Stephen Crane's American Cheese

 

     The Red Badge of Courage (1895) had been sitting on my shelf so long, unread, that when I finally opened it recently, determined to cross it off my list of 19th century novels, the cover tore off. One more reason not to keep it on my shelf. I suspect it was assigned reading in the past but I can’t imagine that it’s commonly used for pedagogical purposes now. I’m unable to name a single living writer who’s even mentioned it. The most readily discernible link is to Ernest Hemingway, though it was praised by the draft dodger Henry James too. That’s enough to secure it a place of historical interest. Perhaps sentimentality played a role in raising the book’s reputation further, Crane having died young, of tuberculosis, promise unfulfilled. But it’s the work of a young man: eager, uneven, limited. Another Signet Classic that the writer of the introduction (in this case, novelist and WWII vet James Dickey) suggests doesn’t, on the basis of aesthetic quality, earn the status of a classic. The hinge aspect of the book is a partially modern view of war, as seen through the eyes of its boy-soldier protagonist, the youth, Henry. Romance mixed with equal amounts of fear and ignorance and absurdity. Crane deflates the ancient myth around the individual who distinguishes himself with great deeds in battle, who’ll more likely be the subject of a brief article “under a meek and immaterial title.” 

With an alternate meaning, the phrase “fog of war” applies to Crane’s approach. The Red Badge is light on specifics, hazy. There’s a conflagration and the youth decides to participate. This is the strangest part of the novel: it’s divorced from context. The gray men fight the blue men. The blue men suffer grave losses but ultimately seize victory. Crane catalogues a boy’s shifting psychological responses from the bare minimum of historical information. The student of the Civil War would learn absolutely nothing substantial about it from the novel, a callow thought concerning the cause of all this fighting—slavery—somehow never once passing through the youth’s head. If anything, the glaring omission would lead to a misunderstanding of the history.

I don’t mean to be glib when I say that it’s difficult to take this novel entirely seriously. It’s a period piece containing what must be one of the cheesiest passages in American literature, the conclusion to chapter 20:

The impetus of enthusiasm was theirs again. They gazed about them with looks of uplifted pride, feeling new trust in the grim, always confident weapons in their hands. And they were men. 

This is no one-off, either. Crane actually brings portentous declarations of manhood back for his ending. The fighting is over. The boy has made it out alive. He is now a man. My preferred final line to the book would have been: “He was a man!” (Sung, in the audiobook version.) The real final line: “Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.” Is my suggestion really much worse?

Flash Fiction: "Letting Go"

     Didn’t call it depression at the time. Or anything else, really. As far as I knew, this was just my mental state, the natural result of anxiety, brooding, doubt. Days of inertia. I read. When I wrote, mostly it was in a journal. I tried writing short stories but tended to abandon them once I thought I could see I was building up, in unexceptional or derivative style, to nothing revelatory. I had to find my own approach to writing them and was coming up with nothing. I bingewatched anime, without caring too much about quality. (Well, concept aside, still couldn’t sit through Pokémon. I wasn’t suicidal.) The job search was a struggle: Applications for writing gigs went unanswered, as if I’d sent my resume, an admittedly skimpy document, into a void. Applications for other jobs, though they often required one to submit 75-, 100-question personality tests, would result in automated email replies informing me that they were considering other candidates, at least confirming that someone had actually reviewed the information I’d sent out. I, the college graduate with a loan to pay back, had to find a job and was coming up with nothing. I couldn’t play guitar because nothing had come from the search for my own approach but bad songs. Any pleasure I took was small and fleeting. I was worn out. Droopy. It’s in times like these that one is most likely to neglect oneself. The symbol that best represents this period of my life is a pair of sweats. 

Don’t get me wrong: I never wore them to the grocery store or the rare job interview. But I did wear them until the waist band broke. Then I kept wearing them. I accomplished this feat by balling up the waist in one hand whenever I had to walk around the apartment. Never got around to sewing them or tying them up with a rubber band. It’s as though I were boasting of having lost 200 pounds. My brother facetiously suggested using suspenders or a rope or an extension cord to hold them up. I took no hint and used one hand to hold up my pants until it came to seem normal. Besides, there were so many other things to dither about. 

One day around noon I emerged from the apartment in these sweats, relatively excited to get the mail. What surprises would await me today? At the bottom of the stairs, a father and son appeared. I’d never seen them before and would never see them again. The father gave me the mean mug: You? I continued around the corner, just minding my business, pants in one hand. Don’t worry, I didn’t need two hands to get the mail. I opened our box, placed the mail on top of the unit, closed the box, then grabbed the mail. Opening the gate and closing it again with both hands full was tricky but I managed that too. Took skills to wear these sweats. 

Up ahead, to my surprise, the father and son were standing around. Both looked up as I approached, smiling, muttering to themselves. I suddenly became nervous. Not sure exactly what was going on, I nodded as I passed by. They didn’t nod back. In the middle of the staircase, I glanced over my shoulder. They were watching me go up the stairs. I hurried the rest of the way to the apartment. 

I thought: Ah, the sweats. They were amused by the sight of someone holding up his pants with one hand. I didn’t realize that this would appear comical to anyone who saw it.  

I put the mail down. Then I walked upstairs, to the floor length mirror. I stood before it and stared long and hard, absorbing this shameful sight.  

Then I let go.  

Isn’t that the advice the wind is always whispering? 

 

Let it go? 

My sweats fell, with no resistance, around my ankles. And I was liberated. I stood there like that for let’s say half an hour, gazing at my reflection. 

“Dude, what are you doing in my room?” my brother would have demanded to know if he saw me.  

And I would have said: This is the first step in my recovery process.

Myriam Gurba: Attack Mode

      Writers, out of fear of making (powerful, influential) enemies, can insist too much on politeness. This is one way fear impairs their work until they can’t bring themselves to state an opinion clearly that might offend. Although sometimes blame can be shared with the editor who decides that the intrepid word nerd, one without the privileges bestowed by fame, should go easy. In a world where very few are famous. (Great piece. Now dilute it.) And sometimes the writer is simply trying to maintain a pretend respectability, exclusively for print, which even the most cowardly and despicable can manage. Excessive politeness, wherever it comes from, is stifling, inaccurate or, in its hypocrisy, deserving more of an eyeroll or solemn nodding followed by a jerkoff gesture. Of those I still think kindly of and wish to see have a breakthrough, I feel cheated: let’s hear what you really think and how you really think it. How bout some honesty, huh? Would a 40 or a bestseller help loosen your tongue? But I have no use for empty bravado, either, much less the garbage-clogged sea of social media sneers and jeers. What I seek is an echt writer to give it to me straight, to deal a verbal beatdown when the situation demands, and to do it with some style, some SAUCE!* Baby! Myriam Gurba’s Creep (2023), a corrosive, no-nonsense essay collection at the intersection of memoir, literary criticism, crime, and history, does just that. It’s bracing and all too hard to find. And this isn’t bias for a California writer talking.

I suspect anger is what, in part, allowed her to remove the shackles other writers are resigned or content to wear. In essay after essay, as her targets started piling up, I came to realize that there’ll be no letup, she’s in attack mode. Her nominee for folk sainthood: Lorena Leonor Gallo aka Lorena Bobbitt. She provides ample reasons why. When she talks about misogyny and sexual violence, she draws on so many sources, from stories of the most infamous killers to dubious legends to failures of the justice system to Bobbitt’s history as a victim of abuse to personal experience, she proves, if #MeToo has somehow dimmed in the mind after all these few years, that they’re pervasive. One appalling fact: “Fewer than 1 percent of rapes lead to felony conviction.” Tone matches subject. It’s revolting, terrifying, especially considering the common reaction: willed ignorance, silence, glibness, indifference, victim-blaming and -shaming.

In the past, I’ve expressed doubts about the value of anger. Based on my own experience, I can recall quite a few examples of people saying or doing dumb shit out of anger, lashing out at those who didn’t deserve it, making a bad situation worse. Exuding anger, forcing everyone to step lightly or else. Road rage. Anger as a justification for anything (including violence, of any sort). Becoming consumed by anger. Blinded by anger. Gurba, however, shows that it can be harnessed: the book is heated without being written in ALL CAPS. It’s approachable and persuasive. And for her, it’s a catalyst. “It seemed to me that making room for rage was the compassionate thing to do. Without rage, how do people heal? Without rage, how does one produce dignity?”

Family isn’t safe from her ire. Based on what she writes, it couldn’t be. As she points out: those closest to girls and women tend to be the most likely to inflict misogynistic views and sexual violence. Fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins. In one essay, “Mitote,” she destroys the myth surrounding her own abuelito, Ricardo Serrano Ríos, a myth trumpeted most of all by abuelito. It’s partly the pathetic tale of a man obsessed with a former classmate of his he never appeared to be especially close to, Juan Rulfo, writer of the landmark novel Pedro Páramo. Ricardo (as Gurba refers to him) made his money as a publicist but he’s also a journalist and a mediocre poet. Among the many stories he puts his listeners to sleep with concerning his “friend” is one about how he lifted from Ricardo’s poetry to write the novel. And yet Ricardo, mysteriously, never received anything close to the praise and adulation Rulfo did for his work. At the same time, Gurba highlights how Ricardo would grow up to reject his parents, with their humble background and means of making a living - the sort of humble background that served as grist for Rulfo’s novel. With so much bitterness toward the famous Mexican writer, one would expect Ricardo to regret the connection and scorn any thought of associating with him. But after Rulfo dies, he sees a money-making opportunity and embarks on a lecture tour centered around his “friend.” A grim reminder that such characters always haunt the high-minded world of literature. Aside from that, Ricardo also declined to pay his wife for her contributions to his work, thwarted her artistic ambitions, and, on the side, had a family with his mistress. In this instance, rage leads happily to ridicule. Not that abuelito thought much of women writers, anyway.

On immigration, Democrats and Republicans are nearly indistinguishable. Especially when election season comes round, it’s hard to find any public figure with the spine (or the will) to defend, staunchly, the radical position that immigrants are human beings, that immigration is beneficial to the country, and that it’s a measure of strength and a source of pride to be a refuge for the vulnerable. Doesn’t seem to matter how often it’s pointed out who composes the pool of low-wage labor (that is, who contributes significantly by doing the worst jobs) or that they tend to be more peaceful and law-abiding than native-born citizens. Donald Trump and JD Vance will spread racist lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets despite repeatedly being corrected. One appalling passage to keep in mind when a candidate asks for your vote or sitting down to your next meal:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics consistently ranks agricultural laborer as one of the country’s most dangerous jobs, more dangerous than policing. Among the occupational hazards are human trafficking, wage theft, and debt bondage. Pesticides seep into the farmworkers’ clothing, skin, and bloodstreams. Farm machinery maims. My dad recalls a mother and father who couldn’t afford a babysitter and so they brought their kids to the fields. One of them got plowed by a tractor. Dad also remembers when there were no porta-potties in the fields and women had to walk in pairs to the eucalyptus groves. As one would squat, the other would do her best to hide her coworker behind an old blanket.

The representative liberal she later gets impatient with is somewhat of a caricature, easily whaled upon: a simpleton who thinks all it takes to defeat Trump is to urge people to vote. What if people take that advice and vote for Trump? It’s one drawback to Gurba’s method: nuance, the right modification or elaboration, gets lost occasionally. She also accuses this liberal of presenting a true but lopsided argument and one could say the same for her. The book is polemical, so she reserves virtually no space for questioning her own position. Other blemishes include the stray awkward line or weak joke. Overreliance on pedestrian insults (the epithet “asshole” refers to everyone and no one). To sum up my criticism of Creep: Perfection has eluded her.

There’s much more to admire. I never used the fugly-looking and -sounding word “Latinx” but I understood the need for a gender-neutral term for our group. And now I’m officially making the switch to a word I’ve discovered in these pages: “Latine.” Along with contributing this small but important change to my lexicon, Gurba is a font of illuminating facts and anecdotes, though she doesn’t exactly lecture. She’s digressive, chatty, has a flair for the dramatic, and, despite the heaviness of her material, regularly displays her humorous side, such as in a piece on a bad relationship. “I considered coming out to my parents again. (The first time I’d told them I was queer, they’d answered, ‘No,’ and we’d left it at that.)” Or, in an ambivalent piece on Joan Didion, when she travels to Quintana Roo:

I was assigned to condominium ocho, where I shared a room with Sara and Thomas. Even more intimately, I shared a bed with Sara. I regaled her with stories that made my wife seem cool while Thomas brought me herbal tea to soothe my melancholy and cramps. I wasn’t hurl-myself-from-the-balcony depressed (which would’ve been fine, we were two stories up and I would’ve landed in plush sand), but I was unable-to-enjoy-the-splendor-of-the-Caribbean blue. Beyond our sliding glass door, the sea twinkled, teasing us with her sequins, and I couldn’t bring myself to honor her with a smile or hello. I couldn’t even muster a wave. I could only offer sighs. The limpest of breezes.

I tested this book against Bolaño’s distaste for memoir: everyone’s been through the eye of the storm. Perhaps I haven’t read enough memoirs - not a favorite genre of mine - to become sick of victimhood. But while there’s a noticeable lack of self-humor in Creep, which tends to throw water on the fire, I can’t say how Gurba would have told her own story to avoid the charge. She’s a woman who’s suffered “innumerable sexual assaults.” Innumerable sexual assaults. And part of the problem is that it largely remains hidden. Ironically, the collection builds to the piece with the least fire, the title essay, in which she numbly describes, in excruciating detail, the sadism of a monstrous boyfriend, a fellow teacher who, at the end, manages to evade justice again, with the backing of the school district, and continues to work with children. Perhaps if she would have amassed more hard evidence…? I thought of Ezra Edelman’s masterful documentary OJ: Made in America: Nicole Brown Simpson documented her abuse.

Myriam Gurba’s farewell: “And to everyone who got in the way of this book happening, fuck you.”

Democracy, 4

     It Can’t Happen Here (1935), the novel by Sinclair Lewis, who rejected the Pulitzer and accepted the Nobel, is an early, better known example of the authoritarianism in the USA genre. Michael Meyer, in his introduction, and Gary Scharnhorst, in his afterword, provide context and biographical information. Back then, during the Depression, a time of severe economic inequality and desperation, when extremists found large receptive audiences and fears grew about the rise of an American Mussolini or Hitler, it sold a lot and a stage adaptation, in one instance starring the writer himself, proved just as popular. Nearly a hundred years later, in the summer of 2024, here’s where we find ourselves: A recent Supreme Court decision shields the president from prosecution for official acts without defining precisely what that means, opening up the possibility that he or she could, say, target political enemies without any legal repercussions. It’s a deeply unpopular rightwing court with unelected judges who are appointed for life and obey no binding ethics standards, disregard precedent, and seize power without deigning to provide a halfway convincing argument for doing so. Right now, against the new presidential candidate, current vice president Kamala Harris, Trump is on the back foot. And it’s possible he’ll stay that way until November: Without Joe Biden in the race, attention has turned to his age and the signs of further dullness are unmistakable. Can’t visit a cemetery for fallen soldiers without generating embarrassing headlines for his stupidity and sleaziness and reminding people that he doesn’t think much of fallen soldiers at all. Still lies and moans and blathers relentlessly. Still a rapist, still a traitor, still an aspiring dictator who still claims the last election was stolen from him on no evidence. But he’s the (scowling, orange) face of the Republican Party, he has his financial backers, he isn’t far behind in the polls, and ya never know, there could be a nasty electoral surprise waiting for us again. After January 6th, one expects violence no matter the outcome. Worried readers have been searching out such books for years to see what the future holds, to find plausible solutions for a way out, to be consoled that someone got the hideousness right, and to read them while they can. I want there to be canonical warnings against authoritarianism. I don’t care if Sinclair Lewis predicted the date of Trump’s birth: the Signet Classics label notwithstanding, this novel isn’t one of them.

At times I momentarily forgot why I chose to read it, disgust for the forces of anti-democracy sapped by disbelief and amusement at the shoddiness of Lewis’s writing. He began the novel in May 1935. He finished in August 1935. He revised until September 1935. And it was published in October of the year 1935. Considering that timeline and the book’s length (close to 400 pages), one can guess without reading a single page that it’s going to exhibit all the problems of a rush job. This is the first time I’ve read Lewis. Usually, as an introduction, I seek what’s generally thought to be a writer’s best work, so if I choose to read something else of his or hers later and it turns out to be second- or third-rate, I always have the other book in mind to pull me through, as proof of what the writer is really capable of and as a comparison. A good first impression that lasts. Instead I chose a book that came after Lewis’s major period and, unfortunately, it’s made a rather bad first impression that’ll last just as long.

The story is told mainly from the perspective of Doremus Jessup, a journalist and publisher, who reports on the rise of Berzelius (“Buzz”) Windrip, a demagogue who’s widely despised but manages to win the presidency. Once in office, Windrip begins radically altering society: He seizes dictatorial power. He establishes a paramilitary force composed of thugs and criminals, the Minute Men, his version of the Blackshirts or Brownshirts, who enforce the new order with violence and intimidation. He takes over media outlets and persecutes journalists, judges, and anyone else who isn’t sufficiently loyal to the new president. He opens concentration camps.

Jessup and his family and friends try to survive these changes.

Lewis takes readers to events with and without Windrip, to the streets where his supporters roam, to quieter settings where the individual’s beliefs and background can be ascertained. To ensure that the reader gets to know what Windrip is about while following Jessup, he introduces several chapters with short passages from Windrip’s ghostwritten autobiography. One doesn’t get lost, nor is the novel overstuffed. It’s readable. But, with the exception of overall structure, it’s disappointing by every measure. Largely mirthless satire. Shaky, schematic presentation of the era’s most influential ideas, as if the writer were relying more on hearsay than serious engagement. Tepid scenes even when the intention is to evoke a sense of outrage. Inadequate navigation of emotional terrain, such as when a family hardly mourns the summary execution of a family member. Careless sentences, such as when the reader learns Jessup doesn’t like listening to kids talk and Lewis adds, with unintentional ambiguity: “Few males have, outside of Louisa May Alcott.” Superficial characters. Or, in the case of Jessup’s wife, Emma, an offensive character, nothing more than a dimwit house keeper Jessup sometimes fantasizes about murdering. (A strange marriage, as the narrator doesn’t acknowledge.) It’s Jessup’s daughter, Sissy, however, that has the worst of the book’s cruddy dialogue. As she expresses doubts about having kids in an authoritarian regime, her boyfriend responds with JD Vance-like thoughtfulness:

Julian boasted, in a manner quite as lover-like and naive as that of any suitor a hundred years ago, “Yes. But just the same, we’ll be having children.”

“Hell! I suppose so!” said the golden girl.

(When you put it that way!)

Jessup is clearly supposed to be the hero, an intellectual with decades of experience covering politics, despite his frequently uninspired opinions and even delusions: on the insuperable differences between the middle- and working-class, he says, “‘They want bread. We want - well, all right, I’ll say it, we want cake!’” Hundreds of pages into the novel, well into the Windrip administration, with countless depraved acts already observed or suggested, Jessup, the cake-eating intellectual, solemnly concludes: “It can happen here.” It would have been consistent with Lewis’s writing to punctuate that line with thunder and lightning.

I was able to finish mostly because I was that curious to see what he got right, what he got wrong, and where society would end up, in his estimation. There are more than a few resemblances between Windrip and Trump: Empty promises to the poor. Lies, racism, misogyny, crookedness. Effective public speaking despite obvious deficiencies (verbal blunders like saying “neologies” instead of “neologisms”). Exaggerated crowd sizes. Identification with the crowd (I am you). “Clownish swindlerism,” as Lewis aptly puts it, and a corresponding hatred of the press. Normalization of thuggery in politics. One scene that’s difficult to dismiss as unreasonable speculation is when Jessup goes to New York to report on a gathering of Minute Men at Madison Square Garden. Outside, supporters of Communism gather alongside another political group that isn’t aligned with Windrip, listening to speeches. A group of Minute Men confronts the Communists and starts throwing punches. The Communists, joined by the other group, fight back. What happens next put me in mind of the police officer who encouraged and gave water to Kyle Rittenhouse, a kid who’d taken it upon himself to monitor a protest armed with a rifle and minutes later wound up shooting and killing people: the police break up the melee to save the Minute Men and arrest their victims. One would prefer to think law enforcement would be fair in deciding who should be protected and who should be punished. But what’s the voter suppose to think when, in the first presidential election since January 6th, the National Association of Police Organizations, which represents hundreds of thousands of officers, has formally endorsed Trump? He’s a felon who has promised to free the criminals who attacked their fellow officers en masse because of an election theft lie, with Trump, the election theft liar behind a coup attempt, looking on and tweeting his approval, and has repeatedly threatened to use force to break up protests. (And a couple of years after the publication of It Can’t Happen Here, tens of thousands of Fascists would gather for an event at Madison Square Garden.) We’re agreed, too, on what would happen if the USA became an authoritarian regime: it’d be dysfunctional and, in the confusion, the forces of democracy, whether lying in wait inside the country or outside, could take advantage.

Even so…the relief I’ve derived from this novel is that no matter how dire the times, I can’t lower my standards and recommend it. I will, however, offer a line I’ve chosen to retain: “Russia forbade everything that made his toil worth enduring: privacy, the right to think and criticize as he freakishly pleased.”