A Book for Alpha Males |
Family Guy: Brian Griffin's Guide: to Booze, Broads, and the Lost Art of Being a Man Andrew Goldberg Harper Paperbacks, $14.96 Strictly based on its title, few books have shown more promise in my eyes. And right from the first line of the book—"It seems like somewhere between Dylan McKay and Clay Aiken, men forgot how to be men"—a guy like me, nostalgic for the tough, durable men of old, whom I've never even known, had reason to believe the author, Brian Griffin, the dog from the television series The Family Guy, had some good gospel to spread. Turns out he doesn't. Just a lot of constipated jokes and bad writing. But in all truthfulness, that is easy to get over, because Griffin, an authentic boozehound, has enough ironic one-liners about his love for dames, his disgust with metrosexuals and his idolization for the manhood of Frank Sinatra, that his 109-page book is worth the money. Just not a spot on the nightstand, where the better bedside reading belongs. Joshua Longobardy |
W.W. Norton's New Directions books recently reissued Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, a 1932 novel that so rocked Depression-era France that Sorbonne professors began hitting each other in lecture halls, and on the Blvd. St. Michelle, arguing its merits—(hard to believe in 2006, when people tend to belch complacently at cultural phenomena like Bush-Blair, Oprah, Fear Factor and Iraq). Celine—real name Destouches—was a no-compromise petit-bourgoise from the Impasse Choiseul, in the hard-scrabble streets behind the Folies Bergere, a kind of gaslight mini-mall in the Gay '90s when he was born, where "rich lard-asses used to come and bug my crippled mother [a lacemaker] over prices for doilies ..."
The full story of the chiseling by the "lard-asses"—the young Ferdinand's first glimpse at universal injustice—was told in 1936's Death on the Installment Plan, the prequel to Journey, presented in typical Celinian fashion after-the-fact (ass-backwards.) It presented a world so dark, framed by the human sausage-stuffing of working-class Parisians into crappy neighborhoods like Pigalle, or miserable suburbs like Clichy, that people were revolted—previously having seen "literature" as something "uplifting"—the way, say, Ronsard, or Grace Hemingway, Ernie's mom, saw it. And this despite earlier efforts to strip away all fictional flowers and harp-work, by French incorrigibles like Rabelais, Villon and Rimbaud. Celine sets off in the first pages of Journey to let the reader know what's up: "I'm going to sing you a song so black that people will come back from the grave to get me ..." He wanted to reclaim "literature" from the effete rich and the ineffectual intellectuals who'd always controlled it.
He succeeded, but it cost him. There are photos of the author in which he looks like one of the demons on the towers of Notre Dame. A kind of long, Celtic handsomeness backlit by evil, the eyes fixed as a crocodile's, a wayward compulsion to go against the grain that makes Huysmans appear like a young lady by comparison. He had to rough things up: He loved slang, which he called "the language of hate"—"Hey, boss! I see you up there in your mansion ... I'm going to get you!," as hard as original gangsta rap—Houston's Ghetto Boyz' "Mind Playin' Trix on Me'' vs. say, Jay Z' s mere persiflage and badinage ... Celine was the first of the true 20th century literary rebels, before Artaud, before Genet (whom he dismissed as "a vaseline-ass"), proved by the homage paid him by Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs (though the latter two, visiting in the '60s just before he died, finally dismissed him as "a crazy old man," convinced his neighbors were trying to poison his cats) ...
The difference between European and American rebels. Ginsberg, after all, had been a Columbia student, copywriter and P.R. man for the Beats, and the author of Naked Lunch was a lifelong trustfunder. Neither had sustained the unremitting stress of lower-middle poverty, where, as Celine jokes in Death on the Installment Plan, "You have to keep up a front. You can't just get drunk and roll in the gutter," like the lower classes . . Neither had been shot at or wounded (arm and head) in WWI, as Celine was, and neither was forced to flee his country for alleged "collaboration" (WWII), or serve time in prison (in Denmark) for the "crime" of siding with Vichy, France. Neither man's career was destroyed by heavy writers like Louis Aragon or Jean-Paul Sartre (whom Celine likened to a "rectal crab louse"), or the bookchat press ... so it can be fairly stated that even his defenders misunderstood him—his suburban neighbors were trying to poison his cats—he loved animals, but there were too many of them, and they were smelly and yowled a lot.
His legacy is unrecorded but profound. Some day, "writing concentrations" in nice schools like Haverford and Bryn Mawr may explicate how Journey to the End of the Night anticipated the rapid-fire visual/aural "film" effects of the Beats' On the Road; Howl; Junkie; A Coney Island of the Mind (Lawrence Ferlinghetti); The Happy Birthday of Death (Corso); Pieces of a Song (Diane di Prima); then James Jones' From Here to Eternity; Nelson Algren's The Man With the Golden Arm; Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me; James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and Blues for Mr. Charlie; Amiri Baraka's poetry; Miles Davis's trumpet lines after Sketches of Spain; Chet Baker's Let's Get Lost; Ken Kesey; John Cassavetes; Marlon Brando; James Dean; Bob Dylan's early work; Sam Shepard's plays and books; the lyrics of the Band; of Van Morrison; Elia Kazan's '40s through '50s directing; Truffaut; Godard; early Don DeLillo; Hunter Thompson's greatest hits; many of Nikki Giovanni's poems; Frank Conroy's Stop-Time—even Will Self, who admitted in The New York Times recently that Celine allowed him to see that you could write about all the internal traffic, the shortcuts of the intellect through the nerves and viscera, where the real fun is ... Journey was to Joyce's Ulysses what Milton's Hell was to his own Paradise: Bardamu (Ferdinand) and his dark double Robinson, (Celine's worst qualities projected into a full character during crises in the novel), saw, as kids, and most sharply, that no one, anywhere, was telling the truth about anything; this created an implacable determination to correct the situation, but also a vast iceflow of pessimism that made it hard to have a good time. Celine/Ferdinand/Robinson skulked through life, grabbing what they could (sex, mostly), joining, then deserting, the army once they'd dug its patriot scam—that soldiers were only meant to "fertilize the fields," the true job of the true private being "to lie three feet under, streaming with worms—the long yellow kind with all the legs—stinking stupendously—more disgusting than ten pounds of turds ... while his family up above, proud of his ultimate sacrifice, joyfully gamboled on the graveyard lawns of a new summer ..." Like the nice folks of Warren, Ohio or Salt Lake City, now tearfully accepting their flag-draped sons' and daughters' bodies, home from Iraq, consoled by their faith in Condi Rice's luxe assurances that America is a little safer for their deaths.
Celine's voice, especially in this first big book, is emetic, vomiting warnings—"Look out! They're going to shoot!"—constantly in crisis—because as Kurt Vonnegut has explained, "he felt trapped in a lifelong artillery barrage, where all he could do was exclaim and exclaim and exclaim!" He moves—as he really did after his wounding in Flanders—from the war to the Boulevard des Italiennes as a gofer for jewelers and shoe hustlers; then to a dead-end as clerk at an outpost in Cameroon, West Africa, where part of his job is to observe as the local charge d' affaires handles native civil cases: a wedding gift of a one-eyed sheep, for ex., is exchanged for a daughter, but the bride's brother murders the groom's sister so the marriage is off, and the groom's people, smelling of garlic, sandalwood, rancid butter (for beautifying ritual facial scars and scabrous hair), want the half-blind sheep back ... which the bride's family feels is unfair, emphasizing their position with "frenzied jumping, cuckoo arguments, spewing castanet-language, shaking their fists ..." Mercifully, Bardamu comes down with dysentery and malaria, and has to be invalided back to Marseilles ...
But it's all downhill. America, where he goes to work on the Ford production line in Detroit, turns out to be an unserious culture, "a shining slide trombone of $ & Fun," where the assembly line workers are always breaking down and going mad from repetitious overwork and underpay, and where the boss swears he'd "prefer chimpanzees" to humans ... Back in France Bardamu drifts to the suburbs, gets a medical degree, and begins work among the poor, who suffer from scurvy, chancres, scabies, sclerosis, TB, scoliosis, warts, weak hearts, battered minds; impotence, priapism, stretched-out vaginas, worms and abnormal farting ...
In the end, his "Robinson" side gets him involved in a pensioner's murder attempt, and then Robinson's girlfriend plugs R in the guts with a .32, and dumps him out of a taxi (like Hemingway, Celine began killing himself 30 years before the fact) ... Bardamu, a dreamer who anticipates Camus' The Stranger, but without the lethal thinkiness, finally wanders away to the absolute end of the night, listening to the noises the Seine bargemen make when they're getting up and going for a morning drink in their beat-up bistros, and grumbling back into the light.
His rhythms, melancholy and longing, despite their blue-black coloration, are still more-or-less formal sentences in Journey, not yet the manic staccato and crueler broken slang of Death, nor yet the utterly fractured, yet deadly-funny prose-poems of Castle to Castle, perhaps his greatest book (the story of fleeing France before the Allied victory in 1945). Next came North, then Rigadon, from Gallimard, for which he was paid pittances, just enough to buy birdseed and cat food—all post-exile and disgrace writing; the books sold fewer and fewer copies. On the morning of July 1, 1961, standing 6-feet and weighing 128 lbs., he burst an aneurysm in the right side of his brain (where the writing came from), while trying to get out of the heat in his suburban basement in Meudon, north of Paris. Strangely enough, thousands of miles away at about the same time, in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway put a shotgun in his mouth and managed to pull the trigger with his big toe, splattering his vestibule ceiling with the top of his head.
Two French kisses for the lost art of literature.