The Golden Age of Paperbacks

     Surely the nineteen-fifties, when I was setting out with the ambition of reading everything, was the golden age of paperback books, when most of the world’s classics were available for pocket change.  The first books I acquired, toward the latter end of elementary school, were all in soft covers: Walt Kelly’s Pogo collections, The Pocket Trashery of Ogden Nashery, Subways are for Sleeping which appealed to my taste for eccentricity, as did Auntie Mame.  I loved Čapek’s War with the Newts long before I knew who the author was, and read On the Beach before seeing Stanley Kramer’s movie.  I was a devotee of Judith Merrill’s annual collections of well-written science fiction.  By sixth grade my shelf held Hendrik Willem van Loon’s History of Mankind, an exemplary book for children which offers distinctive style, amusing drawings, and (in memory at least) no condescension whatever.  Fledgling literary interests were emerging, and I read and reread my volume of Poe’s stories and poems, or a little collection of American short stories, or one of the Untermeyer poetry anthologies --  each of these sold for 25 or 35 cents.  I had been entranced by my parent’s purchase of the Life book of The World’s Great Religions and considered my Mentor copy of The Way of Life: Lao Tzu translated by R. B. Blakney a revelation.  (Its rhythms run still in my mind, doubtless to my benefit.)

    But when I became somewhat older and able to go to Chicago by myself, my middle-class parents, though frugal about nearly everything else, let me buy paperbacks freely in the interest of education.  I could indulge myself with reckless intemperance and my paperback library mushroomed.  When I would visit the Loop over sixty years ago, I had several regular routes.  One of them culminated in a visit to “the world’s largest bookstore,” Kroch’s and Brentano’s.  But I would not go there directly.  First I would stop by the Rose Discount Record store on South Wabash to pick up classical sides and then proceed a few blocks further south to Seymour’s Record store  where Seymour Schwartz sold jazz and blues from a decidedly unglamorous (and thereby hip) shop.  He had heaps of old 78s in the back for maybe 25 cents each.   I would then stop by a few favorite dusty old used bookshops and, I confess, toward the end, I would also patronize also the Iwan Ries tobacconist (conveniently on Wabash as well) to pick up a pack of smokes from some exotic and thus sophisticated country, transforming me instantly from a callow youth to a cosmopolite.  Though the tobacco was foolish, in the books lay the very foundations of my education.  Through my teen-age years I was never without a pile of paperbacks on the floor by the head of the WWII army surplus cot on which I slept. (The stack persists all these years later, though now, as I share my bed, it rests on the table by the parlor sofa.).

     Most had been purchased at the climactic stop on my urban excursion when I entered the precincts of Kroch's, also on Wabash.  It was there that I spent by far the largest sums I spent anywhere in those days (modest as they were).  With the exception of a few volumes in German, I never bought books on the main floor.  Passing the carefully curated record selection at the top of the stairs, mainly folk music and blues but offering the old Caedmon spoken word albums as well, I would head down to the basement where the paperbacks were kept, arranged in shelves by publisher. 

     What a glorious new-found-land it was in which every region offered substantial rewards. From every side authors beckoned: Dante, Camus, Ben Jonson, Lady Murasaki, among hundreds of other worthies, a magnificent company! To this day I recall in which corner I would find the austere Penguins without cover art featuring reliable translations from a variety of languages, the cheap little Mentors and often rather ugly Signets for the general run of classics, the Doubleday Anchor books with their marvelous designs by the likes of Edward Gorey and Leo Lionni, the larger format grey-jacketed Scribner’s books for Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the wondrous old reprints in hardy well-bound Dover editions (including many of Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East), the New Directions with their black and white covers and avant-garde edge, even the Catholic Image books for Aquinas and Cardinal Newman.

     The bookstore staff seemed mostly composed of young men, perhaps working a while between undergraduate and graduate school or else ABDs too educated to find any other employment. At any rate, they seemed very knowledgeable about the arts, and were rather intriguing to an adolescent shopper from the suburbs, still living with his parents.  They had opinions.  I recall when my brother bought a copy of Naked Lunch against the advice of the clerk, who told him, “Don’t waste your money. For ten minutes you’ll be shocked, but it’ll be nothing but boredom after that.”

     It was surely due to the influence of these young workers that Kroch’s had a decent selection of small press books, not just City Lights, but Piet Hein’s Grooks and Botteghe Oscura, and many more obscure titles.  For years it seems they were trying to move the plain black copies of Norman Mailer’s Deaths for the Ladies, which, though I was an enthusiastic admirer of the author, struck me as aggressively off-hand.

     I may have lived in an insular little haut bourgeois suburb, but here was an entrance to a far greater realm, providing access to people of all times and places.  What could be more exhilarating than to read one’s way through the world’s greatest texts for the first time? I was quite serious, making systematic surveys or movement and periods, noting marginal comments, sometimes in German once I started learning the language. My granddaughter hears such things and affectionately says, “You were such a nerd,” but to me it was the epitome of cool. I wanted to read everything, though, of course, I had my favorites.

     Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945-1960 was a revelation and a delight. I wrote to many of the small presses listed in the back to obtain books Kroch’s didn’t offer. During high school I ostentatiously carried the book around — I did the same with Spenser’s The Faerie Queene because I had read that he was “a poet’s poet” — and got my reward when some prankster put chewing gum in my anthology when I was away from my seat.  I became a missionary for Gary Snyder’s Cold Mountain Poems, translations of Han Shan, which I photocopied and gave to friends.  Apart from the Beats I tried to keep up with contemporary poetry, picking up paperbound volumes of Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, John Berryman, and John Ashbery. 

     In fat Mentor editions I worked my way through the turgid Russians – Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, though I preferred Gogol’s Evenings Near the Village of Dikanka published by political refugee Frederick Ungar whose company was strong in German translations (I had Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and Goethe’s Werther from them) but also included such odd works as Gladkov’s socialist realist novel with the dramatically uncompromising title of Cement.  Kleist’s stories fascinated me with their precise exacting weirdness in a Signet book.  I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses from Collier translated by Sir John Harington, the Elizabethan inventor of the water closet, and it never occurred to me to wonder how such a book could possibly be issued in a popular edition.  My Washington Square Press copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Songs, and Poems is dated 1960, cost thirty-five cents, and is yet today in serviceable condition.  I very nearly wore out my Muse’s Library edition of Thomas Wyatt’s poems while the Everyman’s paperback of Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century added Surrey, Ralegh, and Davies.  I had, of course, Howl and Kaddish (as well as Ferlinghetti, Corso, and Jack Hirschman’s Artaud Anthology) from City Lights, while among my New Directions volumes from my high school days were a half shelf of Henry Miller, Pound’s Selected Poems, Williams’ Paterson and Pictures from Breughel, and novels by Louis Fernand Céline.  And, of course, I had Evergreens from Grove Press  as well.  I just reread Melville’s The Confidence Man (their first title), Lorca, Beckett, Aphra Behn and Crashaw as well as essays by D. T. Suzuki.  When I set out from home for university, I brought my Modern Library College edition paperback of Plato as a talisman.

*          *          *          *          *

     If the golden age I am celebrating has passed, the change may be due less to changes in the publishing industry than to a decay in the public’s taste.  In my youth not only the professoriate but people in general (especially, but not exclusively, those with some bit of education), recognized the value of the liberal arts.  To many it was obvious that to glimpse the world through Plato’s eyes, even briefly, must surely broaden and enrich even a banker’s view of the present day.  Nor was this belief entirely a class attitude.  The Little Blue Books (an essay on the Blue Book phenomenon will soon be posted to this site) indicate that the American autodidact, exemplified by figures from Benjamin Franklin through Jack London and Malcom X, was a sociological fact in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties when workingmen might read Shelley’s poems or Will Durant on Aristotle in little booklets costing a nickel or a dime.  Meanwhile in the United Kingdom Penguin began selling quality books for two and a half (old) pence, advertised as “the price of ten cigarettes.”

     During World War II when the American government printed over a hundred million Armed Services Edition books to distribute to troops, a project headed by former Pocket Books executive Philip Van Doren Stern, the titles included bestsellers like Anthony Adverse and the Hornblower novels, but Shelley, Poe, Conrad, Maugham, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald as well.  By the nineteen-fifties there were plenty of trashy exploitation titles like those from Gold Medal on the racks in bus stations and drugstores, the descendants of the pulp magazine of the ‘thirties, but they were often accompanied by a few classier titles.  (Sometimes a French classic, Zola, say, or D. H. Lawrence, received a cover as though it were a potboiler, resulting, perhaps, in a mix of disappointed and delighted purchasers.) 

     What has become of these books, at once so good and so cheap?  Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one of the first Pocket Books in the, now sells for over thirty times its ‘fifties price, and inflation accounts for only a third of the increase.  Wilder’s The Bridge at San Luis Rey, which had been a good seller in its Pocket Book form is presently available in editions costing between thirty and sixty times that price.  The price growth reflects the fact that these books are today bought almost entirely by students to whom they are a classroom assignment.  The casual purchaser has all but vanished; very little remains of what had been a cherished common cultural patrimony.  The allusions of filmmakers, poets, and composers alike are lost to those unfamiliar with the artists’ predecessors.     

     I fancy that there was then a lesser gap between low and high art, that the two could rub shoulders in the marketplace, but the mass base for the classics, such as it ever was, has largely evanesced as even most university students, even the cleverer ones, choose to focus solely on vocational training rather than the general intellectual practice – absorbing information, analyzing it, and generating new ideas – that provided the center of the old curriculum in which literature was essential and central.  The change has affected more than just reading.  A glance over a symphony audience will show a sea of white hair, and the classical percentage of recorded music sales has been declining for decades (as has the share of jazz).  Even theater attracts elders for the most part.  What was once a shared body of cultural information has become a territory visited primarily by specialist academics. 

     The younger generations has not, however, abandoned art by any means.  They listen to hours of mostly digitalized music, watch great amounts of television and a good number of movies and never feel as though confining themselves to popular forms is any constriction at all.  Critics will discuss a new pop album or Netflix series, on NPR and PBS, mind you, as though the potential of art had any scope in such productions, virtually none of which have proven other than forgettable.  The decline of the paperback, which played an important role in the democratization of learning, inevitably accompanies the abandonment of the liberal arts.

     When he founded Penguin in 1935 Sir Allen Lane declared that he “believed in the existence of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it.”  His intuition proved true (and profitable) both in the United Kingdom and the United States, but decades, now, of devotion to iPhones and iPads, to Roku and Hulu, Spotify and Apple Music, has eroded that market to insignificance.  People today can be educated through the graduate level while never acquiring cultural literacy and never, indeed, missing it. 

     If I rue the end of such cheap books of the very highest quality, still that loss is trivial compared to the loss of the readership that once welcomed those old paperbacks and with them came to take possession of their own literature, including poetry so beautiful as to make the reader weak in the knees, drama so sublime as to refresh the soul, and stories truer than the truth of everyday lived reality.  People who settle for an episode of Breaking Bad or a tune from Taylor Swift will never, I am afraid, know what they are missing.   

The Anti-Aesthetic Aesthetic of Farrell’s Studs Lonigan

 

     Admirers and critics alike must acknowledge that James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan preserves a glorious array of slang from the ‘twenties.  Studs and his young friends on Chicago’s South Side know every mean ethnic slur including some that were unfamiliar to me such as “schonicker” for Jew (though fellow Chicagoan Saul Bellow uses it, too).  Their Irish parents may have contributed such Britishisms as “gaffer” and “shag,” while the Black population whose spread dislodged the Lonigans from the old neighborhood contributed “jazz” (in the sense of having sex) and “getting one’s ashes hauled.”  Everything good is “jake.”  Good things may also be “swell,” but this word often carries suggestions of snobbish arrogance.  “That’s a swell suit” means approval but a bit of surprise at the wearer’s implied social pretension.  In Studs’ world one can say “She’s a keen girl” and “keen” carries sexual associations absent from its use today (if, indeed, it is used today). 

     Of course, the elements of a story that are most up-to-date are those that first sound dated and soon require footnotes.  Yet to a twenty-first century reader, it is not the language alone that is out of fashion.  James Farrell himself and his monumental trilogy Studs Lonigan are to a certain extent passé.  With the privileging of the largely European avant-garde tradition and its American lineage descending from Gertrude Stein, with naturalism as a whole démodé, it is little wonder that few critics care to comment on the proletarian novels of the Depression era.  The left-wing views that motivated a legion of agitators among the authors of the ‘thirties are now more likely to be found among the obscure scholarly publications of university mandarins practicing New Historicism or Gender Studies.

     Yet at one time books like Studs Lonigan were not only popular but seemed to many the strongest representatives of American literature, with Studs prominent in most reckonings.  [1]  Readers today might have to think a minute to understand H. L. Mencken’s insistence, repeated at least from 1917 on, that Chicago was the most important city in American literature.  For him the most innovative and authentically American writing developed in the Midwest, the source he thought of “all literary movements that have youth in them, and a fresh point of view, and the authentic bounce and verve of the country and the true character and philosophy of its people.”  In part Mencken’s encomium derived from his conviction that in the West “originality still seems to be put above conformity.” [2]  

     Mencken was surely cocking his snoot at New York City, but the gesture carries a meaning beyond provocation.  If the United States is conceived as the place of liberation from moribund Europe ways, writers from the Midwest and West, further removed from the conservative values and decorum associated with the old wealth of the Northeast and the façade of gentility among the Southern plantation owners, might offer the greatest freedom of all.  Writers from states lying well west of the Hudson River such as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Sherwood Anderson, Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Edward Dahlberg, Richard Wright, and Nelson Algren challenged received ideas in wildly different ways.

     In this American context, influenced by the socially conscious naturalism of Zola, which itself developed from Flaubert and Balzac, Farrell’s Studs Lonigan opus, three novels amounting to nearly a thousand pages, seemed a ground-breaking and monumental achievement.  Farrell’s uncompromising treatment of poverty written on the cusp of the Depression was daring in its sexual content as well as its radical thematic premises. 

     Sex in Studs’ world was often rough and thoughtless.  His story includes descriptions of taboo topics such as masturbation, homosexuality, and gang-rape.  Well aware of the possibility of censorship, Farrell excised certain especially explicit episodes, yet Farrell and his publisher Vanguard remained anxious about the consequences of the content that remained [3].  The original introduction assured readers of the sociological value of the work but cautioned that “it is not for children or for the unsophisticated.”  Its unsparing realism and lack of “prudery” means the book might “shock the naïve adult who has lost touch with youth.” [4]  As a further cautionary move, the 1932 Vanguard dust jacket bore a special notice informing the public that the book was a “clinical document,” directed solely at “physicians, surgeons, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, social workers, teachers and other persons having a professional interest in the psychology of adolescence.”  A later edition included a second and bolder introduction, stressing the story’s social implications, in particular the failure of the Catholic Church, as though some ground had been gained in writers’ ability to deal with sexuality [5].  Nonetheless, the book was still to encounter censorship [6].

     No one can doubt Farrell’s role in increasing the writer’s freedom in America.  Whereas Mark Twain had been torn between his rebellious Huck side and his conformist Tom Sawyer tendencies, the milieu of Farrell’s novels is wholly that of his lower middle-class characters, albeit from the point of view of Danny O’Neill, himself on the rise in education and status.  The inclusion of sexual incidents so significant in people’s lives yet long proscribed in fiction is surely salutary.  Furthermore, the open espousal of revolutionary economic views, in Farrell’s case Trotskyite, was novel in his youth, though for a time during the later ‘thirties it seemed as though a good portion of the American intelligentsia had become “fellow travelers.”  Farrell’s role in pushing back sexual and political boundaries is clear.  What has been debated from the start has been the aesthetic quality of his work, whether his fictions possess the style, the beauty to make great novels.   

    The verdict has often been far from flattering.  Most critics, even Farrell’s admirers, concede his weaknesses, prominent among them being a graceless style.  To Alfred Kazin he was the “the plainest” and “most ungainly” of writers; Irving Howe found his prose afflicted by “soggy repetitiveness;” and Mark Shorer observes that “in sheer clumsiness of style no living writer exceeds him.”  The point need not be belabored, since virtually all critics have concurred to one degree or another in defining these weaknesses [7].  Luna Wolf, who worked with Farrell for nine years as a secretary and editor said “He was an extremely creative writer, but he was not a great stylist.  That’s always a problem with his writing.  It’s a shame.  Because he could have been right up there.  It’s terrible that he had this flaw.  He was a writer who, in a way, couldn’t write” [8].

     Farrell was quite aware of modern developments in literature.  He did in fact live in Paris for a year during 1931 and 1932 while writing Studs Lonigan.  His use of popular songs, fragments, newspaper headlines and other materials recalls John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy.  Yet, when he attempted a more radical deviation from conventional narrative, as in Studs’ terminal delirium, most of his readers find he had little success.  (He later imagined he might write a Joycean book about O’Neill’s deathbed consciousness.)  While others, like Lola Ridge and Edward Dahlberg, managed to combine a proletarian perspective with innovative technique, Farrell was never at home with anything but straight story-telling.

     It is hardly a justification to claim that, since Farrell’s character were so often bored, asking each other what they should do, seeking intoxication, loveless sex, and risky or cruel pastimes just to get through the day, that readers should feel similar ennui.  The deadening repetition of the daily routine, relieved mostly by suffering, ought, of course, to be vividly portrayed, not reproduced in the reader.  This general truth is apparent in the vernacular, at first quite fascinating, but which becomes tiresome because it is always the same.  The frequent use of vulgarities flattens their impact until the transgressive words fade to having no specific meaning.  Their significance is only general, implying a low social status and a reactive worldview: rough, cynical, semi-anaesthetized, but the same in every utterance.  The worst consequence is that such language, even if it initially shocks, rapidly becomes tedious.

     Yet Studs does retain a readership if no high spot on Parnassus.  How can one account for Studs’ continuing appeal to many readers?  The wealth of local color – not only slang usage, but references to specific Chicago buildings, local politics, and the like – may underly some readers’ pleasure.  Others may applaud Farrell’s principled advocacy for socialism, consistent for a lifetime.  But the primary artistic appeal of Studs Lonigan is paradoxical: the work exemplifies an anti-aesthetic aesthetic.

     Such appreciation of art on anti-aesthetic (rather than non-aesthetic) grounds is not a new practice. The twentieth century produced a theory to explain the beauty of objects considered camp or kitsch, but these are not the only possible categories for ironic appreciation. Some years ago I saw an exhibit of tiny editions of poetry that celebrated poets in the ‘fifties and early ‘sixties produced to distribute to friends. Some were mimeographed, all were crude-looking, but this is the very quality that enhanced their meaning for me, indicating unmistakably that the authors were hip enough to cultivate their development with showy disregard for fame and the marketplace.  They intended their work to be defiantly unprofessional-looking.  At the time I myself was making visual poems using paste-on letters, always slightly out of place.  The lack of art school precision seemed just right for broadsides distributed on the street. 

     The shabbiness of the product can be an asset; it can be a seal of authenticity.  I am thinking of a wide variety of examples: Kenneth Anger films or the Cockettes, the off-key ebullience of a Mexican band in the zocalo, the plastic tableware of a marvelous hole-in-the-wall eatery, art brut, the lumpy forms of some Zen pottery, the slapdash simplicity of some graffiti-inspired painting, the creaky voice of an aged Appalachian singer, delivering a tune from a half a millennium ago.  In each case the imperfection seems not just appropriate, but expressively beautiful, however much in contrast to ordinary standards.

     There is a similar technical flouting of the usual rules of art in other writers of whom I am fond. Nelson Algren and then Willard Motley followed Farrell in chronicling Chicago. In Jack Kerouac (and Wolfe before him) the naive sexuality and loping, sometimes wandering, rhetorical periods convey passion and vulnerability. Though many pages of Henry Miller seem to have been hastily written, an intoxicating esprit pervades his narration and, even more, his essays.  His casualness is part of his style and this reader would not have it any other way. Norman Mailer could make stumbling both on the page and in person look like the poignant moves of a great if flawed hero.

     So, while I concur with Farrell’s critics in their negative judgements, I do not regret reading the three volumes of Studs’ life once more. I find in it not just life, but a kind of beauty common as dirt and perhaps sometimes as fruitful.

     At times Farrell can strike just the right note.   Fragments of "Just A Gigolo" are quoted a number of times.  This song was wildly popular, the first hit of Bing Crosby’s long career when it was issued in 1932. In its original form this was an Austrian cabaret song of a hussar fallen in the world to the status of gigolo.  In Crosby’s version the speaker is a WWI veteran in a Paris café who laments; 

 

When the end comes I know

They'll say just a gigolo

As life goes on without me

 

The tone of weary, lack-love suffering, of a life pushed by inescapable currents, directionless, can apply to a poor neighborhood of Chicago as well as to the capitals of Europe.  The confidence implied by the left-wing parade near the conclusion of Judgement Day cannot overcome the pathos of this fragment of song, or the suffering of the lives recorded in the fine detail of Farrell’s memory, not to mention lives not so very different, being lived today on a thousand urban streets, including those of Chicago’s great South Side. 

 

 

 

1.  Vestiges of this prestige persisted.  In 1999 the editors of the Modern Library included Studs Lonigan in their list of the hundred best novels of the century.

2.  The quotations are from the October 28, 1917 Chicago Sunday Tribune.  Mencken also wrote an essay for the London Nation (not to be confused with the American journal of the same name) of April 12, 1920 heralding Chicago as the “Literary Capital of the United States.”  Nelson Algren, a strong but late representative of gritty Chicago realism and left-wing sentiments, cited Mencken’s judgement approvingly in his Chicago: City on the Make.

 3.  One he turned into a short story titled “Boys and Girls” which is included in the Library of America edition of Studs Lonigan.

 4.  Frederic M. Thrasher, “Introduction,” Young Lonigan. Thrasher was a professor of education and author of a study of urban youth titled The Gang.

5.  This was written by University of Chicago English professor and radical activist Robert Morss Lovett.

6.  Studs Lonigan was seized by authorities as obscene in Canada in 1944 and in Philadelphia in 1948.  The latter case led to a significant decision by Judge Curtis Bok who decided in Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Gordon et al. that the works of Farrell, as well as those of Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell which had been seized were nothing but “obvious efforts to show life as it is” and could not be suppressed.

7.  Kazin’s comments are in a largely sympathetic obituary in the New York Times, Sept. 16, 1979 titled “James T. Farrell, 1904‐79.”  For Irving Howe, see “Naturalism and Taste” in A Critic’s Notebook and for Shorer, “Technique as Discovery,” The Hudson Review Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1948).

8.  Robert K. Landers, An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell.  Note the mildly apologetic tone of Landers’ title.  When Wolf left him in 1962 to work at McGraw-Hill, he angrily accused her: “All right!  Go ahead!  Leave the sinking ship!”

9.  The original song was "Schoner Gigolo," (1928), first sung in America by the French star Irene Bordoni.  The song has been recorded by a great many artists, including Louis Armstrong, Django Reinhardt, Thelonius Monk, and Louis Prima (for whom it was something of a hit in 1956).

Smokestack Lightning

 

     Texts of the songs discussed, including a transcription of Howlin’ Wolf’s recording that represents the non-word sounds in his performance, are appended. 

     

 

     Apart from the striking repeated title image Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning” [1], consists largely a of collage of blues formulae mixed with more significant and effective inarticulate moans and cries.  The song, with its elemental emotional appeal, made number eleven on the R & B charts and has since been covered by countless bands, including significantly the Yardbirds who brought Wolf’s lyrics a huge white audience.

     Musically the performance could hardly be more focused with its driving relentless vamp on a single chord.  The song contains some of the most familiar language in blues literature; set phrases of complaint that define the genre.

 

 

Why don't ya hear me cryin'?

 

Whoa oh, tell me, baby

What's the, matter with you

 

Where did ya, stay last night?

 

Whoa-oh, fare ya well

Never see, a you no more

 

Whoa-oh, who been here baby since,

I-I been gone

 

     This web of lament is then intensified by the non-linguistic utterances so prominent in Wolf’s oeuvre, indeed the basis for his name.  Here the singer bursts beyond the capacity of words, as in scatting, field hollers, and gospel screams, and the yodeling Wolf admired, a kind of eloquent speaking in tongues, giving voice to the suffering of human life expressed also in everyday life at times as wordless sighs or weeping. 

     Against a background of highly conventionalized set phrases, the title image stands out dramatically.  “Smokestack lightning” had appeared earlier in songs by the Charlie Patton and Mississippi Sheiks as well as by Wolf himself. [2]  In spite of this small place in tradition, the expression reportedly puzzled bassist Willie Dixon. [3]  Though discussion continues, Wolf provided a simple and convincing comment on the origin of the image: "We used to sit out in the country and see the trains go by, watch the sparks come out of the smokestack. That was smokestack lightning." [4] 

    In Howlin’ Wolf’s song, the image accumulates all the more signification due to its underdetermination.  A semiotic map of “smokestack lightning” would begin with the direct reference to a steam railway locomotive smokestack which triggers associations common to the blues in which trains suggest most often loss and love longing but sometimes escape and liberation.  The trains were a dramatic intrusion of the outside world for the farm worker, representing specifically the exit from local life, the route to the cities and the North.  The train as an agent of change was often the herald of suffering and its mechanical might seemed all but supernatural.  Countless songs refer to the train separating one-time lovers. [5]  In the song’s immediate predecessors the train’s stack is associated with loss.  Patton sang that the train’s appearance “give me the blues” because the singer is “'fraid she's gettin' on board.”  The railroad association is more tenuous though the separation is more final in the Mississippi Sheiks usage in which the singer is “cryin'” due to finding “my baby/ Layin' on the coolin' floor.”  The melancholy connotations of the train cling to it even when there is no question of anyone riding out of town, when, in fact, the train is reduced to pure symbol.

     The suggestive potency of the striking image of “smokestack lightning” is not limited to the mournful associations of its sound at night, a use reminiscent of the role of the calls of wild geese in Chinese poetry.  The fiery combustion of the engine, its titanic pressures and terrific heat, represent as well the strength of libido that drives all creatures always forward.  The great clouds of steam and smoke generated by a steam locomotive provide a glimpse into the churning heart of life itself.  The glowing sparks seem animated germs of existence.

     Convention is often opposed to innovation and denigrated by critics, though in fact a discerning use of convention allows the economical expression of themes of great complexity.  In Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning” both musical and verbal resources are restricted to the bare minimum, and one single “floating image,” that of “smokestack lightning,” governs the entire song like that single insistent chord against a tissue of blues commonplaces and even more universal non-verbal utterances.  The image is the richer and the deeper for its measure of indeterminacy.  The songc is a classic not of complexity, but of fierce single-minded intensity, both in feeling and in structure.  Beginning and then periodically dissolving in inarticulate vocalizations, against a collage of floating phrases with great elliptical gaps the listener must complete, the song unforgettably portrays the suffering of the singer as the driving music indicates the unfailing energy to persist in the face of pain and loss. 

 

 1.  “Smoke Stack Lightning” was released in 1956.  In subsequent recording and most covers the song is called “Smokestack Lightning.”  The band consisted of Howlin' Wolf singing and playing harmonica, Hosea Lee Kennard on piano, Willie Johnson and Hubert Sumlin on guitars, Willie Dixon on bass, and Earl Phillips on drums.

 2.  Patton’s “Moon Going Down” (1929) contains the line: “Lord, the smokestack is black and the bell it shine like, bell it shine like, bell it shine like gold/ Oh the smokestack is black and the bell it shine like gold.”  The Mississippi Sheiks’ “Stop and Listen Blues” (1930) contains the lines “Cryin', smokestack lightning/ That bell that shine like gold.”  In 1951 Wolf had released "Crying at Daybreak" which uses the same image: “Smokestack lightnin', shining just like gold/ Honey do you hear me crying?”

3. According to James Segrest.  See his The Life and Times of Howlin' Wolf. 

4.  This line is quoted hundreds of times, including in the “Smokestack Lightning” entry in Rolling Stone’s list of “500 Greatest Rock and Roll Songs, but I have not located its first appearance in print. 

5.  The range of train references in rural songs is suggested by a few examples: “Railroad Blues” by Sam McGee, a white country singer, who says he “went to the depot, looked up on the board/ It read "Good times here, but better down the road."  In “Dixie Flyer Blues” by Bessie Smith the female speaker is leaving, while in Little Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train” she’s likewise on her way, but the persona is male.  In Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” it is unclear who is taking the train.  Many songs (such as Henry Thomas’ “Railroadin’” refer to travel by freight train, while in others such as Leadbelly’s “Midnight Special” (and Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues”) the train is simply the emblem of freedom.  In Big Bill Broonzy’s “Too Too Train” the engine is a dynamo outdone by a lover’s energy.

 

And she do a little of this

And mama and she do a little of that

And when she put on full steam

Make a freight train jump a track

 

 

 

 

 

 

Smokestack Lightning {Howlin’ Wolf] 1956

 

 

Ah oh, smokestack lightnin'

Shinin', just like gold

Why don't ya hear me cryin'?

 

Whoo hoo

Whoo hoo

Whoo

 

Whoa oh, tell me, baby

What's the, matter with you?

Why don't ya hear me cryin'?

 

Whoo hoo

Whoo hoo

Whoo

 

Whoa oh, tell me, baby

Where did ya stay last night?

A-why don't ya hear me cryin'?

 

Whoo hoo

Whoo hoo

Whoo

 

Whoa-oh, stop your train

Let her, go for a ride

Why don't ya hear me cryin'?

 

Whoo hoo

Whoo hoo

Whoo

 

Whoa-oh, fare ya well

Never see, a you no more

A-why don't ya hear me cryin'?

 

Whoo hoo

Whoo hoo

Whoo

 

Whoa-oh, who been here baby since,

I-I been gone, a little, bitty boy

Girl, be on

 

Whoo hoo

Whoo hoo

Whoo

 

Whoa, smokestack lightnin'

Shinin' just like gold

Why don't you hear me cryin'?

A-whoo-hoo, a-whoo-hoo, whoo

Whoa-oh, tell me, baby

What's the matter here?

Why don't you hear me cryin'?

Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, whoo

Whoa-oh, tell me, baby

Where did you stay last night?

Why don't you hear me cryin'?

Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, whoo

Whoa-oh, stop your train

Let a poor boy ride

Why don't you hear me cryin'?

Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, whoo

Whoa-oh, fare-you-well

Never see a you no more

Why don't you hear me cryin'?

Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, whoo

Whoa-oh, who been here baby since

I, I been gone a little bitty boy?

Girl, be on        [heard by some as “derby on”]

A-whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, whoo

 

 

 

 

Crying At Daybreak [Howlin’ Wolf] 1951

 

 

Tell me baby, what's done matter now

Today been a long and lonesome day

Lonesome day

 

Smokestack lightnin', shining just like gold

Honey do you hear me crying?

 

Today been a long and sad old day

Don't you hear me crying

 

Tell me baby what you got on your mind

Why don't you hear me crying

 

Ain't gonna marry, ain't gonna settle down

Why don't you hear me crying

 

 

 

 

Big Road Blues [Tommy Johnson] 1928

 

 

Cryin', ain't goin' down this big road by myself

Now don't you hear me talkin', pretty mama?

Lord, ain't goin' down this big road by myself

If I don't carry you, gon' carry somebody else

Cryin', sun gonna shine in my back door someday

Now, don't you hear me talkin', pretty mama?

Lord, sun gon' shine in my back door someday

And the wind gon' change, gon' blow my blues away

Baby, what makes you do me like you do do do, like you do do do?

Don't you hear me now?

What makes you do me like you do do do?

Now you think you gon' do me like you done poor Cherry Red

Taken the poor boy's money now, sure, Lord, won't take mine

Now don't you hear me talkin' pretty mama?

Taken the poor boy's money; sure, Lord, won't take mine

Taken the poor boy's money now; sure, Lord, won't take mine

Cryin', ain't goin' down this big road by myself

Now, don't you hear me talkin', pretty mama?

Lord, ain't goin' down this big road by myself

If I don't carry you, gon' carry somebody else

Cryin', sun gon' shine, Lord, my back door someday

Now don't you hear me talkin', pretty mama?

Lord, sun gon' shine in my back door someday

And the wind gon' change, blow my blues away

 

 

 

 

Stop and Listen Blues [Mississippi Sheiks] 1930

 

 

Ev'r day have been there

Long old lonesome day

Now don't ya a-hear me talkin', pretty mama?

Ev'r day have been

Long old lonesome day

Cry, it seem like you-ooo would

Be there ooo-ooo, same old way

 

Cryin', smokestack lightning

That bell that shine like gold

Now don't ya a-hear me talkin', pretty mama?

Ooh, smokestack lightning

Bells that shine like gold

Cryin', I found my baby

Layin' on the coolin' floor

 

Don't a hearse look lonesome, mama

Rollin' for yo' do'?

Now don't ya a-hear me talkin', pretty mama?

Don't a hearse look lonesome

 

Rollin' for yo' do'?

Cryin' she's gone, tell you-ooo, Lord

Won't be-ee-ee back no mo'

 

Ooh, stop and listen

Hear how those bells in toll

Now don't ya a-hear me talkin', pretty mama?

Ooh, stop and listen

Hear the bell it tolls

I had a sweet little faror

But she's dead and gone

 

 

 

 

Moon Going Down [Charlie Patton] 1930 

 

 

Aw, the moon is going down baby, sun's about to shine

Aw, the moon's going down baby, sun's about to shine

Rosetta Henry told me, "Lord, I don't want you hangin' round"

Oh well, where were you now baby, Clarksdale mill burned down?

Oh well, where were you now babe, Clarksdale mill burned down?

(Boy, you know where I were)

I were way down'n Sunflower with my face all full of frown

There's a house over yonder, painted all over green

There's a house over yonder, painted all over green

(Boy, you know I know it's over there)

Lord, the finest young women, Lord, a man most ever seen

Lord, I think I heard that Taylor whistle, Taylor whistle, Taylor whistle blow

Lord, I think I heard that Taylor whistle

(Well now I hear it blowin')

Lord, I ain't gonna stop walkin' 'til I get in my rider's door

Lord, the smokestack is black and the bell it shine like, bell it shine like, bell it shine like gold

Oh the smokestack is black and the bell it shine like gold.

(Cover me boy, you know it looks good to me)

Lord, I ain't gonna walk there, ah, babe ain't 'round no more

Aw, I evil was at midnight, 'til I heard the local blow

I was evil out at night, when I heard the local blow

(Boy it give me the blues...)

I got to see my rider, 'fraid she's gettin' on board

 

Suburbs

     I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, closer in distance or travel time to the Loop than many of the city’s own neighborhoods. Yet Glen Ellyn was a world apart from that sometimes gritty city with its huge black population and its working class ethnic neighborhoods whose boundaries, though unwritten, were fiercely enforced. My own neighborhood, white and upper middle class, had its own rules. In the 1950s, by social convention enforced by real estate agents neither Black people nor Asians could buy homes in Glen Ellyn’s tree-shaded streets with large lots, nor could Jews.
     In the morning my father, like the other fathers of the town, would gather at the commuter train station, each wearing a dark suit with a white shirt, bleached and starched, and a fedora. There were few women. In the late afternoon they all returned.
     Like many of my age cohort, I did not find this an attractive prospect for my own future. I thought blacks had culture, as did every nation and national group. I could perceive cultural patterns in small Iowa towns, but I could not in the suburbs where it seemed size of homes and greenness of lawns were important determinants of social standing.
     There were numerous other standards for judging one’s neighbors. Mine was the first generation for whom orthodontia was the norm, and in Glen Ellyn, one practitioner had an office in the center of the village while the other was situated out on Roosevelt Road with the gas stations and drive-in burger shops. Though unable to compare the expertise of the two, Glen Ellyn’s adolescents all knew which was more prestigious and to which each classmate went. There were two country clubs, one more impressively costly than the other. (My family joined neither.) Many of my friends purchased their “ivy league” style clothing at Bob Horsley’s, the classy little haberdashery in our downtown (most of which was half-timbered neo-Tudor).[1] My closet was full of labels from Sears and Montgomery Wards where my parents felt at home. Frugal they may have been, but at least, I thought, they did not sink to the level of patronizing Thom McAn’s or Robert Hall.
     My home town seemed as tasteless as the bologna on white bread I daily took to school and vapid as a Mitch Miller tune. Though not as well off as many in the town, my family was secure, but I felt alienated and bored, stewing in a very particular brand of adolescent dissatisfaction, even as countless aspirants would have felt they had made it if their family owned a home to a town like mine.
     While I was in high school, the film club founded by a friend showed Eisenstein’s monumental Ivan the Terrible. At one dramatic peak, messengers arrive at the court declaring, “The suburbs of Moscow are burning!” The spell of that beautifully stylized operatic masterpiece was suddenly broken for me, as I involuntarily imagined the wanton destruction of golf courses and shopping malls.
     Another film club program featured a program of 30s documentaries including The City, a film made in 1939 by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke with a prestigious crew of progressives participating. [2] After depicting an early New England town, the film focused on urban pathologies, depicting the poor living in tenements and crowded apartments on unclean streets. The third section of the film portrays a more desirable alternative: garden towns with open spaces where residents might enjoy short commutes to nearby workplaces and could shop at convenient shopping centers. It was a vision of the suburbia of the future based on a few planned communities already built, though the real demographic shift did not occur until after WWII when the GI Bill allowed many veterans to purchase homes and developments like Levittown sprang up across the nation. Between 1948 and 1958, 85% of the new homes built in the United States were located in suburbs.
     The rosy hopes of the progressives of the thirties did not long survive. Lewis Mumford, who had contributed to The City came to believe that “the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of illusion,” producing “not merely a child-centered environment” but a design for living “based on a childish view of the world, in which reality was sacrificed to the pleasure principle.” [3]
     Pejorative use of the adjective “suburban,” however, predates Mumford’s reversal. According to the OED the first recorded use of the word bearing an implied negative value is in Byron’s Beppo in which the lovely Laura criticizes one of her associates for an unfashionable look, “vulgar, dowdyish, and suburban." As an urbanite and, in fact, a resident of Venice, a notoriously sophisticated place, she looks down on the suburbanites even when they are wealthy. [4]
     Ralph Waldo Emerson continued the tradition in "The Conduct of Life," where he wrote, "If you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuous-looking house for a little money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap dear house." I think his terms could apply to the treeless, sidewalkless developments full of homes lacking character but containing numerous bathrooms which sell for over a half million dollars. In such would-be neighborhoods parents drive their children to a bus stop a block away and the dogs will go berserk when they descry a pedestrian.
     Born in the first wave of postwar babies, I grew up in the Eisenhower fifties, famous for the conformity that so characterized the suburbs. Yet voices of protest emerged and found a place on the best seller lists and, in the great American tradition of cooptation, even into hit movies: The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman with (Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney), William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, and Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The alienated became anti-heroes in such movies as The Wild One, Rebel without a Cause, and a series of films of Tennessee Williams’ plays, albeit softened for cinema. Further out the were the Beats, visible to everyone in Life magazine, and, at the decade’s beginning Neurotica, founded by Jay Landesman, edited after the third issue by Gershon Legman and, at its end, Paul Krassner’s The Realist.
     When I was in middle school, my brother’s high school English teacher risked, I have no doubt, his job by giving my brother a copy of The Realist. Though I lived in what seemed to me the emptiest of environments, I visited Hyde Park and Old Town in Chicago, seeking alternative spaces and wrote the small presses in the back of The New American Poetry 1945-1960. At school I ostentatiously carried this volume though, of course, it was not part of the curriculum. [5] I reached out to what I could find of the Other, visiting Old Left offices in the city, gratifying the aging radicals with a younger face and joining the handful of people who attended their demonstrations. I wandered Chicago’s great South Side, walking miles along 64th Street before returning to look for a used book store or a coffee house near the university of Chicago. I sought out restaurants like Diana’s in the old Greektown when the place was a small room in back of a little grocery with a stunning variety of olives, the Assyrian-American restaurant on North Halstead where old men stirred their pickled cabbage and gambled in the back room, or the Warsawianka which served such homely fare as boiled chicken and blood soup.
     My mind had rambled far from the suburbs, and once I left, I rarely looked back. I lived in college towns and big cities, often in more-or-less voluntary poverty, until moving from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley where it might seem to an observer that the suburbs never let go of me and that I have come to rest after a gypsy career in a village not so very different from the one in which I spent my schooldays.




1. All things devolve. Cheap housing developments tend to have British-sounding names like Bonnie Brae or Pickwick Estates.

2. The film included planning by Pare Lorentz, writing by Lewis Mumford, music by Aaron Copland, and narration by Morris Carnovsky and was considered sufficiently au courant to be shown at the World’s Fair in New York that year.  Steiner and Van Dyke were leftists, members of the agitprop film group Nykino, inspired by Vertov’s Kino Pravda and similar work in the Soviet Union.

3. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York, 1961), 494.

4. Stanza LXVI, line 524.

5. My wife and I were visiting a very affluent and very Southern Californian relative whose surly teen-age son could hardly be coaxed from his room from which one could constantly hear the sounds of Kurt Cobain. When his parents tried to persuade him to join us for a dinner out, he used what he surely thought a solid excuse. “Aww, I got to write a paper for English class.” When asked what topic had been assigned, he said, “Oh, just some stupid boring book my teacher made us read.” “What’s the title?” I pursued him. “Oh, it’s so dumb. On the Road.” Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

How I Came to Work at Scott, Foresman

     Teaching Greek tragedy, I sometimes sought to explain fate neither as providence nor predestination, but simply as what one does not know until it unfolds in experience. I asked students to think of how their lives were dependent on chance, not merely their own paths, but even their existence. Had their parents not chanced to meet, through countless events, fortuitous in the sense of leading to their births, they would not be sitting in my classroom. Then I suggested they reflect on the same improbability extending back through grandparents and all the previous generations. In this light each individual’s substantial and indubitable existence was at the same time almost impossibly unlikely and altogether ordinary.
     I recall one of John Cage's anecdotes about a woman – I cannot chase it down just now since my copies of Silence and A Year from Monday have vanished from my shelves – o every book less is regretted one day! Cage tells of a woman who had spent her entire adult life in a small New England town. When asked what had brought her there, she said that she had bought a bus ticket when young to the furthest destination she could afford. She never left. Itself implausible, the story is a charming fable of randomness in human life that makes sense to me. In my own life chance has pushed forward quite shamelessly.
     During the late sixties, after my university graduation and marriage, the draft was still pursuing me. While the more level-headed among my contemporaries may have pursued professional credentials or begun saving for a down payment, I had dreams of poetry and travel. (Persistent for dreams, these have never left me.) Lacking altogether the career direction that seems to possess most of today’s youth, I realized with some regret that I had to find a job. My hostility to capitalism made most salaried positions distasteful. I would have felt a fraud in any corporate setting, regardless of my productivity. It is often inconvenient to possess values.
     My antipathy toward “straight” jobs had, however, a corresponding benefit. Because of the fact that I greeted a host of options with a single reaction (can I carry off the imposture?), I found them all equally acceptable (and equally unacceptable), creating a wide range of choice.
     Many of my former classmates stepped into positions open in those days to anyone with a liberal arts degree such as teaching in the Chicago schools or working for the welfare (as it was called). At that time a B.A. was also the ordinary qualification for executive trainee tracks in the business world, so it seemed as though, if Selective Service would just leave me alone, I could certainly find something.
     Responding to the random prompts of classified advertisements, I applied all over the place in Chicago: an insurance company or two, a bank, even the Pinkerton agency. I was found to be unqualified as a night watchman by the last, but the bank gave me a job offer contingent only, they said, on my security background check. After a few days they must have heard something, because the offer was withdrawn.
     Eventually I found my way to a little one-room employment agency, high in an old Loop office building, the kind with mail chutes next to the elevators in which one could occasionally see letters flash by on their speedy trip from higher floors. This one man operation specialized in placing applicants as writers and editors. The agent’s commission, though steep (more than a month of the worker’s salary) was, in those olden days, paid entirely by the hiring company. The proprietor of the agency sat at a capacious pre-computer desk heaped with papers, one of which occasionally fluttered to the floor as he chewed an unlit cigar and talked. It was the sort of enterprise, I realized, that survived solely on account of this single individual’s contacts and their faith in his judgement. After he had sized me up, he said, “Well, I think I’ve got two good spots for you, one at least, maybe two. Are you willing to write pornography?”
     Thinking myself ready for most anything other than manual labor and thinking, perhaps, of Henry Miller and Anais Nin, I assented and, a day or two later, headed out to the west side for an interview at a small company that published three tabloid papers a few notches below the Enquirer and the Star as well as four or five skin magazines (as the pre-pornography genre was known). The production area for the tabloid was a single large room with long tables, more like a lunchroom than an editorial office, with a few glassed-in areas for the head editors. I learned at my interview that my language skills had impressed them. They thought I could scan the heap of equally lurid European tabloids to which they subscribed in search of articles to translate. They were unconcerned about obtaining rights. “Oh, they’re probably stealing from us. That’s the least of our concerns.” I would have the opportunity not only to translate, but to use my own creative powers as well. I got a short course in making stories up from nothing. “For instance, we might run a story with a headline, ‘President Nixon’s Wife Seeks Divorce’ and then quote some unnamed ‘experts’ about potential tell-tale signs. It’s simple to say very nearly anything you like without any problems. Then we could find pictures of each of them scowling and place them together so it looks like they are reacting to each other.”
     I did a bit of writing as a sample and had lunch with the staff where I was not surprised to find some interesting people, a number of travelers, artists, poets, and at least one undergoing a novel. I figured I could live with this bunch. The next day I got an offer and asked for a few days to consider.
     The following day was the second interview the employment agent had lined up, this one with the textbook company Scott Foresman, famous then for its Dick, Jane, and Sally readers, though it published a wide range of other books, including college texts, and Thorndike-Barnhart dictionaries. This looked very much like a “straight” job. The offices were in a modern building with vast lawns in suburban Glenview, everyone wore suits, and I felt like I had to act a part to make the right impression. To be quite certain I could do that, I took some benzedrines before driving out for my interview. Here, too, my supposed language skills were the excuse for my being considered to work on a series of world literature books aimed at high school honors English classes. That head editor rapidly decided I wouldn’t fit their needs, but I had talked in such a scintillating manner that she referred me to a colleague who was directing the development of a four-year series of books aimed at “inner city” (meaning minority-dominated) schools.
     I was to learn that Scott Foresman’s dedication to racial equality was influenced primarily by market forces. Mindful of the civil rights movement but also of Southern states, not a few of which had state-wide text adoption, the publisher had a number of versions of Dick, Jane, and Sally. One was immaculately white, another included darker faces in non-speaking roles, and a third had African-American characters who actually interacted with the angelic suburban stars. There did not seem to be an all-black edition, which must have been an oversight, as all-black schools certainly did (and do) exist. However, the burning cities of the mid-sixties summer riots had unnerved the powers that be enough to call for the War on Poverty and special funding for urban, under-performing, disadvantaged, education. So the corporations responded, and the project for which I was being considered was a result.
     Little remains to tell. Perhaps because my recent experience as a VISTA volunteer attested to my suburbanite’s understanding of the underclass, I got an offer from Scott Foresman to be an editorial assistant. I considered. While I felt at home in the demi-mondaine atmosphere of the first option – it would have likely made a more entertaining story -- I possessed just enough prudence to realize that the second would look better on a resumé. So I accepted and spent a few years in a pleasant window office there (though more often hiding out in the carrel at the back of the library), living on very little on Chicago’s far North Side, amassing money to see the world. I learned that among the workers were no less a percentage of artistic, even hip, people than at the disreputable publisher: poets, artists, scholars, some real characters. I found that that to be a high school textbook editor was tantamount to being a high school textbook author. The concept for the series was attributed to a teacher but every word in the finished project, the selection of the readings, the teacher’s manual and other apparatus were all composed entirely in-house. I was told, “There has to be a working teacher as author. He can go and do publicity at professional meetings, but he doesn’t have time to actually write the thing.”
     The pace was very comfortable. At least three hours out of four were my own. After a while I joined a simpatico carpool, most of the members of which went immediately to the subsidized cafeteria when we arrived to linger over coffee and pastries before even reporting to their areas. The director of another project hired a new editor, fresh from a spell at the Lama Commune where he had departed after the group failed to accept his suggestion that everyone act out the previous night’s dreams every morning. The fact was that his services were not really needed for six months. I came to understand this lassitude about our productivity when I saw a pie chart of the expenses of publication in which our work was almost unnoticeable among the costs of advertising, salesmen’s commissions, and the actual printing.
     When I had to participate in large meetings with marketing staff or potential customers, my boss’s boss, vice-president of editorial services, sometimes made semi-embarrassed but good-humored references to my long hair or my Western boots, but I was never told to conform. I could perhaps have become too comfortable there.
     As the time for my departure, known to me but not to them, approached, this v.p. began hinting that there was “something sweet” in store for me shortly. Realizing after sufficient clues that he meant a promotion I kept silent about leaving, thinking that to report a higher title would be advantageous in the future. I don‘t even recall if I made it to the position of “assistant editor,” but I am quite certain it would never have made any subsequent difference if I had.

Black Lives Matter

     It is disgraceful that in the twenty-first century, a hundred and fifty years after emancipation and fifty years after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws, a movement asserting that “Black Lives Matter” should have to arise. Yet opposition to racism remains a controversial position. The bigots, ashamed of their own attitudes, use more subterfuge now. Instead of speaking of “nigras” as the Southern politicians used to do, they claim to live in a post-racial world; they condemn “political correctness” and quotas and complain about of crime and welfare recipients, while saying “all lives matter.” But every American knows that unalloyed racism lies just beneath this rhetoric.
     Though de jure segregation and explicitly white supremacist language are obsolete, the United States remains a country bound by structural and institutional racism. I have encountered college freshmen who honestly feel that discrimination is a thing of the past. Often, accompanying this conviction lurks the notion that in fact minorities now enjoy an advantage. Such resentment flies in the face of all available evidence, including studies that consistently show that a white person who reports having just been released from prison will receive a job in preference to a black with equivalent education and experience who reports no criminal history. Inner city neighborhoods are worse off by many measures than they were before the civil rights era due to the exit of members of the black middle class who departed as soon as they were able to purchase homes in the suburbs. In terms of drug addiction, incarceration, single parent households, and welfare dependence these areas are significantly more depressed than they once were. [1] As a teacher in a New York State prison my entire class was often made up of men of color. In average social conditions, health care, education, employment, the criminal justice system, indeed, in every significant way, blacks are in a position statistically inferior to whites. Anyone with open eyes and an objective mind can see these things.
     This in no way denies the opportunities available to middle class and academically well-qualified blacks which are indeed far greater than in the segregationist past. But for the majority of blacks conditions have not improved in the least. Contact with the (largely) white working class in police departments across the country is only a flashpoint for this far more general and significant rule. Though the real enemy sits in the corporate board room and the police are merely the minions of the powers that be, it is on the level of the street that society’s contradictions become manifest. Of course security is the first requirement for civil life and black grandmothers need to be able to go to the market without worrying about thugs. This hardly alters the fact that police in general, including black police, do not do their job in a color-blind way and that needless harassment, arrests, and the use of excessive force are all too common. White progressives are well acquainted with behavior from law enforcement ranging from crude to sadistic and illegal. And yet the malefactors are protected not only by their more well-behaved colleagues, but also by politicians and juries because of their uniforms.
     The fact is that, however well-meaning an individual may be, a white person in America inevitably benefits from white skin privilege. This unfair edge has nothing to do with individual integrity and everything to do with social norms. One can shed money but not this socially institutionalized advantage. Further, contrary to sentimentalist rhetoric about racism arising from ignorance and being a matter for the individual conscience, personal feelings about race are almost irrelevant to the social problem. Overt racism flourishes in fact in those poor white neighborhoods that find themselves physically adjacent to black areas where workers feel they compete for jobs with blacks. Suburbanites in economically segregated districts can afford to be unprejudiced (except when it comes to workplace decisions). In my view Lester Maddox was entitled to shun black dinner guests in his home and to attempt to dissuade his son from marrying an African-American but he could not refuse to serve any individual in his public restaurant. It is social guarantees like the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the middle sixties that transform society, not spiritual awakenings.
     As a lifelong white anti-racist I think the crisis at this moment is sufficiently heightened that all people of good will must stand in public together. If only the many groups that fail to get a fair shake under American capitalism today, the workers, women, national minorities, gay, immigrant, the poor, the sick, the young and the old, if all these were to stand together, what might not be won? It is time to join hands in a real rainbow coalition. [2]



1. In the same way, sub-Saharan Africa (with the exception of South Africa, always a special case) has regressed in terms of education and health standards from late colonial days.

2. This term, later coopted by Jesse Jackson, was first used in the late sixties to describe the program of the Illinois Black Panther Party which sought solidarity in Chicago with the Puerto Rican Young Lords and with such white activists as the Young Patriots, Rising Up Angry, and SDS.