At a great distance, William Barrett’s memoir may look like one of those reactionary outbursts that so often occur when one’s idealism has withered with age and one’s knee has lost the power to jerk liberally.
After all, in the course of his text, the author manages to cancel the subscription of his youth to both Marxism and literary modernism. …
If his logic is correct, then we should be ready to die for anti-communism.
—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
SHEE-IT. THAT AIN’T NOTHIN. If my logic is correct—and you better not say it ain’t and I hear about it, because me and Doyle Cathcart will come over there and beat the pure shit out of you. If my logic is correct, we should be ready to kill anybody that says anything smart-ass about General Westmoreland.
And you’re listenin’ to a man who used to get on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ass for bein’ a tool of the interests.
Shit yeah, I knew old Sartre. I remember the night before I graduated the Sorbonne, he come over to my table in the Deux Magots and said he’d heard about me, did I want to help him write a leftist screed. “I doubt it’d be ‘leftist,’” I snapped. I could reely snap in them days.
Cause I had been raised in a household where we strangled Spanish priests. That’s right. Believed in assassinatin’ anybody in America who’d ever been as high as cabinet-level. Saw Trotsky as an agent of the Big Railroads. Advocated the nationalization of mom-and-pop stores.
Yeah, I was born in Greenwich Village one night while my momma was trying to get the floor so she could demand less shilly-shallying at a Com’nist bomb-throwin’ meetin’. They threw them round, cannonball-looking bombs with the fizzy fuses, like you used to see in the cartoons. My momma could throw one of them things twenty yards. Yeah. And my daddy, he knew Emma Goldman before Maureen Stapleton was born. In the summer they’d go to Provincetown and do modern art.
Nude theater. Hell, I was in my first nude theater when I was three months old. Crawled out on the stage while Edna St. Vincent Millay was just as nekkid as a jaybird bein’ mounted by Eugene O’Neill in a cutaway swan suit, and my diaper slipped and the audience loved it. My folks, why they threw off their clothes so they could run out from the wings and grab me, but the audience made ’em leave me out there. Course O’Neill got the red-ass and stomped off. He wasn’t no modernist, no more’n Sartre was a leftist.
By the time I was seventeen or so, I had composed an anti-Wall Street opera that lasted two and a half hours and had only one note in it, sung twice.
And acourse as the years rolled on I was right there at the barricades on everything, right on up through colored rights, Veetnam, Abstrac’ Impressionism, and antinucular. I took all the right stands and said all the right things and wrote poems that I defy anybody to this day to explicate. I was writing stuff that made Ezra Pound’s Cantos read like “Dan McGrew,” and at the same time throwing sheep’s blood at Nelson Rockefeller and doing more acid than Timothy Leary. I had my hair down to my ass and was sleeping with a gunrunning Guatemalan nun and an auto-parts sculptor from Chad and was writing long letters to The Nation in defense of Alger Hiss because he was guilty. My ex-wife was organizing hookers in Nuevo Laredo, my son was doing out-of-body travel in New Guinea, and my three daughters were down in Angola with a Cuban brigade.
And then one day I was listening to the weekly Forty-eight Hours of Rage broadcast on this underground Maoist radio station I pick up—I believe it was an Albanian reggae group singing a song against Adlai Stevenson—and eating some tofu I’d bought at a Whole Grain Weatherpeople rally and making some nonobjective silk-screens for the Debourgeoisization of Poland Committee, and somehow something jist, I don’t know, I just sat down and said, “Fuck it.”
You know. I mean, maybe Warren Beatty got a movie out of it, but where had it all gotten me? Where had it all gotten the world? And I turned on the TV and there was this preacher, Brother Luther Bodge, he was saying “Brother, if you have not found the light, you had better leave off your un-American ways. You had better move on down here to Sudge, Arkansas, where for the furtherance of this gospel I will sell you a lot in my Closer Walk Developments and soon as the Com’nist-inspired interest rates go down you can build yourself a nice house, and meanwhile you can vote against the forces of godless atheism and shout Hallelujah!”
And I did. And I started tawkin’ like this. And shit, you know, it felt good. And me and Doyle Cathcart go out dynamitin’ fish and puttin’ up signs saying “Don’t Nobody Better Think about Buildin’ No Synagogues in This County” and readin’ the Closer Walk Industries Simplified Holy Word ever’ mornin’ about four A.M. and then I come home to my lot here and think for about twelve or fifteen hours about how great a country this is, and about how much greater it’s going to be after I go back up North for a couple of weeks and pitch scaldin water on ever’body I used to know that ain’t a Christian, which is ever body I used to know and specially that nun. She was awful. She’d do innythang.
I got to work on, not saying shit so much. It feels so good sayin’ it when you’re a conservative. But I know it’s a sin. And I got to stop bein’ tempted to read old Ezra Pound. It’s all right for the content, Brother Bodge says, the content is fine. There wasn’t no foolin’ Pound on social issues. But the form is Satan-inspired. You can tell that by comparin’ it to Billy Graham’s column in the paper.
Course Billy Graham ain’t no Christian. No more’n this William Barrett memoir is truly reactionary. Course it’s not something I’d buy anyway, being it ain’t put out by Closer Walk. But it sounds to me like this William Barrett has got a ways to go yet before he’s reely part of what’s goin’ on.