Bernard Wolfe: Anyone? Anyone?

Though New Haven is rich in intellectual history and, as a corollary to that, has a small place in literary history, one hears little of writers who've actually lived here. By writers I mean not writers who had to take teaching posts to get by but writers who grew up here and went on to Great Things (or even Greatish Things), or who just happened to wind up living here. It does happen. Sometimes. One of my parents is a huge sci-fi/fantasy fan from way back and so I grew up in a household that had ridiculous numbers of those cheap mass market paperbacks with lurid covers. I did not inherit the sci-fi/fantasy gene, so I was and am uninterested in this stuff, but there's one writer in that genre who fascinates me: Bernard Wolfe. Wolfe's stuff came to my attention maybe ten or fifteen years ago. It's not that I was so interested in his writing but I was intrigued by his writing career. He wrote a number of novels, and his subject matter was all over the place. His best known novel -- and a book that is, I understand, a sort of classic in the field -- is called Limbo. I'm sure if you like this kind of stuff it's great; I've tried to read it twice, been bored to tears each time, and don't expect to ever get through it.

But Wolfe wrote a lot of other stuff, too. He wrote a classic of jazz lit -- co-wrote, really with Mezz Mezzrow -- Really the Blues -- and he wrote a Hollywood novel (Come On Out, Daddy); he wrote political novels; and, as one can glean from the title of his memoir, Confessions of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer, he wrote pornography. It was this book that I read from cover to cover, and which made me wonder: What the hell?

Because it turns out that Bernard Wolfe was a townie. The guy grew up in New Haven. Went to Hillhouse. Went to Yale -- an unusual thing for a Jewish guy of his generation. He graduated from college and was sure that he'd kick some ass in publishing only to find that no one would hire him. So he started out writing porn. (His being a Trotskyite was probably an issue, too, but what can you do.) He had worked as Trotsky's bodyguard, at one point. But he became a real literary figure in his day, and published many works which got reviewed by, you know, professional book reviewers. The New York Times Book Review knew who he was.

So how is it that no one I've talked to around here knows anything about him? Back when I had daily contact with literary geeks of many stripes, I would ask, periodically, "So tell me what you know about Bernard Wolfe." And I'd get very little back. People of a certain generation recalled the name, and that was pretty much it.

Even if Wolfe was just a hack, wouldn't you think that his name would be mentioned more often in New Haven? I mean, as a famous hack? Let's face it, this is a town that will grab desperately at any straw that seems like it'd be good p.r. ("We got restaurants! Boy, do we have restaurants! We got some damn good restaurants! No, don't go over there.... come over here, where there's some good restaurants!"). You'd think maybe that places like, oh, I don't know, the New Haven Free Public Library, for example, might have some Bernard Wolfe stuff sitting around. Well, they've got a copy of Limbo. That's it. The Institute Library has a copy of The Magic of Their Singing, which is Wolfe's take on Beat culture (and pretty entertaining at that). Yale, of course, has tons of stuff, but most of it is in the Beinecke (i.e. not circulating), and I think was mostly given to the place by Wolfe himself (though I may be wrong on that point). They have some of his papers, and I've read them, but it's a spotty collection. It's like the guy evaporated shortly before he died, leaving almost nothing behind. Spooky.

So come on. There's more to this. Wolfe was obviously something of a wonderful maniac in his day. Why don't we know more about him? There was clearly a bunch to know... and I, for one, would like to know it.

Boston's Neat Graffitist vs. New Haven's.... Random Acts of Text

A Short Tribute to Selected Artiness I Remember from the 1980s, and a Hearty Recommendation of a Novel by Eric Kraft

When I was in high school, someone—I have no idea who—went around town putting up posters that said "New Haven is the Paris of the 1980s."

This was completely untrue, but it just slayed me and my friends. Every few years or so, I end up in a conversation with someone who was around then, and we go, "Remember the 'New Haven is the Paris of the 1980s' guy? Who the hell was that?" and then we laugh and have another beer.

In the 1990s I read all the available work by the sadly underrecognized literary genius Eric Kraft. I'd read his Herb n' Lorna, fallen madly in love with it, and begun to eat my way through the rest of his books. The one I liked best, and which is probably still my second favorite, is called Reservations Recommended. It is a sad comic novel (I know that sounds impossible, but trust me, it isn't) about a guy who lives a boring life working for a big company, but has an alter ego who is a restaurant critic in Boston. A lot of the novel is this guy's observations about Boston in general, and many of those observations focus on someone he calls the Neat Graffitist. The Neat Graffitist, actual identity unknown, goes around Boston neatly magic markering the town with random statements, "in small, precise capital letters," such as:

NEVER FEAR PAIN. TIME DIMINISHES IT. BUT AVOID BOSTON CITY HOSPITAL. NURSES THERE WEAR USED UNIFORMS PURCHASED FROM BURGER KING, TREAT PATIENTS WITH FATALISTIC DETACHMENT.

There are many parts of Reservations Recommended that I reread with deep pleasure, just reveling in the wonderfulness of it, but the words of the Neat Graffitist are some of my favorite parts of the book. My husband and I are especially fond of this one:

TO HERBERT: YOU WERE BORN ONCE AND NOT TWICE AND WHEN YOU ARE DEAD YOU WILL BE DEAD FOREVER. GIVE ME BACK MY WATCHES. THEY WILL NOT MAKE YOU HAPPY. THEY ARE NO DEFENSE AGAINST DEATH.

The Neat Graffitist belongs in a category, I feel, with the "New Haven is the Paris of the 1980s" creator, along with the person who spent time writing pithy little sweet nothings on masking tape and putting them on parking meters around downtown around 1984–85. I vividly remember strolling around downtown with a friend who noticed this and chortled: "Uh-oh—someone's getting arty with the parking meters." It was almost certainly a Yalie, but still pretty entertaining.

So whoever the "New Haven is the Paris of the 1980s" guy (or, okay, girl) is, thanks and hats off to him/her; also to the Masking Tape Artist of 1984. Where are you now? Do you even remember doing these things?

Meanwhile, Eric Kraft's been getting rave reviews for his recent fiction, but it's not likely you've actually acted on your fleeting thought, "Gee, I should pick that up sometime and read it." Listen to me. Start with Herb n' Lorna if you can; if you can't, with Reservations Recommended. Act on the fleeting thought. Fleeting thoughts are our friends.

Life Among the Savages

By Shirley Jackson (Penguin edition, 1997; orig. pub. Farrar and Rinhart, 1953)

There are scads of books about motherhood out there, and obviously most are crap. I’m okay with that; I know I can always re-read Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages. Last week, I sent an email to a friend who was going mad trying to work on a book while tending her two small children. It wasn’t going so well. She described her domestic scene and said, “On days like this, I wish I liked the taste of alcohol.” My immediate response was that she would simply have to find a copy of Life Among the Savages. “When I went into the hospital to deliver our daughter,” I wrote, “I took one – ONE – book with me, and it was Life Among the Savages.”

Shirley Jackson is best known for her creepy fiction. “The Lottery” is one of the most anthologized of short stories; The Haunting of Hill House has been filmed twice. Writers cite her; there’s a literary award named after Jackson. The creepy stuff is fine, I’ve got nothing against it, but for my money Life Among the Savages is Jackson’s masterpiece. Laura Shapiro cites it as a touchstone in the “literature of domestic chaos,” which it is, but to me it’s more than that. Jackson’s fictionalized account of her life with her husband, critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, is wise on marriage, on why urbanites don’t belong in Vermont, on cats, on the folly of gun ownership, on children, and on why it is that, when everyone gets sick, blankets will go missing.

Eva Geertz, a bookseller, lives in New Haven.