one reads the complete works, it is clear that Bukowski was equally as rough on females, males and on himself. He constantly undercuts the “macho” pose by portraying his male anti-heroes as extremely comic personages. Bukowski’s obsession is with love, actually. His anguish and disappointments are due to the failure of romantic love – he says in an interview something like “love is like the fog which burns away from the sun of reality.” He read the great Roman love poet Catullus very deeply and Catullus’ influence can be seen in Bukowski’s poetry (he composed several homages to Catullus) especially in Love is a Dog From Hell. And he loved Boccaccio’s Decameron and intentionally sought to portray the “battle of the sexes” as a comedy. Remember too that he admired the American writer and artist James Thurber who wrote the funny illustrated book Is Sex Really Necessary? Bukowski admired D.H. Lawrence, but he often poked fun at him for being too serious and too cosmic about sex. In fact in my research I found a comic drawing Bukowski created of D.H. Lawrence urinating and I discovered recently that this is a parody of a water color Lawrence painted in 1928 called Dandelions depicting a naked man in nature relieving himself. So you have to read between the lines with Bukowski. He is always playing with expectations and conventions, and he is no “misogynist.” If anything, he is like his favorite French writer L.F. Céline a (sometimes) misanthrope, but in the Greek sense of “anthropos” being all of humanity, not just the male half. But even here, I think this derives from his disappointment in humanity, his hurt, his anguish. He cares a lot, and if you care, you get hurt.

While on the subject of hurt and romantic love, Bukowski was never more distraught than by the death of Jane Cooney Baker, his one true love. The two had a very destructive relationship, but when she died it almost broke him. Do you think that his attitude towards women was shaped by the overall experience?

Jane obsessed him, quite clearly. In his poem ‘my first affair with that older woman’, he wrote: “she was ten years older/and mortally hurt by the past/and the present;/she treated me badly: desertion, other/men;/she brought me immense/pain/continually.” I think that sums it up. And as you say, upon her death he composed some of his greatest poems. We enter again here psychoanalytic territory, but I suppose that when a person experiences severe trauma in childhood – as Bukowski did – that this then sets the pattern for later life. So that when such a person experiences great loss later, this reactivates the primary loss and the pain is experienced with extreme force. I don’t think it was the relationship with Jane that set the pattern, but the relationship with his parents. His father was insanely abusive and his mother neither defended him from this abuse nor gave him love. In his early poetry and stories of the 40s Bukowski begins to refer repeatedly to the spider who makes the web to catch the fly. This becomes his metaphor for love, for the totentanz of love, which can end in madness or death. He says this also in an interview, that Woman becomes for him Father often: the force that can destroy. But I think this vulnerability is not atypical with many American Romantics such as Hart Crane or Tennessee Williams.

Do you think then that writing about love is when Bukowski truly came into his own? Lawrence Durrell often talked of the writer’s need to make a breakthrough in his writing, to hear the sound of his own voice, is that how Bukowski acquired his?

A very good question. Firstly, we need to distinguish between Bukowski the poet and Bukowski the prose writer. He was always doing both poems and fiction. His early stories are both lyrical and sometimes very dark (like ‘20 Tanks From Kasseldown’ whose anti-hero is Dostoyevskian in his intense, mad, solitariness) and also light, deft and humorous like ‘Aftermath’. He would continue throughout his career to compose in these seemingly opposite styles: tragic and comic. As for “originality” or “finding his own voice”, these things can get complicated. Back to Beethoven: when did he become “Beethoven”? I suppose by the Third Symphony? Before he is still Haydnesque and Mozartian? People will debate these things. I think in some ways it was there from the beginning, but by the mid-60s, Bukowski really started to roar. I think that the Beats (though he often inveighed against them, he had much in common with them) and the hippies and the California counterculture of the 60s allowed him the freedom to become much more open. Censorship restrictions began to lessen, and he was able to combine the lyricism and sensitivity of his original vision with a more hip, direct, vivid style. He also became very fluent in combining these various elements – the absurd comic vision with the deep existential questioning. The fact is that he has several periods, perhaps again like Beethoven: early, middle and late. The early poems in particular are often densely metaphorical, allusive, condensed, intricate. We should remember that Bukowski often read the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review, which were the bastions of the “New Critics” like John Crowe Ranson, Allan Tate, Cleanth Brooks who prized precisely this kind of poetry. Bukowski avidly read the essays in these journals but said he disliked the poetry. Another missing piece of the puzzle of his early influences is Conrad Aiken, who also had an intellectually dense style. So from 1944-1965 you get one Bukowski. Then as I have said, the 60s kick in and you get Bukowski 1966-1986 and then Barfly and the “Late Style” 1987-1994. These are very approximate dates, but in the middle period you get Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969), and then the first novels – Post Office (1970) and Factotum (1974) – a very rich period when he had quit work at the post office and was writing full-time. His life was also very chaotic during this time. He had several mind-wrenching, life-giving, ecstatic love affairs (he was also re-reading Catullus during this period which left its mark) which brought Love is a Dog From Hell (1977) and Women (1978). Then a magnificent book of poetry Dangling in the Tournefortia (1981) and his bildungsroman Ham on Rye (1982). He was consolidating his early achievements during this middle period and also finishing his autobiographical exploration of his whole life, again rather like Henry Miller did in Tropic of Cancer, Capricorn, and the “Rosy Crucifixion” – Sexus, Nexus and Plexus. Then we get Barfly, which I think is the final summation of this period, in the final phase, 1987-1994. Theodor Adorno wrote about Beethoven’s “late style” and here with Bukowski we also get a final summary of his life’s themes. Again, rather like D.H. Lawrence in his late poems, Bukowski becomes more and more preoccupied with building his “ship of death” and the poems become profoundly metaphysical. His cats, listening to classical music on the radio, drinking fine German wine, invoking Li Po, constantly speaking of the quest for authentic selfhood – the late poems are way ahead of anything he had achieved before. And then we also get an experimentation with form – he writes a mystery novel Pulp (1994) and a splendid journal, published posthumously as The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over Ship (1998). So we have a relentless creativity as he tries out new forms as well as returns to earlier themes in a new manner.

Taking his experimentation into account, would you describe Bukowski as a daring writer?

Yes. He absorbed many influences yet succeed in doing what Ezra Pound advised: he “made it new.” I think he is original in fusing the elements of “low-brow” and “high-brow” culture in a vital and often funny way. In creating “Hank Chinaski” – his alter ego who listens to Mahler and Stravinsky, reads Li Po, Pound, Jeffers, and yet can speak in the most colloquial and “vulgar” manner, he brings a new energy and panache to literature. Bukowski learned from Whitman, Hemingway, cumin’s, Saroyan and Fante, and he succeeded in creating his own literary universe in which he fused the existential, dark themes of European literature (Céline, Hamsun, Dostyoevsky) with this particular American tradition of direct speech. He also often added a riotous, absurd humor anchored in the realities of the body. He said he was really a “Puritan”, and therefore went a good distance in the opposite direction to balance his yin and yang. Opinions are divided about Pulp: some really like it and others think it shouldn’t have been published. I myself am fond of it – it demonstrates Bukowski’s interest in crime fiction. He wrote a poem back in 1946 which bears the influence of James M. Cain’s The Postman Only Rings Twice. And he sends up this American tradition. He does this often – refers to a predecessor either in tribute or parody. The opening of Post Office is “It began as a mistake” and the opening of Céline’s Voyage au Bout de La Nuit is “Ça a débuté comme ça”. So Bukowski is always working in a tradition, alluding to other writers, but then going in his own direction. His late poetry is marked by the deepening of his Gnostic vision of life – humans struggling in an indifferent cosmos where each of us must “save ourselves.” This is a recurring theme, as well as a heartbreaking openness in poems such as ‘The Bluebird’. The parallel with late Beethoven I think is apt. If you listen to the Grosse Fuge, the Bagatelles and late sonatas for piano, the Ninth Symphony you can see that Beethoven is pushing way into new territory, pushing the limits of what you can do harmonically, polyphonically, what the instruments are capable of producing. The Germans as usual got this right because in one of the televised interviews they did of Bukowski late in life they played the ‘Scherzo’ from the Ninth Symphony as the opening music. I think that gets it just right.

You reference Germany quite frequently, would you say Bukowski is better appreciated in Europe?

He is immensely popular in Germany, and also in Spain, Italy and France. He is translated into Hebrew, Greek, Japanese, Finnish, Russian, Swedish and others. His sales during his life were greater in Europe than the US. I’m not sure now what the situation is. He often said that the US was behind Europe in its appreciation of good art. In some ways, one recalls someone like Edgar Allan Poe who was appreciated by Baudelaire and Mallarmé before he was considered of any consequence here. Something similar happened I think with William Faulkner whom Sartre took up with great passion long before Faulkner achieved anything like acceptance in America. And the Russians have always appreciated writers like Steinbeck and Saroyan from a different angle than Americans. In writing my book for Reaktion, I did quite a bit of research into Bukowski and Germany and my feeling is that he fits into a long German literary tradition: he is really a German writer who was actually born in Andernach, Germany and came to Los Angeles at the age of three. He writes in the 60s of his pleasure in being translated into German, as if he is now returning to his original tongue. And when he went to Hamburg in 1978 to give a poetry reading at the Martkhalle, his first words were: “It’s good to be back.” He adored Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Bach, Brahms, Beethoven. He has that sehnsucht of the German Romantics: that desire for what lies beyond. And he has the German hard, trenchant, ironic, side to balance the tenderness. I think too he often writes in very simple English, which translates well into other languages, rather like Hemingway. And he is firmly in the American Romantic tradition. As Hart Crane hymned in The Broken Tower: “And so it was I entered the broken world/To trace the visionary company of love, its voice/An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)/But not for long to hold each desperate choice.” And there are lines in Bukowski straight out of Walt Whitman. And he loved Voyage au Bout de la Nuit and Catullus and Rabelais and Li Po, Tu Fu and even has a poem about Vallejo. So one might say he is a figure of Weltliteratur, beyond national classification. He writes with verve, compassion and comedy about our common human plight. You know, like that English chap… what was his name?… (Matthew Arnold) something about how “we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

Dolly Delightly reviews More Notes From a Dirty Old Man at her literary blog Book Me…

Jacob Knowles-Smith sits down for a TV dinner with Tom Wolfe

Thankfully BBC Four hasn’t been demolished just yet. If it had been, we wouldn’t have had chance to enjoy its recent ‘All American’ season. They say that BBC 2 would absorb the channel’s role, but doubtless this would come with – if not dumbing-down – half as many documentaries as they currently produce. And, indeed, they’ve produced a near-dazzling array of films for this latest season focusing on US culture – but this is no paean to American hegemony, and the more I tried to absorb the schedule, the more I wondered if perhaps Tom Wolfe hadn’t been given some role at the Beeb. The subjects covered over the last couple of weeks have been like a cross-section of that writer’s brain; there’s been high culture, low culture, kitsch culture, surf culture, diners, journalism, nomads, hookers and civil rights. Any fan of Wolfe will no doubt be able to pluck a volume up and thumb through almost all of those subjects in one of his collections, but then I began to wonder, how would Tom Wolfe write a TV review? Well, for starters he probably wouldn’t title it anything nearly as banal as the above, but he might call it something along the lines of…

The Electric Blu-Ray Acid Mind-Bath: America is Over There!

‘Why’s all this paint here?’ You can see Andrew’s mind ticking over and his puppy-dog eyes begin to twinkle with his excitement – Yes! Pollock painted here! And they’ve preserved it, an encrusted monument to that great man’s drips. Great man? You can make up your own mind. Andrew Graham-Dixon has made his up in the Art of America and, as the BBC’s finest regular documentary maker – now that Attenborough stays out of frame, we can cut him a little slack. He deftly traces – with his infectious enthusiasm and never-patronising dulcets – the history of American art from pilgrims to present. All American art is here: Rockwell, Hopper, Warhol, The Simpsons?… and all of it, it seems, is about the loneliness of being one among many in a great big country full of people. After all, can’t Manhattan at rush hour be the loneliest place in the world?

Hopper’s popping up all over the place, and his most famous work – ‘Nighthawks’ – gives us a lead into the next show and the lonely fat-clogged heart of America in Stephen Smith’s America on a Plate: The Story of the Diner. This is where we sit down at that democratic counter and look across into America’s short-order soul… French fries pancakes sausages coffee doughnuts shakes steaks turkey clubs plastic seats – top you off? – cheeseburgers blueberries coffee onion rings eggs over easy – warm you up? – French toast roast beef meatloaf coffee gum chewing waitresses truck stop bacon coffee. What more can you say? What more can anyone ask for!?

Now this cat’s crazy, he’s touched the hem of death after all – or, at least, skirted around the edges – and who wouldn’t be a little spooky kooky cuckoo? James Ellroy’s Feast of Death (BBC 2) – with some strong language! – delves into the murder-centric mind of the author and we meet the embodiment of obsession. Kim Bassinger? She’s alright. But forget the movies – what the fuck good are we to him? Who are we to ask anything of this guy? This modern Beethoven! (Just ask him… why listen to anyone else?) Did the bitch overcook the steak again, James? Nah – It’s sexual power. That’s murder. Right there. If you don’t believe him, then why else do we care about serial killers? Men think about sex more than women, so they kill more. Ellroy is clearly obsessed by his mother’s murder; perhaps he sees himself as a failure – a not-quite-Beethoven – because he couldn’t protect her, but, if that’s not it, then he still has every right to be obsessed because, he says it, closure is bullshit. What’s a dyke bounty?

Now we’re with shutterbug Rankin in America in Pictures: The Story of Life Magazine. He’s indulging himself in a bit of hero worship – mutual snapshotting of these wily old coots that chronicled America. And, sure, maybe these guys aren’t exactly the man – but they were working for a Luce publication! Think Fortune, think Time. Think middlebrow America. But that’s, perhaps, not entirely fair, Life was, as Rankin’s film describes, a great unifier of the people – all of America could ooooooohhh and aaaaaaahhh at the pretty violent shocking beautiful celebrities/dead soldiers/famine victims but – look over here, America! – you could be looking at those photos next to this fridge, in this new kitchen or on this new lawnmower (in your fourth floor apartment) and, boy, now here’s Rita Hayworth. Call me an elitist or a cynical bum, but Life always seemed pretty cheap.

So, that’s all American, and, if that’s not enough for you, some of the most delightful chocolate chips to be found in this rich cookie came in Old Jews Telling Jokes. It’s pointless to tell the one about the rabbi or the gentile here, but these rascals have their own website and you have a few minutes to spare.

1. The purpose of politics is to inspire art. The only useful thing it has ever achieved

When Marshall Brennan argued “The Manifesto is remarkable for its imaginative power… It is the first great modernist work of art”, he referred specifically to The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. While the Diggers and Levellers before them had already captured for the people the format of dramatic declamation previously used only by noblemen and clergy, it was Karl and Friedrich who were to craft it into something resembling literature, with its “opiates of the people” and “icy waters of egotistical calculation”. These were cadences which spoke on as aesthetic as well as an instructional level, more scripture than stricture. But if Germans were the forefathers of bringing an artistic sensibility to the manifesto, it was an Italian who was to take it to the next level, to make the manifesto a work of art in itself. Fillipo Marinetti was a man whose life’s work was dedicated to hammer at the block of his own bombast in the hope it was battered into something resembling genius. His diabolically dynamic screed ‘The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism’ was published on the front page of leading national newspaper La Figaro in 1909, and was to set the tone for many of the hundred manifestos Alex Danchev has compiled in this fascinating collection: it takes pride of place as the chronological first. Taking in his own Futurists, through their British counterparts and bitter rivals the Vorticists, to their bastard offspring and political foes the Surrealists and Dadaists, it was his supercharged oppositionalism which set the template.

2. Substance is for abusers. Style is king, subjects are mere subjects

Futurism’s bad reputation proceeds it, but should not supersede it. With its adolescent worship of speed and war, cars and explosions, and with the knowledge of its noxious later association with fascism, one returns to Marinetti’s original manifesto expecting a risible gaucheness at best, (a kind of Top Gear for intellectuals), or a repellent mania at worst. And yet its evil beauty can and does still thrill today. From the orgasmic opening scene of his car crashing off the side of the road (“Oh mother of a ditch! … How I relished your strength-giving sludge that reminded me so much of the saintly black breast of my Sudanese nurse…”) the narrative itself roars off into the distance, crashing repeatedly through its audience’s senses and sensibilities. Later comes the firecracker destruction of all established art and history:

“We want our country free from the endless number of museums which cover here like countless graveyards… admiring an old painting is just like pouring our purest feelings into a funerary urn, instead of projecting them far and wide, in violent outbursts of creation and action”.

Then the zealously phrased, totemic proclamations: “There is no longer any beauty but the struggle. Any work of art that lacks aggression will never be a masterpiece”.

This is the word as weapon, where the pen is power (or penis power given Futurism’s obsessive virility: penis mightier than the sword). It is absurd, illogical and immoral, but it is as much a manically brilliant, endlessly fascinating creation in itself, as it is a tyrannical statement of intent for the magnificent paintings which were to follow.

Other manifestos from Futurist followers follow in the collection, including Boccioni and Carlo Carra (perhaps the greatest Futurist painter, railing against “the cube, the pyramid and all other static shapes” and hailing “Red, rrrrrrreds, the rrreddest rrrrrrrrreds that shouuuuuuuut”), but it was Marinetti who remained poet provocateur in chief. Yet while this was a movement founded by a priapic misogynist, it took two women followers – Valentine de Saint Pointe and Mina Loy – to make manifestos which contained enough jagged aphoristic gems to match those of those of the Futurist founder (“Misery is the disintegration of joy. Intellect, of intuition. Acceptance, of inspiration”). They bring a lightness of wit lacking in Marinetti, which reminds us that another forbear of the manifesto tradition is perhaps the un-credited Wilde, whose paradoxical ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’ (“One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art”) can also be traced here. A greater wit than Marinetti could also be found in his great rival Wyndham Lewis over in Britain, whose Blast manifesto contained all the acidic bombast of Futurism with a greater realisation of its own contradiction and absurdity.

While this is a form rooted in politics it can graduate into a purer aesthetics of the soul and mind, and it is perfectly possible to wander its waywardly beautiful walkways without being corralled down the shady political alleys many of its practitioners ended up skulking. With the deliberately self contradictory rhetoric of Blast, this is positively invited, political rhetoric is a mere tool for internal implosions of the mind and senses (despite Wyndham Lewis’ own later rightist dalliance). The Russian Constructivists, and later the multinational Dadaists and Surrealists, were undoubtedly inspired by Marinetti’s manifesto, but were to take sides at the opposite ends of the political spectrum, some Communist, some Trotskyite, (not many anarchists despite what you might expect) though their own thought experiments clearly inspired many way beyond this ideological milieu. All were to understand the importance of rhythm and cadence in channelling the grand chaos of their ideas. They also understood the importance of having an enemy to kick out at, a hate figure at which to throw their artful darts. Whether their politics ended up on the far-left or the far-right, the tone of absolute rebellion, the stance of heroic David in creative revolt against a moribund art establishment Goliath is often markedly similar in spirit, though not necessarily in execution. The Dadaists after all were to cast the Futurists themselves as just such a rigid, fusty old relic, despite Marinetti’s crew arriving not five years before them. And despite, or perhaps rather because of, the clear inspiration they gleaned from them.

3. We never saw an opposite that didn’t attract. All hail MC Skat Katt!

As early as 1923 we see reactive statements against political ‘control’ of art in Theo Van Doesburg’s ‘Manifesto Prole Art’, which explicitly renounces the existence of a “proletarian” art in an of itself – “Every proletarian work of art is nothing more than a poster for the bourgeoisie”. While the contemporaneous ‘Manifesto of the Union of Mexican Workers, Technicians, Painters and Sculptors’ of the Mexican David Alfaro Siquieros shows the stale, nullifying uniformity which came to dominate the degenerate art in the “actually existing socialism” which became known as “Communism” to the world. “Exploiters of the people in concubinage with traitors who sell the blood of soldiers who fought for the revolution” etc etc. By contrast, Breton, Riviera and Trotsky’s later ‘Towards a Revolutionary Free Art’ from 1938, (one of the few manifestos here with input from a “real” politician), displays a beautifully stated commitment to absolute freedom of expression “No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above!” It’s perhaps surprising to read the one time brutal overseer of the Red Army and butcher of Kronstadt sounding positively anarchistic. And yet earlier manifestos here from artist supporters such as Mayakovsky and Rodchenko show in its earliest days the Soviet Union was both a wellspring and a haven for artistic rhetoric of the most rapturously absolute intellectual freedom, though this very quickly curdled into the gruel of “socialist realism”, little of which is worth reproducing today.

If Futurists were in revolt against tradition, Dadaists were in fuller revolt against established thought: anti-sense. This made their output more knockabout, pranksters as much as revolutionaries. Pranks are always hit and miss, and this approach can often grate to modern eyes as often as it delights. (“Honour is bought and sold like ass. Ass, ass represents life like fried potatoes” says Francis Picabia’s 1920 ‘Dada Canibalistic Manifesto’, and on it goes). Of course the Dadaists would argue this was the very intent, storming the bourgeois boundaries of our sensibilities, twanging the elastic until it snaps. The later Surrealist manifestos here are comparatively stately in their assaults on political, spiritual and mental establishment, take the sublime statements of the movement leader, Andre Breton: “This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass. The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes a little impression on me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere”. Far more, and greater works of art emerged from this more elegant swipe at the accepted.

4. Those who can, paint, those who can’t, write manifestos

Though they may have dabbled, neither Marinetti nor Breton, the movement maestros, were painters nor sculptors, their manifestos were their art. This leads us to the half truth above. At least in many cases there does seem to be a kind of inverse relationship between the artistic success of the author and the brilliance of the manifesto. There are no manifestos from Picasso, Miro, Magritte, nor later from Pollock or Francis Bacon. Carlo Carra and Wyndham Lewis were relative exceptions in excelling at both the written and pictorial form. Certainly Dali’s ‘Yellow Manifesto’ from 1928 is rather flimsy and derivative thing in comparison with its Dadaist forbears, with little of the flair at work in his painted phantasmagoria , while the sculptures of Picabia are wonderful grotesques which do not begin to translate into the language of his writing. Art is absolutely subjective – fly forward to the book’s more recent manifestos, and Gilbert and George’s words are dry recitations of the banal (in contrast with what – to me – are the dizzy delights of their images), while the Stuckist Manifesto written by Billy Childish in 1999 – a declaration of war on conceptual art of the Young British Artists, Hirst, Emin et al is a fabulously angry and witty slice of excoriation, expertly honed (and far more interesting – to me – than anything he has ever drawn). Kandinsky meanwhile, perhaps the greatest painter writing here, has a manifesto written with Franz Marc which is not a striking piece of art in itself, and does not aim to be, but is instead an expertly clear and ordered explanation of what the new non figurative art aims to be. Sometimes the manifesto is simply a piece of meticulously crafted description or statement rather than an exhibit in itself.

There are other quieter, thoughtful manifestos here, such as Takamura Kotaro’s ‘Green Sun’ from 1910, grasping the joins between traditional Japanese art and the new Western abstract style. There are wry pieces like Michael Bettancourt’s ‘The —————– Manifesto’ from 1969 (i.e., fill in the —————- yourself), and there are inroads to far more all encompassing and revolutionary philosophies such as Guy Debord’s ‘Situationist Manifesto’ from 1960. Danchev’s selections in this to-and-fro across the century are eclectic yet exhaustive, and his introductions to each piece are highly informative, managing a fine balance between an impassioned interest in the subject and the aim not to overwhelm with his own point of view. As always in art, true objectivity is impossible, and he cannot – for instance – disguise his contempt for Lars von Trier’s Dogme 95 movement, but then a little of the combative spirit redolent in so much of the material here is quite welcome.

5. There is no one true path to the sublime. The road may be painted in ink as well as oils.

100 Artists’ Manifestos is both an intriguing history of art in the 20th century, and an art exhibition itself, artists using words not canvas. And this is art, not literature. It seems to me it is possible to signify a separation between the two, the teleology and order of the former, and the amorphous, weightlessness of the latter. In one of the quieter pieces here, Apollinaire claims the new (in 1912) non-figurative art is “purer” as, like music, it reaches parts of the soul beyond description. In the best these manifestos, the melange of aphorism and idea, of barbed incongruity and graceful lyricism, can entice and sooth the nameless contours of the soul just as much as Miro’s ‘Ciphers and Constellations’ or Kandinsky’s ‘Composition VIII’. There is a genius at work in these words-as-art which cannot easily be imitated, as my own piss-weak pastiches here no doubt amply display. The manifesto is an insistent form, one that makes demands. Read the selection here, and see where the orders take you.

What is it you strive for in your shows?

Mainly to make people laugh, but along with that I suppose my main goal is doing so in an original way and hopefully also producing something that will make people think and maybe challenge their world view. But it’s different for each show.

Is there some kind of ideology behind your routines, something that you’re consciously trying to get across?

Sometimes. Other times not. Each show and routine tries to do different things. But I guess if there is a common theme it is challenging preconceptions and making people think about what they believe. If something is true I think you can question it and it will still hold up. If it’s not true then questioning it can help you realise that. By making people laugh you can get their guard down a little bit and discuss things that you might not be able to do or tackle subjects that might otherwise make people clam up.

What do you think of the whole interview procedure, is it worthwhile to ask someone to discuss his/her work?

It’s good to be questioned about what you do and to think about it yourself. Often interviews and the self-analysis that they entail can help one get to grips with something you’re doing or indeed make you question your own motives.

Would you consider your comedy ‘alternative’?

I don’t think that term really has any meaning in the 21st century. It’s a bit of an 80s term. I am not doing mainstream stuff on the whole, I suppose. But comedy loses some power if it becomes too mainstream anyway. I think my audience will always probably be smallish in comparison to those big TV names, but I would prefer to be creating interesting and original work. Though I am not opposed to doing TV or indeed some more mainstream work – you just have to be careful to get the balance right and I’ve realised from observation and my own experience that “success” can sometimes affect the quality of one’s work in a negative sense. I am lucky in fact to be in the position where I am an acquired taste and I am not the face of BBC prime time or crisps or something as it means I can cover the subjects I want to without being beholden to anyone else.

Does ‘alternative’ comedy have a relationship with truth and honesty?

I think most good comedy is about truth and honesty. But some of it is about lies. There are no rules. For me my honesty about myself allows me to be honest about other subjects. But sometimes I will take a contrary or dishonest approach to a subject in order to explore it thoroughly. There is a freedom in honesty though and it is good to express oneself.

You’re mentioned that you’re a fan of Bukowski. What is it about his work that you enjoy?

I like the fact that he’s not bothered about revealing himself to be an unpleasant or unscrupulous person. There is an honesty there that is endearing. We’re all fuck ups and it’s refreshing to read people who admit it with a sense of perspective. But he’s also a brilliant writer with an interesting life that has some parallels with mine, but is mainly entirely different. It’s good to see the world from another point of view.

Of course I am not saying that you have but what do you think of some literary figures’ move further to the right, in terms of politics, as they got older (i.e. Hamsun, Céline and Pound)? Does the same thing happen to comedians?

The same happens with a sizeable proportion of the population of all backgrounds. Realism and idealism are things that one has to attempt to keep balanced in life and I am not surprised that people become more cynical and selfish as they grow older. But there’s no need for it to happen and in fact, probably amongst comedians most of the older ones have stuck to their guns or get more left wing if anything. Personally i think it’s good to keep an open mind throughout your life and there is no shame in changing your mind as long as you do it for the right reasons. I have always been fairly central left and don’t see myself changing too much. But it’s easier to be left wing when you’re poor and young then when you’re rich and old so I can see why people do change their mind. And don’t forget that a good proportion of people are left wing when they are young out of a pose or because they think that’s what they should do or cos they think it might get them somewhere. Time usually flushes these people out. But life has some difficult choices for us all.

Do you consciously try to evolve through each of your performances?

I keep working in all aspects of my job, writing, performing and the vagaries of delivery. I want to keep improving and fortunately find the craft so interesting that I can do a show 100 times and not get bored with it, because I am discovering new avenues in the routines or new ways of doing them. It’s more perfecting than evolving in that sense. But I also don’t want to turn into a bitter old man saying things were different and better in my day. I love comedy and exploring the way it changes, but I also want to stay relevant. But these things tend to come organically rather than as the result of planning. By staying original and pushing oneself hopefully one can help to shape the way comedy is going, as well as being shaped by the work of others. You have to stay interested, which so far i have.

Are there any comedians, or styles, that you particularly respect? And any that you don’t?

I like any comedian who can surprise me. Originality is again the key. I tend to like the ones who have thought of something that I haven’t thought of, or expressed it more clearly, than the ones who tell me stuff I already know. But sometimes an observational comedian using the more basic comedic formulas can still be skilful enough to surprise me and in some ways I find that more impressive than some of the more avant garde comics. A comedian has to keep moving and not get too predictable. Not many achieve that over a whole career.

Who would you say your influences are (comedic, literary, political or otherwise)? Or does the idea of listing them seem arbitrary and tedious?

I think you get influenced by everything, good and bad and the list would be too long and complex to have any kind of meaning. As a child I was very impressed with Monty Python and Pete and Dud and The Young Ones. But if the influence was anything it was about the importance of being your own person and creating stuff that was yours. But throughout life you meet people, read books, see shows which shape you as a person.

What do you think of the brand of comedy that usually fills stadiums and sells millions of DVDs?

I am impressed by any comedian who does their job competently, even if it’s not my sense of humour. It’s a tough job and it’s not easy to get that many people to like you. It’s not my cup of tea generally speaking, but it’s only lazy comedians who coast on a wave of success and don’t put the work in that annoy me. And there are plenty of those at all levels. And it is possible to do something that is populist and also worthy. Tim Minchin and Morecambe and Wise spring to mind. I don’t have a problem if an act becomes popular. That is not what they should be judged by and there is no shame in success if achieved on the right terms

Are you at your happiest when on stage, or when writing your material, or neither?

I prefer performing because it’s more of an immediate thrill and just writing can be lonely and hard to cope with, whilst there is nothing that compares with making a crowd of people laugh. But after working very hard and going through pain and tears to write, it is also very satisfying to get something finished that you are proud of. I am lucky to be able to do both. If I had to do just one I think I would be unhappy

Has performing ever felt futile and fruitless? Any moments of despair? If so, What has kept you going?

All the time, at regular intervals. It is quite futile in many ways and as a performer your mood is very much affected by your last gig, or how things are going right now. You just have to push on through it and luckily (and kind of sadly) a good gig can banish the blues immediately. It’s a tough job in many ways and there is little security to it and one is always fearful that there might be better ways to fill one’s time or that one might have lost it. But the same is true of any job and life in general. You just have to keep on pushing on or lie down and die! Nothing we do has any real meaning in the long term and we’re just specks of dust on a rock hurtling through space. What keeps us going?

Has there ever been a moment when you’re felt contempt for your audience? How about hecklers?

Again these moments come along every now and again and sometimes an audience or a member of it deserves contempt. The danger is that you start to hate all audiences and forget that you are there to entertain them, they’re not there to pander to your ego. If a crowd is dull or misses the nuances you sometimes feel like slacking off and not giving them the best show, but there’s a chance that the dullness is something to do with you, or they’re just quiet and don’t show their enjoyment as much, so a big part of the job I think is to have the grace and ability to keep performing as if it’s the best gig ever. You can’t let your head drop – though sometimes it gets hard. Hecklers are generally just a pain in the arse. They’re easier to deal with than people realise and it’s an annoyance usually if they throw you off your stride. But again you have to embrace the changes and the unpredictability of live performance and try to make a positive out of it. If you have too much contempt for your audience or comedy in general then (unless you harness it and make it the act, which is hard, but possible) you’re heading in a bad direction. No one is forcing a comedian to be a comedian. If you hate it all of the time then you can stop.

Do you think a comedian or an artist has any other purpose than expression/creation?

It’s fine to be just entertaining and to give people something to laugh about. Life can be bleak for us all and if a comedian telling a cock joke makes someone forget their problems for half an hour or banish the blues then that is something to be happy about. There’s a danger that comedy can become all about subversion or expression and I think you have to keep the funny in there. I am lucky to be able to use my work to create and express myself, but there is nothing wrong in making people laugh until their sides hurt.

What do you think of the current state of comedy?

I think it’s pretty much the same as it’s always been. Lots of good stuff, plenty of bad stuff. Lots of the good stuff doesn’t get the credit it deserves, but some does. The stand up circuit is much more inventive and interesting than when I started out. TV is producing similar amounts of great and terrible stuff, but now with the internet there are a lot more outlets for people to do interesting stuff. The people at the high end doing stadium tours and making loads of money might seem a bit mercenary and weird, but there were always these types of comedian and if anything there is more opportunity for invention and self-expression.

Locklin has somehow managed however, in his mountains of work, to remain indefinable, as his famed “alter ego” Jimmy Abbey observes in his latest collection (The Vampires Saved Civilisation): “it’s a constant struggle, against others and oneself, to remain undefined”.

Through his sheer prolificacy in the small presses since the 60s, working both as a teacher at California State University and of course as a writer, Locklin has influenced many, publishing more than 4,000 poems (catalogued here) along with over 125 books, a feat that would defy the most ardent of collectors.

He has worked in every genre, regularly putting out novels, novellas, short stories, essays, journalism and interviews, tackling all manner of subjects in his signature style, speaking directly in an unpretentious and seemingly casual, exact language.

Lisa Glatt (A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That, The Apple’s Bruise), fellow writer and former student of Locklin’s, and now also a teaching colleague in Long Beach, says: “The main thing I remember Gerry telling me was ‘Don’t think too much!’” And though I’ve forced him here to think about ‘writing’, perhaps more so than he would have liked, he has still managed somehow to remain undefined, and an ever-expanding library unto himself.

How do you think comic books have influenced writers, like yourself, reading them when growing up? Is it a kind of first step into reading before becoming a writer? And is it the same with detective novels?

I can only speak for myself. My mother, who was an elementary school teacher, and a very good and enlightened one, taught me to read before I started kindergarten. At first she read books to me, two books a night, one of my selection and one of hers. After I could read to myself, she would let me purchase two comic books at a time: one of my choosing and one from the old Classics Illustrated series. Of the former category, I liked best the ones one might expect, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Green Lantern, Donald Duck, and such. But I immediately took to the Classics as well, voraciously, which allowed me a cultural literacy long before I ever read the actual books – although I, of course, did read all of them in good time.

My mother convinced the nuns to let me into the local parish school when I was four-and-a-half, which was no problem because I had been so well prepared for it by her. I’d breeze through the readers in a few minutes after which the nun would have to find me something else to read or do for the weeks the rest of the class was on the text, and when I was simply faced with boredom, I filled the time with daydreams of being able to fly like Superman.

My father, by the way, was serving in the boiler room of a destroyer escort in the South Pacific during this time, since I was born in 1941, and he did not return except for brief leaves until 1945. After my mother had returned to the classroom, I had a caretaker, an older woman, until kindergarten – there were no pre-schools in those days – so my early entry into kindergarten was also geared to save my mother considerable expense – not that the Catholic schools were free.

As a teacher she would also have known that the Catholic schools were significantly superior to the public (in the American sense) schools, not only because of the dedication of the sisters, but because of the strict discipline – any truly disruptive students were quickly dispatched for the public schools to deal with. There was the occasional private school also (what you would call a public school over there) but few Catholics could afford those, and I doubt they were as good as the parish schools.

The Church served the sociopolitical purposes of the generation of immigrants from Ireland, just as “Negro” churches were doing the same for their members. And the division was not between black and white, but among the different nationalities – Irish, Italian, Polish, German – that dominated one or another of the parishes.

Integration did not really get underway until the 1950s. When a black fighter fought Rocky Marciano, I rooted for the black fighter, not because I had much experience, good or bad, of blacks, but because I didn’t: it was the Italians I mainly had to deal with on the way home or at the playground. And the Irish themselves, of course.

At any rate, I think I simply grew seamlessly out of comic books and into books. I did get my one strong incentive towards writing fiction from the movie and comic book of Bambi – I was so distraught by the death of Bambi that I vowed to become a writer and only write books that had less tragic endings. By then I had already been launched as a poet not only by the poems my mother read to me but by my Aunt Pat, who, when I stayed overnight with my aunts, would stand me up on the bed, direct me to gaze upon the night sky, and instruct me to compose a poem about it. The poems may have been of the ‘Star Light, Star Bright’, variety, but she dutifully copied them down and archived them and from that early, pre-literary age, I took it for granted that I was a writer and would always be one, no matter what I might also aspire to. Because I wrote well in school, I also had that reinforcement from my teachers at all stages in my education. And in high school and college, the former taught by Jesuits, I had five years of Latin, four of Greek, four of French. In graduate school: reading German, and numerous courses in Old and Middle English language and literature.

My mother’s father had come from Ireland, fathered 14 children, and died at the age of 50, shortly before I was born. Of those 14 siblings, of which my mother was the youngest, none except her ever had a child. I was, in other words, the only member of the next generation, and all my surviving maternal aunts and uncles (four or five died during the flu epidemic of 1918, and another, after whom I am named, of tuberculosis) were my aunts and uncles exclusively. Few of them ever married. The ones who lived into middle age lived into old age as well – their 80s and 90s.

My father returned from the war with Type One diabetes and died at the age of 50 of a diabetic-related heart attack a week before my graduation from high school. He was a very good father, and I loved him very much, and it has only been later in life that I’ve realized the influence his death had upon my later life: the friends that, unbeknownst to them, filled successive roles of surrogate father for me.

My father had made the promise that I could be raised Catholic – his own father was Methodist – and he took the further step of becoming involved in all my youthful activities – which got me through cub scouts, for instance, because he could do just about anything, whereas I could do nothing of any useful nature except academics and athletics. I was encouraged in both by mother and father alike, and excelled in both. But I couldn’t change a light bulb and still can’t. And I’m technophobic and never took typing.

I have written many poems about the above, both fiction and poetry: Go West, Young Toad; New Orleans, Chicago, and Points Elsewhere; and any of my early experimental novellas, are good places to look for such materials, although all are fictionalized, as are all human memories and utterances.

As for detective novels, I did read those of the juvenile variety, which frequently involve the solving of crimes and outwitting of criminals, but radio and film were probably stronger influences. I read a lot of crime novels today, for the wit of the British ones and the maleness of the American ones. Where else in English can a male of a traditional sort find characters with which to identify in fiction of the last 50 years? I love to read of Inspector Morse, Dave Robicheaux, and Matthew Scudder. I also love Helen Mirren, Iris Murdoch, and A.S. Byatt – and P.D. James – but a lad does need his infusion of literary testosterone now and then.

I’ve never taken to “serial graphics” by the way – as much as I love dialogue – to read and to write – print is easier on my eyes. The only comic strip I still read faithfully is Pearls Before Swine. Do you get it over the there?

I’ll have to have a look.

Pearls Before Swine is truly pretty funny and sustains one’s illusion of sanity when confronted by the realities of Human Nature.

I read something you said in an interview you held with Rain Dog about “sacrifice of the ego”. How does the “sacrifice of ego” free a reader, or an audience as a whole, as well as a writer? Does it mean that the reader must accept what he/she is reading rather than rejecting it on grounds of previous education or taste?

Did I use the term “sacrifice of ego”?

Here is the quote: “And we really need appreciative readers more than we do more poets, but that requires a sacrifice of ego which few are willing to make (and which many no doubt feel that I should be the first to make)”. I am wondering now if the phrase is somehow related to Jung?

No, there was nothing profound in my use of it. Just that a certain charisma attaches itself to the image of the poet – or would-be ones assume that, at least, and are thus reluctant to relegate themselves to the less glamorous roles of reader, critic, scholar, reviewer, editor, teacher, etc., as important as those literary jobs may be, more so, in fact, than a large percentage of the poets – now that the writing of poetry requires so little aptitude, skill, practice, education, etc., although work of any permanent value will always require quite a few of those items.

I read widely in Freud, Jung, and other psychoanalysts at one time – especially when writing my dissertation of Nathanael West – but, no, I doubt they snuck into my use of that phrase.

You’re a long-time follower of the Lakers and the Yankees. What function do sports play in your life? As a supporter of a team I find myself questioning the reason why I support them, as if it is some arbitrary selection my ego must stand by at all costs (a refusal to sacrifice the ego).

I’ve published many sports poems. And I’ve stated often that my participation in sports as a youth saved my sense of self-worth in adolescence – when I was afflicted by acne that rivaled Bukowski’s – and saved my life, to some extent during my 30 years of heavy drinking, and even more so when I gave up drinking in order to lose over a hundred pounds in the wake of pulmonary emboli at the age of 52, and found a substitute for alcohol in the endorphins released by swimming (though badly), lifting weights (as I had from an early age), and occasional long walks.

My main point, though, is that athletic competition teaches you that you can always do more than you think you can – in any aspect of life, literary and academic even: I am, for instance, a very prolific writer. When I need to write fast, I can. And I knew I could quit alcohol when I had to, without going to any 12-step program or ever proclaiming myself an alcoholic. What does that term even mean? All such categories are designed to control us, pigeonhole us, keep us from being as independent-minded as we can be and should be. To humble us. Humility is a good thing, but humiliation isn’t. Self-confidence is.

You mention rooting for the black fighter against Rocky Marciano: Now, this may seem unrelated, but did/do you feel some duty to root for the underdog, and not just in sports? I’m not sure what it’s like in America with this sort of thing, but the British (and Irish) for example, always seem to take pleasure in supporting the underdog.

I would have rooted for Rocky Marciano because of his excellence if it weren’t for the Irish-Italian neighborhood rivalries of those days. Later, my best friends in high school, college and as teaching colleagues were Italian, and I consequently read voraciously in the Italian novels of Pavese, Vittorini, Moravia, Verga, Manzoni, all of them. I rooted against the Russians during the Cold War Olympics, but that didn’t deter my reading of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and the rest.

I root for some teams in solidarity with my kids. I root for the USA when we’re the favorite and when we’re the underdog. I become very chauvinistically American when my country is attacked abroad. But when the USA is not involved, I root for whatever place I’m visiting. Sometimes I do root for an underdog mainly for that reason, but I also hate to see a legend grow old and over the hill. So I often root for an “over-the-hill gang,” all the more so now that I identify with the aging gunfighter (though I’ve never fired a round of live ammunition in my life). My great film hero was and still is Shane – I’ve watched the movie more than any other. I’m an only child and according to psychologists who place an emphasis on the role of Birth Order, the only child, even more than the first-born, hates to see a king dethroned, or any kind of radical change.

I have my liberal sympathies, inculcated by an educated schoolteacher mother who was of an ‘enlightened’ bent way ahead of her time, but I’m not fond of the extremes to the left or right. Of course, one person’s extreme is another person’s mainstream. I’m a registered Democrat but more of an Independent, in fact, and I wish the Democratic Party had remained more libertarian and individualistic, and less socialistic and Orwellian.

A lot of my foreign policy is based on my experiences of human nature in the bars. I learned, for instance, that the person who is willing to fight is less apt to have to. I think that goes for countries as well. The more pacifistic the American public has become, the more wars we find ourselves fighting. I’ve taught courses in contemporary literary theory, but that doesn’t mean I swallow it whole – most of it derives from Marx, and I’ve seen the Marxist countries fail.

It’s assumed that one grows more conservative as one ages because one has more money, and it’s true that one hates to have one’s earned savings eroded by confiscatory policies, but it’s also because one has seen so many sociopolitical, psychological, and pedagogical theories fail in the course of one’s lifetime. Look at all the ‘growing-up’ in terms of political realities that Obama has had to do in just two-plus years. I’m glad he has moved closer to the center. I was never fooled by all his rhetoric anyway. The real racists were not those who voted against him because McCain was a much better prepared candidate for the office of the presidency, but those who voted for Obama only because he was black and because he told them everything they wanted to hear.

He’s been a quick learner – I have to give him that – but I’m afraid he’ll revert to his old ideological ways if he ever re-gains the electoral power of his first two years. I would have loved to have had a Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice to vote for, especially the latter. And I much preferred Bill Clinton to Hillary, and I don’t give a damn how many blow-jobs he got in the White House.

I don’t usually discuss my political opinions because some people will just use them as an excuse not to have to read a writer’s work, to feel superior to it because the author’s opinions are, in their view, so barbaric. Almost all the great moderns held political views that are unfashionable today. And it’s a lot of work to read them. So those views are great excuses not to invest the effort that an Eliot or a Pound or a Joyce demands, and that their work repays.

The Four Quartets is profoundly beautiful verbal-intellectual music, no matter what one thinks of God, royalty, or the House of Lords. And ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ explained intertextualism decades before the term was coined. I’m not a fascist, far from it, but I don’t dismiss great artists as “elitist” either.

That’s about all I have to say on those matters, though. I don’t politicize my teaching or my friendships. And I tell my students they can probably reach more readers and accomplish more with a well-written letter to the editor than with a sloganeering poetic rant. But they’re free to follow their own literary instincts. I don’t teach them what to write, but how not to write poorly.

Do sports teach something to a writer, as a participant or a spectator?

Sports teach us that competition is not a bad thing. Feminists prefer cooperation, and it is a necessary component, but neither America nor the western democracies have been better off since they became less competitive internationally. And most of us know that committees are far less effective in making decisions than are strong, confident, decisive leaders – those, at least, who are committed to making the best choices for their constituents. Washington, Lincoln, or Churchill, not Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, nor, it would seem, Saddam or Gaddafi.

The best editors and publishers I’ve had were individuals. As for committees, judge by the recipients of literary awards, and the advanced age at which those most worthy of recognition are finally accorded it. I think the feminists prefer committees because they’re good at dominating them. Whereas the women who have risen to leading nations have all emulated male decisiveness.

There are, or course, exceptions to every generalization. Please remember that you’re asking me to attempt generalizations. I’m doing my best to do so provisionally.

Are sports another release of tension, like drugs or writing or anything else? Or is it much less serious than that? Why do you support ‘a team’?

I choose my teams or individuals for a variety of reasons, I think, most of them fairly common and superficial: I root for the Lakers because they’re a Los Angeles team and I’ve lived here since 1964, whereas I rooted for the Rochester Royals when I was a kid, because I was living in Rochester. I was convinced to favour the Yankees not so much because I lived in New York State – Rochester is 350 miles from NYC – but because a young, athletic priest upon whom I based one of my novellas convinced me that it made much more sense to root for a team that never lost than for one of the many that seldom won. And the Yankees, with their storied tradition, have given me years of pleasure as a result of that – especially, though, in my 1950s adolescence when Mickey Mantle (my great hero), Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Billy Martin, and other colorful all-time all-stars were comprising their roster. I’ve rooted for the athletic teams of the universities I’ve attended and the ones I’ve taught at.

Furthermore, I enjoy watching sports and rooting for teams, although not as much as I enjoyed playing them – God, I wish I could still compete at basketball. I’m not as fanatical a fan as I once was, but I’m loyal to the Lakers and the Yankees, because they are a part of my personal history, and, more importantly, because rooting for a team is fun… a pleasure… which, as Coleridge understood, is the best reason for reading or writing poetry also.

There is also the camaraderie that sports provide, and the sense of continuity with our own earlier selves. Nor is that camaraderie homo-erotic. Trust me: there is no sexual pleasure – even of a cryptic variety – in slapping a teammate on the hip-pads – which are composed of a very hard and un-phallic plastic.

Heterosexuals have many faults – which have been amply enumerated by others, but a frequent though not universal gay weakness resides in the need to assert that everyone else is in some way or other gay also. In truth, the closets of the world are simply not that capacious. If diversity is a value, doesn’t that include heterosexuality as well?

What you say about sports relating us to our personal histories I find particularly interesting; is it the same with literature and your own writing?

My own writing is postmodernist, but my literary heroes are moderns: Yeats, Thomas, Auden, Hopkins, Hemingway, Faulkner, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Forster, Lawrence, Greene, Waugh, Frost, Eliot, Pound, Robinson, Stevens, both Cranes, W. C. Williams, Cummings, Jeffers, etc.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t enjoyed reading my contemporaries – hundreds of them, especially the novelists – I’ve read them all and taught 20th-Century British Lit and 20th-Century American Lit and Contemporary Literature at both the graduate and undergraduate levels for my entire career. I love Beckett, Byatt, Kureishi, Naipaul, Murdoch, Spark, Doyle, Roth, Mailer, Updike, Malamud, etc. all of them. That’s not even touching on the writers in translation, and the films of the New Wave that I was weaned on in the late 1950s and early 1960s or the earlier ones of the Angry Young Men. I saw them all… we all did… “we” meaning the students and writers of my generation. I side with the Modernists in their Aestheticism. I don’t believe in reducing art to a servant of society. I believe any demands outside of the aesthetic are secondary to it, and should be used for it, not catered to by it.

I know that’s not fashionable. So what?

Do you find yourself taking a dislike now to things you once enjoyed, perhaps a book or a writer or piece of music, perhaps? Or maybe the reverse, that you take a liking to something that once seemed unpleasant or simply bad?

I pretty much enjoy the same works I enjoyed the first time around. And new ones all the time. I don’t re-read many books. There are too many new ones. And my writing takes more time from my reading all the time.

Money has never influenced my writing significantly because I’ve never made significant money with my writing. I haven’t come even close to earning with my writing what I have for my teaching. Of course the writing contributed to promotions, travel, and such, but I never wrote anything for extrinsic motives that I wouldn’t have for its intrinsic worth anyway. I wouldn’t even have been any good at it.

Maybe literary wealth awaits me – though I greatly doubt it. But even if it did, to paraphrase Bukowski, it would be arriving too late to harm me much.

I’d use some of it to get back to Britain, Ireland, and Europe, though.

You’ve travelled quite a bit, also spending some time in the UK. What do you think differs in American and British appreciation of the arts?

I wouldn’t want to belabor our differences, because we are obviously more alike than different. We love your comedies. We admire your verbal genius. I tell people that you don’t raise children who can’t write over there; you put them out on the passing ice floes.

You seem to enjoy us most when we are least like you: a Bukowski, for instance. Or a Fred Voss – good friend of mine – who writes poetry out of building airplanes.

Your present is more rooted in your past than ours, but you have a longer history and less immigration. You have done a wonderful job of preserving much less green land, whereas we have a tendency to squander our resources and our talents.

Your schools emulate ours, which is a tragic error. You are a little lacking in confidence at times, whereas we are cocky to the point of obnoxiousness. (In some of these things, the Irish may resemble us more than they do the Brits.)

You are more aware of class than we are – and I do think there is more opportunity for upward mobility over here still – though it may be endangered by our fiscal indebtedness.

I spent a semester on a teaching exchange to the University College of North Wales at Bangor. We (my wife and two young children and I) lived in Menai Bridge, with one of the most beautiful views that side of Big Sur, California. My wife loved it so much it may have spoiled California for her.

I’ve traveled about on various trips giving readings. We had a car during the teaching exchange but it was not very reliable. We had a good rental car for a month a few years later.

We’ve stayed in a lot of bed and breakfasts. We’ve been to most parts of England, a few days in Scotland, a couple of weeks in Dublin and Galway. I spent two-and-a-half months in England while on Sabbatical in spring 1980, mostly in London, with ten days in Paris.

We’ve spent significant time there and other places on the continent. To paraphrase Hanif Kureishi, London just about effing killed me, but those were my heaviest drinking days, and I was lonely for too many weeks.

I was first in England in, I think, 1971, early summer and late; again for five weeks in 1972; back for two weeks of readings while staying with John Mowat and his family in Hull in, I think, 1987; back for Wales, London, Dorset, and all over in 1989; five weeks in 1992, but having had a deep vein thrombosis getting on the Piccadilly line at Heathrow; a few days each in Dorset and London in 1997 (or 1998) and 1999 to participate in the Dorset Literary Festival for Dave Caddy’s Tears in the Fence magazine.

Many poems and stories in that, and many poems in Ambit and elsewhere and on Ragged Edge, Keith Dersley’s online mag and press. A play I co-authored, The Toad Poems, played for a week in Camden Town early last summer, directed by Donita Beeman, but I didn’t get over there for it. I hope it’s revived again soon.

Is good writing more than many different people saying largely the same thing, just in a different way? Is it a natural progression then that things get a bit more money-oriented in this environment of writing, where it becomes a kind of trickery to say the same thing in a new way? Does it need to be more?

There are almost infinite and unpredictable ways in which writing can be good, but finite ways in which it can be really bad. I’m not a terribly judgmental person in any arena except, I suppose, sports. And there are people who are simply assholes. But they generally elicit a certain sympathy from me, maybe because my wife considers me such a consummate asshole myself.

Is there a kind of writer that you don’t respect?

Any writer who manages to stick with it deserves a certain amount of respect. But who am I to presume any other writer needs or desires my respect anyway. I spend much more time doing things – writing included, of course – than I do thinking in the abstract about them. Entertaining abstract controversies that inhibit or restrict a writer’s writing is not my nature. The same for teaching. I like to get things done, and I like to have fun doing them, or afterwards at least. People waste a lot of time on matters that are just pure bullshit. Action cuts through the theoretical shit.

Do you think self-taught poets/writers somehow differ with students of the arts? What can each offer?

Ultimately we’re all self-taught because we can always accept or reject what our teachers teach us. I just try to help my students in any way I can, mainly by telling them what my own experiences have taught me. And to facilitate their learning from each other, from their reading, etc.

I also teach them some things about the techniques of poetry and fiction that would take longer for them to learn on their own. And to point them towards reading works they may enjoy and which may serve as models or stretch their minds. And their own works serve as models for and inspirations to each other. I emphasize positive reinforcement. I tell them to increase their vocabularies and to expand their syntactical arsenal. Most of the time the principles of good prose apply to poetry also.

I also try to get them to write more prolifically and to open their minds to the vastness of subject matter in the world and in themselves. To break through our self-imposed assumptions. Right now at the end of the semester, when I see some good poems I urge the writers of them to submit them to periodicals, and I show them how and I tell them to tell their editors that I urged them to do so. Once they start publishing their work and reading it publicly, they’ll find they can go forward with a new confidence. Success breeds success (as someone more concise than I once said).

So do you think it’s important for your students to get published? I mean, the main concern must be writing something worthwhile, or new, but is it then about having people read it? I presume it is.

I never require that any of my students seek publication. But many are grateful for me giving them the benefit of my 50-plus years of experience with manuscript submissions – and I allow them to say I urged them to submit their work, and I tell them what magazines I am publishing in regularly, and I tell them not to hesitate to say that I urged them to submit their work to these mags that do at least know something of my own work. Without this help from me, most of them would be paralyzed by ignorance of and fear of the submission procedures. They wouldn’t know where to start; they’d be afraid to embarrass themselves, etc. I just give them the confidence to make these first attempts at publication. When they succeed, they gain tremendous confidence, and their writing generally is strengthened by that. And even though the editors who read their work will range from experienced to novices, they will at least be more objective than the students’ friends will be. The “market place”, even for the little mags and small presses, is a more valuable immersion in the literary world than are the endless series of “literary sewing circles” out of which many writers never escape. They become addicted to these captive audiences.

You know the statistics show that most graduates even of MFA programs stop writing shortly after graduation. Having to earn a living is part of it – it often leaves no time for writing. And when you don’t write regularly or ever get any success experiences, you lose confidence in your abilities.

So I try to help them get actually involved in the world of publishing IF they want to.

And I try to teach them everything I know in my creative writing classes, because I know very few of them will continue writing for very long – or will just “write for themselves,” consigning their work to boxes or drawers… forever!

They can learn a lot besides how to write poetry or stories in these classes – about literature, about society, about what and how to read, about how to get along with others, or how to retain your individuality under social pressures, about themselves – their repressed lives… I’m glad my degree was in literature not creative writing, but today with the politicization of literary study, it is less useful for a writer. At least in creative writing they learn the nuts and bolts of writing.

With the explosion of online journals in recent years, how do you view this fanning out of writing/writers, put into boxes and published in niche publications, where the readers and editors keep everything within the same style and limits? Is that a problem? As people on the Internet tend to read or look at things they are familiar with or ‘like’, is there less of a chance for someone to encounter something new unexpectedly?

The good side is that writers can get their work into at least this form of ‘print’ who might never have been able to break into print in the past. There are fewer dictators of taste and such… and when I started publishing, there were very few mags and thus the editors of the ones that did exist were very powerful. And I managed to step on almost every one of their toes: at APR, Esquire, The New Yorker, Poetry, etc. – it’s amazing how many shit lists I got on in spite of my existing in obscurity. And those editors never died!!! I got on The Shit Lists of The Immortals. So I was very grateful for the emergence of so many new magazines, some of them with brilliantly independent editors such as Marvin Malone at The Wormwood Review.

The downside of course is that there is so much more work out there that the wheat can get lost in the chaff. And I think there has been an overall decline of ‘taste’ as a result of that, and of performance poetry, of self-publishing, etc. But somehow the cream does seem to rise if not to the top than not too far from it. And sometimes that happens faster; and sometime more slowly. But a writer has to have faith that somehow it does eventually happen.

I’ve fought against joining the cybernetic world, but, ironically, the friends who have dragged me clawing and screaming onto the Net seem to have done me an enormous favor. I seem to have somehow achieved some modicum of a reputation in the last couple of years. And at the young age of 70!!!

With the web journals it seems (probably only from the ones I am reading) that a lot of writing is concerned with throw-away observation (like the worst of comedy) or a ‘timely’ aspect (like in journalism) and aimed more and more at a temporary effect. Nothing seems timeless from what I read. It becomes more of a titillation, an entertainment (my writing included, unfortunately). This is maybe the result of so much writing published all of the time that stories/poetry must have this ‘angle’ that is for a moment refreshing, but cannot be sustained. But perhaps things were only ‘timeless’ when there was not as much of it being written.

You’re no doubt onto something, though the trivialities you note may have been endemic to postmodernism itself. The modernists were such giants. I guess after WWII the whole literary world craved a bit of a rest – which has turned into a 70-year snooze.

Postmodernism contributed self-reflexivity, but the modernists were anticipating even that, and the modernists dramatized subjectivity and relativity, whereas the postmodernists took them to absurd extremes: to the extent that they mainstreamed the marginal, and marginalized the mainstream, though the marginalized themselves naturally rejoice at that.

I just finished re-reading Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, and having read it (too hastily) and taught it when it first came out. This time I was in awe of it. Talk about a giant. And last night I saw Woody Allen’s Moonlight in Paris, which is a wonderful film, only flawed (for me) by his jejune and stereotypically uninformed parody of Hemingway – when he first comes on screen, that is – gradually his greatness begins to emerge in spite of the filmmaker’s intentions.

I defend Woody Allen’s films, because he’s been an obvious victim of simpleminded feminist and puritan hostilities. But the film is pure parody of the Giants of the 20s, so as funny and engaging and appealing as it is (and God, the women are beautiful!), it makes one aware of how less a giant the parodist is, than are the giants he is caricaturing.

Parody was really the name of the game for the intertextualizing postmodernists, myself included. I’m glad I wrote in so many styles and moods that not all of my work is guilty of it.

I think a lot of people who haven’t liked [Woody Allen’s] recent films will find Midnight very hard to resist, as romance, as nostalgia, as fairly gentle parody. I’m one of them, but I also saw it in a romantic mood in romantic company, and I’ve long been a sucker for the 20s, like most of my literary generation. I’m guessing that for younger generations the 60s might fill that bill. Then again, with their flattening of history, and the pedagogical ‘privileging’ of the synchronic/ahistorical viewpoint over the diachronic/historical one, they may not even be aware that there were decades before their own.

Earlier in your career, did you ever feel as if you were following any writer in particular, as some writers have (becoming heavily influenced or obsessed by certain predecessors), before finding your own honesty/originality? Or did it come naturally?

There’s no question that I was influenced greatly by Edward Field first, in the 1960s, and a little later in the 1960s by Charles Bukowski.

Both were quintessential ‘Stand-Up Poets’, a term that suggests most of the qualities most common to poets of my ilk within my own lifetime. You could find it defined first in an article my former officemate here, Charles Stetler, and I published in the Minnesota Review in 1969, Volume IX, Number 1, entitled ‘Edward Field: Stand-Up Poet’.

Field’s first book had been entitled Stand Up, Friend, with Me. I discovered him through a poem, ‘The Bride of Frankenstein,’ from his second book, Variety Photoplays – the poem had also appeared in the New York Review of Books.

Field is still a good friend, and I consider him our greatest living poet. He splits the year between a rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village and a flat near Paddington Station in London.

Later, my friend and colleague, Charles Harper Webb, a great poet himself, published an enormously successful anthology in various editions, the most recent of which is Stand Up Poetry: The Anthology, from University of Iowa Press. I use it in all my poetry classes, even though Field, and Stetler, and I were co-editors of The New Geography of Poets, from U. of Arkansas Press in 1991 or 1992.

It was a lesser sequel to Field’s Bantam Press anthology A Geography of Poets, that sold 31,000 copies in a pocket book edition in, I think, 1977. It was the first truly decentralizing anthology of poets in the USA, because Field had discovered via his readings around the USA that poetry was no longer the possession of NYC and Boston. The spread of university creative writing programs and the underground little mags and small presses had combined to ignite that phenomenon. Another aspect of it was sometimes called “the mimeo revolution,” a precursor, I suppose, to the Internet revolution. It helped to popularize Bukowski.

Webb didn’t know we had invented the term “Stand Up Poetry” when we used it for our article – especially in the first couple of pages, but he credited us as soon as I called it to his attention and showed him the similarities in our summation and his brilliantly organized and explicated introduction to his anthology. Field’s first Geography introduced many of us young California poets to a national audience for the first time.

Ron Koertge and I had become great friends at the University of Arizona in graduate school – I was there 1961-64 – and we were very much both in a learning stage, and much of what we learned was from each other – an ongoing mutual influence which continued into The Wormwood Review, which was the best poetry magazine of my lifetime, from the 1960s to the death of its editor, Marvin Malone, in the mid-1990s.

I’ve mentioned that I was inevitably influenced by poets I had learned to love earlier – Dylan Thomas, E. E. Cummings, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath – not to mention all the poets I read in graduate school and as a lifelong teacher and reviewer of literature. But Ron, Edward, and Buk (or Hank, as he liked to be called) were major influences from among the living. And so were many fiction writers such as Hemingway, Barthelme, Brautigan, and such, because my poetry was often highly narrative or dramatic – lots of dialogue(s).

Though it is your career, have you found yourself taking writing less or more seriously as it has gone on? Or has it been the same throughout? I guess I am speaking here of futility and purpose.

I always took my writing seriously, and I always wrote a lot and published more and more all the time (from about 1993 on), but my writing seemed more casual in the early days – more youthful, naturally – and I still write a lot of what I call my “smart-ass poems,” as they occur to me, and because my younger readers demand them, and I virtually invented the very short poem – one of mine was three words – although I got the idea from Norman Mailer’s collection Deaths for the Ladies, but I don’t think he wrote any poems after that, and I wrote thousands – I’ve published something like 4,000 according to one index that is linked to geraldlocklin.org.

But as my parenthood burgeoned – I have seven children by three marriages, and nine grandkids so far – my seriousness naturally increased – and I took my teaching very seriously, although I gave the impression of being highly unconventional and off-handed about it – and when I almost died of pulmonary embolisms in 1993, and quit drinking and hanging out in bars – the drinking life poems trailed off, and I began writing hundreds of ekphrastic poems in which I was often as irreverent as I had always been, but also celebratory, and mainly I used the art objects, or jazz or opera, etc. as starting points for poems that might end up who knows where, often in my memories or reflections.

I had always written books of travel poems and I continued to. But yes, one does begin to confront aging, death, and so forth, although I still tap dance vigorously at my poetry readings, and I toss in a Lady Gaga medley.

So I would say that I take things more seriously now – especially my progeny and other loved ones. I had always taken my friends very seriously also. I wouldn’t call myself somber or saturnine, but I do pontificate more than I used to, though I’ve long been a somehow agnostic ex-Catholic, who definitely took Catholicism seriously as a kid. I was practically a theologian, though also immersed in athletics: I was co-captain of my high school football, basketball, and track teams in senior year, but I was also Student Prefect of the parish sodality (a youth organization, non-political).

But by the end of high school I was growing away from the church, mainly just tired of sexual guilt, but also under the influence of James Joyce, Graham Greene, and Italian novelists such as Silone, Vittorini, and Pavese – actually all of them, because I had a very literary and Italian good friend. And I also had a high school sweetheart, who would become my first wife.

I definitely mined my childhood and adolescence in my early, often experimental stories and novellas.

With growing amounts of disposable fiction being published, do you think writing has become something too much of a profession, a moneyed ends, rather than a sincere exploration that is merely a necessity for a writer? Perhaps it has always been this way. I often catch myself revering the things from before my time, imagining they were somehow better, though I guess there was also a lot of chaff then, too.

I do think we’ve lacked the giants of the modern period during the postmodern period, but on the other hand we’ve had a lot more extremely good writers in the last 60 years than in the previous 50. Think of Iris Murdoch and A.S. Byatt alone, how many excellent and many-layered novels they produced, and Martin Amis, David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury, Roddy Doyle, Kureishi… I could go on endlessly, and what pleasure I took from them, and maybe they are a bit long in the tooth now – or worse yet, a bit dead, and maybe I haven’t found as many younger writers I enjoy as much, but their own generation probably enjoy their writers as much as I enjoyed mine.

My former officemate, Chuck Stetler, and I created a course, ‘Fiction Now’, and took turns teaching it for years, and we changed the reading list every semester, and we loved the books and the students loved the books, and we never came close to running out of current books to teach. And even in my graduate seminars in 20th-Century British Fiction and in 20th-Century American Fiction, we sometimes studied a neglected modernist in detail, but more and more I just assigned more and more of the current novels and let them do their papers on the modernists, whom I concentrated on in the double-numbered graduate/undergraduate period courses, the surveys as opposed to the seminars. So I don’t think the novel is dead by any means but we may be waiting for a few rough beasts to slouch their way into print.

Is it dangerous for a writer to a have a philosophy, even for a time, despite that philosophy changing? This brings me back to the message. Is there a place for a message? Or is it all eventually forgotten and lost to inculcation or early education and prejudices?

I think I’ve already noted that there have always been great novelists with a message – Tolstoy, Dickens, most of the Victorians, most of the writers of the 1930s; it’s just that for later readers the messages that were most topical when the books were printed are of least importance to later readers.

The same with poetry: who really cares about the politics or religion of Hopkins, Yeats, Auden, Thomas, Browning, Arnold, etc.? The fiction lives by its stories, not its messages, and the poetry by its music not its messages. But a message for its own generation can be one level of the work – it’s just ultimately not the most important one. No matter what the theorists tell us, there are such things as aesthetic universals – they are just not to be narrowly implemented.

Find a novel or novella you really like, and imitate its structure. I did that with Miss Lonelyhearts, and it served me very well as a starting point and scaffolding for an early novella of mine that I still like a lot. I used Nathanael West’s structure for my own characters and story.

We all learn by imitation. Look at Lady Gaga and Madonna. Look at Ulysses and the Odyssey.

Two messages that have stood the test of time – unfortunately – are those conveyed by Brave New World and 1984: the totalitarian carrot in the first (Soma, or drugs in general) and the totalitarian whip in the latter (threatening the greatest fear of the individual or the group).

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Dan Fante is one of the last surviving writers of his generation that could be called a “maverick”. Having spent years in his own personal wilderness, and never touching a typewriter, he spat his years of alcoholism and excess into a maelstrom of novels, poetry and plays. Continuing the tradition of Hubert Selby Jr. (his literary hero), Charles Bukowski and the works of his legendary father John, he has written about the sleep paralysis of the American nightmare from the perspective of someone who has lived through it.

Born in Los Angeles, Fante briefly studied acting at UCLA before going on to hold a number of low-end jobs as he went cross-country to New York working, amongst other things, as a telemarketer, private investigator and cab driver. He settled there, for a time, during the 60s. During this period he wrote plays for radio and local theatre groups and got heavily into drinking and drugs, giving up on his burgeoning career in the early 1972.

Years later and sober, he has written two critically acclaimed plays, both staged in the late 90s: The Closer (aka Boiler Room) and Don Giovanni. His debut novel, Chump Change, was the first of the Bruno Dante saga and a struggle to get published; he sent the manuscript to a slew of American publishers who all rejected it, before finding a home for the work in France.

He recently published Bruno Dante’s latest installment, 86’d and a second poetry collection, Kissed By A Fat Waitress.

What kind of writer is it that you do not respect?

That’s simple. Those who write simply to titillate. Disposable entertainment fiction.

How do you feel about ‘writing’? Are there particular things that have kept you going?

My father John Fante, felt being an author was nearly a sacred calling. I share that with him. A good book can change a life. I continue to try to write that kind of book.

Before you started to actually write, was it something that you felt always seemed to be waiting for you?

You mean other than insanity and death? It took years to scrape the crust of self-hate and madness away. Years. But even as a bewildered young guy I always wanted to write. Writers were my heroes.

What is art worth? What is life worth? Do they amount to the same thing?

Art is experience – a place visited beyond the reasoning mind. The sense of knowing and experiencing someone’s beauty and passion with awe and admiration. No, they are not the same thing.

Is there a purpose, an underlying intent, to your writing?

Any writer worth his own ashes believes that his words can change the world.

So, there is something worth believing in?

Yes! The living knowing of one’s self as a spiritual entity. The celebration of breathing in and out. All experience devolves to gratitude.

Should a writer have a ‘point’, apart from honesty?

That people will understand his heart. Books are scribbled notes sealed in a bottle and then thrown into the sea.

You have previously mentioned the influence of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but what else was it that drew you to playwriting? Is there something in it that cannot be done with another medium, say poetry or prose?

Yes, surely. The medium of speech has a profound impact. Live theatre – good live theatre – reaches passed the mind to touch the heart.

Have you considered film? Can it offer anything?

Yes. But ’film’ by its nature is a collaborative effort, which I believe compromises the experience. But there are not wonderful films nonetheless.

What about television?

I don’t know. I don’t look at television. But I do know that it poisons the brain and trivializes all emotion.

Have you ever thought about going back to acting?

Yes. Creating a character on stage can be magical. The experience of inhabiting someone else’s body and emotions is singular and amazing.

You once said, “My secret weapon is my anger”. What are some of the things that make you angry?

The ‘screwing’ of the American people by the merciless engine of corporate greed really does piss me off – when I let myself think about it. The USA has changed the Europeans view themselves. Out of control Capitalism is the plague of the millennia.

Do you feel as if you have to stand by your words or defend them against critics?

People ‘get’ my stuff or they don’t. Most critics are paid to think and not to feel. I don’t write to please critics.

Who is worthwhile to read (poetry, prose or otherwise)? Is Selby still important to you?

All of it. Selby shined a light into the darkness of my mind and allowed me to become friends with my mind.

How do you stave off complacency in your work?

By continuing, hopefully, to get better as an artist.

When you write, does it flow quickly? Do you re-work a lot?

I write two hours a day, six days a week – unless I’m really hot and on to something. I begin my day by going back in my manuscript three or for pages from where I left off. I start by re-working, then let my mind take me forward.

Do you think an audience must be great for a writer to be great, or the other way round, or neither?

Writers are village square evangelists. An audience is essential.

So do you think it is a writer/artist’s duty to wake up the audience?

Oh yes.

How does one escape the guilt that bores into the mind of a Catholic?

By re-experiencing the notion of God.

Was Catholicism a big part of your upbringing?

Sin and personal damnation was a bigger part.

And the publishing world? How did those initial rejections affect you?

A writer must believe he has something worthwhile to say. When he comes to know that his work is important, then nothing will stop him.

Does the ‘truth’ have to be marketable to get published?

The truth is always marketable if not always pleasant.

I sense some kind of compatibility with yourself and Bukowski’s opinions on contemporary literature that it is airless and false. Would you agree with something like that?

For the most part. Bukowski despised convention. It fed his rage and his work.

What function did drugs have for you earlier in your life?

Without booze and drugs I’d be dead. It helped for years – until it didn’t.

Is originality as important as honesty in writing?

Good writing is always original. Honest is always original.

What would a snapshot of modern life look like to you?

Chaos that leads back to the quest for peace of mind. The more fucked-up things get the closer we get to real metamorphosis.

And how about your own?

I spent the first half of my life pouring gasoline on myself – in search of a match. This second half I’ve set to music… Too many questions but all quite well asked.

Chris Hall revisits J.G. Ballard’s childhood and finds the future in the past

The opening of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984) has young Jim watching British war propaganda films with fellow choristers in the crypt of the Holy Trinity church in Shanghai, which was designed by George Gilbert Scott and built in the 1860s and is due to reopen this year after extensive renovations. Ballard himself attended the church’s prestigious boys school, a 1920s Art Deco addition. It’s a nice thought that Ballard’s archive is going to be in the British Library, right next door to another Gilbert Scott building, what used to be the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras railway station in London, also recently restored to its former glory.

I was recently in Shanghai, researching a book about Ballard, and this was one of the many places from his childhood there (from 1930 to 1946) that I visited, including the Ballard family home on what used to be Amherst Avenue. It’s now another restaurant – the Xinyue Club – after some recent renovation work and, though internally much has changed, the structure of the house remains. Ballard described it as being in the “stockbroker style of the home counties”. A Chinese friend who lives in the city steered me there and we pretended that we’d come to take a look at the private dining rooms upstairs to hire for an event. Seeing what would have been Ballard’s bedroom as a “luxury and elegant private room” hammers home his belief that “reality is a stage set”.

It hit me while I was there that a great deal of those quintessentially Ballardian obsessions are seeded in Shanghai – gated communities, suburbia, his interest in Art Deco, etc. As Ballard himself said, the Art Deco buildings of Shanghai – the city is thought to have a higher concentration of them than even Miami Beach – seem somehow more modern than the steel and glass skyscrapers that tower above them.

Further south is Lunghua pagoda, which the Japanese used as a flak tower against the US planes and which features a lot in Empire of the Sun. The pagoda is oddly affecting when I finally chance upon it, and, like the Ballard house, it’s a very moving sight. Ballard wrote about the time shortly after his family’s internment: “During the American raids the pagoda had lit up like a Christmas tree, tracers streaming towards the low-flying Mustangs, but now its guns were silent and unmanned”.

From the ghost towers of Bangkok and the very real atrocity exhibition that is the War Remnants museum in Saigon, to the empty streets of Hong Kong the day after Chinese New Year and especially the drowned world of Brisbane, my trip had been a little too Ballardian for comfort.

Further Resources:

• Chris Mitchell: In Search of Ballard’s Shanghai

Published a few years before the works that made him a posthumous literary superstar, Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas is an evasive, hybrid beast. Ben Granger gets to grips with it

This arcane curiosity of a book – first published in Roberto Bolaño’s native Chile a few years before more his more famous and fêted works The Savage Detectives and 2666 – raises many questions about what literature is for. Nazi Literature in the Americas is a mock encyclopaedia, portraying a selection of imaginary 20th-century authors, South and Central American in origin with the odd Yank thrown in, most of them insane and quixotic, and all of whom are connected to extreme right-wing ideologies. Why? What effect is it seeking to create?

One answer might be absurdism. In real life no true collection of fascist Latin American writers really exists, at least not to the extent of the pantheon, or oeuvre on display here. When we see the immense consideration accorded to Italino and “Fatso” Schiaffino, two Argentine brothers who wrote lauded poetry, novels and social commentary while simultaneously leading both a football hooligan gang and a Galtieri-era death squad we are clearly entering into a brutal whimsy, a Carrolesque fantasy with no real parallel in reality.

Not all examples are as strange as the Schiaffinos and, as the meticulous details of these bizarre reactionary salon scenes emerge, surely the answer is really satire? But satire on what? That there was no real right-wing literary movement in Latin America could be seen as a sledgehammer battering of the right, pointing out the incongruity of buffoonish bigotry in the artistic soul. Of “soccer player futurist” Silvio Salvatico, we hear a list of his beliefs: “the re-establishment of the Inquisition, a permanent war against the Chileans, the Paraguayans or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation, polygamy, the extermination of the Indians to prevent further contamination of the Argentinean race; a massive influx of migrants from the Scandinavian countries in order to effect a progressive lightening of the national skin colour, and the abolition of tax on artists’ incomes”. We also hear “he worked as a gossip columnist and copy editor for various newspapers in the capital, hung out in dives, and practised the art of the novel, which stubbornly declined to yield its secrets to him”. The often lingering implication in many entries is that the talent of these individuals is largely a figment of their own diseased imaginations. The ‘artistic temperament’ is the last refuge of the scumbag, a passport to endless selfishness and limitless cruelty, as displayed by many of the subjects here. The likes of Salvatico play at being the artist to sate their own sociopathy, talent is an afterthought, a hoped-for extra.

Yet, in reality, the most burning insight and talent can co-exist with unsavoury ideology. In early 20th-century Western Europe we really did have our right-wing literary heroes – T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis on this side of the Channel, Marrinetti on the other. Is Bolaño extrapolating on the perverse allure such artists have, and giving a farcical twist to see what they would look like in South American drag? (A recurring theme is how odd it is for the “mestizos” to follow Nazi cults of racial superiority while they themselves would not pass the Aryan test.) Certainly the demonic buccaneering Chilean Pedro Gonzalez Carrera, a trigger-happy adventurer offering his gun hand for the forces of Franco and the Fallange seems to echo the demonic buccaneering avant-swagger of Marinetti.

Bolaño himself said of the book “when I am talking about the right, of course I am really talking about the left” – a left to which he definitely belonged and yet was far from unafraid to criticise. In this sense the outrageous crassness and excesses of the characters on display could be seen as looking-glass distortions of their equivalent counterparts on Bolaño’s own political side. Ernesto Perez Mason for instance, a swaggering Cuban drunk who continually challenges foes to duels who are too scared to appear, and who secretes the acrostics “LONG LIVE HITLER” and “KISS MY CUBAN ASS” in his journalism seems like a fascist doppelgänger of Hemingway. Are these the real targets?

So perhaps Bolaño’s satire aims in two directions at once? And perhaps sheer absurdity? And maybe the competing streams are there to add to one straightforward torrent – to make the reader laugh. Humour is perhaps the most subjective value of all, and it certainly seems true to say that if you don’t find the book funny, you will not see its ‘point’. Plenty of reviewers have sat po-faced through the work and given it the negative notices they believe it deserves, Alberto Manguel in The Observer being just one of many nay-sayers, the good burghers of the Amazon review corps seem similarly non-plussed.

Myself, I found it hilarious. The necessarily flat pomposity inherent to the encyclopaedic style contrasts brilliantly with the demented and demonic behaviour in display. Hazlitt wrote that we laugh because we see the gap between things as they are and as they should be, and the conceit of the encyclopaedia is highly suited to bringing out this contrast, with the gaps of what is unsaid just as vital as the facts on the page. Of the troubled monarchist Mexican poet Irma Carrasco and her ‘tempestuous’ relationship with Communist husband Barreda, the bare biographical facts belie the violence beneath.

In 1953, after another reconciliation with Barreda, who had become a renowned architect, the couple travelled to the Orient: Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines and India inspired Irma to write the new poems of The Virgin of Asia, steely sonnets fearlessly probing the open wound of modernity. The solution, it now seemed to her, was to return to 16th-century Spain. In 1955, she was hospitalised with various broken bones and extensive bruising.

The reactionary Brazilian Catholic philosopher Luiz Fontaine De Souza and his crusade against the figures of the Enlightenment yields a similarly muted gap of anguish, as he follows his Refutation of Voltaire, Refutation of Diderot, and Refutation of D’Alembert with further works on this well-thumbed theme. In 1930, A Refutation of Montesquieu (620 pages) appeared and, in 1932, A Refutation of Rousseau (605 pages). In 1935, he spent four months at a clinic for the mentally ill in Petropolis. De Souza later bites off more than he can chew with his refutation of Hegel and Marx.

Fontaine was, irrefutably, well versed in French philosophy (his command of the language was excellent) but not, by any means, in the work of the German philosophers. His “refutation” of Hegel, whom he confuses with Kant on several occasions, and worse still, with Jean Paul, Holderlin and Ludwig Tieck, is, according to the critics, a sorry affair.

Again, it is the dry staid bibliographic tone surrounding it which makes this passage so funny. Well, for me, at least.

And yet the themes go a fathom deeper than that. With his expertly crafted idiosyncrasies Bolaño has created another universe here, a breathing, thriving world. Bolaño has been accused of the solipsistic sin of self-reference – writing about writing – and perhaps nowhere could that accusation be more accurately levelled than here. Yet by featuring windows on other authors’ narratives Bolaño fashions a dream bridge between different minds, creating a eerie universe of shared perception, in a way truer to life than linear narrative. And in the more bizarre and outré landscapes forged by such damaged misanthropes as Zach Sodenstern (a science fiction writer whose immensely popular Fourth Reich series imagines a noble tribe of Caucasian barbarians reconquering a post-apocalyptic US), Bolaño conjures up the tormented demons of the mind which can give life to real-life nightmares. “The sleep of reason produces monsters” said Goya. In showing the beasts stalking the reason-starved imaginations here, Bolaño shows these monsters can be as seductive as they are bestial.

The far-right is only the secondary subject here. The real focus is the literary world and its feuding literary journals, and cliquish literary societies are distorted but recognisable replicas of those Bolaño himself must have known. The strange self-destructive paths the authors travel down also seem to have an anchor in the realities of Bolaño and those around him. Bolaño was a heroin addict, which may have contributed to his early death aged 50. Different methods and different pathways to be sure, but Bolaño and the buffoonish monstrosities on display here are gripped by the same urge to self-destruct, and to write. They are blood-brothers under the scarred skin.

In real life, as a subversive Chilean leftist, Bolaño was at real risk of torture or even murder at the hands of the country’s right-wing putschist tyrant Pinochet. For him to identify with these monsters, the spiritual brothers of his oppressor – is a strange game, playfulness at its most unnervingly masochistic. The final chapter, on Carlos Ramirez Hoffman, takes a different turn. Longer than the other entries, the writing takes a more straightforward novelistic style, and the narrator is Bolaño himself. He spends the chapter tracking Hoffman, a lauded poet now gone to wrack and ruin and a retired killer in league with Pinochet’s death squads. As Bolaño seeks him out, and the more passages open into more conventionally striking prose unconstrained by the bibliographical format in previous chapters, we see a strange, eerie fruition of synthesis, the encyclopaedia breaking out into the world. The epilogue of characters, books and journals only serves to complete the creation of this dark universe.

This work is not a satire, not a comedic whimsy, not a dark jaded quasi-autobiography. And yet it is all this and much more, a schizoid laugh as much as a peer into the abyss. Bolaño has been the posthumous literary sensation of these past few years and I’ve yet to read his more lauded works, 2666 and The Savage Detectives, put off probably by both their length and fashionability. After the weird brilliance I found in this work, I await their delights with wonder.

In her essay ‘Facing Reality’, Marilynne Robinson likens our present model of the world to so much ‘floorsweep’ – the meagre skimmings from a hundred years’ worth of economics, history, technology merged into a seamless narrative. It is a “collective fiction”, she thinks, and underwritten by its authority we vote, send our children to school and earn our living – but it is a “poor” contrivance which no one would believe in “if we did not want to”.

That narrative is the nightmare from which the novels of Joan Didion are trying to awake. Existing somewhere in the flotsam of Robinson’s sweepings – “the hot white empty core of the world” – they experience a kind of high anxiety over cause and effect. Dread-filled protagonists uncertainly, endlessly, encircle the “might, could, would, did, did not” against backdrops of deserts and equatorial islands – vanishing points where story lines never meet. Taco Bell and abortionists, film directors and arms dealers, newspapermen and CIA expats ally in some sinister, materialist continuum.

“What makes Iago evil, some people ask? I never ask”, thinks frazzled actress Maria Wyeth in Play It As It Lays. Languishing in rehab, she refuses to interpret Rorschachs – to see something in nothing. “They will misread the facts, invent connections, will extrapolate reasons where none exists”, she says of her evaluators. ‘NOTHING APPLIES’, she writes with electronic pencil.

Maria’s passive attitude in the novel has been criticised, but it is the modus operandi of her defiance. When we see her driving, conceiving “audacious lane changes, strategic shifts of gear”, on the spiralling multi-lane freeways of outer Los Angeles, she shares something with J.G. Ballard’s Vaughn in Crash – the lure of careering off a pre-constructed path, of escaping the science fictional, mass-produced narrative she no longer believes in.

But it is in the radical scenarios of Didion’s novel Democracy that this recalcitrance becomes most urgent. Characters in the novel often read as if they were not much more than an paper trail. They might be an entry in Who’s Who. They might be a label on a prescription bottle, a customer account at a bookstore. They might be a Vogue interview, a conversation heard in a Washington hotel lobby. They feel like a series of representations, ledger entries. And just like in any respectable totalitarian bureaucracy, those entries are frequently revised, downgraded, subject to imperfect recall (accidental or otherwise). CIA man Jack Lovett likes to sand his tracks with meticulous detail, never leaving the same name on bar tabs. He’s a man who leases one-bed rentals under the name ‘Mid-Pacific Development’. Obviously someone who stage manages world events can only leave the vaguest traces of his presence.

Meanwhile Inez Victor, who continues a long and doomed love affair with Lovett, struggles to maintain control over her biography. We see the novel slowly accrete into specifics, like a memory cautiously set down, as if it might at any moment be forgotten: “He said to her. Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor… Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor (who was born Inez Christian) in the spring of 1975”. The backdrop is the Vietnam endgame and the febrile Presidential campaign of husband Harry Victor. This is a world where nothing happens unless you read it in The New York Times. Watching a CBS broadcast about her life as a young girl, she hears about a childhood governess from Neuilly and how Inez was called Nezzie and how Nezzie spoke pidgin. She is silent: “There was no Mademoiselle. She had never been called Nezzie. She had never spoken pidgin. The governess from Neuilly had not been a governess at all but the French wife of a transport pilot who rented the studio over Cissy Christian’s garage”. Memory, Inez knows, is one of the first casualties of political and ideological posturing.

Covert stage-managing of events without leaving evidence and staying in control of the story… these seem like a writer’s concerns. And just as we are making this connection, Joan Didion herself enters the proceedings.

“Consider the role of the writer in the post-industrial society”, she turns to us and suddenly asks. “Consider the political implications of both the reliance on and distrust of abstract words.” Then the character Joan Didion reads The Los Angeles Times and The San Francisco Examiner and finds the same kind of Orwellian revisionism that we noticed earlier: “Tank battalions vanished between editions. Three hundred fixed wing aircraft disappeared in the new lead on a story about the President playing golf”. Environments are reorganised, individuals transposed, history restaged at a moment’s notice. The world is Authored. So is that the role of the writer in the post-industrial society? Or is it – paradoxically – the reverse: to challenge the authority of Narrative, to show us that history is a hoax, a bride stripped bare?

What started as political exposé is now something more complicated. Democracy is its own problem. The novel becomes conscious: it knows that to narrate is to corrupt. She asks us to “consider her own involvement in the setting”, and what ‘atmosphere’ results. There are puzzling questions about the implications of using the autobiographical third person. “Call me the author” she writes (recalling Melville), as if that were only a stand-in, a label to be discarded later for something more conclusive. Perhaps negotiator might be a better word? Through this narrated self, direct experience becomes mediated experience. Her ‘I’, just like Inez’s ‘I’, is destined to be a commentated ‘She’: a sometimes suffocating, disruptive imposition of one identity over another, but also possibly a sometimes open and reflective collaboration. Thus Democracy.

 What remnants, fragments are left over from this obliteration? If Democracy is about resisting narrative, it is at other times fascinated with the incantatory power of nouns, details. As if ineluctable matter is all that there were. Forget verbs, context. Nouns are immobile, context free. There are lists: “iridescence observed on the night sea off the Canaries, guano rocks sighted southeast of the Falklands, the billiards room at the old Hotel Estrella del Mar, a particular boiled beef lunch eaten on Tristan da Cunha”. Elsewhere there are “Brown-and-white spectator shoes, very smart. High heeled sandals made of white silk twine, very beautiful. White gardenias in her hair on the beach at Lanikai. A white silk blouse with silver sequins shaped like stars”. There is the list of cruise ships’ names Inez compiles. The Pacific functions as a tabula rasa – a vast stage upon which the fiction of US post war ideology was imposed. And then there is the final note she writes to explain her decampment to Kuala Lumpur: “Colors, moisture, heat, enough blue in the sky”. Those things alone, she explains, are “four fucking reasons” to stay.

Didion seems to have reached the same impasse as the ‘detonation theorists’ working out at the atolls in the Pacific, one of whom, Lovett tells Inez, was “a pretty fair Sunday painter”. But he could never quite paint the “nuclear pink of the dawn sky” after a shot. “Just never captured it,” Lovett tells Inez, “Never came close”. Didion might advise this artistically inclined physicist that he will never succeed in composing an accurate picture, and that it isn’t the point. The real trick is simply to note the debris patterns, particle trajectories, ignition sequences, fallout clouds – the dust that rises when a floor is swept.

“I felt savaged a bit by the whole thing… Hunter was in the middle of institutionalising his mother at the time, for her drinking. Great lady, by the way. Met her once, she had this kind of drinks zimmer frame with all her requirements in it. Very useful.”

Ralph Steadman is recounting his first meeting with Hunter S. Thompson. That assignment, later recounted as The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved, was the first foray into Gonzo journalism. This broke enough moulds to pave the way for Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, which followed a year later.

The Kentucky stint was a trial-by-fire nightmare. A life threatening liberty risking menace that only a sick fool would want to repeat. Thompson really did empty a restaurant by firing mace about.

“Only a few squirts,” Steadman blithely recounts. “You don’t need very much of that stuff.”

On the subject of the Kentucky project, no, he isn’t sorry he never got to write ‘Fuck The Pope’ on the side of a huge yacht in spray paint. I felt I had to ask, as it seemed such a great idea.

“I’d have been jailed if I’d done that, and never got back into the country. And then I wouldn’t have worked with him all those other times.”

There in a nutshell is the flipside of Hunter S. Thompson’s other ego, Ralph Steadman, the artist responsible for illustrating much of HST’s prose. A more rational, less chemically enhanced soul, to be sure. Ink drop for ink drop, one of the few people to be Thompson’s match. In his field he is the equivalent of HST.

He was also someone who could be put through many trying, sordid ordeals, produce wonderful work and then come up smiling with the words, “Great, when can we do this again?”

This probably why Ralph insists on stating, very clearly, that Thompson was a son of a bitch. He was a mean bastard, and he always was.

That much is made clear early in the conversation. It is also apparent in Steadman’s book, The Joke’s Over, a behind-the-scenes look at life with one of American letters’ most dissolute, honest and crazy souls. This had to be worth recording for posterity, and it’s delightful that the Steadman brand of (written) invective is lucid, evocative and even generous. He recounts the details behind some of the finest American writing of the last century.

Assignments would typically start along the lines of: “Ralph, you filthy perverted pig. I want you to draw something for me, Ralph. Only you would know how to do this. I need you to draw absolute evil”.

That’s an odd way of talking to friends but it creates an allure, a solid bond of piss-taking, menace and curiosity. I try and dig for a little background on the Thompson bloodline. Steadman is effusive in tracing Thompson’s lineage back to Scotland (via Manchester, by the way).

“Incidentally,” he asks, “have you heard his voice?”

At this point, a tape is played down the phone. A bizarre rumbling patois barks out, roughly a third of which is coherent. I catch the words “Time magazine” and “masturbating.” The rest is seething angry gibberish and static. It doesn’t sound Scots, though. More like how Badger in Toad Hall might’ve sounded if he’d been cornered by weasels while drunk.

Trying to define something like Gonzo is difficult. For the uninitiated, it means basically getting horribly shit-faced, mingling with the subject of a journalistic assignment, provoking them to bile and incest, disappearing from town looking half dead, and then recounting the matter with a twisted, mocking style.

One point Ralph emphasises is how funny a writer Thompson was, and this cannot be overstated. Certain types of people miss the astoundingly keen, precise reportage because the drugs and rage act as a screen. This is a damn shame. The drugs and rage are the extra spicing. Also the social justice. HST cared for an America that is now in retreat, the flag he proudly draped round his shoulders degraded in his eyes by Bush’s time in the White House. It’s a shame the mean bastard’s dead.

Talking to his artistic enabler underlines all the more how much of an absence that proud raving figure has left. The two fused magically. Without Steadman, there would still have been Thompson, but it wouldn’t have been as brilliant. Equally as sure is that Steadman hasn’t had his share of the credit. Many American readers believe that HST did the pictures himself, despite the signature.

Satire is a sore point to Ralph. He feels ripped off by Spitting Image. Apparently Roger Law swiped the, well, spitting. Terry Gilliam also took certain cues from Steadman’s biliously nibbed arsenal. Apparently Michael Palin’s been… well you know… the whole ‘which circles do you move in?’ type of situation. Those doors never opened for him.

At this point I feel a little sorry for Ralph. When I told him how I first read Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, after seeing its elegantly warped, intriguing cover, he recounts how this threatened Thompson. The drawings pull at the reader, providing some hilariously twisted insight in the depravity being spewed out onto the pages. It seems this cut a sight too near sharing credit for Thompson, who made Ralph suffer for this apparent slight.

At a push, and finely recounted in The Joke’s Over, we can see real affection between the two men. Also, a rare instance of the author being shamed. Thompson apologised with sincere humility for the time he almost killed Steadman with an accidental shotgun discharge. That may sound only sensible, but do bear in mind the vast weight of things he didn’t apologise for. Only rare types can get away with that.

“He created for himself a mountaintop and never really lived up to it. He gave himself a peak. He was the same way with drugs, always wanting to get back to that high spot. His approach was, ‘I’ve got to write it as I’m going – each step is another sentence’. But after all that, when it came to putting these things together, it seemed right and natural that I should do the work”.

At this point, without any eliciting, Steadman gives his theory on why the good doctor, as Thompson liked to be known, committed suicide.

“He shot himself because he was afraid of an old people’s home, just being strapped in. He had a crazy dream where he couldn’t do anything, and this old woman was crawling slowly closer to fondle his balls”.

So now you know: it was them mad old sack strokers in the old folks’ home that finally did for Thompson.

There is a parallel between that and the acid vision of his grandmother crawling up his leg with a knife between her teeth circa Las Vegas. Maybe such demented notions run in circles. Possibly the downside to having the insight of a demented loon is being a demented loon with insight into too many things.

On a personal level, Steadman is clearly tired but still running full tilt. He is engaged upon a variety of business ideas. Check out ralphfancygoods.com for all your elegant needs. He works exceptionally hard. The drive comes from wanting to establish his children in the whole art market thing. There is also the constant need to create. It would be easy to admire Steadman as a working definition of the term ‘artist,’ but graft often detracts from the end product in people’s minds. We’re a funny bunch, us artistic consumers.

–––––

Chris Wood is the author of Sherlock Holmes and the Flying Zombie Death Monkeys, available from Amazon.