Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer. Bernard Wolfe
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This story was by all standards a piece of proletarian literature, though the term had not yet come into currency. Two short years later writers by the hundreds had shed their Brooks Brothers gabardines for blue denim work shirts and the Proletarian Novel was swamping the American literary scene. Nowhere, however, in that massive body of workingclass literature will you find one word acknowledging the highschool junior who sparked the movement. But that’s always the fate of the frontrunner. No prophet is so scorned in his own country as the one whose pioneering work is taken over lock, stock and barrel by his plagiaristic countrymen.
I contented myself with the knowledge that of the 100 or so prolecult novels that flooded the bookstalls few came up to the literary level of my early effort, and practically none added anything to my innocent-victim thematization of the contest between nice young lads and carnivorous old free-enterprise machines.
(That wasn’t meant cynically. I’m still of the opinion that our means of production are really consumers, savage meat-eaters, even, I would now add, when the social relations of production have been drastically changed—in form, anyhow. It has dawned on me, though, that young fellows who try to catch 40 winks on a shaft-driven transmission belt, no matter how worthy and no matter how tired, are, to put it mildly, mastication-prone.)
Item. There was a national essay contest for high school seniors. I entered it and won it. My subject, since I was oriented toward science to get away from letters, rather, from the kinds of people who usually teach letters, was, the future of soil-conditioners in American farming. Or, “Whither Fertilizers?” Something in that line. I made up a joke about this contest—maybe you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear but you sure can get together a big pile of horseshit and come up with a prizewinning essay.
I was breathing hard in anticipation of some cold, hard cash. What they handed me was a leather-bound commemorative volume honoring a dean at Harvard who’d been helpful to several generations of incipient writers when they were undergraduates, among them John Dos Passos. The dean’s name was Riggs, or Briggs, or Griggs. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Tetrazzini. I’ve never read that book. Not that I had anything against this dean—what put me off was that they should give me payment in kind, instead of the kind payment of money.
It simply did not make sense, in or out of the Great Depression, to reward words with words. This seemed to imply that the most important thing for an incipient writer to do was read, not eat. That committee on awards turned its collective back on the strong possibility that neither reading nor writing was going to be feasible for me if I suffered from malnutrition, and in those days an awful lot of people, including writers both incipient and well-launched, were doing just that.
I don’t know if that copy of the commemorative volume is still around. Maybe it’s buried in a carton in my brother’s cellar outside New Haven, I haven’t seen it in decades. I rather wish I had it now, I’d like to read about Dean Riggs, or Briggs. I understand he was very nice to John Dos Passos. For some years I’ve been trying to be nice to incipient writers at UCLA and I’d be interested to see how our techniques compare.
Item. So we can say that at 15 I was by any definition an incipient, as well as malnourished, writer. Further proof came in my first year at Yale when I won some sort of freshman essay contest. My subject this time was the development of the esthetic of realism, which my survey traced, hastily and in big jumps, from the early cave drawings to Norman Rockwell and Raymond Chandler.
This time, too, I got not a penny, just a voucher entitling me to $25 worth of books at Whitlock’s Book Store. I pleaded with the people at Whitlock’s to convert that useless piece of paper to negotiable currency but those incorruptible Yankees—whose enthusiasm for steady habits (Connecticut had way back nicknamed itself “The Land of Steady Habits”) did not seem to extend to eating—wouldn’t hear of it. I finally took my payment in Modern Library novels, sat up several nights devouring them two or three at a time, there being little else around to devour, then sold them for whatever I could get. With the proceeds I bought a meal ticket at the Greek’s on Chapel Street, where they offered a marvelous thick and crusty breaded veal cutlet drowned in tomato sauce with a heap of spaghetti and two fat buttered rolls for 35 cents.
For once, however devious the operation, I’d managed to convert award-winning words into food, and you will not mistake my meaning when I say it whetted my appetite.
Item. Words finally did bring in some moneys at college. With my good friend Johnny Dorsey I started a ghosting agency for people like football players who had no time to write essays and term papers and who in any case had probably so sapped their heads by overnourishing their bodies that they couldn’t write anything. (If the Manicheans have at times kept me from employment, at other times they’ve made profitable work for me.) We charged four dollars a page if the client was satisfied to squeak by, but hiked the price to six if he wanted a guaranteed “B” or better.
I must say that when we gave a grade guarantee we stood behind our product and we never missed. This can be interpreted in a couple of ways. It might mean that we were incredibly talented writers. It may, on the other hand, suggest that Johnny Dorsey and I knew a lot of the young reading assistants who graded papers for the professors, were alert to their crochets, and got good at assessing their tastes. For a couple of years there Johnny and I ate well at the Greek’s, and any number of varsity members did their double-shift wingbacks at the Yale Bowl with an easy mind.
Item. After some pointless months in the Yale Graduate School I quit to take a teaching job in a school for women trade unionists which operated on the Bryn Mawr campus during the summers. Here I reached new heights of eloquence, though of the oral rather than written order, particularly when I addressed the noontime assembly on current happenings around the world.
One noon I lectured forcefully as to why the political tensions now mounting in Paris would have to explode with a military bid for power by the labor-hating fascists in the Croix de Feu. Two days after I made my categorical prediction there was a fascist uprising, Francisco Franco’s in Spain. I quickly appeared before the assembly again to announce that my analysis of the class struggle in Europe had been absolutely right but that I’d gotten the country wrong, that was all. I overwhelmed these girls the first time and I overwhelmed them equally the second without shifting any essential gears.
Right after that I came down with a bad case of gastric poisoning and had to spend several days in the campus infirmary. Nobody visited me on my bed of pain to crow over what happens when a man has to eat his words (I thought I’d avoided that rather neatly) but oh, how my stomach hurt.
Item. After Bryn Mawr I hung around New York for a time producing for the Trotskyite publications (The Militant and The New International) words covering the Spanish Civil War, the one I’d misplaced geographically, plus book reviews and an article or two. I discovered that the best way to report any overseas war is to sit in a Greenwich Village room and redo the dispatches of the New York Times correspondents who are required by their task-master bosses to make personal appearances at the fronts. (The approach I picked up in this period was to stand me in good stead during World War II, in which I avoided personal appearances on a wide variety of fronts.) The technique is simple, you keep the facts cabled home by the front-line reporters, since you don’t have any of your own to substitute for them, and just correct their blurred vision with Bolshevik-Leninist bifocals.
One piece I did for The New International