I belong to the tradition of outsider,
like Whitman and Thoreau, Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac. As William Carlos Williams
remarked, being against the grain is solidly in the American grain, in the mainstream,
and at some point the mainstream writer fades into irrelevance and triviality and
the rogue, or underground writer is adopted into the canon.
Also, the underground
is often transgressive. Think of William S. Burroughs, John Rechy, and Hubert Selby,
Jr., or, more recently, Charles Bukowski, the Poet Laureate of Skid Row.
This is not an easy job to fill. Many are called but few are chosen. Most fall
by the wayside, or fall among thorns, or fall on barren soil. It's rare for someone
to create a body of work and invent a genre to present it in. Without any help.
Over the course of a writing life.
Whenever such a writer sneaks past the
gatekeeper it creates a succès fou, or runaway success. America has a passion
for the inédit, and the writer who crosses over from the underground to the
mainstream, in his lifetime, is celebrated.
The writer may die before this
happens.
These things run in cycles. Whenever the literary arteries get
clogged with glitz and hackwork, a strong dose of medicine comes along to clean things
out, like pouring lye down a sink. It foams.
In Ike's farewell address he
warned about a military-industrial-academic complex, where scholars and researchers
have been co-opted by the power of federal money. This has happened to writing in
America, in our time. Except at the fringes, the margins, beneath the underdog,
beyond the pale. That's where a writer like me will come from. Has come from.
Lafayette, I am here.
Deal with it. THE EMPTY NEST: OLD FOLKS'S FIRST 35
YEARS AS A WRITER makes recent left-wing tomes look tame, partisan, and narrow.
It's not just about the political and economic realm it's about literature, and culture.
What are our choices, and how do we recognize them, amid the fray.
Values,
how do we know what our values are?
What is good and what is not good,
Phaedrus? Need we anyone to tell us?
Yes. We need the artist. The outsider.
Unbought and unbossed. Ichor in his veins, or vitriol.