Underground Critics of the 1960s

While a lot- some might say too much- has been written about poet, novelists and music of the 1960s, little attention has been given to the critics of that era, particularly non-academic types who wrote for small magazines, be they literary, cultural or political, and who, to grasp the parlance of the era, might be termed underground critics, however much of a misnomer  that term might be. Some of these critics would be highly influential both at the time and in years to come,  while others would be influential for a time only to fade from sight.  Certainly a number of such critics during that era would influence me when it came to what I listened to, saw and read.

For instance, when it came to films, I avidly devoured articles by Jonas Mekas and Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice, the former writing about underground films, and whose taste and passion prompted me to exhibit films in San Francisco a few years later; while the latter offered an appreciation of a range of Hollywood and European films, not to mention auteur criticism. Naturally, I was also a keen reader of Film Culture,  in which I read not only the aforementioned writers, but sought out the likes of P. Adams Sitney, Ken Kelman and  John Fles. It was through Fles, whom I heard lecture in Los Angeles, and whose midnight screenings at the Cinema Theater I attended,  that I first heard about L.A. artists like Wallace Berman and George Hermes. Then there was Manny Farber's film criticism in the Nation, though it would be some years before I would appreciate the subtlety of his exquisite writing. When it came to music, mainly jazz, I never missed articles by LeRoi Jones, Nat Hentoff, Martin Williams, Frank Kofsky and AB Spellman, in Down Beat, the Village Voice or wherever else I could find them. All, in varying degrees, were supporters of the new music- Ornette, Trane, Shepp, Cecil Taylor- and, aside perhaps from Williams, articulate about  the relationship between the music and the politics from which it, to a large extent, derived.  It was a breath of fresh air to also discover a couple years later  publications  from John Sinclair and his associates at Detroit's Artist Workshop, like Change, Work, Wh'ere and Guerrilla (for which I'd become west coast editor) which, in its concentration on jazz and blues, combined poetry, criticism and articles regarding the social change that appeared to be imminent.

Donald Phelps

So hungry was I for intelligent criticism that I often found myself at the local liquor store on Haight Street to read the right-wing National Review, edited at the time by the venomous William Buckley just because it published articles by Guy Davenport and  Hugh Kenner. I probably read the NR as furtively as others read the porn magazines of which the liquor store kept a generous supply.

One of my favourite magazines of that era, and one which you could not have purchased at that liquor store, was Kulchur, which came out of New York, and lasted for twenty issues, from Spring, 1960 to Winter, 1965. The magazine included two writers-  Gilbert Sorrentino and Donald Phelps- who, at the time, would rank amongst my favourite critics, and whose work stands up remarkably well today. Phelps contributed to the first nine  issues of the magazine, while Sorrentino appeared in issues 3 to 16. Sorrentino would also edit the magazine, as would LeRoi Jones, Lita Hornick, Joel Oppenheimer, John Fles and Marc Schleifer. Both Phelps and Sorrentino contributed a range of intelligent articles and reviews which served ammunition in any number of debates and discussions with various academic literary honchos. What's more, both were political in their outlook, though it would be difficult to pinpoint what those politics were. Were they leftists, libertarians, anarchists, or what exactly? I had no idea, and still don't.

Phelps and Sorrentino were both born in 1929 in Brooklyn. Both attended Brooklyn College. Presumably they knew each, though Phelps claims in a 1974 essay on Sorrentino in Vort, that he first encountered Sorrentino on the pages of Kulchur. Sorrentino, who a couple years earlier had edited Neon magazine with Selby, would eventually become known for his own  brand of meta-fiction, the apogee of which was probably Mulligan's Stew. However, I've always been partial to his criticism, as well as to his very first novel, the incredible The Sky Changes, a road trip love-triangle novel that I read in a single sitting sometime around 1967. I also remember with fondness his articles on Hubert Selby, including Last Exit to Brooklyn, which he championed and helped edit. His piece "The Art of Hubert Selby" can be found in his exemplary book of criticism, Something Said (published by North Point Press in 1984, and subsequently reprinted by Dalkey Archives).

These days Donald Phelps' criticism has been pretty much forgotten.  Now he's primarily known as a historian of comic books, not graphic novels but traditional comics, and the author of Reading the Funnies (Fantagraphics, 2001), which is well worth checking out. But his Covering Ground- essays for now (Croton Press, 1969) with a typically sparse but evocative drawing of Phelps by Fielding Dawson, another Kulchur contributor, remains, for me at any rate, a lost classic and deserves republication.

For me,  Phelps was always the ultimate hipster critic: sharp, somewhat incomprehensible, passionate, and appreciative of all the writers I liked. Or maybe it was a case of my liking the writers he liked. Like Sorrentino, he covered a range of subjects, mainly literary but also political and cultural. In the first issue of Kulchur, he contributed an essay, The Muck School, about what was then euphemistically called sick comedy. While his controversial article A Second Look at Pornography in Kulchur 3, was an extended piece that placed the subject in the context of its time as well as place. In future issues Phelps also contributed articles on  Dashiell Hammett, Edward Dorn, Douglas Woolf, LeRoi Jones, Peter Taylor, William Eastlake, the police and the Warren court, satire and Jules Feiffer, the films of Allan Dwan, William Buckley, the Prayers Laws and church and state, I.B. Singer, Lil Abner,  Doc Savage and the Pulps, the self-immolation by a Quaker and a Catholic as protests against the war in Vietnam, capital punishment, Westbrook Pegler, Spencer Tracy, Anthony Mann, film critic Robert Warshaw, Philip Roth's Letting Go, and Pinocchio As well as appearing in Kulchur, Phelps, during the 1960s, contributed to The Nation, The National Review, Wivenhoe Park Review, The Second Coming, For Now and Rouge (where he wrote an excellent essay on Manny Farber). After that, the trail gradually grows cold.  On the other hand, one can still find blog posts by Phelps at the Comics Journal site, which includes articles on Calder Willingham's End As a Man and Preston Sturges' forgotten film The Power and the Glory.

Gilbert Sorrentino

As for Sorrentino, during  the 1960s though known primarily as a poet, published articles in Kulchur on Ron Loewinsohn, Charles Olson, Andrew Hoyem, Pablo Neruda, The Moderns anthology, and pamphlets by poets Aimé Cesare, Paul Blackburn, Clayton Eshleman, Fram Samperi, David Antin, Richard Brautigan, and Joe Brainard. He would go on to write about Denise Levertov in The Nation,  Marianne Moore in  The Park, 1968, the Reagan west in Guerrilla, Jim Brodey and Black Mountain writers in Poetry, and, later, in other publications he would produce articles on the likes of Michael McClure, Lorine Niedecker, David Antin, Louis Zukofsky Jack Spicer and Ross Macdonald.

In Phelps' essay on Sorrentino, the future comic book pundit would refer  to Sorrentino's poetry as  reactionary and conservative, though he gives such terms a positive spin:

Inspector Maigret and Sam Spade

"The most imposingly and movingly distinctive feature of Sorrentino’s work was always, in some of that word’s best and many of its worst senses, its reactionaries... Sorrentino’s block-like essays, often pummelingly indignant, occasionally hortatory (as, his study of the then-little-known Hubert Selby’s fiction) seemed founded on some promontory of sheer affirmation, massive response to particular occasion. In his writing, this reaction was predicated on neither barriers denied, nor barriers created; but rather, on fervent and visceral response against barriers which, correctly or not, he seemed to feel were prescribed and impassible: existing, therefore, only to be identified and either hailed or denounced — usually, the latter. Every such barrier represented, for Sorrentino, an implacable issue of taste, or candor, or esthetic integrity.

"It was a source of his basic, however abrasive strength as a critic, I think, that Sorrentino was both reactionary and, in the profoundest and most mobile sense, conservative: something but rarely encountered, liberal suppositions to the contrary; one reason being, that genuine conservatives, at least as much as genuine liberals, prize their spiritual autonomy and fluency. The impulse toward containment and sustenance of intangibles — toward, in a word, conservatism — produced, I daresay, much of the stertorous haranguing with which he laid upon targets of, sometimes, elephantine obviousness in the veldt-country of Kulchurmagazine. But it also evidently induced and projected a kind of foursquare unapologetic arrogance, and reinforcing it a reverence, which could be both refreshing and heartening; and were so, oftener and oftener among the increasingly salamander-like critiques which Kulchur multiplied with its final change of editors." 

Which makes one wonder what Phelps' politics actually were. After all, Phelps admires Sorrentino's poetry, his criticism and his first novel, The Sky Changes, though he's no fan of subsequent novels like Steelworks and Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. I have no problem with that. But I keep wondering whether  Phelps' politics might have changed over the years. And what was the story, if there was one, regarding his transformation from cultural critic to comic historian and pundit. Of course, that's what was always intriguing about Phelps. He was always elusive when it came to pinning down his politics, or figuring out exactly where he was coming from. The same could be said, to a slightly lesser degree, of Sorrentino, who, having emerged from the working class, appeared to be on the left, but used language in such a way as to make it hard to define just where on the left he stood. On the other hand, this was the early 1960s, when identification with political parties or, for that matter, popular front politics, seemed overly prosaic and part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Looking back, it seems as though the likes of Phelps and Sorrentino were writing from a world that no longer exists, one in which  ideas mattered, and the reader had to put in a small amount of work to understand and appreciate what was on offer.  But in the function and drift of early 1960s America, it was an oasis in the midst of a cultural and class-ridden desert.

Low Down by A.J. Albany

Subtitled "junk, jazz and other fairy tales from childhood," Low Down is the story of A.J. Albany's youth, spent much spent as misspent, in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Daughter of the great be-bop pianist Joe Albany- best known for his work with Charlie Parker and Lester Young- and Sheila- a beautiful hipster, and Allen Ginsberg's pre-Neal Cassady  fiancé- Amy Albany was forced to grow up all too quickly, as she watched her parents descending into junkiedom. Joe would somehow survive that descent, but Sheila would disappear into the abyss, leaving Amy to assume, at an early age, the role of family adult. Joe was left raise his daughter in a world comprised of musicians, junkies, whores, sexual outsiders, probation officers and cops. Considering his circumstances, he didn't do all that badly, schlepping his daughter to clubs, where she would sleep on a blanket behind the bar, or leaving her with an array of dodgy, but loving, babysitters. Not surprisingly, Amy would turn into a child of the streets, her companions more often than not kids whose parents were similarly marginalised. Through it all, she remained preoccupied with how she could protect her father, whether from the law, dealers, landlords, or rip-off artists.

A.J. Albany's memory, informed by an incisive eye and turn of phrase, takes her days as a precocious five-year old to a wizened in-your-face teenager, an avid record collector, with tastes schooled by her father's music, and an attitude derived from having seen too much too soon. The scenes, most of them unforgettable, come in short, sharp shocks, as sleazy and sad as they are touchingly funny. There's pre-pubescent Amy being used as bargaining chip so her dad won't be sent back to prison by his parole officer. There's Amy meeting Satchmo- part Santa Claus, part God. There's Amy living in a string of run-down hotels and cramped rooms, surrounded by the desperate and downtrodden. It's not that she isn't aware of what's going on around her; it's simply it is what it is, including the suicides and the drug overdoses.  In the end, it's an exhilarating and courageous evocation  of growing up on the margins of the culture at a particular time and place: early 1970s L.A, before Reaganism, trickle-down economics, gentrification, tough love and austerity, when there was still a walkable wild side and an edge in the air.  It's also a heartfelt portrait of a gifted musician and  a loving depiction of a father-daughter relationship devoid of sentimentality. For me, Low Down can take its place alongside the likes of John Fante's Dreams of Bunker Hill, Dan Fante's Chump Change, John Rechy's City of Night, Art Pepper's Straight Life or David Goodis's Down There. I only hope the film adaptation, directed by Jeff Priess (Let's Get Lost's cinematographer), does the book justice.  After all, the track record for such projects isn't all that good.

Here's a documentary about Joe Albany.

And here a 2003 interview  with A.J. Albany.

Purgatory by Ken Bruen

When compiling the list of  favourite crime novels of 2013 there were some glaring omissions. No mention, for instance, of the latest by George Pelecanos,  Walter Mosley, Scott Phillips or  Reed Farrel Coleman. My reason for not including a number of books was simple enough: I not yet read them  (blame the publishers for not sending copies). Also, no mention of  Jean-Claude Izzo's magnificent Marseilles Trilogy- Total Chaos, Chourmo and Solea- probably because  I'd read all three years ago. And no Gone Girl. But wasn't that one published in 2012? On the other hand, it was a list of my favourite books, not a list of the best books of 2013.

Had I read it a few weeks earlier, I would certainly have included Ken Bruen's Purgatory, the most recent in his Jack Taylor series. For me, it came as a pleasant surprise, mainly because I've never been able to work my way through an entire Bruen novel. Which is ironic given his style- short sentences and paragraphs, sometimes more like free verse than prose. On the other hand, I don't hold the view of a pundit-friend who maintains Bruen's novels are more akin to comic books, that he writes for people who don't like to read, that he over-relies on Irish stereotypes, and throws in an excessive amount of many cultural references- songs, quotes, movies, t.v. programs- leaving it to the reader to work out what they stand for.

Well,  that's a bit unfair. After all, I've got nothing against comic books or, for that matter, novels that are easy to read. Nor do I have anything against cultural signifiers- though I admit Bruen does tend to over do it- so long as I like or can comprehend what they signify, and it's not simply a matter of name-dropping or product placement.  And even the most casual reader would have to admit that Bruen has some important things to say about contemporary Ireland, if not the world in general.

Purgatory- which  I guess is the state in which most of us live- might be easy to read, but it's also very funny, with more than its share of serious observations and, as one would expect, dark moments.  Having said that, it could be that I enjoyed the novel because it's the first by Bruen  I've read since watching the Jack Taylor series on TV earlier this year. It was only while doing so that  I realised how good Bruen's dialogue can often be, with some great one-liners and pithy observations about Catholicism and the Celtic Tiger. Maybe it's simply that Bruen is better visualised than read, or that he should be read as though visualised. I was reminded  of Billy Wilder's comment to James M. Cain to explain why he might not be the right person to pen the screenplay for Double Indemnity: "Jim, that dialogue of yours is to the eye." To which Cain responded that he knew it was to the eye, but he could also write for the ear. Wilder obviously didn't think so.  But what I think Purgatory illustrates is that Bruen can write for both the eye and the ear. Okay, it doesn't offer much in the way of suspense- most readers will know  who the killer is quite early on. Not that it matters, because  Jack Taylor novels are really about... well, Jack Taylor. A consummate outsider with a cranky disposition, now wrecked and ruined by drink, drugs, work, his age, and demands made on him by the state and world in general, yet with enough humanity and wit to still do what he thinks is right. Now that I've revised my opinion of Bruen, I'm going to have go back to those earlier Jack Taylor novels and see what they have to offer.

Ten Favorite Crime Novels of 2013

(in no particular order)

-Ask Not by Max Allan Collins (Forge)

-Under the Eye of God by Jerome Charyn (Mysterious Press)

-Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliot Chaze (reissue, Stark House)

-Snitch World by Jim Nisbet (PM/The Green Arcade)

-Others of My Kind by James Sallis (No Exit)

-The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell (Sceptre)

-Three Steps to Hell by Arnold Hano (reissue, Stark House)

-Dead Lions by Mick Herron (Soho Press)

-Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, anthology, ed. Sarah Weinman (Penguin)

--Laidlaw by William McIlvanney (reissue, Cannongate)

Bubbling Under:

-Grind Joint by Dana King (Stark House)

-Hammett Unwritten by Owen Fitzstephen/Gordon McAlpine (Seventh Street)

-Dark Times In the City by Gene Kerrigan (Europa)

-The Red Road by Denise Mina (Orion)

-Strange Loyalties by William McIlvanney (reissue, Canongate)

-Papers of Tony Veitch by William McIlvanney (reissue, Canongate)


For a full annotated version of the above list, see my article at the L.A. Review of Books.

Ask Not by Max Allan Collins

Conspiracies and paranoia are, of course, the essence of noir fiction. And Max Collins, a throwback to the days when the likes of Harry Whittington and Gil Brewer churned out novels for paperback companies at a super-human pace, is well aware of that fact. Since 20th century America is infested with such conspiracies and paranoia, Collins has had no problem finding the appropriate subject matter. Having said that, these days conspiracies are a dime a dozen- from 9-11 to Obama’s secret agenda. Even so, present day paranoia seems to at least in part have its origins in the Kennedy assassination in Dallss, November 22nd, 1963. Ask Not is the latest instalment in what Collins calls the “Nathan Heller memoirs,” which began in 1983 with his True Detective and represent some eight years of American history, from prohibition, Al Capone, Frank Nitti, the origins of Las Vegas, the Lindberg kidnapping, and Huey Long to Rosewell, the Black Dahlia, the death of Marilyn Monroe, and the death of John F. Kennedys. Some eighty years of American history, or at any rate, a secret history, all fodder for Heller’s investigative eye. Collins’ last three books- By By, Baby, about the death of Monroe; Target Lancer, about a failed assassination attempt on JFK in Chicago just weeks before the real thing, and involving the same characters, and now Ask Not, which moves into post-assassination territory. Here Heller investigates the numerous unexplained deaths- whether “suicides” or outright murder- focusing, for the most part, on noted columnist and TV celeb Dorothy Kilgallen, (here called Flo Kilgore), who at the time had been  looking into the assassination, and whose death remains suspicious. 

Collins has definitely done his research on this one, enabling him to bring an array of facts to life, albeit with a dash of novelist’s license.  As he admits, he has long been interested in the subject and has read all the relevant material. Though it appears the book mostly relies on Douglass’ excellent JFK and the Unspeakable. But Heller has also poured through numerous fringe books, watched the relevant films and visited the various websites. He’s certainly no nutter, but he's also no conspiracy-denier.  The problem here is how to interject a fictional Nathan Heller into this historical occurrence. Collins does this by allowing Heller to take on the guise and findings of real life investigators, while intervening in particular places, such as the death of alleged LBJ henchman Mac Wallace, an instance where the mystery remains unsolved.

Yes, Collins’ book does cover the same ground as fiction writers Ellroy and DeLillo. But Ask Not is unlike either of their books (Collins is said to purposely avoid reading Ellroy for just that reason). For one thing it sticks as close to the facts as possible, or at least to the facts according to Collins’ research. The result is like a pulp version of the events, without Ellroy’s obsessional, high-octane prose, and DeLillo’s literary contextualisation. It’s simply a different take, and isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though Collins’ narrative seems somewhat thin in comparison.  But then that’s Collins’ shtick. He prefers to simply state his case and move on. After all, this guy produces a lot of books, including the graphic novel Road to Perdition. Consequently, the book floats on a cushion of historical fact, sometimes feeling as much like reportage as fiction. Having said, and despite its thin and occasionally clumsy narrative, I rate it as one of the year’s best crime novels if only because it’s actually about something, serves a function, and is, in its own way, an important book.

It should be said that one need not have read the previous two books in the trilogy to appreciate this one (perhaps the operative question should then be ask not what the novel can do for you but what you can do for the novel). Though, as I’ve said elsewhere you have to work hard to suspend your disbelief when you read these books simply because Heller, as the “p.i. to the stars,” has done it all, knows everyone worth knowing and some who aren’t, and has intervened in at least fifteen crucial events in twentieth century American history. Call me cynical, but that’s stretching credulity to breaking point. But, okay, I’ll go along with it. Particularly since Nathan is getting on in years, and his his days are obviously numbered. Still, if you want to learn about what happened in and around those events in Dallas, you could do worse than read Ask Not.  As for where Collins goes next with his Heller memoirs, he strongly hints that it might well be the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Heller’s pal and former boss Robert Kennedy. Then there’s always Watergate. After that things get murky, while noir becomes more an excuse, or at any rate a commodity, than a manifestation. Anyway, by then Heller most certainly will be living with the worms. Though these books are easy to criticise, I, for one, am eagerly awaiting the next instalment. 

A Colossal Wreck- A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption and American Culture by Alexander Cockburn

It's a romantic image: flitting across America in a vintage gas guzzler, sticking to the back roads, taking the pulse of the nation, jotting it all down, sending off dispatches, in an attempt to stir  things up as much as possible. Alexander Cockburn's A Colossal Wreck is not so much Kerouac's On the Road or Dan J. Marlowe's Name of the Game Is Death as some mutant artifact created by crossing by H.L. Mencken and Edward Abbey, with a soupçon of Hunter Thompson, not to mention  the author's father- once the scourge of everything provincial and conservative in Britain- Claude Cockburn. In other words, Alexander Cockburn was, until his untimely demise, part of a long line of  journalists unashamedly radical, eccentric, opinionated and invariably entertaining.

I began reading Cockburn in the 1980s, when he was excoriating Reagan and his minion. His articles were a necessary tonic for that toxic decade. Cockburn went on to flay subsequent administrations with contributions to  periodicals ranging from the Nation, Esquire, Harpers, Village Voice, to his local Anderson Valley Advertiser,  his on-line Counterpunch, and, surprisingly, the "paleocon" Chronicles Magazine. The latter a reminder that Cockburn, ever the iconoclast, could be as critical of liberals and  progressives, including, heaven forbid, socialist senator, and progressive favourite, Bernie Sanders, as he was of the right.

This, Cockburn's final book, could be his best. It's nothing more than a journal, which begins in 1995 at the end of Clinton's first term, and ends in the summer of 2012, four months before  Obama's re-election. The individual entries are, for the most part, under two pages, with some notable exceptions, such as  his excoriation of Rupert Murdoch; a play in which fellow Brit, and militant atheist/war-apologist Christopher Hitchens meets Henry Kissinger in heaven; an entry on his father, regarding Oxford types, spies and the Spanish Civil War.  Describing himself as "Marx-ish," AC's  renegade leftist perspective can also be painfully prescient, whether on the financial crisis, or the entry, dated  9-12-01, in which he notes the imminent threat to civil liberties posed by the previous day's attack. While his initial Hitchens slap-down comes some years before the latter became the neo-cons' poster-boy for cross-perspective war-mongering, when, during the those crashingly tedious dog-days of Monica-gate, he snitched, just like his idol George Orwell had done, on his friend, the Clinton insider Sidney Blumenthal. Moreover,  Cockburn, unlike many, had  Obama clocked from the beginning, describing him, after his famous "race speech," as "a master at drowning the floundering swimmer he purports to rescue, while earning credit for extending a manly hand in human solidarity...reminiscent of Alexander Pope's eighteenth-century lines about Joseph Addison: Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer/ And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer."

If I have any criticism of Cockburn, it's his occasional reliance on  gossip. It's the pundit's  equivalent of an "unnamed source." Like the guy  who schleps Hillary around telling him that he overheard  her saying something nasty about a homeless person. On the other hand, Cockburn makes a cogent case for gossip- in this case, "outing"- early on in the book: "Yet even in the counterculture, or at the level of the off-beat and unofficial, gossip always has the twin function of being liberating- letting the sunlight in- and repressive, in the sense of exposing the personal and the private, naming names and hurting people. Gossip represents visible fault lines at the social surface, reflecting subterranean, gradual shifts in our social attitudes. Although the liberating and repressive functions are both at work, given the structure of media ownership and control, the repressive function is usually dominant." 

Ever the contrarian, Cockburn, with his elegant prose and perspective, can never can be accused of reaching for the lowest common denominator. Particularly enjoyable are entries on contemporary buzz-words on their way to the tumbril (a cart used during the French revolution to haul away the dead), overseen by the infamous, if dubious, Fouquier-Tinville. Words and phrases such as  "iconic", "the new normal", "a tsunami of..." Coming across as a politicised version of Private Eye's "Colemanballs," Cockburn prefaces these entries with a reference to Marcuse regarding the Pentagon giving up on verbs because they believe them to be "unreliable and probably subversive. They talked too much, gave too much away," substituting "clotted groups of nouns" in their place. Though maybe Cockburn sometimes strains just a little too hard to sound like a modern version of Wyndham Lewis's  Enemy, someone unafraid of offending, unable to not  tell the truth as he saw it, for whom speaking truth to power might be applied if that term had any meaning and wasn't  destined for aforementioned tumbril. Or, for that matter, if author had ever displayed any interest in that particular process.  Cockburn's final entry is dated  July 13th, 2012, about why, even though it would be more equitable, a return to the draft is not about to happen in the U.S.. Cockburn would die  eight days later in a German hospital. Without so much as a mumbling word about his illness.