A reader
suggests that the collected works of Hubert Selby Jr. might “set [me] straight”
when it comes to literature and the ways of the world. “You’re stuck in the
classroom,” he tells this university drop-out (who returned after thirty years to get his long-deferred B.A. in English). He might be surprised to learn that I
read much of Selby’s work when the Grove Press imprint still carried the imprimatur
of bohemian transgressiveness. His first book, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), I read in high school. Selby couldn't write, not even on the remedial subject-verb-object level. He made
Studs Lonigan sound like Isabel Archer. I wasn’t immune to the charms of
literary slumming, and I served my time with Burroughs, Kerouac, Rechy & Co.
But even then, in my late teens, I never confused them with literature. They
were a late outbreak of the same readerly impulse that lead me in puberty
to science fiction. Their books were one-dimensional and badly written; their
morality, binary, with a twist: The bad was good and the good was bad. Later, I
came to the same conclusion after a brief encounter with Bukowski. The target
audience of such writers is the adolescent male. The same goes for Heinlein,
Asimov and the sci-fi crowd.
Four years
ago, Theodore Dalrymple reviewed Joseph Epstein’s Essays in Biography and A
Literary Education in the Claremont
Review of Books. He tells us Epstein, growing up in Chicago in 1950’s, was
attracted to “its rather extensive seamy side”:
“This was
natural enough in a young man who sought excitement as young men are apt to do,
but Epstein matured and came to understand that authenticity is not coterminous
with seaminess. A Bach cantata is no less authentic than a barroom brawl; and
he grew out of his attraction to life at the bottom of the urban pond when, at
university, he realized that there were finer things in life. He therefore
never distilled his early experiences, remembered with fondness, into an
anti-bourgeois ideology.”
Nicely put. “Authenticity
is not coterminous with seaminess.” I wish I had written that.
3 comments:
Yes, Epstein's literary criticism, his familiar essays, and his book-length meditations on human relations are the very model of things "nicely put."
As to writers without credentials, it would make for an interesting list. David Warren, Mark Steyn, and the self-taught Dalrymple come to mind as such writers who induce envy.
"Set [me] straight." It's always nice to receive condescension from devotees of petrific hipness.
Hate to be pedantic, but wouldn't 'coextensive' be better than 'coterminous'?
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