I picked up
Literary Rogues at the library
recently when I needed something to read while my kids used the computers.
Also, I needed something to get away from the more historiographical reading
I’ve been straining my neck with, although this book turned out to be an
interesting bit of history in its own right. I suppose the title was intriguing
enough; a quick skim through the beginning of the book left me unsure whether
to take it or not, but as I couldn’t find anything else I figured I’d give it a
shot. You can never find what you’re looking for, now that there’s no physical
card catalog, but sometimes the right book just jumps out at you. I do miss the
old stacks from my library; the main branch of Cambridge, MA’s public library
is now one of the most well-known in the world, I’m told; it’s not what it was
in the good old days, when I went to high school next door and cut class to
read Antonin Artaud and dream of being a literary rogue myself.
But you see,
my position has changed on so many things, now that I’m an adult, that part of
my reason for choosing this book was to refute the admiration I once held for
some of these ill-behaved literati. However, the book itself proved to be
interesting and informative, before I even reached the chapters on my youthful
idols. Shaffer traces the origins of perverse penmanship to the Marquis de
Sade, infamous for his bizarre sexual obsessions and both the life and writings
they inspired. Personally, although I haven’t read any of Sade’s writings, and
I didn’t know much of his history before Rogues,
I have never had an affinity for his persona, as it seems to me based on
cruelty and depravity, without the redemptive element of genius or personal
drive that some of these other ‘bad boys of Western literature’ arguably
possess. Likewise, the following two chapters on eighteenth century English
opium addicts, who happened to write poetry, was good perspective, but again I
found nothing to draw my ego in to the personalities of Coleridge and de
Quincey. Despite my youthful interest in drug literature, I had never read
these English fops and I can’t say that I will now. What is accomplished,
however, in these early chapters especially, is to demonstrate how lonely and
unrewarding the path of the solitary writer often proves to be, even in cases
where the artist has received immortal praise. One must be hardened, to the
remonstrances of friends and family, to the harsh world of solitude, and to all
the pains one rather courts than avoids in the pursuit of his art, while at the
same time somehow remaining soft towards that tender impulse inside, nurturing
the creative wonder inside with all the warmth and love that one withdraws from
everything, and every one, else. The literary road remains less travelled, and
now although it is less prohibited, it is also more well-beaten and causes less
of a stir, eclipsed by popular music and reality television.
After these
sensitive souls we turn to Lord Byron, whose legendary sexual exploits I think
betray a major part of the modern fascination we have towards these figures in
general. There is a sort of vicarious cult attached to money, fame and sex that
is characteristic of the decline of aristocratic and ecclesiastical values over
the past two or three centuries. While the eruption of the mass libido, so
violently constrained for ages by arbitrary and inhuman moral restrictions, is
no surprise, what is perhaps worth lamenting is the inversion of values which
posits excess and decadence, overall lack of discipline, as ideals to be
cultivated (or at least adulated) in youth, until the modern man has no sense
of decency or responsibility and any appeal to rekindle these important human
achievements is summarily dismissed as reactionarily conservative.
…and so on,
until the French so-called ‘Decadent’ writers, particularly the poets
Baudelaire and later, Rimbaud, who signified a glorification of decadence as
conversely virtuous. What strikes the mature
reader is how the desires and unrestrained passions of youth have become
embedded in our culture as possessing value in and of themselves, their ‘cool
factor’, and this despite the overall predominance of liberal morality in this
same demographic. But we shall note this phenomenon in vain, as it has already,
too late, been imbedded in the modern esthetic, just as certain opposing
virtues were in vogue at one time, and therefore beyond question, implicit as
dogma. It is testament to the sublime beauty of these French poets’ work, and
in particular the blurring of the distinction between prose and poetry, between
thought and feeling, which had such a profound effect on so many generations to
come, and in fact inspired the chief esthetic of rock music from the
mid-to-late 60’s which still holds sway in the modern cult of today’s youth.
Rimbaud in particular was a hero of visionary magnitude to later poets,
including the American ‘Beat’ writers, and rock musicians like Jim Morrison of
The Doors. France’s influence on modern world culture is the grossest
decadence, through the effeminization of European literature and the contagion
of Parisian fashion and the idolatry of anorexics, perfumes and
prostitution…although Rimbaud himself is striking as one of the few men (or
boys) in Literary Rogues not obsessed
with brothels and promiscuity…caught up in a turbulent homosexual relationship
with older poet Paul Verlaine, his is the quintessential story of youthful
innocence lost. After writing the greatest poetry of the French language,
Arthur Rimbaud, barely a young man, turned his back on letters, forever.
Perhaps this is the moral we should take away from the book.
But we move
on. Those ‘Beats’ we spoke of in America, probably my favorite writers as a
teenager, a right-of-passage for so many young people for the past half-century
and more, all over the world. This is what I was waiting for the whole time,
reading the book. One gets the impression I wasn’t the only one. It seems like
once they got past these curious characters, so contradictory, so full of freedom
and suffering and youthful foolishness, the author and/or his editors got
sloppy, as the grammar and punctuation decline noticeably after this point. I
certainly began to lose interest, and in fact I am anxious to hurry on and
complete this article. But let us stop for a moment and hover over the spectre
of literary rebellion in post-war America, and its deeper implications for the
nation’s intellectual psyche. In retrospect, Allen Ginsberg is probably the
only one of these writers who can really be said to stand for anything, to
possess any art, any substance. Kerouac is a phase, something that touches some
of us in a very personal way, myself not least of all due to shared small-town
Massachusetts roots in childhood, loneliness and the weathervane-like sense of
a loss in the current of the American soul. But Kerouac’s alcoholism and
frequenting of child prostitutes in Mexico must lead us to abandon this
mystique of decadence altogether, with less a sense of moral outrage at the
popularity such men have enjoyed than a sober realization that perhaps English
poet William Blake’s famed ‘road of excess’ is really a dead-end street.
William Burroughs, for all his brilliance, was merely a creep, a junkie, a
deadbeat rich-boy who lucked out and sold books, books which, to be sure,
overturned deeply-rooted psychological and literary assumptions, but without
any positive influence on society. This was a bitter, hateful man who blamed
the whole world for the rejection of his would-be childhood boyfriend and the
stifling alienation of his well-to-do Mid-Western upbringing. Ginsberg, aside
from being a gifted poet who understood
poetics and poet tradition while still revolutionizing the genre, who
worshipped the great American poet Walt Whitman (who wasn’t enough of a drunk
or philanderer to make it into this book) who believed in religious values even
as he fought against religious dogma; Ginsberg was an champion of gay rights,
pacifism, environmentalism and freedom of expression, an advocate for his
fellow artists often to the neglect of his own ambitions, and early proponent
of marijuana reform, as well as publicly testifying that LSD should indeed
remain legal so long as all other avenues to freedom of thought were patently
denied to citizens of the free world.
All-in-all,
the book is well-written, with a characteristically modern synthesis of gonzo
journalistic intrigue and sober scholarship. Indeed, the research that went
into the work shows through more often than not, balancing any obvious bias in
regards to the subject matter. Quite frankly, it would be either boring, on the
one hand, or overly adulating to write about them in a way other than Shaffer
has undertaken. The book itself is short and captivating, easy to read
straight-through. Shaffer makes strong connections from chapter to chapter,
tying his subjects together in time and space, making bold conceptual leaps,
literary allusions and displaying a sharp grasp of the social and cultural
climate in which these artists all wrote, something that is easily lost on the
modern reader of dated literature, and which indeed is critical to the
understanding of any form of art.
The last
sentence of the book’s last chapter (prior to the postscript) quotes writer
James Frey, “Writers today are polite and meek and scared of bad publicity.
Unless that changes, they will fade away.” The challenge, as I see it, for the
future of literature is to reclaim that sense of strength and urgency, of
courage and individualism that does in fact seem to have faded away, while also
disowning the new modern liberal pornographic commercialized esthetic which
permeates every facet of our culture, from literature and music to film,
journalism and politics. Shaffer’s book will not provide any answers to the
questions that must confront today’s writer if she wants to stand out from the
crowd; it will give a fascinating and at times entertaining overview of how we
arrived at this point.
