The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room

BARRY GIFFORD’S WRITING KEEPS: it stays fresh every time you re-read it and what’s more you want to re-read it because his characters feel like old friends. His fiction is just as vivid as his memoirs, as heart-filled as his poetry, as workmanlike as his essays, and vice-versa da capo: vivid essays, heart-filled memoirs, workmanlike fiction. It isn’t that Gifford disrespects genres by letting them leak into one another. Quite the contrary: the specific engine of each genre is powered by something ineffable: the Gifford style. Like Hemingway, Saroyan, Kerouac, Salinger, Brautigan, and Bukowski, Gifford has a style. He is a great comic realist who does with the turn of a phrase what a Zen master does with a brushstroke. Gifford’s universe is Giffordian. It’s an unmistakably American universe, too, populated by a huge and love-able humanity propelled on a tragic river of excess energy. Once brought to life on the page, they cannot be removed, they will live forever. Wherever Marble Lesson, Sailor, Lula, Baby Cat-Face or Consuelo come from, they aren’t going anywhere: they are a permanent part of our literature.

Gifford has rightly noted that the “human comedy” of Balzac, Saroyan, and Kerouac is his project as well, and, like them, he has staked out a specific humanity that is solely his. The lesbian jail-birds, drifters, outlaws, star-crossed lovers, charlatans, preachers, and lumpen-spiritualists who populate the mythical (but geographically precise) Gifford-world, are neither puppets nor cartoons, (though they have the seductive swiftness of comic strips or shadow theater), but real-life spawns of the demented last-half of the American century. Gifford, however, is not primarily a social critic. He is foremost a benevolent and involved deity who looks with curiosity and compassion on his creations. Which is to say, he is foremost a writer and an original who has seized the still-live vein of that American realism which began with Mark Twain and has not been exhausted by theory of any kind.

Writers like Gifford come big, to the chagrin of academics. The insurgent life that powers his prose is unwieldy and generative, manifest in marginal and violent characters whose genius for language and depth of inquiry is sublime but saves them neither from tragedy nor absurdity. If their marginality doesn’t distress the pencil-pushers of our Sahara of the Bozarts, their prodigal speech certainly does, as does Gifford’s clearly joyous disregard for the ongoing fads. This wouldn’t even be worth mentioning in the context of this foreword if it wasn’t in itself a guarantee of authenticity. The great family of American writers to whom Gifford belongs is one of outsiders. Among the ones mentioned above, only Hemingway and Salinger are canonized, and the effort seems to have sapped the dainty energies of our exegetes. Others, such as Tom Robbins, Ken Kesey, and Jim Harrison, have captured the allegiance of readers while still being treated like live serpents by the literary establishment.

I mention this because it points to a paradoxical failure: America delights itself and the world with the joyous products of a popular culture that is complex enough to generate its own distinctions of greatness, from genuinely luminous creations such as Sailor and Lula, to outlandishly marvelous television creatures like Homer Simpson and Hank Hill. The self-selecting critical instinct of people who think of culture as their quotidian right, like hot water and Stop’n Go, is still suspect to the fading guardians of “high” culture. European critics don’t have that problem, at least not with American culture, which they value precisely for its irreverent freedom. It makes sense then that Gifford, like the other writers mentioned, is better respected in Europe than in his native country. The analogy, of course, is jazz, which thrived for a time in Europe before returning in triumph to its native land.

Barry Gifford is both a “cult” writer and a great one. In Europe, where his cult and his prose are not in conflict, he is read as an American original who meets his readers’ expectations of America’s violent pioneering spirit. Eventually, he will be read the same way here. Critics will have no choice but to abandon their terror of fertility and genre-crossing and read his work for the purposes of delight, just like real readers do.