Writers, before and after the Bend
Awhile back I was watching a documentary about the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick and someone (maybe Thomas Disch?) said that PKD’s fans could roughly be divided into two categories: those who like the writer’s work when he saw the bend coming, and those who like his stuff after he went around the bend.
Maybe I’m a bit of a square, but I’m a “before the bend” guy when it comes to Philip Dick and also when it comes to most other writers whose writing can be so roughly divided. If I had to pick my favorite Dick book, I would say it’s the beautifully allegorical The Penultimate Truth. Describing the plot here would spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it, but as with the best of Dick’s pre-bend work (like Man in the High Castle), this is the time when the author seems to have sloughed off the last vestiges of the old Golden Age SF trappings that made some of Dick’s earlier stuff feel hidebound, and, at worst, like a pastiche of Heinlein (about whose work Dick himself was not crazy). Yet this was still before he had delved into the sort of quasi-religious, New Age cultic figure he seemed to become after the late sixties, the LSD, and his time as a hostage to his fears about Richard Nixon trying to blow his house up.
The later stuff by PKD has its fans, but the books like VALIS, while still possessed of a kind of divine spark of genius, feel like the writings of a man rushing to finish his last cohesive work before his mind completely cracks. There’s a schizophrenic-with-an-IQ-of-180-riding-public-transportation quality to a lot of the later Dick stuff, a curdled paranoia, and the sense that Dick is trapped in the self-referential world of his own creations, his own mind, and ultimately himself.
This definitely appears to be what happened to Hunter S. Thompson, who, as critic Roger Ebert put it, became a sort of prisoner of his own pleasures at the Woody Creek compound where he lived with his fame, his guns, his booze, and his drugs. Of course, the whole point of Thompson’s post-Hell’s Angels straight reportage was to go around the bend with his pith-helmeted alter ego Raoul Duke and his faithful “Samoan attorney” Dr. Gonzo (based on the real writer and Chicano activist, Oscar Zeta Acosta). “Buy the ticket, take the ride,” as the saying went. Then again, as mentioned earlier, I’m a square and I prefer Hell’s Angels to the rest of Thompson’s oeuvre.
Part of what sidelined Hunter Thompson’s writing after, say, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, is that when you define yourself in opposition to a dominant culture, you must keep pretending you’re the outsider even after you’re rich and have the high ground, literally in this case when one considers the elevation where Thompson lived was contiguous with Aspen (it doesn’t get much more Establishment than that). Nixon was a dead horse long after Thompson stopped kicking him, and some of the people he dropped acid with back in the day had not only also dropped back in with a vengeance, but thanks to Silicon Valley’s reshuffling of the deck and the rise of David Brooks’ Bobos, the longhairs had a hell of a lot more money and power than the religious fundamentalists and skull-cracking fascists (this may have always been the case, and I remember Terry Gilliam talking about how it occurred to him once while being hassled by a couple cops in his pre-Python days that he made more money than they did).
The filmmaker David Cronenberg claimed that after he made Naked Lunch, he got a lot of backlash from Burroughs fans who were hipper-than-thou. I’ve personally always preferred pre-bend Burroughs to post-bend. The early, minimalist, and straightforward stuff like Junky and Queer is somehow just more my speed than the later stuff with the disjointed cutups and Breughel-esque tableaux of strangled boys ejaculating as they’re being gibbeted and sphincter-like proboscises talk about entheogenic plants that must be consumed to exterminate the bane of rational thought.
The square in me (and maybe I’m all square) knows there was a Burroughs without the bend just waiting to be unleashed. I know after reading some interviews with Old Bull Lee (as Kerouac called him in On the Road) that in his own free time he mainly read detective novels and books to help him stop smoking. Other than that, he blurbed for a handful of young bucks (like Richard Price and William Gibson) and was otherwise content with F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he highly admired even when he was out of vogue.
Maybe, sometimes the constraints of a market, a deadline, and some sort of creative shackling (if that’s the right word) can bring out the best in people. I imagine a twenty-five-year-old kid with some deadline a couple of hours away whose rent is due can compose as well as or better that someone who has a lifetime of laurels arrayed behind them. Philip Dick did good work to keep the lights on, and under less than ideal conditions. Great books have been written in two weeks, and decades have been squandered to produce easily forgotten tomes.
Some writers don’t have a “bend” in their career, something delineating it into two parts, wherein the first part is mostly straightforward and well-grounded, and the latter portion (after fame and drugs) is gonzo, subjective, or experimental. In a way, Charles Bukowski seems to have benefited from a sort of reverse bend. Buk foreswore the hard liquor as he got older, found himself unashamedly enjoying the fruits of his half century of hard living and hard writing (including a nice Mercedes Benz and a hot tub, around whose edge his cats paraded) and there’s a kind of gentleness, gratitude, and clarity in his later stuff that’s missing from a lot of his angry young man verse. His later books like Hot Water Music and Septuagenarian Stew have a reflective and profound quality missing from some of the earlier work.
Maybe wine is a better preservative than whisky and maybe after you’ve opened your third eye wide enough, it gets so big that it can’t discern between what’s real and what isn’t. That state-of-mind has a lot of appeal for a lot of people, but I’m not one of them. I struggle to remain sane while stone-sober and the idea of being insane loses its romantic appeal after you’ve spent enough time in mental hospitals. To throw Bukowski’s hat into the fray one last time, “Don’t play with madness; madness doesn’t play.”
Maybe I’m a bit of a square, but I’m a “before the bend” guy when it comes to Philip Dick and also when it comes to most other writers whose writing can be so roughly divided. If I had to pick my favorite Dick book, I would say it’s the beautifully allegorical The Penultimate Truth. Describing the plot here would spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it, but as with the best of Dick’s pre-bend work (like Man in the High Castle), this is the time when the author seems to have sloughed off the last vestiges of the old Golden Age SF trappings that made some of Dick’s earlier stuff feel hidebound, and, at worst, like a pastiche of Heinlein (about whose work Dick himself was not crazy). Yet this was still before he had delved into the sort of quasi-religious, New Age cultic figure he seemed to become after the late sixties, the LSD, and his time as a hostage to his fears about Richard Nixon trying to blow his house up.
The later stuff by PKD has its fans, but the books like VALIS, while still possessed of a kind of divine spark of genius, feel like the writings of a man rushing to finish his last cohesive work before his mind completely cracks. There’s a schizophrenic-with-an-IQ-of-180-riding-public-transportation quality to a lot of the later Dick stuff, a curdled paranoia, and the sense that Dick is trapped in the self-referential world of his own creations, his own mind, and ultimately himself.
This definitely appears to be what happened to Hunter S. Thompson, who, as critic Roger Ebert put it, became a sort of prisoner of his own pleasures at the Woody Creek compound where he lived with his fame, his guns, his booze, and his drugs. Of course, the whole point of Thompson’s post-Hell’s Angels straight reportage was to go around the bend with his pith-helmeted alter ego Raoul Duke and his faithful “Samoan attorney” Dr. Gonzo (based on the real writer and Chicano activist, Oscar Zeta Acosta). “Buy the ticket, take the ride,” as the saying went. Then again, as mentioned earlier, I’m a square and I prefer Hell’s Angels to the rest of Thompson’s oeuvre.
Part of what sidelined Hunter Thompson’s writing after, say, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, is that when you define yourself in opposition to a dominant culture, you must keep pretending you’re the outsider even after you’re rich and have the high ground, literally in this case when one considers the elevation where Thompson lived was contiguous with Aspen (it doesn’t get much more Establishment than that). Nixon was a dead horse long after Thompson stopped kicking him, and some of the people he dropped acid with back in the day had not only also dropped back in with a vengeance, but thanks to Silicon Valley’s reshuffling of the deck and the rise of David Brooks’ Bobos, the longhairs had a hell of a lot more money and power than the religious fundamentalists and skull-cracking fascists (this may have always been the case, and I remember Terry Gilliam talking about how it occurred to him once while being hassled by a couple cops in his pre-Python days that he made more money than they did).
The filmmaker David Cronenberg claimed that after he made Naked Lunch, he got a lot of backlash from Burroughs fans who were hipper-than-thou. I’ve personally always preferred pre-bend Burroughs to post-bend. The early, minimalist, and straightforward stuff like Junky and Queer is somehow just more my speed than the later stuff with the disjointed cutups and Breughel-esque tableaux of strangled boys ejaculating as they’re being gibbeted and sphincter-like proboscises talk about entheogenic plants that must be consumed to exterminate the bane of rational thought.
The square in me (and maybe I’m all square) knows there was a Burroughs without the bend just waiting to be unleashed. I know after reading some interviews with Old Bull Lee (as Kerouac called him in On the Road) that in his own free time he mainly read detective novels and books to help him stop smoking. Other than that, he blurbed for a handful of young bucks (like Richard Price and William Gibson) and was otherwise content with F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he highly admired even when he was out of vogue.
Maybe, sometimes the constraints of a market, a deadline, and some sort of creative shackling (if that’s the right word) can bring out the best in people. I imagine a twenty-five-year-old kid with some deadline a couple of hours away whose rent is due can compose as well as or better that someone who has a lifetime of laurels arrayed behind them. Philip Dick did good work to keep the lights on, and under less than ideal conditions. Great books have been written in two weeks, and decades have been squandered to produce easily forgotten tomes.
Some writers don’t have a “bend” in their career, something delineating it into two parts, wherein the first part is mostly straightforward and well-grounded, and the latter portion (after fame and drugs) is gonzo, subjective, or experimental. In a way, Charles Bukowski seems to have benefited from a sort of reverse bend. Buk foreswore the hard liquor as he got older, found himself unashamedly enjoying the fruits of his half century of hard living and hard writing (including a nice Mercedes Benz and a hot tub, around whose edge his cats paraded) and there’s a kind of gentleness, gratitude, and clarity in his later stuff that’s missing from a lot of his angry young man verse. His later books like Hot Water Music and Septuagenarian Stew have a reflective and profound quality missing from some of the earlier work.
Maybe wine is a better preservative than whisky and maybe after you’ve opened your third eye wide enough, it gets so big that it can’t discern between what’s real and what isn’t. That state-of-mind has a lot of appeal for a lot of people, but I’m not one of them. I struggle to remain sane while stone-sober and the idea of being insane loses its romantic appeal after you’ve spent enough time in mental hospitals. To throw Bukowski’s hat into the fray one last time, “Don’t play with madness; madness doesn’t play.”
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