Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer. Bernard Wolfe
the tidier and slights or distorts the facts.
There was no continuity in our lives in those days, just a stewing around with now this bobbing to the surface, now that—that’s my point. If you want the truth I don’t remember the porno months in the context of the calendar at all. They don’t fit into the slot after Munich and Maginot, no, they stick in my head as the time I wasn’t rolling my own. In those years we used to come together in somebody’s room with several of those devices for rolling cigarettes out of cheap bulk tobacco, and play poker and roll, talk politics and roll, drink and roll, sometimes just smoke and roll. When I got into porno I gave up these homemades because I had enough money for store-boughts. During my porno months I was nice to myself, I treated myself to Murads and Melachrinos, so to me porno will always have the faintly musky odor of exotic Turkish tobaccos, will, as a matter of fact, suggest shapes oval rather than round.
Art makes order out of chaos, do they still teach that hogwash in the schools? It’s liars who give order to chaos, then go around calling themselves artists and in this way give art a bad name. Here high up on their cerebral peaks are all the artists sifting and sorting out the facts and pasting them together any old way to show how neat it all is and how they’re at the controls of the whole works, and there under their feet the facts go on tumulting and pitching them on their asses over and over, and what’s the whole demonstration worth? Don’t tell me the real artists are tidiers. Céline is in the grand spatter business. Henry Miller spatters too, though a good part of the time by plan, by program, and that’s his tension. Hemingway held it all in his tight hand and pretended it was one packed ball of wax till the end, then his true spewing self came out and he spattered all right, spattered all his order-making brains over the living room, and the lie of having it all together was done for he arrived at the moment of going at his authenticity, his one moment of truth. When do you see Dostoevsky laying out his reality with a T-square?
No, the ones who want to make a big display of how they master facts through words, all they master most of the time is words. The words tend to get in the way of the facts. The words get to be lies because they don’t reflect and illuminate the runaway facts, they conceal them. The worst thing about an art that’s forever making packaged sense out of the world is that it leaves no room for the randomizing senselessness that pervades most of the daily scene. In Hemingway’s neat print world held together and presided over by the code of grace under pressure there’s just no room for graceless berserkers who with enough pressure blow their heads off—such unstyled people are even made fun of, and often are Jews.
What a new and exhilarating art we’d come to, finally, if artists set out to feature the amuckness of the world instead of their own imposed and irrelevant designs—an art that faced the simple roughhouse facts and told the plain ramble-scramble truth—revolutionary! This is by way of saying that I mean to tell this story, no world-shaker, I admit, I insist, in the hit or miss way it happened. If at times I seem to go every-whichway, well, that’s pretty much how things were going back there at the tail-end of the rampageous Thirties, without let-up, around the clock, and it seems to me all that needs recounting, not rendering.
I hope I’ve shown you in these introductory words where I was before porno—nowhere. On the outer limits of all matters. Limbo. Beyond any pale you care to name. You will appreciate that porno came into my life not as a pardon or commutation of sentence, nothing that histrionic, but at least as an opportunity to discharge some words from that mass of language pent up and squirming in me, a needed bleeding in the last skinny nick of time.
It had to appear to me as a bountiful gift from the gods I did not believe in. I clutched at it as the drowning man at a cabin cruiser, one well stocked with supplies and, more important still, equipped with a powerful shortwave radio.
Somebody out there in the wide, wide world actually wanted me to write something. They wanted my words. They were more than ready to pay me for them.
I’d be eating, the precondition for writing. I would write, the only way I knew to eat. Words and money had finally been introduced to each other in my life and made partners in my head.
I suddenly felt wanted. Not, for once, by the authorities; they assuredly were much too busy looking for my employers.
I’m going to stop calling it porno. The vowel ending makes the stuff sound Italian or Spanish, something foreign and a little greasy, an importation, which is far from the facts. Without question this country has had its own homegrown or homespun pornography as long as it’s had a Constitution, very likely as long as it’s had printing presses.
I suspect that the Puritan fathers, by emphasizing how many things in this world were pornographic either in quality or potential, succeeded in calling the public’s attention to this whole area of life. There’s nothing like a negative endorsement from the clergy to get the public interested, stir up a good word of mouth, as they say in PR, when you’re introducing a new product a bumrapping from a churchman is worth more than any special introductory offer, 30-day trial with no obligation to buy, money-back guarantee, 5,000 Blue Chip stamps for bonus, entry in the milliondollar sweepstakes with each box top—look how a Boston banning used to make any sappy book into a bestseller.
From here on in I’ll call it porn. Porn has a very American ring to it. It sounds a little like corn and a little like pone, and cornpone’s about as American as mom’s apple pie, a product, by the way, which by a sort of backlash effect has made a lot of Americans run toward pornography pretty much for the same reason that the diabetic runs from sugar.
You see, then, what I’ve been trying to do in these opening pages, give you some picture of me preporn, preborn.
The setting: I was dividing my time between New York and New Haven (my home town, if I haven’t made that clear). I’d be unemployed in New York for a while. I’d get out on the Boston Post Road and hitch a ride east. I’d be unemployed in New Haven for a time. I’d get out on the Boston Post Road and hitch a ride going west. I rolled a lot of homemades in both towns, maybe a few more in New Haven because I had my family there, and there were trees to walk under, and snow wasn’t processed into a slushy gray muck 10 minutes after it fell. Then through some fluke I got a job in a factory up in Bridgeport. Then this girl Bettina wrote me from the Village. She’d run into this woman named something like Zoma or Zo-Zo. Zoma or Zo-Zo knew this fellow named Barneybill who had some things going. If I wanted to come down and meet Zo-Zo in order to get to meet Barneybill I might, it was just possible—read on, you’ll find out how it all happened, how from the very pyorrheic jaws of crisis I snatched the loose tooth of identity. . . .
This is going to be hard, I feel myself tensing up, I’m not used to writing about myself. Not that I’m coy, I just get restless looking at the same thing day in, day out. I’ve got a short attention span, which discourages autobiography.
Some writers write nothing but successive editions of their autobiographies in various fake guises, telling even more lies than straight autobiographers do. I can’t put myself in that self-circling frame of mind and don’t warm up to people who do. (Céline excepted. Céline looks so hard and deep into his insides, he sees the whole damn world deposited there.) A page sprinkled with first-person pronouns puts me off. People whose subject is forever themselves seem to me to be operating under two handicaps, one, that they suffer from tunnel vision, two, that they don’t have much to say, a characteristic of tunnel workers. On their horizons their own persons bulk so large as to blot out the world about, and without a not-me surround to point up where they end and the impersonal materials begin they can’t even see themselves, their one subject. Writers who are eternally running round and round inside their own heads and recording each lap for posterity will eventually tamp down and deaden major portions of their brains, that delicate stuff isn’t built to take a heavy foot traffic, it’s there to be used, not trampled on.
Paradox: the more you comb through your insides the less you come up with to write about. Besides, there’s more to look at out there than in here, and it’s less fogged over. You’ve got to learn more from three billion people than from one, it’s a matter of arithmetic. Again, it’s the writers who keep their eyes on the world about who tell us the most about themselves. What’s a man after all but his vision? Blinders and all? What’s he going to convey