I Rather Expected Something with Dirty Fingernails

BOOKS

I Rather Expected Something with Dirty Fingernails

THE BIG SLEEP FAREWELL, MY LOVELY THE HIGH WINDOW THE LADY IN THE LAKE by Raymond Chandler; Ballantine Books

Those writers who cater to the pulp appetites of the masses have been constant targets of abuse at the ailing hands of their fellow writers who pose as artists of a superior caliber. One of the few writers of detective-mystery fiction who has received critical acclaim not belying a profound disdain for all things smelling of pulp has been Raymond Chandler, a British-educated oil company executive who found himself jobless in S. California when the great crash came in 1929. His first stories were published in Black Mask Magazine, not a small feat as Black Mask was the most prestigious of the pulps and kept a stable of highly polished writers knifing each other in the back in desperate attempts to keep the shop closed. (In the Pulp Jungle, Frank Gruber gives . an anecdotal history of the goings-on.) Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep, was published several years later, and until he died in 1959, Chandler kept writing and rearranging his works, patching together seven novels and two dozen short stories. He freely borrowed characters, scenes, and plots from his stories, in order to compose the novels, and this allows some insight into the complete development of his penultimate protagonist, Philip Marlowe, S. California fuck-up and. cheapie private eye.

With the paperback reissue of the “big four”, The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, and The Lady in the Lake, Chandler may well be received as an addition to the coterie of lost authors (Fitzgerald, West) who found in California a despair worthy of fictional expression, though in all cases the attractiveness of the /locale was its inexplicable tangibility. Marlowe is a vehicle to allow free movement in arenas as varied as the third degree rooms of police stations, the libraries of Hollywood autocrats, and the pantries of half-forgiving Okies. As a vehicle, he has the industrial charm of a ’51 Ford, and his cheapie status sets him up to be maligned by anyone in the mood for bug squashing. With all this against him, how is he supposed to survive, much less tell the audience about L.A.’s civilized despair?

Style. Marlowe has been blessed with a winning ambiguity that allows him to deal with anybody without letting on that he knows nothing of what’s expected of him. The style through which he percolates tells all of what little there is to know about him. He has no desire to make it big; he likes to see the little guy get a fair shake;.he dislikes cops; he resents people with money who don’t know how to use it; in short, he’s indignant over the fact that he’s capable of success, but is systematically deprived of the opportunity to succeed in his terms by virtue of the unfailing stupidity of the people with whom he has dealings. A martyr too big to be nailed.

Chandler’s rehashing of plots, characters, and scenes is the most significant feature of his writings. In doing so he disqualifies the preeminent validity of the detective-hero in favor of the meaninglessness of the endless American adventure. Marlowe is not the sharkskin knight, rather he’s a straw man asking for flaggelation at the hands of the corporate richesse manifested in the “membership” allowing people entrance into country clubs, gambling joints, long con operations, and special privelege escape routines. Hardly a prole hero, Marlowe nevertheless vilifies the sanctity of one of the few remaining 'outposts of the American Dream by disregarding the protocol of wealth. He doesn’t mind the label “cheapie” because he assumes an innate dignity in himself, his clients, and anyone he feels is being shafted; and he knows he’ll survive.

“You’re Marlowe?” I nodded.

“I’m a little disappointed,” he said. I rather expected something with dirty fingernails.”

“Come inside. You can be witty sitting down.”

Chandler’s writing differs from that of such mystery scribes as Micjcey Spillane in that it is writing first and

mystery only as an afterthought. Whereas Mike Hammer is a blood and guts automation whose taste for lurid sex is matched only by his taste for knees to the groin, Marlowe is an ambivalent sort who spends his free time practicing chess moves and pondering the big questions of life as a two-bit private eye. Marlowe’s taste in women is parallel to his taste in liquor, thatis “anyway atr all”, but it’s tempered by a sobriety derived from his need for a girl who won’t give him too much trouble over his chosen simplicity (“Not clever, but quick . . . ”). Again, Chandler’s ap’parent intention is to displace the surface importance laid on people who surreptitiously operate as outcasts. Marlowe is no wunderkind, but he’s competent, something which distinguishes him from most of the people with whom he has dealings, and something which places him on a par with the more proficient heavies.

It would be foolish to ascribe too much importance to Marlowe-aseveryman, but Chandler’s reluctance to do so more explicitly seems to be the result of universal literary disregard for pulp. All the material is extremely well written, replete with near-grotesque wit and excellent dialogue, both presented in a very low-key manner. The movie version of The Big Sleep is a good example of what’s to be expected; Bogart is a natural for Marlowe. Just put on some seedy clothes, put a gun under your jacket, grab a bottle and a greasy glass, and pick up a book. Marlowe wouldn’t, but then he’s just a cheapie.

Stephen Nugent

A recent mailing of the loose-leaved West Coast rock fanzine frank’s apa included a Richard Meltzer contribution which consisted of a bunch of mouldy old textbooks with the titles of well-known books about rock ‘n’ roll pasted over the covers — e.g., German Marxism and Russian Communism became Jefferson Airplane and the Rise of the San Francisco Sound by Ralph J. Gleason. Meltzer called his feature “Ain’t Rock Books Dull?”

TWENTY-MINUTE FANDANDOS AND FOREVER CHANGES Edited by Jonathon Eisen Random House

There’s more truth than humor there; most of the books on rock published so far have been boring and pretentious, despite the fact that there are almost as many styles and schools of writing as there are publications on the subject. By and large the books have not only not been very much fun, but, especially the anthologies, have also suffered from a provincialism that’s petty and incestuous. The two main seats of provincialism are San Francisco and New York, and where Rolling Stone neglects so much worthy music in its constant coverage of the Frisco-Mill Valley floating musical crap game, New York editors do much the same with writers.

Which is not to say that there are not as many or more fine rock journalists and fantasists ‘concentrated in New York than perhaps anywhere else in the nation: this book alone features editor Eisen, Bobby Abrams, the gifted Nick Tosches, Bud Scoppa, Sandy Pearlman, the fraudulent J Marks, Michael Zwerin, Danny Fields, Robert Levin, and Meltzer in serveral incarnations. These writers, and others not included such as Lenny Kaye and Richard Robinson, seem as a group to have several identifying characteristics. One is cheerfully indiscriminate love of all that’s crass and commercial in popular music, which has given us such pure-trash, pure-fun tomes as Robinson’s and Andy Zwerling’s The Rock Scene, which wondered on its back cover if the Future of Rock might not lie in the hands of a group called Hackamore Brick, whom Robinson just happened to be producing.

Another hallmark of New York rock criticism is strong roots in the Eastern Jewish intellectual tradition. At its very best the result of this is tempered by a hearty sense of humor, despite a tendency toward obfuscation, and its pinnacle is R. Meltzer’s The Aesthetics of Rock, which may be sequentially unreadable but is more fun to dip into at random than any other book on the subject.

The trouble with New York journalism arises when the commercial and intellectualized veins get crossed into a wierd hybrid approach that seemingly would like to think of itself as avantgarde, and has been heavily influenced by the Warhol sensibility, which used to be called camp and now finds Crawdaddy magazine running a special called “The Great Ladies” (not only Jean Harlow and Alice Cooper, but Elvis, Jim Morrison, Brando, etc.) So things have come full circle, and where rock ‘n’ roll and the teenage masscult sensibility did much to initially define Pop Art, we how can subscribe to frank’s apa and receive, between writing of some substance, such artifacts as “NYALTWYTOSBA No. 1 by Richard Robinson” (48 pages ripped out of the Manhatten phone book) and a book of matches stapled to a piece of paper bearing the inscription “Light My Fire — Lenny Kaye.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if “NYALTWYTOSBA No. 1” turned up in Jonathon Eisen’s next book. In TwentyMinute Fandangos we get large helpings of both the intellectual and anti-intellectural strains of New York rock writing, and not a little of the cross-breed.

If you want pop prose sans all dreary critical empiricism, this book probably has more of it than anything else that’s appeared in hardcover. There are documents and “documents” from everywhere. The straight press is represented by an AP dispatch about the Manson defense’s' attempts to have Lennon testify and a couple of Parents’ magazine style stories called “We Think the Average Parent Should Know as Much About Drugs as the Average Pusher” (“junkie: an opiate addict”) and “How to Tell if a Child is a Potential Hippie and What You Can Do About It.” There’s a truly tasty item from the tabloid National Mirror called “Guitar Hemorrhages Pop Star’s Face.” Varying levels of groupie fantasy are represented in the teenmag articles “My Secret Love List by Bobby Sherman” and Trudye Labell’s “Dream Date with Jim Morrison” (“Suddenly Jim breaks the silence. ‘Hey, what time is it?’ he asks.”), Natalie Stoogeling’s Iggy newsletter, and an interview with Devon, who made it with Jimi and Mick. And connoiseurs of the press release^ will find surfeit, though by no means the cream of the crop, in a sheet for a book called The Sexual Power of Marijuana, an item called “Young Heart Patient, John Brown, receives Rubber Duckie Watch and Toy From Columbia,” and a United Artists promo for Boffalongo, which consists of the band’s name in capital letters repeated for the duration of a page and is presumably included for a suggestion of concrete poetry. There, as with much of the other material included, what may once have been artless and good for a passing laugh becomes rather pretentious through context alone.

The more literate inclusions are just as much of a grab-bag. Abrams, Zwerin and Pearlman each wrestle with the L.A. myth, with interesting if predictable results. Abrams also continues his exploration of the Stones, and types up a list of Elvis hits off an album and calls it “The Fourteenth Element.” The politics of rock are represented a little too neatly by a White Panther manifesto, Susan Hiwatt’s “Cock Rock,” Dominic Soline on gay entertainment and rock, and Weberman on Bob’s garbage. Karlheinz Stockhausen drafts an “Open Letter To the Young Generation,” if anybody cares, while Danny Fields goes to see Mrs. Miller and strikes up instant friendship, and CREEM’s own Janet LaRene learns from a Fundamentalist preacher of the African Fertility Rite’s influence on rock ‘n’ roll. For sheer writing, there are Nick Tosches’ brilliant dialecticalhistorical wankoff “The Punk Muse,” a couple of very funny parodies on the festival syndrome by Meltzer and Abrams, and some of the very best ever by Magister Meltzer himself, on Cream, Doors, Stooges, fan clubs, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Marty Balin’s booze habit, and the fellating groupie who discovered Jimi’s boner to be rigor-mortis.

I feel extremely ambivalent about this book, as I did about Eisen’s past collections The Age of Rock 1 and 2. The best of it, like Meltzer on Balin puking and Fields on Mrs. Miller, is great fun, but so much of the rest and the book as a totality just seem so pointless. All in all, a good book to run across in a bargain bin, to kill an afternoon in the library with, or find while scavenging in the debris cleaned out of everybody^ lockers on the last day of school.

Lester Bangs

VAGABONDING IN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA Ed Buryn Random House

I suppose there is some justice in hordes of former Europeans returning from America to abuse the cultures of the “natives”. Hippies aren’t a bit more exempt from this than their “straight” counter-parts. But, just or not, Ed Buryn attempts to prepare the traveler for his first trip to Europe.

If you’ve . already been over, you should know everything in this book, at least through your mistakes. All Buryn wants to do is get the reader/traveler’s head open and receptive to the. possibility of personal encounters with Europeans. He wants you to understand the risks and discomforts involved in getting to know Europeans, rather than travel agents and tourist workers.

The information here about transportation and housing and the rest is readily available. Buryn doesn’t try to provide guides to the character of any particular country but instead tells of his own experiences, which is really the point of the whole book: traveling is a very personal experience, probably different for everyone.

He gets a little preachy and repetitive at times but if you want to travel anywhere and really learn something about the place, Vagabonding can help you get into the reality of that rather than just the travelogue glory.

Archie Anderson

LOVE NEEDS CARE David E. Smith, M.D. and John Luce Little-Brown

This book, written in a style that just up and defies you to read it, is the chronicle of the life and hard times of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, its administrators and its patients. It’s also a rare glimpse into the deterioration of a neighborhood into America’s first “white teen-age slum,” and, in a larger sense, the deterioration of what the authors term the “eupsychic hippie ethic.” Eupsychic, in case you’ve never heard the word,’means, according to the glossary, “Pertaining to the release of psychic impulses for purposes which are alleged to be beneficial to man and society.” The definition itself says a lot about the tone of the book.

I became interested* in this book by leafing through it in a bookstore, and noticing the wonderful portfolio of photographs of street people it contained. Every picture told a story, I was willing to bet, and, since the people had their names under the pictures, I thought there would be neat case histories, detailing medical aspects of these peoples’ lives, but hinting at broader things. I was wrong.

Mainly, what this book does is just what I said above: it chronicles the Clinic’s history with nary a glance at any wider context (except a medical one, natch). The pix are there for human interest, I guess. But in a medical context, this is a fine book. Its main thesis is 1) hippies don’t care for themselves, trusting instead in some kind of mystical forces to keep them alive to an extent practiced by nobody this side' of Christian Science and 2) because of this, and their ability to kill pain with drugs, they get more fucked-up than most folks.

And, since the Clinic has weathered some incredible changes, some nonmedical relevance sneaks in anyhow. The progression of the Haight from eupsychia (the first hippies in the mid 60’s), to psychedelia, to amphetamine, to smorgasbord to downers fo smack, enlivened here and there by comments by users and Clinic volunteers (most of whom came from the surrounding community) is instructive and fascinating. Also, the “see ourselvfes as others see us” aspect of the book should not be overlooked, as most of the people who made the Clinic happen were from outside it, geographically and psychically. Especially fascinating (and well worth reprinting in the popular press) is a kind of summation of the findings of psychiatrist Ernest A. Dernburg, entitled “The Hippie Modality,” in which he cites such parameters of hippie psychology as extreme pasivity, poor symbol-formation, marijuana-induced amotivational syndromes, difficulty in handling sexual and aggressive drives, and just general emotional regression. Chances are good it’ll make you mad, that is, until you think about it.

The book is most useful to citizens thinking of initiating a Free Clinic trip in their own town, something that, with the spread of the Haight to include most American towns with populations over 10,000, is a real great idea.

Ed Ward