Despite his engagement with history, there’s no attempt to make a wide-screen historical panorama of his book—what enters of political and cultural context does so through individual experience. Wolfe also doesn’t trouble much over the question of censorship, despite the great battles over Ulysses, Lolita, “Howl”, and others that he’d certainly be capable of drawing into the mix. Apart from Henry Miller, and one other generationally important writer who comes in as a bizarre punch line, late in the book, Wolfe doesn’t drop names. He doesn’t situate his writer’s life in terms of movements or generations, apart from dividing his future efforts from the drab proletarianism he sees as the Marxist writer’s obligated legacy.
That the “labor” young Wolfe found for himself was to create exotic, gussied-up porn novels for the private delectation of gentlemen-collectors, or maybe just one gentleman-collector—talk about your lost worlds!—is a perverse irony of which the book makes its primary meat. Not that the memoir is salacious in any way (in fact, Wolfe can seem prim), but the situation forms a puzzle for the young writer, one the older Wolfe’s still captivated by: how did I get here and what could it possibly mean? The book is a portrait too, a poison-pen portrait, of the disappointed, pretentious, and disingenuous publisher/go-between for the porn novels, who Wolfe calls “Barneybill Roster.” In his luxuriant and fascinated distaste for this man, Wolfe himself resembles Henry Miller in the grip of one of his long denunciatory ranting episodes, like his great novella A Devil In Paradise. This brings us to the matter of the book’s style—the weird, cavorting, punning, ruminative, aggrieved and deeply humane style that was Wolfe’s own. Like many things in the book, Wolfe’s astonishing and peculiar voice is deeply individual, but also historically characteristic. It shows, to me, the way Joyce’s influence, but also Henry Miller’s, was essential in the development of so much colorful “voice” in mid-century writers as seemingly otherwise unallied, or even divergent, as Mailer, Kerouac, Brautigan, Pynchon, Philip Roth, and so forth. Wolfe, in his novels, never quite rose into that company—his restless and motley enthusiasms may have catapulted him in too many directions, and he may simply not have had the luck or even the desire to apply such fixity to the novelist’s art—he’s almost a monologuist, a stand-up man, like Lenny Bruce or Lord Buckley. But the fellow who writes, here, “Words are problem-prongs” was a great man of language, and it’s a gift to be able to read him again. Wolfe lives.
— JONATHAN LETHEM
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: Preporn/What’s What
CHAPTER 2: Old Blue
CHAPTER 3: Chew 32 Times
CHAPTER 4: Grinder Days
CHAPTER 5: Summoned, Saved
CHAPTER 6: I Write! I Write!
CHAPTER 7: I Meet My Maker
CHAPTER 8: Into the Haystack
CHAPTER 9: Village Nights
CHAPTER 10: Dry You-Know-Where
CHAPTER 11: Green Thumb, Black Leg
CHAPTER 12: Kissers, Tellers
CHAPTER 13: Somewhat Raw Materials
CHAPTER 14: Animal Sounds
CHAPTER 15: Family Man
CHAPTER 16: Cliffhanger
CHAPTER 17: Turncoat
CHAPTER 18: Henry’s in Town
CHAPTER 19: Up and Out
CHAPTER 20: Postporn/That’s That
To
Thomas Berger
CHAPTER 1
You never know exactly why you got hired for a job You put yourself in the boss’s shoes, you think back to what a fine froth of a boy you must have looked when first you bloomed into his office, babyass cheeks, glassied shoes, neatened nails, cutlery creases in the trousers, morning-mown hair, famously faked work record, panache of a free and independently wealthy soul who’s totally unpressured and going more for inspiration than occupation—you still don’t know.
I did my time in pornography, as this book will tell. In, not for. I didn’t print, illustrate, shoot, exhibit, sell, act in, pose for, or slobber over it, I wrote it, one fat and flamy volume after another. It was far and away the best job I’d ever, by age 24–25, found, and I thought myself smiled on by the gods, if smirkingly, and I prayed it might go on forever. But I never could figure out why they saw me as qualified for this line of work, and actually took me on, those being depression times—the soup lines long, and the competition for all jobs tough.
I went on the payroll well after the Munich Umbrella Caper and in the wake of the Maginot Line Erasure.
My stint in the porno business is not to be rated on the Richter Scale with nation mashings, no. But it could be argued, as here I won’t bother to argue, that all these items are parts of one picture, and maybe the business wouldn’t have been flourishing so, and therefore might not have had an opening for me, if there hadn’t been a lot of Munichs and Maginots happening and in the air.
I was a spic and span lad, all right, toothsomely shaved, barbered, shined and suited. A word about that word “suited.” I was wearing a hand-tailored suit of velvety cashmere, lined with what appeared to be a fabric woven of filamented platinum. When J. Press delivered it to the Yale student who’d had it made to custom, the cost was something like $250, enough in those days to feed a family for months. When it was sold to me by my friend Attilio, the Western Union messenger boy, days after it had been handed to its original owner, judging by its mint condition, the price had come down to $12.50, suggesting that this fellow was more interested in rapid turnover than heavy return.
I never was told how that choice garment came to the Western Union messenger so soon after it arrived at the student’s rooms. I figured it this way. Most likely Attilio had delivered a telegram to the dormitories. Most likely it contained good news, maybe word from a girl up in Vassar that she would be coming to the thé dansant or that she was back in the flow of things after all and not to worry. The student had probably wanted to give my friend a nice tip. There probably wasn’t any loose change around. But J. Press cashmere suits? These were all over the place. Attilio, by the way, was always getting tips of suits, camel’s-hair coats, wristwatches and bags of golf clubs from the Yale students. He must have brought them lots of cheerful bulletins from Vassar.
So for Pierson Quadrangle I was smashingly well suited. This tells us nothing about why the porno people took one look at me and decided I was similarly suited for them. Porno is not the most nepotistical power pyramid around when it needs new blood, but neither does it bend over backward to make openings for rank beginners. Some ranknesses it doesn’t have use for. A few.
• • •
I refuse to believe that luck was the whole or even the main story. I think it was a matter
