Saving Private Power
(The Hidden History of “The Good War”)
by Michael Zezima
New York: Soft Skull (2000)
When William E. Dodd, U.S. ambassador to Germany during the 1930s, declared that “a clique of U.S. industrialists is … working closely with the fascist regime[s] in Germany and Italy,” he wasn’t kidding. In fact, it was more than just a small “clique.” A handful of books published in recent years have pulled the fascist skeletons out of more than a few corporate closets.
Among the major U.S. Corporations who invested in Germany during the 1920s were Ford, General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil, Texaco, International Harvester, ITT, and IBM. Although corporate historians profess that they did this to help the country recover from the devastations of WW I, they are careful to omit mentioning that the German cartels they financed helped bring Hitler to power. And of course all were more than happy to see the German labor movement and working-class parties smashed by SS thugs. U.S. multinationals profited from and supported Hitler’s industrial war machine as it was built and even after the U.S. entered the war:
• As Max Wallace writes in The American Axis, Ford was not only aware of the Nazis’ use of slave labor at their factories in Germany and France, but condoned it. Hitler, in turn, was a big admirer of Henry Ford (a notorious anti-semite) whose photo he kept on his desk.
• Standard Oil of New York honored its chemical contracts with I.G. Farben – the German chemical cartel that manufactured Zyklon-B, the poison gas used in the Nazi gas chambers – right up until 1942. IG Farben’s corporate descendants include companies like BASF. (Aside: In the late 1980s, I was helping a community group in Indiana fight a BASF hazardous waste incinerator proposal. A guy who claimed to be an opponent came to our office in Chicago with information about BASF’s ties to the Nazis. We never got distracted by that history from the threat the incinerator posed to community health. We had reason to be reluctant, not just because it might derail us from broad community support, but also because I could smell a strong chemical smell on the guy’s suit – which may just mean that he was a guilt-stricken employee, not a plant. In any event, BASF ended up shipping their waste to Chemical Waste Management’s notorious commercial incinerator on Chicago’s south-east side where, on Labor Day, community residents added this sign to the parade in protest of the company’s search for a permit renewal from EPA: “1940: Hitler Brings People to the Gas Chamber…1990: Chem Waste Brings the Gas Chamber to the People.”)
• In 1976, Anthony Sutton wrote in Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler that not only was an influential sector of American business aware of the nature of Naziism, but for its own purposes aided Naziism wherever possible (and profitable) – with full knowledge that the probable outcome would be war involving Europe and the United States.” Those eminent business leaders included the Rockefellers, GE , National City Bank, Chase and Manhattan banks, Kuhn, Loeb and Company, ITT and “scores of other business elitists.” Sutton’s book puts much of the blame on international bankers who constructed complicated deals to hide their support of Hitler. Of course, the multinationals have not forgotten how to engineer such coups. ITT, for example, later backed the coup that brought to power Latin America’s most notorious fascist, general Pinochet in Chile in 1972.
• Other companies that traded with the Reich and, in some cases directly aided the war machine before and during this time, included the Chase Manhattan Bank, Davis Oil Company, DuPont, Bendix, Sperry Gyroscope, and the aforementioned General Motors. GM top man William Knudsen called Nazi Germany “the miracle of the 20th century.”
• In 2001, Edwin Black explained the strategic alliance between Big Blue’s founder Thomas Watson and the Nazis in IBM and the Holocaust. No surprise to readers of Gravity’s Rainbow (even Wyman Jr. at Amherst?), who know that behind the cybernetic language of corporations there is a universal stone determinacy, a Calvinistic preterition, a single labyrinthine plot that manipulates men and events, so that we fight ineffectually against a vastly superior machine that makes us active participants in our own destruction, yearning, perhaps, for a secret integration -- the “single-set of coordinates” where Zero and One meet and we can find a starting place for a new beginning -- after all, haven’t They arranged everything? But how does that explain the wing-tips?
• Perhaps most interesting is John Buchanan’s series of reports for the Nashua, NH Gazette (finally picked up by AP) that Prescott Bush (father of President George Bush and grandfather of the current president) worked with his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, in the family firm Union Banking Corporation to raise $50 million for the Nazis, by selling German bonds to American investors from 1924 to 1936. The Federal Government shut the bank down in 1942, under the Trading With the Enemy Act.
• We should also not forget that the corporate collaboration with members of the Nazi technocratic and scientific elite extended long beyond the war. In 1991, Linda Hunt, a former executive producer of CNN’s investigative unit, published Secret Agenda (St. Martin’s), an expose of Project Paperclip, an OSS/CIA program designed to keep Nazi war criminals and scientists from falling under commie influence by placing them in the employ of U.S. companies such as General Electric, Grace and Dow Chemical. At least 1600 scientific and research specialists and thousands of their dependents were brought to the U.S. under Operation Paperclip. Hundreds went to work for universities, defense contractors, and CIA fronts, with all sorts of weird consequences. E.g. Paperclip scientists working at Edgewood Arsenal in MD performed some of the first human experiments with LSD and other “psychochemical warfare” agents that were developed in the search for the ultimate mind-control weapon that could turn a man into a “Manchurian Candidate” (Richard Condon’s fictional character, who had been brainwashed and reprogrammed as an unwitting assassin). As former CIA agent David McMichael said, “drugs and covert operations go together like fleas on a dog.”
Of course, in America you're not taken seriously if you openly deny the Holocaust. (In 1993, Newsweek reported that nearly 40 percent of adult Americans expressed doubts as to whether a European Holocaust of the magnitude depicted in standard histories occurred during World War II.) But what does it say about our culture and politics that we deliberately ignore the role of business in the emergence of monstrous forms of blind nationalism and patriotism? Although there is little doubt outside the U.S., there continues to be a strong culture of denial that the war in Iraq had anything to do with oil or the interests of defense contractors? And maybe the comparisons between Saddam and Hitler are apt, considering U.S. corporations provided support to both. We should ask ourselves how much the world really has changed since WW I, when Americans renamed Sauerkraut “liberty cabbage.”
“My hope,” Zezima writes, “is that by exposing the lie of such a powerful and enduring myth, we can all begin questioning everything being marketed to us within our commodity culture. Saving Private Ryan (the movie), by bringing home the insanity and suffering of warfare, has led directly to Saving Private Power which, I feel, can help explain how that insanity and suffering has been packaged and sold as inevitable and necessary … and good.”
On the role of corporations in fascism:
In 1980, Webster’s New World Dictionary offered the following definition of fascism:
“a system of government characterized by rigid one-party dictatorship, forcible suppression of opposition, private economic enterprise under centralized government control, belligerent nationalism, racism, militarism, etc.”
In true Orwellian fashion, a recent (1990) variation removes all that unpleasant talk about private economic enterprise: “fascism: a system of government characterized by dictatorship, belligerent nationalism and racism, militarism, etc.”
Saturday, November 15, 2003
The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group
By Dan Briody
John Wiley & Sons (2003)
Exposed.
(A 45 minute web-streamed Dutch documentary about Carlyle)
It's hard to write objectively about the Carlyle Group, the global private equity investment bank that specializes in defense and aerospace takeovers, without sounding like a conspiracy nut. Yet it's hard to imagine any single company that epitomizes Eisenhower's warnings about the "military-industrial complex" more than the Carlyle Group.
The company employs a who's who of Washington and global insiders, including (until recently) ex-president George H.W. Bush, ex-SEC Chair Arthur Levitt, former UK British Prime Minister John Major, "Spooky" Frank Carlucci -- the former deputy director of the CIA and Reagan-era Secretary of Defense, Bush family consigliere James Baker III, Fidel Ramos (former President of the Philippines), and a roster of other top ex-government figures, Ivy-league MBAs, World Bank executives, etc. As Dan Briody (a business journalist who has written for Forbes, Wired and others) puts it: "over time, the pattern of Carlyle's hiring practices emerges to reveal a series of old friends helping one another out." And opportunizing on the decisions that their ex-colleagues (e.g. Colin Powell, once a Carlyle consultant) or sons (in Bush's case) are making inside a sitting administration.
The Carlyle Group was the first major private venutre capital firm to be located on Pennsylvania Avenue, blocks from the White House. As such, Carlyle epitomizes what Michael Lewis was the first to label "access capitalism" in a 1993 article for The New Republic. And given the way many of the post-war contracts have been doled out, Carlyle has become a model for THE way of doing business in Washington these days.
The company has come a long way since the early 1970s, when it was first established by a fluke at a NYC hotel of that name (chosen to give teh firm an old money patina). The company's first deal was a scam that brokered tax loopholes intended for Alaskan Eskimos but sold to U.S. companies. Carlyle partners have since continuously milked their high-level contacts ("in Washington, it's not what you know, but who you know" Briody writes) so successfully that the company boasts in its own marketing literature about having "a vast interlocking global network." Carlyle's influence clearly signals a dangerous trend in U.S. foreign policy that has gained considerable force and deserved attention during the Bush administration.
The company was embarrassed when an investment stake from the bin Laden family was revealed after 9/11. (Carlyle quietly returned the investment after the unwelcome attention, though bin Laden had been identified as a terrorist long before then). Like Halliburton, Carlyle pioneered the privatization of certain military operations. The company's Vinnell Corporation subsidiary (which Briody calls the "clearest example of Carlyle's business inside the Iron Triangle") -- recently spun off -- has been training the Saudi Armed Forces in how to protect their country's oil fields since the mid-1970s (Vinnell personnel actually fought alongside Saudi forces in the first Gulf War). Vinnell was the target of a major terrorist bomb attack in July. (The bin Ladens pulled their money out of Carlyle after 9/11.)
Critics have suggested U.S. interests have also been bent to help the company. For example, ex-president George H.W. Bush (who took a leading role in the company's Asian operations) is reported to have influenced his son's decision to reverse course and reopen negotiations with North Korea, a move tied to the over $1 billion the company had invested in South Korea. (Carlyle invested in South Korean banks after the Asian crisis of the late 1990s collapsed the country's economy. The IMF had forced South Korea to open up the banking sector to overseas investors as a bailout condition.) The IMF may criticize countries like Indonesia for fostering a system of "crony capitalism," while forgetting to look out of its windows and down Pennsylvania Avenue for a better example.
Carlyle has had a few setbacks, but they are rare. The ill-fated (and unfortunately named) Crusader howitzer, for instance, was cancelled through the efforts of Donald Rumsfeld, a friend of Carlucci's from Princeton days. (Rumsfeld shortly thereafter threw his old friend a contract for another new weapon system that the company's United Defense Industries subsidiary could supply.)
With all of their connections, some of Carlyle's executives also epitomize the Bush League's ability to rise to top-level positions despite their less than stellar business record (President Bush himself was appointed to the board of a Carlyle subsidiary - Caterair -- that also crashed). Before he joined the Reagan administration (where he was called "Mr. Clean" for coming in after the Iran-Contra scandal left so many people tarnished, if not indicted), Carlucci made $1.2 million -- not bad for steering a company (Sears World Trade) into bankruptcy. He succeeded Caspar Weinberger as secretary of defense for the final year and a half of the Reagan administration, where he spent much of his time refining the budgeting and weapons procurement process, experience that would serve him well in his future role with Carlyle, where "he would have special knowledge of which defense contractors would later be cashing in on the long-term procurement system he had arranged."
The fact that more and more financial companies are hiring politicians like Rudolph Giuliani or Al Gore during their hiatus from politics suggests that they are either learning from Carlyle's example, or coming to recognize that having a quality rolodex may be increasingly more important than having a better business plan.
In a move that Business Week characterized as an attempt to "scramble the conspiracy theories," Carlyle recently hired Lou Gerstner - the ex-chair of IBM to succeed Carlucci as chairman. Although Gerstner helped the computer maker turn itself around in the 1990s, no matter how much he diversifies the company's business, it will continue to rely most heavily on the deal-maker's high-level political contacts.
Other Carlyle stories:
Red Herring
Also, check out this French Stop Carlyle web site.
By Dan Briody
John Wiley & Sons (2003)
Exposed.
(A 45 minute web-streamed Dutch documentary about Carlyle)
It's hard to write objectively about the Carlyle Group, the global private equity investment bank that specializes in defense and aerospace takeovers, without sounding like a conspiracy nut. Yet it's hard to imagine any single company that epitomizes Eisenhower's warnings about the "military-industrial complex" more than the Carlyle Group.
The company employs a who's who of Washington and global insiders, including (until recently) ex-president George H.W. Bush, ex-SEC Chair Arthur Levitt, former UK British Prime Minister John Major, "Spooky" Frank Carlucci -- the former deputy director of the CIA and Reagan-era Secretary of Defense, Bush family consigliere James Baker III, Fidel Ramos (former President of the Philippines), and a roster of other top ex-government figures, Ivy-league MBAs, World Bank executives, etc. As Dan Briody (a business journalist who has written for Forbes, Wired and others) puts it: "over time, the pattern of Carlyle's hiring practices emerges to reveal a series of old friends helping one another out." And opportunizing on the decisions that their ex-colleagues (e.g. Colin Powell, once a Carlyle consultant) or sons (in Bush's case) are making inside a sitting administration.
The Carlyle Group was the first major private venutre capital firm to be located on Pennsylvania Avenue, blocks from the White House. As such, Carlyle epitomizes what Michael Lewis was the first to label "access capitalism" in a 1993 article for The New Republic. And given the way many of the post-war contracts have been doled out, Carlyle has become a model for THE way of doing business in Washington these days.
The company has come a long way since the early 1970s, when it was first established by a fluke at a NYC hotel of that name (chosen to give teh firm an old money patina). The company's first deal was a scam that brokered tax loopholes intended for Alaskan Eskimos but sold to U.S. companies. Carlyle partners have since continuously milked their high-level contacts ("in Washington, it's not what you know, but who you know" Briody writes) so successfully that the company boasts in its own marketing literature about having "a vast interlocking global network." Carlyle's influence clearly signals a dangerous trend in U.S. foreign policy that has gained considerable force and deserved attention during the Bush administration.
The company was embarrassed when an investment stake from the bin Laden family was revealed after 9/11. (Carlyle quietly returned the investment after the unwelcome attention, though bin Laden had been identified as a terrorist long before then). Like Halliburton, Carlyle pioneered the privatization of certain military operations. The company's Vinnell Corporation subsidiary (which Briody calls the "clearest example of Carlyle's business inside the Iron Triangle") -- recently spun off -- has been training the Saudi Armed Forces in how to protect their country's oil fields since the mid-1970s (Vinnell personnel actually fought alongside Saudi forces in the first Gulf War). Vinnell was the target of a major terrorist bomb attack in July. (The bin Ladens pulled their money out of Carlyle after 9/11.)
Critics have suggested U.S. interests have also been bent to help the company. For example, ex-president George H.W. Bush (who took a leading role in the company's Asian operations) is reported to have influenced his son's decision to reverse course and reopen negotiations with North Korea, a move tied to the over $1 billion the company had invested in South Korea. (Carlyle invested in South Korean banks after the Asian crisis of the late 1990s collapsed the country's economy. The IMF had forced South Korea to open up the banking sector to overseas investors as a bailout condition.) The IMF may criticize countries like Indonesia for fostering a system of "crony capitalism," while forgetting to look out of its windows and down Pennsylvania Avenue for a better example.
Carlyle has had a few setbacks, but they are rare. The ill-fated (and unfortunately named) Crusader howitzer, for instance, was cancelled through the efforts of Donald Rumsfeld, a friend of Carlucci's from Princeton days. (Rumsfeld shortly thereafter threw his old friend a contract for another new weapon system that the company's United Defense Industries subsidiary could supply.)
With all of their connections, some of Carlyle's executives also epitomize the Bush League's ability to rise to top-level positions despite their less than stellar business record (President Bush himself was appointed to the board of a Carlyle subsidiary - Caterair -- that also crashed). Before he joined the Reagan administration (where he was called "Mr. Clean" for coming in after the Iran-Contra scandal left so many people tarnished, if not indicted), Carlucci made $1.2 million -- not bad for steering a company (Sears World Trade) into bankruptcy. He succeeded Caspar Weinberger as secretary of defense for the final year and a half of the Reagan administration, where he spent much of his time refining the budgeting and weapons procurement process, experience that would serve him well in his future role with Carlyle, where "he would have special knowledge of which defense contractors would later be cashing in on the long-term procurement system he had arranged."
The fact that more and more financial companies are hiring politicians like Rudolph Giuliani or Al Gore during their hiatus from politics suggests that they are either learning from Carlyle's example, or coming to recognize that having a quality rolodex may be increasingly more important than having a better business plan.
In a move that Business Week characterized as an attempt to "scramble the conspiracy theories," Carlyle recently hired Lou Gerstner - the ex-chair of IBM to succeed Carlucci as chairman. Although Gerstner helped the computer maker turn itself around in the 1990s, no matter how much he diversifies the company's business, it will continue to rely most heavily on the deal-maker's high-level political contacts.
Other Carlyle stories:
Red Herring
Also, check out this French Stop Carlyle web site.
Friday, November 14, 2003
Miss the National Conference on Media Reform in Madison last weekend?
So did I. But you can see/hear/read a lot of what happened on MediaReform.net
Bob McChesney and John Nichols' site (read Bill Moyers' keynote).
Here's a poem related to the issue. Written after seeing a "United We Stand" billboard on the side of the hwy. in Jersey on the way back to DC from the big 2/15 NYC anti-war rally. (I think this was before we heard the stories about their Nuremberg-style pro-war rallies):
Clear Channel: United We Stand
"United We Stand"
Supporting the Man
Because we believe the News
That broadcasts his views
On 1,200 stations
Across the nation
One program -- one brand.
One simple command.
Clear Channel: United We Stand
Originally published in Multinational Monitor.
-=-=
For details on Clear Channel check out Eric Boehlert's series on Salon.
Prometheus Radio in Philly is a good source of info on Clear Channel. Like this fact sheet
Jim Donahue and Essential Information filed this excellent challenge to CC's license renewal
(gives a good overview of their abuses -- I especially like the one where they offered "10,000"
to anyone who could answer 10 questions correctly -- without explaining that they mean liras, not dollars,
-- 10,000 liras is about $53).
So did I. But you can see/hear/read a lot of what happened on MediaReform.net
Bob McChesney and John Nichols' site (read Bill Moyers' keynote).
Here's a poem related to the issue. Written after seeing a "United We Stand" billboard on the side of the hwy. in Jersey on the way back to DC from the big 2/15 NYC anti-war rally. (I think this was before we heard the stories about their Nuremberg-style pro-war rallies):
Clear Channel: United We Stand
"United We Stand"
Supporting the Man
Because we believe the News
That broadcasts his views
On 1,200 stations
Across the nation
One program -- one brand.
One simple command.
Clear Channel: United We Stand
Originally published in Multinational Monitor.
-=-=
For details on Clear Channel check out Eric Boehlert's series on Salon.
Prometheus Radio in Philly is a good source of info on Clear Channel. Like this fact sheet
Jim Donahue and Essential Information filed this excellent challenge to CC's license renewal
(gives a good overview of their abuses -- I especially like the one where they offered "10,000"
to anyone who could answer 10 questions correctly -- without explaining that they mean liras, not dollars,
-- 10,000 liras is about $53).
Thursday, November 13, 2003
THE MALLING OF AMERICA
In 1986 there were 28,496 shopping centers in the
U.S., boasting 3.5 billion square feet of space. Today there are 46,438
malls and such with 5.8 billion square feet of space. . . The number of
malls is growing faster than the number of babies. . . American households
owe on average $8,940 on their credit cards, up 173% from 1992, when we had
an average outstanding balance of $3,275.
This is all part of a disturbing over-leveraging and over-capacity problem
we have in this country. For the past 20 years the mantra from Wall Street
has been that if an asset isn't leveraged, it's underutilized. In other
words, if you can borrow against something - a factory, a business, a cash
flow - why, by golly, you should. But what if you don't need the capital?
Heck, son, you always need capital. Use it to expand. Create new sports
teams, build new cookie factories, develop new shopping malls. And so what
do we end up with? We have the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and bags and bags of
Keebler cookies, and 22 shopping malls around Columbus. . .
-- Fortune, Andy Serwer
In 1986 there were 28,496 shopping centers in the
U.S., boasting 3.5 billion square feet of space. Today there are 46,438
malls and such with 5.8 billion square feet of space. . . The number of
malls is growing faster than the number of babies. . . American households
owe on average $8,940 on their credit cards, up 173% from 1992, when we had
an average outstanding balance of $3,275.
This is all part of a disturbing over-leveraging and over-capacity problem
we have in this country. For the past 20 years the mantra from Wall Street
has been that if an asset isn't leveraged, it's underutilized. In other
words, if you can borrow against something - a factory, a business, a cash
flow - why, by golly, you should. But what if you don't need the capital?
Heck, son, you always need capital. Use it to expand. Create new sports
teams, build new cookie factories, develop new shopping malls. And so what
do we end up with? We have the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and bags and bags of
Keebler cookies, and 22 shopping malls around Columbus. . .
-- Fortune, Andy Serwer
Remember that big NFL season kickoff show on the Mall back in September?
Here's a poem memorializing that ostentasteless event:
On the 2003 NFL Kickoff Festival, Washington, D.C.
(Co-sponsored by the Pentagon, Reebok, Coors, AOL and Pepsi)
The view's much better, since the protesters are gone
and Britney's singing (half-unzipped) on the Jumbotron
before thousands of uniformed personnel whose
Commander calls this a "celebration of American values."
Yes, it's a new season, and we're going for broke:
Patriots versus Redskins; Pepsi versus Coke.
And by now every citizen should know why we call
the Capital's most important public park the "Mall."
Here's a poem memorializing that ostentasteless event:
On the 2003 NFL Kickoff Festival, Washington, D.C.
(Co-sponsored by the Pentagon, Reebok, Coors, AOL and Pepsi)
The view's much better, since the protesters are gone
and Britney's singing (half-unzipped) on the Jumbotron
before thousands of uniformed personnel whose
Commander calls this a "celebration of American values."
Yes, it's a new season, and we're going for broke:
Patriots versus Redskins; Pepsi versus Coke.
And by now every citizen should know why we call
the Capital's most important public park the "Mall."
A Fan's Notes
By Fred Exley
(1968)
There are enough comical novels about middle-aged fuckups (the humor a kind of pathos, and therefore unintentional) that it could be considered an important genre in a country that values material and social success as much as Americans do. Call it the anti-bildungsroman. I've read quite a few in this genre (but don't tell me I should start reading a bunch of self-help books to compensate).
The first examples I recall reading as a teen were Tropic of Capricorn (fits this genre more than Miller's masterpiece, Tropic of Cancer). Then it was the Beats. Not just On the Road and Junky, but others who from the fringe, like Kenneth Patchen's Journal of Albion Moonlight (a hallucinatory, dream-like rage against WW2 & mankind's insanity and hatred in general), Mark Vonnegut's The Eden Express (an astonishing depiction of schizophrenia), and Bukowski. Even some of the essays of John Holmes (not the porn star, but the southern beat novelist who wrote GO, the onventional yet underrated 1950's tale that's still far more relevant to the lives of twenty-something Manhattanites than Friends ever could be) would probably qualify. Jack Black's You Can't Win an others
Why is it that recent attempts to write in this genre seem so affected? Are they spoiled by trying to live up to a standard set by their predecessors? I'm thinking of Nersesian's The Fuck Up and Frey's A Million Little Pieces (a mostly convincing journey through rehab). Frey's doesn't reek of pretense and hidden literary ambition so much as other overrated novels like Dave Eggers' Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius, which might have better been titled "Fuck Me Because I'm Such a Sensitive Guy Who Tragically Had to Take Care of His Younger Brother like a Stray Dog and So Had to Grow Up Faster Than Most Young Suburanites"), but you get the feeling that he's still holding onto certain delushions of old-Grandadeur.
I thought I'd just about exhausted the genre when I came across Fred Exley's A Fan's Notes. It was like discovering a great band years after the lead singer commits suicide and wondering why no one told you to check them out before.
Notes is the first (and best) of a trilogy, and easily stands alone. (I've also read Pages from a Cold Island, his second installment. It a disappointing recollection of how he stalked his literary hero, Edmund Wilson, in upstate New York. I haven't touched Last Notes From Home, his third installment, or Jonathan Yardley's bio of Exley, The Misfit, which is supposed to be good).
More than the Great Gatsby, A Fan's Notes is a classic tale of American failure and disappointment, the observations of a man forced by alcohol and depression and bouts of insanity (and forced hospitalization) to be a spectator not just of sports, but of life and others who manage to succeed in it. It is one of the most honest and tales of alcoholic failure that you'll read.
Exley never seems to be a caricature in his own novel, unlike Portnoy or, even more so, the aimless wastrels that you find in so many of P.J. Donleavey's novels (e.g. in his hilarious masterpiece, The Ginger Man). And at times the book reminds you of something of your own life, making it all the more engrossing (and potentially frightening):
"Next I read the book reviews. I read them with nostalgia and remorse. There was a period when I had lived on book reviews, when I had basked and drawn sustenance from what I deemed the light of their intelligence, the beneficence of their charm. But something had gone sour. Over the years I had read too much, in dim-lighted railway stations, lying on the davenports of strangers' houses, in the bleak and dismal wards of insane asylums. That reading had forced the charm to relinquish itself. Now I found that reviews were not only bland but scarcely, if ever, relevant; and that all books, whether works of imagination or the blatant frauds of literary whores, were approached by the reviewer with the same crushing sobriety. I wanted the reviewer to be fair, kind, and unny. I wanted to be made to laugh. I had not better luck that Sunday than on any other." (p. 16).
Exley' rambling style reminded me of the desultory days when I used to sit in Harvard Square and talk with every homeless stewbum and mental outpatient that I could corner for a cup of coffee (sometimes I bought; other times it was necessary to let them buy, to allow them to demonstrate they didn't want anything from me). Out of college with a liberal arts degree, somehow I was convinced I could learn more there on the street than within the wall of Ivy League institutions, with their rigid syllabi etc. (my parapathetic indulgences in poetry and eclectic reading of Joyce, Mailer, Miller, Plath, Sexton, Vonnegut, Heller, Pynchon, etc. bolstering this pseudo-philosophy and lifestyle).
I remember spending many days under the broken schizzors of the Harvard Square clock, reading and jabbering with newfound friends. It was easy to be convinced that, deracinated from the pressures of a career-track, you could somehow understand that if everything is an illusion (as the Buddhists say and LSD can reveal), then we're all failures -- especially those who succeed by our society's terms, though they don't know it, because they are the most afraid to let go of our collective illusions, living their lives in the rigid comfort of workaholic schedules -- yes, our "best and brightest" would rarely climb the mountains of mental mania that allowed you to look down in exhilaration and lonely clarity upon the Empire's foolish rules -- no better place to see this from than from Harvard Square, where other brilliant outcasts could be found -- totally ignored by the prim traditionalists and disciplined young MBAs and law students who would soon be off to Wall Street and the State Department (to eventually start another war). You could sit there for days with the wicked geniuses who had long ago chosen to apply their minds to chess rather than nuclear game theory, the scruffy alcoholic blues guitarist Jake who had to drink just to keep his hand from shaking out of control, the Wookie, Albert Fine (the man who introduced me to Proust, an expert on Gustav Mahler and John Cage, who had one day walked out of Manhattan, sleeping in roadside ditches all the way to Maine) and ... And, if you ran out of company, there were plenty of libraries and bookstores within a close distance that you could wander off to, including the Grolier, there on Plympton, the only poetry store in the country. But I digress.
Exley was the son of a father he didn't know well (dead at 40), except as a legendary football player: "Once, when I was very small, I actually saw my father play football; but like the propagators of his legend I remember nothing about the game save that at one point in it an opposing player, whose cleats had been removed to expose the sharp steep screws that held them (a customary bit of nastiness among the old-timers), stepped on my father's hand, tearing it rather badly.It was a nasty, jagged tear; it bled profusely, a heavy, brilliant, crimson blood; and the trainer no sooner began pouring iodine into it than my father let out a high, fierce, almost girlish howl, one that representing, as he did to me, the epitome of strength and courage immediately induced in me the urge to scream in terror. But then, almost as suddenly, the substitutes on the bench, the crowd behind them, and even the trainer who was ministering to the wound were uproarious with glee, were bellowing and guffawing, slapping their thighs and pounding each other's backs, and I saw that my father was parodying how a lesser man might react to iodine. Suspended between tears and laughter, I stood there listening to the gleeful homage of the crowd; then I, too, began to laugh, hysterically, wildly, until my father looked up at me, surprised and not a little upset, recognizing what had transpired. It was the first time the crowd had come between my father and me, and I became aware that other people understood in him qualities I did not -- a knowledge that gave them certain claims on him. It is a terrifying thing to have a wedge driven into one's narrow circle of love."
"Other men might inherit from their fathers a head for figures, a gold pocket watch all encrusted with the oxidized green of age, or an eternally astonished expression; from mine I acquired this need to have my name whispered in reverential tones. There were, that summer n New York, other things I longed for. I wanted the wealth and the power that fame would bring. I told myself I would one day write The Big Book; but I can understand now that I never believed I would." Instead, he is haunted by the success of college classmates like Frank Gifford, whose denial at being forced to retire (after a tackle-induced concussion) rather than decide for his own reasons a perfect mirror to Exley's own soused solipsism (or so he sees it): "On reading his exasperating remark, I immediately rose, went out and bought a copy of every New York newspaper, returned, and read their accounts with equal diligence. Searching for the slightest nuance, I wanted to see if any of the reporters had greeted his remark with, if not outright laughter, a splattering of levity. I understood perfectly. With a magnanimous gravity not unlie that of the reporters, people were at this time meeting my protestations that I could quit drinking any time I chose. Thus it was tat at the end, or at what Gifford and I must have believed would be the end for him, it gave me some consolation that we were both addicted to something -- he to football and I to liquor -- capable of destroying us, if not actually, in humiliation and loss of pride."
Exley calls himself a "paltry poet." Hardly. Of course, when the anti-novel is your genre, it's hard to beat the first volume. I've heard that the third installment comes back strong from the second. When I get to it, I look forward to telling you if that's so.
By Fred Exley
(1968)
There are enough comical novels about middle-aged fuckups (the humor a kind of pathos, and therefore unintentional) that it could be considered an important genre in a country that values material and social success as much as Americans do. Call it the anti-bildungsroman. I've read quite a few in this genre (but don't tell me I should start reading a bunch of self-help books to compensate).
The first examples I recall reading as a teen were Tropic of Capricorn (fits this genre more than Miller's masterpiece, Tropic of Cancer). Then it was the Beats. Not just On the Road and Junky, but others who from the fringe, like Kenneth Patchen's Journal of Albion Moonlight (a hallucinatory, dream-like rage against WW2 & mankind's insanity and hatred in general), Mark Vonnegut's The Eden Express (an astonishing depiction of schizophrenia), and Bukowski. Even some of the essays of John Holmes (not the porn star, but the southern beat novelist who wrote GO, the onventional yet underrated 1950's tale that's still far more relevant to the lives of twenty-something Manhattanites than Friends ever could be) would probably qualify. Jack Black's You Can't Win an others
Why is it that recent attempts to write in this genre seem so affected? Are they spoiled by trying to live up to a standard set by their predecessors? I'm thinking of Nersesian's The Fuck Up and Frey's A Million Little Pieces (a mostly convincing journey through rehab). Frey's doesn't reek of pretense and hidden literary ambition so much as other overrated novels like Dave Eggers' Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius, which might have better been titled "Fuck Me Because I'm Such a Sensitive Guy Who Tragically Had to Take Care of His Younger Brother like a Stray Dog and So Had to Grow Up Faster Than Most Young Suburanites"), but you get the feeling that he's still holding onto certain delushions of old-Grandadeur.
I thought I'd just about exhausted the genre when I came across Fred Exley's A Fan's Notes. It was like discovering a great band years after the lead singer commits suicide and wondering why no one told you to check them out before.
Notes is the first (and best) of a trilogy, and easily stands alone. (I've also read Pages from a Cold Island, his second installment. It a disappointing recollection of how he stalked his literary hero, Edmund Wilson, in upstate New York. I haven't touched Last Notes From Home, his third installment, or Jonathan Yardley's bio of Exley, The Misfit, which is supposed to be good).
More than the Great Gatsby, A Fan's Notes is a classic tale of American failure and disappointment, the observations of a man forced by alcohol and depression and bouts of insanity (and forced hospitalization) to be a spectator not just of sports, but of life and others who manage to succeed in it. It is one of the most honest and tales of alcoholic failure that you'll read.
Exley never seems to be a caricature in his own novel, unlike Portnoy or, even more so, the aimless wastrels that you find in so many of P.J. Donleavey's novels (e.g. in his hilarious masterpiece, The Ginger Man). And at times the book reminds you of something of your own life, making it all the more engrossing (and potentially frightening):
"Next I read the book reviews. I read them with nostalgia and remorse. There was a period when I had lived on book reviews, when I had basked and drawn sustenance from what I deemed the light of their intelligence, the beneficence of their charm. But something had gone sour. Over the years I had read too much, in dim-lighted railway stations, lying on the davenports of strangers' houses, in the bleak and dismal wards of insane asylums. That reading had forced the charm to relinquish itself. Now I found that reviews were not only bland but scarcely, if ever, relevant; and that all books, whether works of imagination or the blatant frauds of literary whores, were approached by the reviewer with the same crushing sobriety. I wanted the reviewer to be fair, kind, and unny. I wanted to be made to laugh. I had not better luck that Sunday than on any other." (p. 16).
Exley' rambling style reminded me of the desultory days when I used to sit in Harvard Square and talk with every homeless stewbum and mental outpatient that I could corner for a cup of coffee (sometimes I bought; other times it was necessary to let them buy, to allow them to demonstrate they didn't want anything from me). Out of college with a liberal arts degree, somehow I was convinced I could learn more there on the street than within the wall of Ivy League institutions, with their rigid syllabi etc. (my parapathetic indulgences in poetry and eclectic reading of Joyce, Mailer, Miller, Plath, Sexton, Vonnegut, Heller, Pynchon, etc. bolstering this pseudo-philosophy and lifestyle).
I remember spending many days under the broken schizzors of the Harvard Square clock, reading and jabbering with newfound friends. It was easy to be convinced that, deracinated from the pressures of a career-track, you could somehow understand that if everything is an illusion (as the Buddhists say and LSD can reveal), then we're all failures -- especially those who succeed by our society's terms, though they don't know it, because they are the most afraid to let go of our collective illusions, living their lives in the rigid comfort of workaholic schedules -- yes, our "best and brightest" would rarely climb the mountains of mental mania that allowed you to look down in exhilaration and lonely clarity upon the Empire's foolish rules -- no better place to see this from than from Harvard Square, where other brilliant outcasts could be found -- totally ignored by the prim traditionalists and disciplined young MBAs and law students who would soon be off to Wall Street and the State Department (to eventually start another war). You could sit there for days with the wicked geniuses who had long ago chosen to apply their minds to chess rather than nuclear game theory, the scruffy alcoholic blues guitarist Jake who had to drink just to keep his hand from shaking out of control, the Wookie, Albert Fine (the man who introduced me to Proust, an expert on Gustav Mahler and John Cage, who had one day walked out of Manhattan, sleeping in roadside ditches all the way to Maine) and ... And, if you ran out of company, there were plenty of libraries and bookstores within a close distance that you could wander off to, including the Grolier, there on Plympton, the only poetry store in the country. But I digress.
Exley was the son of a father he didn't know well (dead at 40), except as a legendary football player: "Once, when I was very small, I actually saw my father play football; but like the propagators of his legend I remember nothing about the game save that at one point in it an opposing player, whose cleats had been removed to expose the sharp steep screws that held them (a customary bit of nastiness among the old-timers), stepped on my father's hand, tearing it rather badly.It was a nasty, jagged tear; it bled profusely, a heavy, brilliant, crimson blood; and the trainer no sooner began pouring iodine into it than my father let out a high, fierce, almost girlish howl, one that representing, as he did to me, the epitome of strength and courage immediately induced in me the urge to scream in terror. But then, almost as suddenly, the substitutes on the bench, the crowd behind them, and even the trainer who was ministering to the wound were uproarious with glee, were bellowing and guffawing, slapping their thighs and pounding each other's backs, and I saw that my father was parodying how a lesser man might react to iodine. Suspended between tears and laughter, I stood there listening to the gleeful homage of the crowd; then I, too, began to laugh, hysterically, wildly, until my father looked up at me, surprised and not a little upset, recognizing what had transpired. It was the first time the crowd had come between my father and me, and I became aware that other people understood in him qualities I did not -- a knowledge that gave them certain claims on him. It is a terrifying thing to have a wedge driven into one's narrow circle of love."
"Other men might inherit from their fathers a head for figures, a gold pocket watch all encrusted with the oxidized green of age, or an eternally astonished expression; from mine I acquired this need to have my name whispered in reverential tones. There were, that summer n New York, other things I longed for. I wanted the wealth and the power that fame would bring. I told myself I would one day write The Big Book; but I can understand now that I never believed I would." Instead, he is haunted by the success of college classmates like Frank Gifford, whose denial at being forced to retire (after a tackle-induced concussion) rather than decide for his own reasons a perfect mirror to Exley's own soused solipsism (or so he sees it): "On reading his exasperating remark, I immediately rose, went out and bought a copy of every New York newspaper, returned, and read their accounts with equal diligence. Searching for the slightest nuance, I wanted to see if any of the reporters had greeted his remark with, if not outright laughter, a splattering of levity. I understood perfectly. With a magnanimous gravity not unlie that of the reporters, people were at this time meeting my protestations that I could quit drinking any time I chose. Thus it was tat at the end, or at what Gifford and I must have believed would be the end for him, it gave me some consolation that we were both addicted to something -- he to football and I to liquor -- capable of destroying us, if not actually, in humiliation and loss of pride."
Exley calls himself a "paltry poet." Hardly. Of course, when the anti-novel is your genre, it's hard to beat the first volume. I've heard that the third installment comes back strong from the second. When I get to it, I look forward to telling you if that's so.
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