Bukowski in the New York Times

You've got to hand it to the Bukster: He's such an outsider that he
can't even make it into an "outsiders" group. To wit:

___________

April 17, 2005
'The Outlaw Bible of American Literature': The Rebel Establishment

By DAVID GATES

THE OUTLAW BIBLE OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
Edited by Alan Kaufman, Neil Ortenberg and Barney Rosset.
Illustrated. 662 pp. Thunder's Mouth Press. Paper, $24.95.

___________

Back in the late 1930's, when Philip Rahv made that famous distinction
between American literature's ''redskins'' (yawping Walt Whitman) and
''palefaces'' (finicking Henry James), he was talking about contrasting
sensibilities, not armed camps. But in the 50's, all hell broke loose.
With the publication of ''On the Road,'' ''Howl'' and ''Naked Lunch,''
the Beat writers and the establishment (which might have been smug
enough not to have realized it was any such thing) declared war on each
other, and the Beats were cast -- and certainly cast themselves -- as
the rebel-angels of a perpetual insurrection, recruiting from beyond
the grave (Blake, Rimbaud), trying to enlist neglected, potentially
sympathetic elders (Pound, Williams) and potential fellow travelers
(the Black Mountain school), proselytizing the young. Earlier American
misfits, from Melville through Robinson Jeffers, had probably figured
neglect was just their personal tough luck. Now misfits had a movement,
even if they were too cantankerous to sign up: a literary
counterculture with an alternative -- at heart, a Miltonic -- reading
of literary history. The entrance exam was largely a background check,
and nobody graded the written portion.

That's a short version of the history behind ''The Outlaw Bible of
American Literature,'' a new anthology put together by the writer Alan
Kaufman, the editor Neil Ortenberg and the seminal publisher Barney
Rosset, whose Grove Press and Evergreen Review gave a brand -- and more
important, a home -- to writers once deemed, for whatever reason, too
dangerous to handle. Some of the foreigners Rosset supported (Beckett,
Pinter, Ionesco) have long since become respectable, if no less
formidable. But most of the Americans he published (William S.
Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Terry Southern) remain outsiders. In part this
is because of the work itself: sometimes semipornographic -- though
seldom gamier than passages in John Updike and Philip Roth -- sometimes
antiestablishmentarian, sometimes hard to read, sometimes all of the
above. But in part it's because the idea of literary outlawry -- any
kind of outlawry -- is irresistible to the American imagination, which
may never outgrow its Puritan-Manichaean origins. In fact, for two
cents, I'd say ''The Outlaw Bible'' is a quintessential document of the
Bush Era, but that would hurt everybody's feelings.

At any rate, although the Rosset-sponsored rebels of the 50's and 60's
center this collection, the editors have opened the countercanon wide
to take in a full range of American Unclubbables. Mickey Spillane,
Sapphire, Waylon Jennings, John Waters, Greil Marcus, Margaret Sanger,
Dave Eggers, DMX: you won't find all of these people together in any
other book, ever. (The only folks not invited to the party seem to be
the far-right cranks: the militiapersons in ''The Turner Diaries'' may
be extralegal, but they're not outlaws.) It's just what an anthology of
alternative/outsider literature ought to be: all over the place. You
can read Woody Guthrie on hopping freights, Valerie Solanas on cutting
up men and Emma Goldman on doing prison time. As long as you're not
expecting that all these writers can write, there's no reason you
shouldn't have a good time.

But ''The Outlaw Bible'' is supposed to be good for you, and that's
what changes it from an entertaining miscellany to something worth
thinking about. Depending on where you sit, it's either a document
recodifying a revolution or a relic recyling an obsolescent
controversy. The editors' introduction, of course, argues for its
contemporary relevance: ''a revolt against a landscape dominated by a
literary dictatorship of tepid taste, political correctness and sheer
numbing banality.'' Your reflexive reaction is to leap to your feet,
whet your knife and take the tarp off the old tumbrel -- the problem
with numbing banality is, it doesn't numb you enough -- but then you
remember what year it is. True, goon squads of editors and critics
still keep the frightened masses buying superficially quiet fiction
about superficially quiet people by Alice Munro and Marilynne Robinson.
But some of the writers the regime is now grooming to take power look a
lot like insurgents themselves: indecorous, sometimes indecent, not
snobby about pop culture. Whatever you think of David Foster Wallace or
Michael Chabon, Gary Shteyngart or Jonathan Safran Foer, they're more
mermaid than Prufrock. For every current big-name writer who's
flatlining, I can name you one who's redlining. (But not here. We'll
talk after the show.)

Kaufman and his fellow editors seem to be fighting battles that were
over with half a century ago -- in romantic-sentimental language that
should have been over with half a century ago. ''Some of our best, our
fiercest, our most volcanic prose,'' they write, ''is not a
tongue-twisted Henry Jamesian labyrinth of 'creative writing' but an
outraged American songline of tear-stained revelation.'' I can't sit
still for James either -- who the hell can? -- but the editors ought to
visit some creative writing classes: these days, both Jamesian
maundering and Vesuvian spewing get the red pencil. And the attempt to
transplant bebop-era grievances to a hip-hop world -- ''in the grip of
Google and Wal-Mart'' -- only makes them sound clueless. This
alternative canon, they write, springs ''not from reality shows, Botox
or I.P.O.'s, but the streets, prisons, highways, trailer parks and back
alleys of the American dream.'' Jeez, why pick on Google, the most
useful tool since the stone ax? (That's how I found out it was Rahv and
not Lionel Trilling or somebody who'd thought up the paleface/redskin
thing. Took me 30 seconds.) And if you're all about the trailer park
and the prison, why dis Wal-Mart, which melds the two so perfectly that
writers should stop wishing it away and start hanging out there and
taking notes?

''The Outlaw Bible'' may be an uneven reading experience -- after
reprinting that bit of Bob Dylan's ''Tarantula,'' the editors have
their nerve to complain about tongue-twisted labyrinths -- but it makes
an absorbing exercise in taxonomy. Who exactly qualifies as an outlaw
and why? Let's try a little quiz. Without looking at the table of
contents, which two made the grade?

A) Bret Easton Ellis

B) Norman Mailer

C) Grace Paley

D) Raymond Carver

Time's up: B and C. Mailer qualifies because he's ''walked a tightrope
over public opinion, often with a dagger in his teeth'' -- possibly an
allusion to his stabbing his wife all those years ago? -- for his
''hipster manifesto 'The White Negro' '' and his ''literary sponsorship
of the criminal Jack Henry Abbott'' (who's also in the anthology).
Paley has published ''highly acclaimed collections of short fiction,''
but heck, so has Munro. Selling point: her antiwar, antinuke and
feminist activism. So what's wrong with Ellis and Carver? If you read
carefully the stuff I quoted above -- I can't blame you if you skimmed
-- you'll see why they don't belong in the club of those who don't
belong in the Club. Patrick Bateman in Ellis's ''American Psycho'' is
far more crazed and violent than Stephen Rojack in Mailer's ''American
Dream,'' but he's an I.P.O. kind of guy: out. Carver passes the
trailer-park test, but his flintlike precisionism doesn't fit the
lava-flow aesthetic. Outlaws are not anal.

Now that you understand the rules, here's Round 2. None of these
writers made it into ''The Outlaw Bible,'' but two of them might have.
Again, pick the outlaws:

A) Charles Bukowski

B) Susan Sontag

C) Jim Bouton

D) Ernest Hemingway

You're catching on: A and C. Sontag's politics are O.K., but she had
that mandarin thing happening: forget it. An outlaw can't be a fancy
pants. Hemingway gets points for his suicide and his slumming -- check
out that story ''A Pursuit Race''; it's got a guy shooting dope -- but
precisionism and the Nobel Prize are deal-breakers. Bukowski?
Absolutely: working-class boozer, volcanically prolific, neglected
except for a cult following. Bouton? A borderline case: I threw him in
to make it interesting. In ''Ball Four,'' he admits he was ''too
chicken'' to take the acid hippies offered him in Haight-Ashbury. But
any writer subversive enough to have the baseball commissioner tell him
he'd ''done the game a grave disservice'' -- and then to use the
quotation on his book jacket -- ought to get the benefit of the doubt.
Mailer himself once did the pans-as-blurbs thing in an ad for ''The
Deer Park.''

If you believe the editors' introduction, what makes an outlaw writer
isn't the writing but the life. ''The authors in this collection are
not greeted with book club invitations'' -- take that, Jonathan Franzen
-- ''and White House invitations.'' (In fact, by my count, four of the
contributors were invited to the White House at one time or another,
and they went like lambs; the excerpt from Dick Gregory's autobiography
even tells about it.) Rather, these writers ''often lead lives of state
pen incarceration'' -- rhymes with quiet desperation -- ''street
hustling, exile, martyrdom, and even murder at the hands of strangers.
.. . . William S. Burroughs . . . traveled to the edge of heroin
addiction and preserved in deathless prose what he found there. . . .
Iceberg Slim . . . ran whores before turning his hand to books. . . .
Ken Kesey . . . captured the American heart in great epic novels before
transforming its society through Merry Prankster revolution.''
Understand, I have nothing against heroin addiction, running whores or
transforming society -- it's all good -- but I wonder about the tacit
assumption that such experiences make your tear-stained prose sing.
Wouldn't revision be less time-consuming and involve less wear and
tear? And the four writers who get special mention -- Richard
Brautigan, Breece D'J Pancake, Donald Goines and F. X. Toole -- are
specifically singled out for having died: the first two by suicide,
Goines by murder, Toole a year after his only book appeared. This may
be too Zen to get your head around, but I'm tempted to think that not
living long enough to write anything at all might be a literary
outlaw's savviest career move.

I'm also tempted to make a really snarky transition here. But let's
just say that some of the old obligatories in this anthology -- the
canonical noncanonicals -- are starting to show their age. The scene in
Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg's ''Candy'' in which the heroine is
seduced by a hunchback -- ''With a wild, impulsive cry, she shrieked:
'Give me your hump!' '' -- must have been campy titillation four
decades ago. Now it's a museum piece: soft-porn whimsy half a cut above
Playboy's ''Little Annie Fanny.'' Better to concede that it used to be
a big deal and skip the actual experience. The seven-page excerpt from
Henry Miller's ''Tropic of Cancer'' -- in a Paris bordello, a Hindu
friend of Miller's naïvely defecates in the bidet -- proves to be an
endurance test whose only reward is a grade-B aphorism: ''For some
reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will
wade through blood.'' On the other hand, the two pages of Iceberg
Slim's ''Pimp'' still have a blunt force; even the musty slang --
''swipe'' is not a verb; ''cat'' is not an animal -- doesn't soften the
claustrophobic, heartless menace. And familiar passages from
Burroughs's ''Junky'' (''Bill Lee'' tries to kick morphine but kindly
Old Ike helps him backslide) and Kerouac's ''On the Road'' (naïve Sal
Paradise first meets holy motormouth Dean Moriarty) seem as fresh,
direct, involving and un-arty as the first time you read them: at their
best, these two are redskins fit to go up against the best the
palefaces had to show.

The more recent outsiders could also give the respectables a run for
their money. This may ruin Michelle Tea's Sunday, but how could you
improve on this passage from ''The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate
Corruption of One Girl in America,'' with its mix of strangeness and
photographic specificity? ''I was up with the sun in the toxic gold of
my bedroom. It took 12 cans of spray paint to make the walls glow like
that, my trigger finger cramped and sticky and I blew my nose gold for
a week.'' And the late Kathy Acker won my heart years ago with the
beginning of her 1982 novel ''Great Expectations.'' (''My father's name
being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make
of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Peter.'') This isn't
to say I can read her books all the way through -- she once said she
never expected it -- but in short takes she can be brilliant. Here's
part of the excerpt in ''The Outlaw Bible'' from her novel ''Don
Quixote'':

''I think Prince should be president of the United States because all
our presidents since World War II have been stupid anyway and are
becoming stupider up to the point of lobotomy and anyway are the
puppets of those nameless beings -- maybe they're human -- demigods,
who inhabit their own nations known heretofore as 'multinationals.' On
the other hand: Prince, unlike all our other images or fakes or
presidents, stands for values. I mean: he believes. He wears a cross. .
.. . Prince believes in feelings . . . and fame. Fame is making it and
common sense.''

Dreadful writing? Acker is well aware of that -- she's careful to let
us know she's done her tour of the literary canon -- and she revels in
her transgression against competence and in the Gertrude Stein effects
she gets when she's just blurting (''Fame is making it and common
sense''). And anyway, this is a persona: a voice brutalized and
rendered inarticulate by the same political and cultural mediocrity and
mendacity it's railing against. Over the top? Discrediting her own
case? Brilliant of you to notice. But it's part of her strategy to
affront responsible people. You may not like it -- she doesn't want
people like you to like it -- but you can't say it's not sophisticated.


Some of the best moments, though, come from the contributors with no
literary pretensions at all, just telling yarns, doubtless channeled by
ghostwriters. In ''The Godfather of Soul,'' James Brown writes about
hearing a knock on the door of his hotel room and finding a grenade
with his name painted on it. ''I'd seen enough grenades in prison and
in Vietnam to know it wasn't live, but it was the thought that
counted.'' And the selection from Waylon Jennings's autobiography has
the Platonic country-music anecdote, about Hank Williams:

''Faron Young brought Billie Jean, Hank's last wife, to town for the
first time. She was young and beautiful, and Hank liked her
immediately. He took a loaded gun and pointed it to Faron's temple,
cocked it, and said, 'Boy, I love that woman. Now you can either give
her to me or I'm going to kill you.'

''Faron sat there and thought it over for a minute. 'Wouldn't that be
great? To be killed by Hank Williams!' ''

I'm with the levelers on this one. That's not literature? All right
then, I'll go to hell.

Maybe in a hundred years, assuming there's anybody left around, people
will be amused at their great-grandparents' failure to grasp the
self-evident idea that what was called literature was a niche-marketed
intellectual property, and that the war between the outlaws and the
canonicals was another dispute between Big-Endians and Small-Endians.
(Half a dozen people with a taste for the recherché will even get the
allusion.) You can already see the borders getting porous. Final quiz:
where do you put A) Mary Gaitskill, B) Nicholson Baker, C) Neal
Stephenson, D) Jonathan Lethem? Canonicals or alt.canonicals? Or should
we call them, along with Foer, Wallace and so on, postcanonicals? (Just
plain ''writers'' would put the taxonomists out of business.) ''Don't
join too many gangs,'' Robert Frost advised us back in 1936, but for
the past 50 years or so, writers haven't had much choice: who you hang
out with, and who watches your back, defines what you are. ''The Outlaw
Bible'' still posits a literary East L.A., with palefaces and redskins
tagging and throwing up signs. With a little luck, we won't have to
live here much longer.