Letters at 3AM

Illustration By Jason Stout

Nelson Algren (1909-1981) was a Chicago writer who in 1956 published a novel called A Walk on the Wild Side. (Yes, it's Algren's phrase; years later, Lou Reed copped it.) In a 1965 memoir, Notes From a Sea Diary, Algren wrote, "Mediocrity is never passive; it avenges itself for its deprivation."

Tape that on the fridge. It's all about the United States today.

Algren's literary fate demonstrates his sentence. The other day, browsing a bookstore, I opened a recent edition of his short-story collection The Neon Wilderness (1947). (Yes, he coined that phrase, too.) I wanted to browse Algren's introduction, which is one of his best essays. It wasn't there. In its place was an intro by a contemporary writer who, like me, would be lucky to be Algren's cab driver. "That's another one you owe them, Nelson," I said aloud. This is a culture where professors teach that literary theory is more important than literature -- a canard for which they get tenure while working writers get what they can. In such a culture, it's neither surprising nor a coincidence to see the deletion of an essay that, in part, goes as follows:

"[The critics] arrived from their respective campuses armed with blueprints to which the novel and the short story would have to conform. ... They made criticism the focus of American writing. ... One could not escape the feeling that the New York literary bench had become peopled by those for whom all allowances are made, yet who make no allowances. And of New York as a place where our new affluence, failing to feel its own possibilities, was settling for the lowest possible returns. ... A place where one whose life has been sheltered from rough weather from nursery to campus ... begins to feel an increasing contempt for men; while one who has had to take his own chances, blows on the head or blows on the ear, gains respect for the same identical race."

The campus-trained literati who all write alike, and who dominate publishing, weren't gonna let that get by, so they replaced Algren's essay with one of their own -- while hoping to make a buck on the stories of a great stylist who wrote like nobody else.

Which is what he meant by: "Mediocrity is never passive; it avenges itself for its deprivation."

From Notes From a Sea Diary, out of print for 30 years: "The present imbalance of books about writing, to those written from direct experience ... sends throngs of young people to believing that literature derives from other books rather than from life. ... For the painter no longer in touch with people who don't look at pictures begins to die as a painter. The actor whose life has moved from the marketplace to the studio acts falsely. The novelist grown remote from people who don't read, becomes untrue to people who do read. The thinker who loses contact with people who don't think at all, no longer thinks justly. As the critic whose only wellspring is the work of other men at last gets to know all there is to know about literature. Except how to enjoy it."

Don't wait for a university press to reprint that book anytime soon. (Surprise me, surprise me -- tell me it's on next season's list!)

At least mediocrity's avengers settled for deleting Algren. Better deleted than diluted. Charlie "Bird" Parker (1920-1955), a genius of jazz and an inspiration to all American arts, has suffered an all-out assault. In a new album called Bird Up, brief passages of his masterpieces are incorporated into a pop pastiche of unspeakably cloying triviality. The perpetrators no doubt are making more money for this obscenity than Parker made for the combined studio dates of his short life. (That is not an exaggeration.) Bird Up is not remix; it's rape. Listeners unfamiliar with the originals will receive a music, in Bird's name, that is precisely the opposite of his artistic intent. People with nothing of their own to offer have avenged themselves for their deprivation upon a genius whom they have only the skills to desecrate.

The effect of mediocrity's avengers is even more pernicious in politics, as in California's elevation of Arnold Schwarzenegger to the governorship. I think of William Carlos Williams, from In the American Grain: "Promise the weak strength and have the strength of a thousand weak at your bidding." This is more complicated than culture-vultures pecking at the carcass of Bird. In a state with shamefully inadequate education, it is not the fault of the electorate that most can't analyze complex issues. They were educated to be stupid; they didn't start out that way. The greatest gift of education is that students learn to think for themselves, comparing data to reach their own conclusions. High school graduates who read at a seventh-grade level can't do that. They believe slick political spots and TV-pap news because they must believe something; it's only human to believe smooth, visually appealing sound bites that flatter one's inadequacies and play on one's frustrations. The frustrations are real. The inadequacies are conditioned. The result is disastrous: a disconnect between choice and sense. People who want an experienced mechanic to fix their car, an experienced plumber to mend their pipes, an experienced doctor to tend their ills -- these same people elect an amateur to run their infrastructure and provide their services and security, and do so out of sheer pique. All their lives their only choices have been between mediocrity and mediocrity; they are fodder for mediocre jobs; they live in mediocre structures built to mediocre standards and less-than-mediocre aesthetics. They are sullenly, inarticulately aware of their dead-end deprivation. They want revenge. That lust for revenge is turned upon them by a multimillion-dollar media blitz that convinces the prisoners to bestow a shrine (the Governor's Mansion) upon their wardens. By the time they wake up it will be too late. The rich already own them; come wake-up time, they will only own them more. And there will be no recourse.

Or this:

Two years ago I was an observer at a City Council meeting in Mason, Texas. The speaker gave these statistics: In most rural towns, the top third of the high school graduating class leaves the state; the middle third leaves the town for the state's major urban centers; the bottom third stays put, because they can't make it elsewhere. Don't confuse that bottom third with the dumbest. Some could be the most rebellious, expressing that rebellion through drugs or fast cars or rodeos, in order to ignore the stupefying dullness of their schools; some, by virtue of class or ethnicity, are slighted by the very educators on which their future depends -- and haven't the home life and/or the natural gifts to overcome that obstacle; and, for some, their best aptitude may be for skilled manual work that we now ship overseas, so there is no place for them here anymore. What is bred in this bottom third but resentment, frustration, and a sense of their own worthlessness? These are easy people to manipulate. Far-right propagandists have become masters at manipulating them. "Promise the weak strength and have the strength of a thousand weak at your bidding." Just such communities made up most of the blue electoral map that was and is the strength of George W. Bush. They're not mediocre, but they feel mediocre; so they sought a clever man who consciously reflected their perceived mediocrity -- sought him, beseeched him, to avenge their deprivation. Yet he increases it under the guise of avenging. What a way to get screwed.

We were once pleased to elect people who were a great deal smarter than average; we took pride that such people represented us. Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon -- agree with them or not, they were damned smart and didn't mind showing it. (Ronald Reagan was a very smart man who knew that he had to appear not-so-smart to be popular.) A citizenry that no longer wants to be led by the most intelligent among them is a citizenry that feels a deep innate inferiority; it is also a citizenry consistently betrayed and condescended to by an elitist liberal intelligentsia, and so is willing to put its faith in anyone who pretends to be against their betrayers. Thus they are betrayed all the more, their economy and infrastructure doomed for the benefit of the rich.

Literature, music, politics: vengeance taken for deprivation. The mediocre run the show via the fear of decent people that they are mediocre. The final shame is that history will judge them so, since, as Thelma told Louise (or Louise told Thelma?): "You are what you settle for."