Words! Words! Words! #2

We expend a lot of energy trying to create order and stability in our lives. It is important to us to find patterns and understand why things happen or how things work. We brush our teeth in the morning, eat our three meals a day and fill our spare time with one pursuit or another.

With our daily comfort relying on finding patterns and being surrounded by the recognizable, it's no wonder that confrontation with something new and unclassifiable makes such a strong impression on our minds and in our lives.

I remember my first encounter with the late-night TV show "Night Flight." The format of this show was unlike anything I had previously experienced. No host announced what was coming up; it was simply a montage of cartoon clips, music videos, experimental films and foreign shorts. Because of its departure from my normal experience, "Night Flight" took on a mystical aspect. Similar instances that have produced the same sort of effect include my first use of the Web, my first reading of "On the Road," my first exposure to Electronica and the new music styles that accompanied it, as well as my first close encounter with a member of the opposite sex (listed in no particular order).

It was just over a year ago that a friend recommended Henry Miller to me. I was at the tail end of a reading frenzy, churning through everything put into my hands, when I ran up against Miller's The Tropic of Cancer. Momentum kept me from pulling away from this work in confusion. But once I found myself in the thick of it, I recognized that Miller was actually saying something I was ready to hear.

Complacency and the desire to be lulled into inaction by creature comforts and a false sense of plenty were the 20th century norms that Miller railed against. He flaunted his whoring, degeneracy, and insolvency. He was an expatriate (anti-patriot) living in France for nearly a decade and decrying the destruction of the human soul by the forces of Consumerism and Commercialism in the United States.

Being a late bloomer when it comes to social and philosophical discourse, I found that many of my friends had read Miller in college, along side Ayn Rand, and were prepared to dismiss his works as dark, angry and tiresome. But most of them agreed that immediately after reading Miller they had been filled with a sense of outrage at the state of Western culture.

It's an indication of the overwhelming strength of the very forces Miller tries to alert us to that this indignation and resolve so quickly drains out of us after reading such rousing words.

While still under the influence of Miller I picked up his "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare," which is a biographical account of his return to the United States after his decade abroad. In the introduction, Miller explains that he had hoped to return in order to, as he puts it, "effect a reconciliation with my native land."

The reconciliation was a failure, and Miller had difficulty finding any kind words to use in the descriptions of his travels.

It's not all gloom, of course. His visit to Ohio revealed that although that state has given little to the world aside from "weak, characterless men" (former presidents McKinley, Hayes, Garfield, Grant and Harding), there are two artist of high regard who came from its wastes. These two, both writers, are Sherwood Anderson and Kenneth Patchen.

I'd read some of Anderson's shorter stories, but I'd never heard of Kenneth Patchen, who Miller describes as, "almost driven mad by the evil and ugliness everywhere...so stricken with pain and chagrin by what he sees that he recreates the cosmos in terms of blood and tears, stands it upside down and walks out on it in loathing and disgust." Strong words, and difficult to decipher.

Searching around I found that Patchen was better known as a poet than a prose author. Among his prose works, the most notable seems to be "the Journal of Albion Moonlight." But in 1999, New Directions republished his Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer and that was the only Patchen title waiting for me on the shelf in my nearest bookstore.

I picked up Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer knowing nothing about it except that it was written by someone who Miller held in high esteem. The back cover promised a "profound social message," as well as "tender silliness" and hilarity.

All of these elements might very well exist in Memoirs but from the start, I was struck by the empeheralness purposely create by the auther. Here is a break from the standard pattern of narrative, erplaced by something really original and almost unsettling. No, not almost. I found this book to be quite unsettling.

The shy pornographer is a man named Alfred Budd. That is one of the few concrete facts to remain more or less constant throughoutMemoirs. Budd begins as a factory worker, living in the home of his sister. He is mentally simple, which makes him an innocent, like Steinbeck's Lennie from Of Mice and Men. Before deciding to write a book, he passes his time collecting mud from the fenders of cars so to build his collection of dirt from all the states in the Union.

Budd's book, The Spool of Destiny is published by a man he meets in the library, Skujellifeddy McGranehan. This pocket-picking publisher takes certain liberties with Budd's work. He leaves out a great number of the words and sends it overseas to be printed under the title The Spill of Desire. Thus is born a pornographer in the eyes of the public. One who can't even bring himself to write out "hell" in his own memoirs, using "h--l" instead.

I would be very surprised if anyone reading this book today didn't find themselves thinking of Bob Dylan. Songs like "Desolation Row" seem to have been inspired by Patchen's work. Characters materialize all around Budd who are nothing more than names and outrageous caricatures, lending them an almost mythical power of representation, much like Dylan's Romeo or Blind Commissioner. These characters frequently threaten Budd or even accost him violently or sexually. Generally unfazed after such incidents, he wanders off to the next encounter.

Patchen himself may have been inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which, like Memoirs, is regarded as light hearted, but which always filled me with a sense of dread and anxiety.

It occurs to me that to this point I've said little about Memoirs to give the impression that it holds any value except to some literary masochists who gladly dive into works like Ulysses. I simply felt that some sort of warning was in order before I entreated everyone to rush out and obtain a copy to read. Consider yourself warned: This is not your typical prose narrative.

That said, I stress that Memoirs is an astounding work. Begin it with an open mind and delight in Patchen's use of the language. Perhaps this is what was meant by "tender silliness," that is, the way Patchen constructs meandering sentences and then snaps them back at the reader like a whip with a single phrase. He moves from prose to poetry and back with fluidity, and speaks through characters in many voices. Often he approaches the edge of corniness, but pulls back just in time. Miller said that Patchen was a voracious reader who, "exposes himself to every influence, even the worst." It is easy to see, in reading this book, that Patchen used a little of everything he could get his hands on in order to create the world Budd experiences.

Most important for me was the realization, upon finishing the book, that there are still boundaries to be pushed. In fact, Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer was published in 1945 and I know of few books released since that time that have so blatantly disregarded the formula for successful publication.

Sadly, it seems that the arguments of protestors like Miller and Patchen are being drowned out over the intervening decades by the drone of the very powers they struggled to free us from. I don't know what sort of reception MemoirsM received went it was first printed, but I doubt it could meet with any less indifference than it enjoys today.

Do yourself a service. Read Patchen's works and let them shake you up a bit. You can only profit when you let the commonplace, comfortable patterns be broken.