5
Rage Against
the Machine
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Blame Society
Societies, like people, are predictably resistant to change. Complain as we will about oppressive governments, myopic leaders, and draconian penalties, most of us opt for the status quo more often than not. The unknown is a frightening thing, after all, and while society may not be perfect, at least we know what to expect from it.
Sometimes it takes the radical ideas of an artist to kick complacent societies where they need to be kicked. The problem is, societies usually kick back—hard. When artists find themselves fighting against the cultural mores into which they’re born, the end results can be at best dangerous and at worst fatal. And yet, rarely does any society succeed in permanently eradicating the ideas it wishes to suppress. Not even Napoleon could do that in 1801, when he ordered his bayonet-wielding cronies to find, and arrest, the anonymous author of sexually explicit books that were circulating around France at the time. That author, it turned out, was the Marquis de Sade, who was caught, arrested, and tossed into a mental asylum. Although Sade was institutionalized for the rest of his life, his work survived. Walk into any bookstore today, and you can pick up a copy of Sade’s formerly banned books, and no, the Barnes & Noble security guards will not tackle you on the way out.
Often, artists battle society in ways that are less direct, presenting their controversial ideas in a manner so cryptic that only folks in the know are likely to get the message. In the uptight 1950s, the television writer Rod Serling wanted to challenge viewers with provocative programming, but he grew increasingly frustrated with his craft after endless fights with network censors, who deemed anything outside of Leave It to Beaver as too risqué for TV. (In two separate instances, Serling tried to dramatize the harrowing story of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African-American boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955. The writer met with censorship both times.) That’s when Rod decided that if he had any chance of tackling important issues, he would have to sneak those issues right over the heads of the bromidic decision makers who were axing his material. The Twilight Zone, Serling’s masterpiece of morality, premiered in 1959, confronting society’s ills in a way that television had never before seen. Shielded by the guise of model spaceships, cheap alien makeup, and fake robots, Serling was free to crank out unflinching fables on greed, racism, mental illness, totalitarianism, and, of course, unchecked censorship.
Rod Serling
The following tortured artists fought their own battles against society. The fact that we’re still talking about these artists can only mean that their fights ended in victory, although the tragic details of those fights might suggest otherwise.
(1809–1849)
Abstract: The would-be sellout
Birth name: Edgar Poe
Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Masterwork: “The Raven”
Demons: Being devalued
“When shall the artist assume his proper situation in society—in a society of thinking beings? How long shall he be enslaved?”
—Southern Literary Messenger, 1836
“Men have called me mad,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe in the autobiographical short story “Eleonora,” “but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.” It’s easy for modern readers to conclude that the question to which Poe referred was settled on October 3, 1849—the day the author was found stumbling aimlessly through the streets of Baltimore, delirious and incoherent, wearing someone else’s soiled clothes. That he succumbed to a mysterious illness four days later, following a lifelong battle with addiction and depression, seems to all but cinch the case against madness as a form of lofty intelligence, and the fact that literary scholars and blue-haired Goths still ponder the symbolism behind “The Raven” a century and a half later doesn’t really prove otherwise.
The truth is, even in the 1800s, people loved a good story about the connection between creativity and madness, and Poe, one of the original tortured authors of American literature, did not fail to beguile a tragedy-loving public. He was orphaned at the age of two, stricken by the gambling bug in his teens, and drinking heavily by twenty. At twenty-seven, he married the love of his life, who also happened to be his thirteen-year-old cousin, and he later watched her suffer for five years before she finally succumbed to tuberculosis, at the age of twenty-four.
And yet, despite Edgar’s unmistakable tortured credentials, he was driven to write by a far more down-to-earth idea—the idea that he could actually earn a living as a writer of fiction and poetry. It’s a simple enough concept but quite radical for the 1830s. Back then, American literature was largely printed in weekly and monthly periodicals, the publishers of which stacked the deck firmly in their own favor. They paid low rates, offered no royalties, reprinted stories at their discretion, and often forced writers to use pseudonyms as a means of keeping them anonymous. American magazine publishers often would not pay for new content at all. Rather, they would simply reprint stories by British authors, who, in the absence of international copyright law, had no legal means to stop them. Edgar condemned these nineteenth-century aggregators, decrying their practices as literary piracy. American writers, he believed, did not stand a chance as long as magazines could reprint British stories without paying for them. “Literature is at a sad discount,” he bemoaned. “Without an international copyright law, American authors may as well cut their throats.”
Nevertheless, Edgar spent his entire adult life trying to profit from his poetry and fiction. Working day jobs at various publications in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York, he mostly earned his keep as a literary critic or an editor. However, the intermittent employment kept him at best solvent and at worst begging his friends and family for money. If the average tortured writer is obsessed with artistry and unconcerned with monetary compensation, then Edgar was not average.
Indeed, by the time he reached his mid-thirties, he had become so fed up with just scraping by that he set out to write something that would change his fortunes—something specifically meant to appeal to the tastes of both critics and the reading public. The result was a gothic poem about bereavement and a talking raven. The doleful tale was, at least partially, based on Poe’s own experience (as the story goes, his young wife, Virginia, was gravely ill while he was working on it), but its depiction of a grieving narrator who is visited in the night by the titular bird was largely an attempt to wow the masses. Consider that the popular writer Charles Dickens, just a few years earlier, had also employed the use of a talking raven in Barnaby Rudge.
Nevertheless, “The Raven,” upon its publication in 1845, made Edgar an instant celebrity. Critics were not universally kind to its elegiac playfulness, but readers ate it up like so much Halloween candy. Buried within its metrical cadence, the poem captured something universal about the nature of grief—our desire to remember versus our need to forget. Edgar’s narrator is torn between them, and mourning for his beloved Lenore becomes a kind of perverse pleasure in itself. Equally responsible for the success of “The Raven” was Edgar’s own poetically tortured backstory: the heavy-drinking gambler, preoccupied with the macabre, whose droopy eyes and upturned brow conveyed the sadness of an abused puppy dog. Women lined up at Edgar’s door, vowing to cure him of his self-destructive behavior. Children would chase him down the street, hounding him relentlessly until he turned around, raised his arms, and screeched “Nevermore!” like the titular bird of his poem.
Edgar was thrilled with his newfound fame, but in the absence of compensation to match his renown, he remained little more than a morbid curiosity, a reality star before such things existed. Poor payment was always a point of fierce contention for Edgar, who remained steadfast in his belief that literature doesn’t just have meaning; it has value. “I have made no money,” Edgar complained after “The Raven” had run its course. “I am as poor now as ever I was in my life—except in hope, which is by no means bankable.” A few years later, amid circumstances that still remain a mystery, Edgar somehow got sidetracked on a trip from Richmond to Philadelphia, and he wound up on that fateful Baltimore street, semiconscious. Edgar Allan Poe once called literature “the noblest of professions,” but the world he lived in showed him otherwise. The international copyright law that he thought so vital to the future of literature would not be adopted by Congress until 1891, more than four decades after his death. And yet his conviction in its importance was quickly validated by the speed with which the conditions for American writers improved. By the early 1900s, hit novels like Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises were generating small fortunes for the authors who penned them.
Today, battles over intellectual property rights have been refashioned for the digital age, with legions of unpaid bloggers weighing their desire for exposure against their need to earn a living. And yet, with its widespread aggregation, the Internet is not all that different from those pilfering periodicals of the nineteenth century. Couldn’t you just see Poe toiling away, thanklessly, as a hired gun for The Huffington Post? Chances are, he would feel right at home. 
The Nonprofits
Poe never made any money from “The Raven,” despite the fact that it was hugely popular in his lifetime. Here are artists from other disciplines who suffered similar fates.
Music—Stephen Foster
The Work: “Camptown Races,” “Oh! Susanna,” and more than 200 other mid-nineteenth-century standards
The Shaft: Foster was the piano-playing Poe, a famous songwriter struggling to make his living at a time when copyright laws were stacked against him. Typically, his songs would earn him a one-time modest fee from sheet-music publishers, who pirated each other’s music like it was going out of style. Foster died in poverty at the age of thirty-seven.
Visual Art—Milton Glaser
The Work: “I Love New York” logo, 1977
The Shaft: Glaser designed the red-hearted logo as a pro bono job for the city’s Department of Commerce. He received no compensation for the now-ubiquitous image, and he’s repeatedly—and graciously—said that he’s not bitter about it. However, in 2001, amid the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Glaser created a revised version, adding a black mark to represent the fallen Twin Towers. After the Daily News published the new design, Glaser received a cease-and-desist order from the company overseeing the copyright to his original logo.
Acting—David Prowse
The Work: Darth Vader, the Star Wars trilogy
The Shaft: You know the voice. You know the helmet. But did you know that the actor who actually donned Darth Vader’s black suit was a former bodybuilder named David Prowse? Prowse has claimed that, although his contract entitles him to a small percentage of the box-office receipts from two out of the three original Star Wars films, he has yet to see dime one. Lucasfilm denies Prowse’s claims but doesn’t discuss the specifics of its financial arrangements. Either way, the whole thing smells like a disturbance in the force.
(1854–1900)
Abstract: Daring to speak its name
Birth name: Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde
Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
Masterwork: The Importance of Being Earnest
Demons: Secrecy and exposure
“I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and shame.”
—From De Profundis, written from prison, 1897
In Victorian England, a culture built on prudery, sex was a taboo subject, and homosexual sex was a crime. The famously flamboyant playwright Oscar Wilde could not enjoy open relationships with any of his male lovers—and indeed married a woman as a sop to cultural pressures. It was part of the double life he was forced to live, a belittling concession made by a natural nonconformist in a repressive society.
Nowhere is the conscripted duality of Oscar Wilde more evident than in The Importance of Being Earnest, his brilliantly durable sitcom of manners, which continues to be one of the most evergreen comedies in theater. Oscar was at the height of his fame when he sat down to craft a story with “no real social interest.” On a superficial level, he achieved this goal in spades, fleshed out in the feckless über-dandy Algernon Moncrieff, who finds social obligations so tedious that he fabricates the existence of a sick friend named Bunbury, whom he pretends to be visiting whenever he wants an out. Algy’s deceitful habits are matched only by those of his friend Jack Worthing, who has conjured up his own phony alibi, a brother named Ernest, allowing him to make no-questions-asked trips into town.
The story’s setup is followed by a farce of the most innocuous, wackiness-ensuing variety, but buried beneath the fluff, and sprinkled with Oscar’s rapid-fire one-liners, is the thinly cloaked twinge of closeted repression. Oscar was no stranger to the kind of charades practiced by Algy and Jack, and he soaks his characters in a parallel conceit. For Algy, the practice is so second nature that he verbifies the name of his nonexistent friend. “Bunburying,” he tells Jack, saves men from the demands of conventional society—in particular, marriage. “A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it,” he says. Of course, the king of Bunburying was the author himself. Even the word is inside reference to his own Bunburying habits—a combination of Banbury and Sunbury, the towns where Oscar met, and later rendezvoused with, a handsome schoolboy on a train, or so the story goes. Earnest, for all its sodden triviality, is simply the expressed frustration of a man forced to live a lie, a man who had the spirited wherewithal to spin that lie into comic brilliance.
The immediate reception of Earnest left little doubt that it would be Oscar’s masterwork. The play opened on February 14, 1895, to an enthusiastic crowd of high-society Londoners who were aflutter with anticipation over the newest work by the famous farceur. Despite a thunderous response and positive critical reception, however, Oscar would not write another play. The high from the highlight of his career was over before he knew it. It was only four days later that the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Oscar’s much-younger lover, Sir Alfred Douglas, stormed into the Albemarle Club—the bohemian den where Oscar was a member—and left a visitor’s card accusing the playwright of “posing” as a sodomite. Against the judgment of his friends, Oscar sued Queensberry for libel, a decision that, in hindsight, seems intentionally risky seeing how easy it was for the Marquess to round up a number of male prostitutes who were willing to testify in his defense. Suddenly, Oscar went from accuser to accused, and three trials later he was convicted of “committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons.”
On the plus side, Oscar’s conviction exposed the draconian conservatism of antisodomy laws and paved the way for a gay-rights movement that even he could not have imagined.
His legacy, which includes a vast trove of endlessly applicable quotes (see the introduction to this book), is fittingly summed up by a line uttered in his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray: “Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.” Exquisite things aside, one wonders why the playwright did not heed the advice of his friends. Why did he not simply tear up Queensbury’s card, ignore the accusation, and call it a night? Perhaps he was simply adamant that he had done nothing wrong. Or maybe he believed he could charm the jury to see things his way. Or maybe, after years of being forced to live a double life, he simply wanted to ensure that future gallivanters would be free to flirt with, pursue, and maybe even marry handsome young strangers on trains.
(1890–1918)
Abstract: The naked lurch
Birth name: Egon Schiele
Birthplace: Tulln an der Donau, Austria
Masterwork: Vienna Secession, forty-ninth exhibition
Demons: The elusive female form
“To restrict the artist is a crime. It is to murder germinating life.”
—Inscribed on one of his sketches, drawn from prison, 1912
The story could have been ripped from last week’s New York Post: a thirteen-year-old girl goes missing; police raid the home of the twenty-two-year-old suspect; they make an arrest, and they confiscate more than 100 pornographic images from the premises. But this was not the tale of a deranged handyman or Nigerian senator. It was the story of Egon Schiele, the quietly tortured Austrian Expressionist, whose erotically charged sketches and paintings have helped redraw the ever-nebulous dividing line between art and pornography.
Schiele’s distorted, often graphic nude figures may be a century old, but they have not lost their capacity to spellbind, even if they would still make most of us squeamish in the company of our parents. In the rapidly mutating world of pre–World War I Europe, it was precisely Egon’s ability to ruffle the complacent masses that led to his arrest, thereby landing him in the middle of a culture war that was dividing the Austro-Hungarian Empire at its core. At the time, Vienna was abuzz with the radical ideas of Sigmund Freud, who used clinical terminology to raise the tolerance level for dirty talk, and yet the conservative towns that surrounded the Austrian capital remained resistant to such open discussions about penis envy and Oedipus complexes. Egon’s greatest misstep, in hindsight, might have been when he ditched the cosmopolitan Vienna to set up shop in the insular village of Neulengbach, where the locals did not take kindly to the arrival of the spiky-haired bohemian.
Egon’s studio became a favorite hangout for local teenage girls who, bored with small-town life, were perhaps a little too willing to model for the big-city artist. Their easy compliance fed Egon’s intractable obsession with the female body, which first manifested in the artist’s psyche at the age of fourteen. His father died of syphilis that year, after a violent struggle for life that taught the young Egon to see the human body as both exaggerated and twisted. He later became enchanted by the form of his younger sister, Gertrude, his first muse and earliest model. Incidentally, the fact that the teenage girl stripped for her older brother sat no better with Egon’s family than it would with families today.
But then Egon was not looking to shock sensibilities; he was looking to explore the unknown and forge emotional bonds in the process. By the time he set up his studio in Neulengbach, he had developed a keen ability to connect with his subjects in a way that dissolved the typical artist-model barriers. This was no dirty old man leering at pretty young things. Barely twenty-two, Egon was essentially a curious artist painting his contemporaries. Then again, try telling that to the father of Tatjana von Mossig—the thirteen-year-old girl at the center of Egon’s arrest. After running away from home, Tatjana convinced the artist and his lover to take her to Vienna. However, when the girl got cold feet, the three of them returned to Neulengbach to find the townies up in arms. Police raided Egon’s studio and confiscated more than 100 paintings and sketches of graphic nude images. The villagers, outraged that their children had been exposed to bold depictions of prostitutes lifting up their skirts and flaunting their vaginas, demanded Egon’s head on a plate. In April 1912, Egon was arrested for kidnapping and statutory rape. (Police assumed that he fondled Tatjana as he painted her.) The charges did not stick, however, as Tatjana refused to testify. The artist was eventually convicted of “public immorality,” meaning he exposed minors to pornographic images. Egon was sentenced to three days in prison; this was in addition to the twenty-one days he’d already spent in a jail cell waiting for a verdict. The experience changed Egon profoundly, as evidenced by the self-portraits he drew from his cell, in which the twenty-two-year-old appears bearded, beaten, and twice his age.
Of course, Egon’s story would hardly be worth mentioning had his preoccupation with the female form spawned the kind of melon-breasted vixens conjured up by today’s comic-book fanboys. In contrast, Egon’s thoughtful figures, with their forceful lines and muted colors, show a deep sensitivity for his female subjects. And at the same time, one cannot deny the obvious fact that there is a categorically pornographic quality to his work. (The title of his Reclining Female Nude with Legs Spread kind of says it all.) Moreover, his use of very young models strikes upon one of the most irreconcilable hypocrisies of contemporary society, which proudly denounces the sexualization of minors but also markets “Juicy” short-shorts to eight-year-old girls.
In a way, however, Egon Schiele was just a victim of bad timing. It wasn’t until 1918, years after his conviction, that he landed his first comprehensive exhibition—part of the forty-ninth Vienna Secession, in Zurich. That same year, as bad luck would have it, an influenza pandemic swept the continent, claiming the life of Egon’s pregnant wife, Edith. Egon himself succumbed to the virus three days later, on October 31, 1918. He was only twenty-eight.
Egon’s final work is a drawing of his wife, finished one day before her death. It is an affecting sketch, in which the dying woman appears placid, collected, and fully clothed.
Parental Advisory
Egon Schiele’s arresting nude figures follow in a long tradition of art that pushes society to rethink the definition of obscenity and pornography. Here are a few others from various creative disciplines.
Lolita—Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 story of a middle-aged scholar who runs off with a preteen girl was called “sheer unrestrained pornography” by the editor of the Sunday Express. The book was initially rejected by American publishers and banned in France for two years after it first appeared.
A Clockwork Orange—Stanley Kubrick’s unflinchingly graphic 1971 drama about London youngsters gone wild was slapped with the dreaded X rating upon its release in the United States, prompting the director to remove thirty seconds of sexually explicit content.
The Perfect Moment—In 1989, this traveling exhibit of works by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe caused controversy over public funding for the arts. After deeming some of the photos sadomasochistic and homoerotic in nature, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., refused to host the exhibit during its national tour. Mapplethorpe passed away that same year due to complications from AIDS.
Frankenchrist—The 1985 album by the California punkers the Dead Kennedys stirred up trouble when a teenage girl purchased the album at a Los Angeles record store. The girl’s mother complained to the California Attorney General, and the band was charged with distributing harmful material to minors. The charge stemmed from a graphic H. R. Giger painting known as “Penis Landscape,” which was included as a poster. The case ended, poetically enough, with a hung jury.
(1866–1946)
Abstract: Mad scientist for hire
Birth name: Herbert George Wells
Birthplace: Bromley, England
Masterwork: The Time Machine
Demons: Professional failure and proletariat prejudice
“I dislike the restriction and distortion of knowledge as I dislike nothing else on earth.”
—Introduction to The Fate of Man, 1939
When H. G. Wells first appeared on the literary scene in the mid-1890s, he was somewhat overshadowed by the French author Jules Verne, who penned such science-themed adventures as A Journey to the Centre of the Earth. (“There was a disposition on the part of literary journalists to call me the English Jules Verne,” he once griped.) However, considering the public’s unwavering taste for high-concept fare over the eleven-plus decades between Wells’s debut and whatever big-budget blockbuster J. J. Abrams is producing this week, it’s clear that Wells, not Verne, imbued science fiction with the coolness factor that has made it the centerpiece of modern geekological lore. It’s hard to imagine how well the genre would have endured without such handy Wellsian gimmicks as time travel, alien invasions, invisibility formulas, and, of course, brooding depictions of future dystopias.
That said, had H. G. Wells’s only contribution to science fiction been gimmickry, he might be remembered today as a kind of prop comic, less an English Jules Verne than a literary Carrot Top. His ongoing influence is more the result of one broad stroke of ingenuity that, you might say, put the science in science fiction. A former scientist himself, Wells was the first major writer to approach sci-fi from inside the scientific community—a community he had hoped to take by storm before his own incompetence shut him out. Wells’s eventual foray into full-time writing was a reluctant one, an act of desperation brought about by abject failure and a stubborn refusal to accept the socioeconomic limitations imposed by his working-class roots. For all his later accomplishments, he was, at his heart, an angry scientist wannabe.
Herbert George Wells, or Bertie as his family called him, was born on the lower rung of the late-Victorian middle class. The son of a shopkeeper father and housemaid mother, he grew up in a time of rigid class structures and stifling religious beliefs. His mother believed adamantly that the best possible outcome for Bertie was the life of a tradesman. But menial work depressed Bertie (one early job as a draper’s apprentice had him threatening suicide). Despite his mother’s mediocre expectations, he never stopped hoping that he might one day eclipse his lot in life through higher education. However, the more he was told to accept his vocational limitations, the more angry and resentful he grew toward the people he believed were narrowing his opportunities. “I thought they had conspired to keep me down,” he later wrote. “I hated them as only the young can hate, and it gave me the energy to struggle … for knowledge.”
For Bertie, knowledge meant devoting his life to science—an endeavor through which he hoped to gain the social legitimacy he so craved. After a few false starts, he won a scholarship to London’s Normal School of Science and a chance to study under Thomas Henry Huxley, one of the most renowned names in science. Huxley, known as “Darwin’s pit bull,” was a fierce defender of the theory of evolution, which was almost as controversial in nineteenth-century England as it is in modern-day Kansas. Bertie saw in Huxley the kind of scientific greatness he wanted for himself.
There was just one problem: H. G. Wells wasn’t that great a scientist. He struggled in the classroom, tested poorly on finals, and even botched the occasional lab assignment beyond recognition. Although Wells did manage to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in zoology, his visions of scientific greatness dissolved into the ether of trying to make a living. He found work as a science teacher—moonlighting on the side as a journalist to make ends meet—but even that small bit of good fortune came to an end when a bout with tuberculosis forced him to resign. It was a low point from which he almost didn’t recover. Having tried in earnest to conquer the one industry that promised to rescue him from a menial fate, H. G. Wells came up an utter failure. It was during this moment of desperation that he conceived of an idea: What if he could apply his knack for writing pop-science journalism to a work of fiction?
As an experiment, Wells chose to develop an idea about a machine that allows people to travel through time. He’d been toying with the notion of time travel since his days at the Normal School, when he’d read a fellow student’s paper on a bold new theory of time as a fourth dimension. The idea was a potential high-concept gold mine, and Wells knew it from the beginning. He called it his “peculiar treasure,” his trump card, and when he finally played it, it brought him the recognition he always wanted.
The Time Machine was first published in serialized form in the New Review, from January through May 1895. Over the next five years, Wells capitalized on the story’s success with a slew of sci-fi adventures, including The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and The First Men in the Moon. It’s no accident that science—the very industry he failed to conquer—is often the target of criticism in these cautionary allegories about the dangers of human progress. Although Wells went on to write well into the twentieth century, he is largely remembered today for those early high-concept adventures that cast the mold for modern science fiction. H. G. Wells may have failed at science, but in the end he was every bit the inventor as the scientists he envied, even if he did break a few test tubes along the way.
Bleak to the Future
H. G. Wells distinguished himself from other science-fiction writers of his era through his unflinching pessimism. Many thinkers of the day saw the new Darwinism as evidence that humanity was destined for progress, but Wells was convinced that humanity, if left unchecked, would just as easily de-evolve into a more primitive state. Here’s how those pessimistic predilections shaped his most famous works:
The Invisible Man (1897)
Hook: A megalomaniacal research scientist concocts an opium-based formula that renders him invisible.
Gaping Scientific Inaccuracy: As countless optometrists have pointed out, the invisible man would have been completely blind. If his retina can’t absorb light, it can’t produce eyesight.
Reigning Pessimistic Message: The quest for power over wisdom will be the downfall of science.
The War of the Worlds (1898)
Hook: Belligerent Martians invade London and wreak havoc.
Lasting Scientific Legacy: Upon its publication, the book sparked the imagination of a sixteen-year-old Robert Goddard, who went on to invent the world’s first liquid-powered rocket, ultimately making real spaceflight possible.
Reigning Pessimistic Message: This is what nineteenth-century British imperialism looks like from the other side.
The Time Machine (1895)
Hook: An unnamed time traveler visits a future society in which the human race has diverged into two species—a separation propagated by the divide between the leisure and working classes.
Dazzling Scientific Calculation: The book predates Einstein’s concept of “time dilation” by a decade.
Reigning Pessimistic Message: One day you will serve as lunch for the people serving you lunch.
(1893–1967)
Abstract: Fresh hell hath fury
Birth name: Dorothy Rothschild
Birthplace: Long Branch, New Jersey, USA
Masterwork: The Wisecrack
Demons: Injustice
“It’s not the tragedies that kill us. It’s the messes.
I can’t stand messes.”
—Interview with The Paris Review, 1956
It all started at a press luncheon at the Algonquin Hotel, in midtown Manhattan, where a roomful of writers and journalists showed up largely for the complimentary food. The year was 1919, and the event was set up to welcome home Alexander Woollcott, the famously multichinned New York Times drama critic who was returning from the Great War. Among the guests was a twenty-five-year-old editor named Dorothy Parker, who barely spoke a word all evening. The future wisecracking, scotch-swiveling minx who would earn a reputation for bedding every guy in New York was still years away. So were her tumultuous marriages, multiple abortions, and four failed suicide attempts, which included cutting her wrists, drinking shoe polish, and taking large quantities of sedatives and sleeping powder. At this particular luncheon, Dorothy Parker was everything we’d expect Dorothy Parker not to be: shy, unassuming, content to observe. She had never smoked a cigarette, and the taste of booze made her gag. However, these things would soon change as Dorothy unleashed a brilliant knack for wisecrackery that would make her a national sensation.
Dorothy came by her literary career on a whim. In the summer of 1914, when she was not yet twenty, she was working at a dance studio and writing poetry on the side. That was when she caught wind of a little start-up magazine called Vanity Fair, launched less than a year earlier by a young publisher named Condé Nast, who himself was a virtual unknown. Figuring she had nothing to lose, Dorothy submitted her poem “Any Porch” to the publication, whose editor, to her surprise, accepted it. Within four years, she would be on the magazine’s staff as an editor and theater critic.
As fate would have it, the press luncheon that Dorothy attended that day in 1919 became a daily tradition, beginning as a humble platform for poorly paid Vanity Fair editors to vent about Nast—who, as a boss, was apparently no picnic—and growing into the most influential literary group of the Jazz Age. The Algonquin Round Table, as it came to be known, included critics, actors, poets, playwrights, and humorists who would show up each day and engage in sardonic, talk show–like banter that would be reprinted in newspaper columns across the country. It was the term-coining curmudgeon Franklin Pierce Adams, author of the column “The Conning Tower,” who most often jotted down Dorothy’s daily quips and printed them for posterity. Dorothy’s reputation as a maven of sarcasm and sass grew by leaps and bounds. (It’s hard to resist someone who, upon hearing about the death of former President Coolidge, remarks, “How can they tell?”)
The Round Table was dubbed our national literary Camelot, and Dorothy, our Guinevere. Her popularity as one of the founding members of the group culminated in 1926, with the publication of her poetry collection Enough Rope.
From the beginning of her career, Dorothy’s poetry revealed apparent scorn for almost everything. “Women: A Hate Song,” an early piece published anonymously in Vanity Fair, has her ranting about the recipe-hunting, dress-sewing, dinner-making housewives of the 1920s. “I hate women. They get on my nerves,” goes the opening sentence. Men were not spared her derision either, as was apparent in the follow-up poem, “Why I Haven’t Married,” in which she explained that all the men she dated thus far had been idiots.
Enough Rope was a hit with readers and critics. Even the bourgeois fusspots who called it vulgar and frivolous only seemed to increase its coolness factor. Dorothy had made her mark on the literary world in almost every sense, and yet underneath the sarcastic shots she took at life’s many disappointments was a deep hatred of the injustices and unfairness that allowed them. As a small child, one of her defining revelations took place after a major blizzard had just dumped several inches of snow on New York City. Dorothy, watching from the warmth of her family’s brownstone, could see the day laborers who were tasked with cleaning up the mess. As they shoveled away, Dorothy’s rich aunt—“a horrible woman” by Dorothy’s account—remarked how nice it was that the snowstorm had provided the men with work. But Dorothy didn’t see it that way. “I knew then it was not so nice that men could work for their lives only in desperate weather,” she wrote. It was at that moment that she came to see her upper-class family as existing on the wrong side of the line between fairness and unfairness. By 1927, her head spinning from the heights of her popularity, Dorothy was growing “wild with the knowledge of injustice and brutality and misrepresentation.” The problem was that she had built her entire career out of taking nothing seriously. She showed no interest in politics, except to take occasional shots at politicians. Women won the hard-earned right to vote in 1920, but in the seven years since, Dorothy herself had not bothered to step into a voting booth. Nevertheless, she began a lifelong commitment to left-wing causes with a trip to Boston, where she was arrested for protesting the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, the infamous anarchists who were convicted of murder. Unfortunately, what marked a turning point for Dorothy’s personal convictions also signaled a decline in her influence. By 1930, the Round Table had dispersed, and her subsequent years as a Hollywood screenwriter and occasional radio commentator never brought her the same level of acclaim.
Turning the Table
In her later years, Dorothy Parker became increasingly critical, not just of the world around her, but also of her own choices. She wrestled with the pestering sensation that her career of quips and one-liners had been a mostly hollow endeavor. Not even the Round Table, the group that catapulted her to fame, was given a free pass. “These were no giants,” she said in an interview with the Associated Press. “The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were—just a bunch of loudmouths showing off.”
Dorothy’s final years were lonely ones. Returning to New York, she lived with her dog at the Volney residential hotel on the Upper East Side, a neighborhood populated by the recipe-hunting women she once derided in the pages of Vanity Fair. The former shrinking violet who gagged at the taste of liquor was now ravished from decades of alcoholism, down to eighty pounds, with failing eyesight.
In 1965, two years before her death, Dorothy bequeathed her entire estate to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was a final attempt by a dying woman who wanted to enact real change, to combat the injustice she so hated. And it worked. To this day, the NAACP still collects royalties for reprints of Dorothy Parker’s work.
(b. 1926)
Abstract: Breaking the sound barrier
Birth name: Charles Edward Anderson Berry
Birthplace: St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Masterwork: The opening lick of “Johnny B. Goode”
Demons: Separation and segregation
“Prejudice doesn’t make me mad. I guess ‘pisses me off’ is the word.”
—Interview with Esquire magazine, 2001
Musicologists have long been divided over the invention of rock ’n’ roll. Depending on whom you ask, the genre either came about through a disparate mixture of cultural attitudes and musical styles or it came about through Chuck Berry. Either way, it’s hard to argue that any other artist has been more responsible for popularizing the steady backbeat, the energetic guitar licks, and the adventurous showmanship that define the form—to say nothing of the youthful marrow that continues to inspire legions of GarageBand soldiers as they set off on the indulgent road to six-string savvy.
Watch old footage of the zoot-suited virtuoso, duckwalking across the stage and singing willful tunes about having no particular place to go, and you will not get the sense that this was a particularly anguished soul. But while Chuck’s happy-go-lucky music transcended racial barriers, it did so at a time when his home state of Missouri still had separate drinking fountains. If Berry became a crossover champion of youth culture, it was only through a painful struggle to unify two worlds that did not want to be unified.
For the young Charles Berry, exposure to those two worlds began in Depression-era St. Louis, where soup kitchens and Hooverville settlements were a fact of life for much of the city’s African-American population. Charles and his family were spared such poverty. His father, a contractor who often scored lucrative construction jobs in affluent white neighborhoods, kept the family planted firmly in the middle class, putting Charles on a precarious dividing line. As a black boy on the streets of St. Louis, he had no shortage of run-ins with authorities, but then he also enjoyed mucking around the all-white country clubs where his father did construction.
Music in midcentury Missouri, like midcentury Missouri itself, was starkly divided by race. Blacks listened to rhythm and blues; whites, to country and western. There was no middle ground. Charles, meanwhile, found excitement in both genres, and he never understood why the two sounds had to be mutually exclusive—that is, until he tried mixing them in front of a live audience.
By the early 1950s, Chuck Berry and his blues band were playing regular gigs at the Cosmopolitan, a club in East St. Louis, Illinois. The shows were nothing unusual: blues musicians riffing on Nat King Cole and Muddy Waters songs for largely black audiences. But when Chuck started introducing a few country-and-western twangers into the mix, more and more white listeners began crossing the river from St. Louis to hear “the black hillbilly.” Wowing a crossover audience would prove more difficult than simply getting them to show up, however, as the mixed crowds responded unevenly to Chuck’s diverse repertoire. White crowds howled enthusiastically to the country-and-western songs, but they couldn’t make heads or tails of Chuck’s thick urban drawl. The black listeners, meanwhile, nearly laughed Chuck off the stage when he broke out in hillbilly verse. Chuck became increasingly discouraged by what he saw as narrow-mindedness from both sides. Asked later why he insisted on mixing genres, even in the face of so much resistance, he explained, “I was trying to shoot for the entire population instead of just—shall we say, the neighborhood.”
Doggedly, he continued to tweak his sound in hopes of striking the right balance. He enunciated his words so good ol’ boys could understand his lyrics; he camped up his showmanship during the country numbers so the blues lovers would feel like they were in on a joke at the hillbillies’ expense. In the process, he struck upon a formula that would speak not only to both races but also to the emerging teenage culture as a whole.
Teenagers, as a marketing demographic, were still a new phenomenon in 1955. Postwar prosperity was producing a generation of idle youngsters with extra pocket cash to slurp down malts, go to drive-in movies, and, of course, buy records. It was precisely this denim-clad, poodle-skirted demographic that Chuck had in mind when, in May of that year, he recorded his first single for the independent label Chess Records. “Maybellene,” a spunky, guitar-fueled rendition of the old hillbilly standard “Ida Red,” became a runaway hit with teenagers of all stripes. It was one of the first records to reach the Billboard charts for blues, country, and pop music.
It should come as no surprise that not everyone was ready to embrace a genre that encouraged interracial mingling. For every bobbysoxer bouncing up and down at one of Chuck’s shows, there was a sign-wielding parent yawping about the obscene devil’s music. At one gig in Jacksonville, Florida, Chuck recalled ropes being tied across the center of the aisle to keep the races apart. The ropes were torn down by the show’s end, with the entire audience dancing together. Chuck Berry, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, was leading the charge for a new generation of colorblind audiences. His subsequent hits remain standards of late-fifties enthusiasm: “Roll Over Beethoven,” a youthful ode to the triumph of low culture over high; “Rock and Roll Music,” a celebration of the genre itself; “Johnny B. Goode,” a semiautobiographical ditty about a poor country boy who finds his salvation in music.
My Payola
Chuck Berry’s breakthrough hit, “Maybellene,” never would have made it on the air had it not been for a shady little side deal between Chess Records and the popular deejay Alan Freed, who is credited with coining the term “rock ’n’ roll.” Chess agreed to give Freed a cocomposer credit on the song in exchange for heavy airplay. The credit entitled Freed to a cut of the royalties—a nice little incentive for stepping up “Maybellene” in the rotation. And that’s just what he did, playing the song every two hours on his 1010 WINS radio show in New York City. A few years later, when authorities started cracking down on payola scandals, Freed was busted and thrown off the air.
Unfortunately, the decade that Chuck helped define would, for him, end on a sour note. In December 1959, he was arrested for transporting a minor across state lines. After two trials and two appeals, he ultimately served an eighteen-month prison sentence, from February 1962 to October 1963. Upon his release, he resumed his music career only to discover that the genre he pioneered was already changing. The rockabilly-inspired grease balls of just a few years ago were being drowned out by the harmonies of moppy-headed Brits. By the time the Beatles played Sullivan the following year, Chuck Berry seemed like a Ford Model T in a Cadillac showroom. But even though the legacy police have been perhaps a little too kind to those British invaders of the sixties, at least the musicians themselves knew when to credit their roots. In fact, it was John Lennon who said it best: “If you tried to give rock ’n’ roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry.’”