LITERATURE BEHIND BARS

...it messed me around but i/ got it together)./ & what he was i am/ capable of being plus some...

...How can Franklin, the plain and overwhelming evidence staring him in the face, suppose otherwise...

...Recently, the producer of Easter pageantry at the Radio City Music Hal.l, lamenting the prospective demise of that palace of culture, called it the LITERATURE BEHIND BARS SAUL MALOFF "greatest theater in the history of the world," adducing as conclusive evidence the awesome fact that some quarter of a billion people had passed through its portals in the thirty-eight years of its existence, a claim his counterpart in Athens or the Globe Theatre could certainly never have ,made...

...How is it that those ~vho elect themselves to speak in the name of the People a}ways contrive to sea~ them below the salt and allot them the meagerest portions...

...No doubt this view contains some measure of truth, as any cetegorieal edict, i,f it casts its net wide enough, is likely to ca~t some part of some 28 April 1978:276 truth, including some great truth...

...And Insan (Robert S. Preston...

...And if reality is reduced to caxicature by the turbulences of ideology, how can literature escape the whirlwind, the more so as the writings of "common criminals" are Franklin's subject, and his burden is to demonstrate the truth we have all been blind to (blinded as we are by our own class interests, racism, ideolo~ica...

...No: "We are .to look," we are instructed, "for what is common, clear, purposeful, useful...

...I respect (and often Commonweal: 277 associate myself with) the emotions distantly underlying the verses...

...For him to proclaim to the nations this "aesthetic" by diktat, all .the while vilifying as racist and reactionary those of ,us 'who would on the whole ra.ther .not,, reveals a driven, self-righteous ideological passion in its most rampant form...

...If, perversely, he knows better, then surely such fulsome praise is nothing but craven flattery and favor-currying . . and thus a special and by no means unfamiliar form of condescension (generally reserved for children and our other lessers), the other face of which is the contempt he parades for the likes of Nabokov and Borges (to say nothing of Hawthorne, who is not to be ,forgiven for apologizing for slavery) and for the university (naturally Franklin is an academic, and like so many of his brethren given to this unpleasant little exercise in self-promotion...

...We are not supposed to sit around admiring the auo t, hors, but to get up and pot their message into action"--in short, the latest version of the doctrine of art as a "weapon in the class struggle...

...Malcolm Braly, of all people, largely because he remained impervious to the Afro-American revolutionary movement, never quite became the transcendent artist he might otherwise have been...

...For this kind of criticism the true Marxist humanists might just as well never have lived and written (and not seldom died .after long silence...

...It is closer in spirit to the "aesthetics" of Lenin at his most philistine, to Zhdanov's (Stalin's alter ego in the field) at all times, and to .the dreariest pronouncements and ukases in Mac's Yunan "talks" on art and literature, with thoir devastating consequences for cultural life in postrevoh~ tionary China...

...And James Lung: "Holds of/ Frigates/ Plying the North Atlantic,/ Engaged in the/ Black Gold trade that/ Was the cornerstone of/ Mercantilism, Capitalism/Americanism...

...Haggard is also of course the creator of "The Fighting Side of Me," his "most nationa.listic song": "When you're running down my country, hoss,/ You're walking on the fighting side of me...

...Prison, by this light, is not so niuch a metaphor for a microcosm of America, as it is, a~ter the horror has been acknowledged and discounted, a peculiarly exatted place, or, again, state of mind, or compression chamber of .historical consciousness,..for there a man--his life now directly objectified and the gauzy illusion as well as the fact of freedom fallen away --is fag more likely to see file truth of his condition as victim of the social order: now he knows America is the prison, and he is, whatever the crime of record, a "political prisoner," whereas those on the otttside d o n ' t . . . yet...

...nevertheless his Felony Tank is strangely touted as "clearly a more universal book...

...F~anklin finds him wanting in one crucial respect: "his consciousness was never touched by the Afro-American movemer~t" and so he fails by that touchstone to meet the most exacting radical-ideological standards by which the highest art is to be judged...

...This sort of crdticism, where language ,is a debased currency and words are dislodged from consensual meaning and can be deployed to serve any .tendentious purpose, goes in some quarters by the...

...As the concert is famous and the ballad "crucial" (all of...

...Here is TJ...

...is of course the most popular country and western singer and songwriter in America...

...inant in the prison and the aesthetic dominant in the universities, which can see little value in such a book...

...But great though Haggard may be, and surely,-is...

...Sometimes, it is possible to attain to the heights though one is by some oversight bereft of the redeeming blood, as for example in the case of John Sinclair, identified only as "a leading white revolutionary...

...for if a writer cannot, try as he may, be a Black revolutionary, he can stitl console himself by being a white revolutionary, not just an ordinary one but, as we used to say on the true, four-square Old Left, a "leading" one...

...this is dirty work I'm doing, you've had enough of it, and rm drowning in it...

...Franklin's examples are crucial), you are o! course familiar with it, indeed are probably singing it softly to yourself (and loved ones within earshot) at this very moment...

...in a memorialto the murdered Malcolm X: " . . . got me to thi~ng that/ if he wasn't the supreme being himself,/ AHlahGndMunguJehovahRama/ (after someone pulled my coat &/ told me that he was a man the same./ as me...

...Look /or Me in the Whirlwind: The Collective Autobwgraphy o/ the New York 21 is advanced as "one of the greatest achievements of the autobiographical mode," anywhere, at any time, a "living epic . . . giving an overwhelming sense of the truthfulness, heroism, and inevitability of their collective commitment to the lSberation of their people...

...enslavement to an antagonist worldview...

...o say otherwise is art-hating...

...And like those who are condemned to repeat them in every generation, he reveals the most invincible ignorance of the applicable lessons of cultural history...

...28 April 1978:278...

...In saying "only," I give the game sway, and identify mysel~ with the class enemy and its decadent uni~ersity~based canons of criticism, and as a racist to ,boot, as Franklin and other literary geneticists will surely note...

...Worse, it passes unchallenged as "Marxist," or even more loosely by that mischievous blanket-term "neoMarxist," and it is precisely the sort of sack, ing of a great intellectual ~.tradition that led Marx--the Marx who committed to memory whole scenes of his revered Greek tragedians and thought Balzac managed somehow to compose pretty fair novels despite his ideological limRations--to say in another connexion: "I am not a Marxist...

...Perhaps he is tone-deaf and word-blind-that's one possibility...

...The Black convicts deserve better of me and of Franklin...

...and since being a "revolutionary" in America, Black or white, Chicano or Native American, Jew or Gentile, female or male, is a state of mind and figure of speech once in vogue in some of our better universities and salons it matters not at all that there doesn't happen to he a revolution going at the moment or any in sight when last I |ooked (I very much regret to say, as we can certainly use a few just now...

...And Reddy again, in "one of his finest poems": "Going around in circles and getting/ Nowhere at different places/ All the time/ I ended up in a Black slum . . . Run fool run/ Run fool run/ Run fast as you can for help to that place/ Written across the front of that sweatsuit/ You are wearing...

...LITERATURE BEHIND BARS SAUL MALOFF M ERL~ Haggard (I have it on the authority of H. Bruce Franklin in The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison, Oxford, $13.95, 337 pp...

...here, v~here "we encounter head-on the conflict between the aesthetic don...

...By cash-register aesthetics, kitsch is elevated to art by the decibel level of cheering multitudes...

...Franklin, who plays fast and loose at all times with the word "artist" as he does with the v~diCt "great," now summons his most scathing contempt from his very considerable arsenal for the opposing aesthetic, employing to that end the buzz-~vords of .the now-extinct, "for the unique and original, for ambiguRy and countless types of ambiguity, for architectonic structure or the self-conscious, solipsism of a N,~bokov or a Borges," those stt:utting peacocks and gaudy exemplars of bourgeois art and its apotheosis of the solitary, estranged, self-glorifying a~ist...

...Its alleged greatness _9 I I SAUL MALOFF, a novelist and critic whose most recent book was Heartland, is now working on a political memoir of the Fifties, the darkest side...

...There is, sad to say, no such thing as a "poetic" emotion which is not possessed by and fully rendered in the poem itself--that is a principle of criticism New and old and future, if it is to be worth the name, which is to say if it is to take poetry (and any other art) seriously...

...In this dark, bloody, world-encompassing fantasy where phantom cadres of the Black "nation," now disbanded and gone on to better things since Franklin last summoned them to armed struggle in a revolutionary movement that the Black masses rejected by indifference or hostility in favor of reformist politics, judicial redress and the pressures of mass organizations-in Franklin's dream of omnipotence, where the barricades are strewn with great works of art if we would but look, the crowning achievement is awarded with full fanfare not of course to any triumph of the individual imagination, "not to any single work," but to the "most collective autobiography of the American prison," which is "the body of poetry 'by Black prisoners," a rather open-ended body of work which, presumably, will not be consummated until the last prisoner has written the last poem on the last day ,before the last prison is 'at long last demolished (may God hasten the day...

...Look /or Me in the Whirlwind does not, Franklin says scornfully, "ask us to admire the creative genius of each individual artist, but to see each artist as merely represe .ne~v~ of a collectivity...

...For Franklin to arrive on the scene at ,this late date (getting on for something like a century after the fact in its modern .form) all breathless with ,wonder and excitement of original discovery, of .a new "poetics" no less, is low comedy and sheer grandiose insolence...

...In such a world as this, Freud said, not aRogethex whimsically by any means, who can say the paranoic is wholly wrong...

...but that alongside them, what passes for literature in the .universities shrinks into triviality...

...name "radical," though in fact tt is pseudo-radical, bogusrevolutionary, latter-day Sixties histrionics in its wider, more willful, narcissistic, icon-smashing manifestations...

...And here the underlying aesthetic premises of Franklin's polemic, portentously promised us from the beginn ing and sounded throughout like a muffled drum-roll, become explicit...

...Banners streaming, Franklin rises to the task, brandishing fistsful of verses, novels, memoirs...

...but in the unlikely event that it somehow slipped your mind, let me remind you of it: "I t.urned t~ventyone in prison,/ Doing life without parole./ No one could steer me right/ But Mama tried, Mama tried,/ Mama tried to raise me better,/ But her pleading I denied./ That leaves only me to blame,/ 'Cause Mama tried...

...If you are so henigbted as not to know who John Sinclair is, 'so hope.lessly out of touch with what really matters in our literary culture, there's no point in your asking and none in my telling...

...Or so driven by ideology that the predetermined thesis is all and the truth nothing--a familiar if lamentable condition...

...Once, right here at home, we were called upon to regard Howard Fast as a great writerm remember...

...We can never promote good art by hailing bad art as models...

...rests equa~ly in its status as the epic of a revolutionary national liberation movement and its collective nature as a "people's art...

...Of the slim anthology provided us I choose my examples, space being what it is, by their length, but not unfairly...

...and hacause they are not poets the emotions themselves are not well served and remain at a great distance, opaque and barely audible, outside the poem, and beyond its reach, there for the sympathetic reader only by an act of goodwill...

...but in Franklin's hands, by means of demogogic overstatement and exclusion of conflicting and modulating truths, it is transformed into an essentially paranoid view of the real world in that it projects a local, even a personal, predicament onto the world-at-large...

...he'd not be the only professor of literature so afflicted...

...It is no accident, as we determinists like to say, that Haggard "chose to open his famous concert in Muskogee, Oklahoma" with his celebrated ballad "Mama Tried," as it has to do with his criminal and prison experience and his life, as man and artist, we are told, turns on that...

...They are not, however, poets, and all of Frarrklin's pettifoggery and fustian will not make them that...

...Someone named Ross Laursen, for eight years Chairman of the Folsom Creative Writers' Workshop, and lucky enough to have a Comanche mother, "sees America in a different light," by grace of the special insight conferred by inheritance~ as manifested by his short poem "Fourteen Year Old Boys Make the Easiest Targets," cited here in its entirety: 'I eat Watergate/ with my breakfast/ each morning/ and wonder/ how many/ will die/ that day/ in America/ by a warning shot/ in the back...

...Reddy: 'Whe drum is the hearfbeat/ Of mother Africa/ As she shapes life and/ Gives birth/ To the world . , . The drums sounded the warning/ Oppressors are coming/ Oppressors are coming/ And when slavers discovered/ How much we communicated/ With music they could not understand/ They took up our drums/ But not our rhythm...

...bad art is not improved .in the smallest degree by ",good" messages...

...And, and, and . . . But I won't go on...

...not only that these writings should command our attention, admiration, respect...

...and, therefore, for conclusive r~l~ification of "Mama Tried" we are invited to listen to the "recorded tumultuous ovation of the people in Muskogee," who accorded the "biggest cheers" to the pivotal line, "Doing life without parole"--as who, sitting there on that electric night, would not clap his hands raw in tribute to that dark vision of eternity captured in a grain of sand...

...arguably a truer book, and I believe a better one" than Catcher in the Rye, just as Braly's It's Cold Out There reminds Franklin of nothing so much as Nathanael West "at his best...

...But contrary, to the "usual liberal caricature of Haggard as a raving reactionary" Franklin assures us that despite certain regrettable ideological lapses "his art is basically a .people's art," which is an excel,lent and virtuous thing for art to be...