At Least We Still Have Tom Waits

 

“As a youth, by way of the saloon I had escaped from the narrowness of women’s influence into the wide free world of men. All ways led to the saloon. The thousand roads of romance and adventure drew together in the saloon, and thence led out and on over the world.”

John Barleycorn, Jack London

The recent passing of literary lion Norman Mailer compelled me to take a glance around the modern world of arts and letters and ask the inevitable question: Who is going to fill the void? I don’t mean who is going to replace Mailer as a writer, a stylist, a punishing pugilist with words. No, the question is where are the writers whose personalities are as large and volatile as the words they sling?

Late last year, at the urging of a friend, I tried to read Augusten Burroughs’ (”Running With Scissors”) alcoholic memoir, “Dry”. I managed to slog through one quarter of the book before violently hefting it against the wall; the book is peppered with so much therapy-speak, self-help jargon, and recreations of AA meetings that it begins to resemble a segment of the Dr. Phil Show rather than a tale of the harrowing road to recovery for a two-fisted drinker.

Publishers Weekly observed: “Initially repulsed by his recovery program’s maudlin language and mind-numbing platitudes, Burroughs eventually makes a steadfast, equally incredulous friend in rehab, finds his own salvation and confidently re-enters society.”

If that sounds about as exciting as a box of rocks that’s because it is. Where are the larger-than-life Fitzgerald-like anectdotes of drunkenly driving a car into a studio mogul’s swimming pool? The legenday Faulknerian drunken binges? Whither goes Dorothy Parker’s pithy remark that she’d “rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy”?

Gone. All gone. Today’s wordsmiths are mass marketed, clean and sober, and safe for human consumption. Popular culture and the mass media leave the public drunken meltdowns to talentless twits like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.

But in crawling through the Google News archives this morning I was reminded that the blazing paths left behind by some of our more raucous contemporary scribes are still burning bright. We are still talking about the reckless antics, for instance, of Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski and even the ghost of Ernest Hemingway makes an inebriated apperance here and there.

At present there are two biographies on Hunter S. Thompson in the marketplace: “Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson” by Jann Werner and Corey Seymour, and “The Gonzo Way” by Anita Thompson.

Edward Champion observes in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

In Gonzo, an oral history with no shortage of speculation, we learn that Thompson copied whole sections of Hemingway on his typewriter and went to Hawaii to catch a huge marlin “just like Hemingway,” an incident later used for The Curse of Lono. In his Hemingway biography, James R. Mellow recounted an incident in which Wallace Stevens, unimpressed with the Hemingway legend, joked at a party, “By God I wish I had that Hemingway here now. I’d knock him out with a single punch.” This resulted in a drunken brawl between the two men. Hemingway was indeed knocked down into a muddy puddle. Six years later, Stevens proposed that Hemingway speak at a Princeton poetry lecture.

This tendency to let Hemingway be Hemingway mirrors the remarkable tolerance that Thompson’s friends had for his behavior. An Aspen neighbor recalls Thompson threatening his son with a cattle prod, but in the same breath declares how “he was always great to Juan.” His landlord confesses to receiving irregular rent checks, but admires Thompson’s motorcycle and is ordered to try high-grade mescaline.

Can you imagine J.K. Rowling threatening her son with a cattle prod or John Grisham dropping mescaline? I didn’t think so. Ah, the good old days.

Champion goes on to say:

Like Hemingway, Thompson had a machismo that wouldn’t quit. He ingested drugs and drink, often ordering “five or six Bloody Marys and twelve or fourteen lines of coke” for breakfast. His room service orders read like the demands of a junta. He had lungs and a liver to rival Charles Bukowski’s and a high pain threshold, but was tremendously sensitive about depictions that didn’t stem from his frenetic adrenaline. He came close to suing Garry Trudeau for the Duke character in Doonesbury, until an old roommate informed him, “This guy makes you out to be friendly and nice, basically. You’re not.”

Bukowski. Now there was a writer-as-public-figure to rival Thompson, literary cousins, if you will, cut from the same Scotch-imbued cloth. In the January 7, 2008, edition of the Los Angeles Times, under the header “Must We Admire the Poet to Honor His Work?” columnist Al Martinez writes:

Oscar Wilde went to prison in 1895 for flaunting his homosexuality. Ezra Pound was indicted for treason in 1943 for broadcasting on behalf of the Italian fascists in the Second World War. Dylan Thomas died in 1953 after proclaiming that he had just downed 18 straight whiskeys and wondering if it were a record.

I mention them to emphasize that not all poets are whispering pixies. Some are maniacs, some are drunks and some are general hell-raisers. Which brings us to Charles Bukowski, who was probably all of the above. Although those who knew him might agree that he was a raving, brawling alcoholic, the question has arisen: Was he a Jew-hating Nazi sympathizer? I knew you’d wonder.

If you want to know the answer to that question, you can read Martinez’s piece here. But it’s really a moot point; the salient point being that we are still exploring Bukowski’s personality — the personality informs the work and all that good stuff — many years after his passing.

But a book review of The Early Years: The Lyrics of Tom Waits (1971-1982) in the December 29, 2007, edition of the L.A. Times filled me with something resembling hope. There is still a lone desolation angel in our midst. He’s not a novelist, of course, but he comes close. Writes Robert Lloyd:

More obviously than many songwriters of our time, Tom Waits is a lover of words — of their sound and the ways in which they can slide or slam into one another, specific and ambiguous, hard and soft. His work is full of exotic slang and evocative names, and the neo-Beat stylings of his early middle years — recalling Jack Kerouac and the milieu, if not the style, of Charles Bukowski — seem to place him in a literary as well as a musical tradition. Waits is a storyteller who fills his songs with characters, colorful speech and narrative momentum; as a performer, he is usually either telling a tale or acting one out.

Lloyd continues:

Waits likes children’s rhymes and lullabies. The moon is a constant presence — banana moon, grapefruit moon, bloodshot moon. He writes about distance and traveling between distances, cars and shoes, petty criminals and old lying drunks. Some songs employ a kind of whiskey-fed wandering stream of unconsciousness that produces nice lines like “and you can pour me a cab.” Things happen at midnight, in a neon glow, in a film noir rain.

In a film noir rain. Indeed.