Bret Easton Ellis would have made one hell of a Coal-Miner

The following quote is attributed to William Ralph Inge, but I’ve seen it crop up in too many places and in too many different phrasings to feel comfortable calling it anything but apocryphal:
“Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.”
The writer Jim Tully is remembered primarily today for his book, Beggars of Life, a pre-Beat paean to the life of a tramp fighting to survive in hobo jungles, riding the rails and mixing it up with callous boxcar bulls like the one played by Ernest Borgnine in Emperor of the North Pole (watch it if you haven’t, or watch it again if you’ve already seen it).
In an essay about Jim Tully in his book Writing and Other Bloodsports, the author Charles Willeford mentions that he had contemplated writing a book-length work about the legendary hobo-slash boxer-slash-chain maker, but for one reason or another he never got around to it. For all I know pages from this abortive effort could still be sitting in a box or several boxes, collecting dust at the Broward County Library in the Charles Willeford Archive; just writing the words “Florida” and “Archive” in the same sentence gives the book collector in me the heebie jeebies; between the cocaine and the swampy humidity there, it’s hard for me to imagine anything being well-preserved in Florida, except for a bunch of Parrot Heads’ livers ...Wasting away in Margaritaville.
In his essay Charles Willeford pondered how Tully was incredibly famous one moment (both as a Hollywood reporter and a writer) and then the next his star took a precipitous dip. Every career (hell, every life) has peaks and valleys, but with Tully it was as disconcerting and discernible as the plunge downhill on a rollercoaster. Well, what happened to him?
Willeford put it well when he said that Jim Tully was quintessentially a creature of his time, and when that moment passed, so too did his ability to say anything that interested the wider world (or at least a significant portion of the reading public).
I think Willeford’s right, and it’s part of the reason why abiding clichés like “strike while the iron’s hot” or “ahead of his/her time” don’t really hold much credence for me. A book is either good or not good, a time-consuming labor (that makes the author oblivious to their time rather than attuned to it), and while period pieces can be said to sometimes be reflections of the current age (“glimpsed in a distant mirror” as one critic said of The Assassination of Jesse James), the fact that an artist is willing to ignore their time is part of what can give their works a timeless quality.
I understand this is just a matter of opinion, and that people can glean sociological details from past cultures by consuming art that focused on the Zeitgeist (i.e. Hunter Thompson’s or Tom Wolfe’s gimlet eye turned on certain events may help people in the future to understand what was going on in our time better than a textbook, if they even have those in the future.)
Putting all that aside, and getting to what I wanted to say, it’s hard for me not to view the literary Brat Pack (the most successful and enduring member of which is Bret Easton Ellis) in the same light as Willeford viewed Tully.
He’s protested that he’s not an eighties author, but I can’t see his face or even hear his name without feeling a wash of Proustian recall that involves a Simple Minds or Depeche Mode untrained baritone warble, Andrew McCarthy in a grey polyester blazer and a blue t-shirt, or myriad mixtures of my memories comingled with the rest of our collective nostalgia from the same time.
It’s not Ellis’s fault that I associate him with a moment he clutched from the ether at the age of 22 or so with Less than Zero, but if I’m to be honest it’s also a moot point because I always found him and his other cohorts to be bad writers.
For starters the “bad boy” (and “bad girl”) swirl of PR around these figures in their heyday always rang pretty hollow. Do even a cursory bit of homework (i.e. google “Literary Brat Pack”) and you’ll quickly discover that most of these writers have über-Ivy pedigrees. People who know more about good schools than I (I went to a state school on the GI Bill) claim the expensive eastern Colleges you don’t hear about are more exclusive than the traditional Ivies (Bennington and Williams > Yale and Harvard). It’s hard, in any event, to read an interview with Bret Easton Ellis in which he talks about his time at Bennington College (fictionalized as “Camden” in his works) toughening him up and hearing him prattle about “Generation Wuss,” as if he’s spent the last twenty years as a beat cop in Oakland or something. People would kill to enjoy the advantages which have cosseted him to the point that he views them as a kind of baptism by fire rather than as the privileges they are.
In Ellis’s defense, I seem to be concentrating on him to the exclusion of the other Brat-Packers for the simple reason that he is at least interesting as person, if not as a writer. I read a book by David Cronenberg some years ago in which the director said some people who dismissed him in the beginning of his career were starting to reassess his work, if only because he’d continued working regardless of whether the Zeitgeist wanted him or not. Ellis is not prolific, but neither is he silent, and I may not believe in what he’s doing or be interested in it, but someone who feels they still have something to say- demons to grapple with, a place to explore, after twenty-five years of going there- must at least believe in what they’re doing.
I don’t want to get into quantitative blogging (math has never been my thing) but looking over the bibliographies of the other Brat-Packers, they seem to average two books a decade. A couple (like Tama Janowitz) strike me as leaving behind a literary trail that resembles the tracks of a dodgy doctor who sells supplements, opens a pill mill, loses his license, and gives up after being exposed as a fraud and disgraced after a couple malpractice suits. I remember the very good writer Alex Garland saying upon the success of his first novel The Beach, “I feel as if I’m going to be caught out at some trick,” or words to that effect. He found his footing as a screenwriter and director, but back in the day he seemed uncomfortable with his newfound status as the next Graham Greene, an imprimatur granted by no less a personage than the late J.G. Ballard.
Praise can paralyze people, turn them into “immobilized men” as Charles Willeford had it in another essay in Writing and Other Bloodsports. Perhaps one can equally be frozen by “striking while the iron is hot” rather than using some ochre and clay to quietly paint on a cave wall while waiting for someone to discover their magnum opus washed in limestone. Apologies for the mixed and belabored metaphor. But you get what I mean.
As a final addendum before putting this think-piece to bed, I should add in defense of all the writers mentioned above that authors are sometimes lumped together against their will, or post-hoc, with no regard for how they viewed themselves. Some were comfortable with the label “Beat,” while others eschewed it. Colin Wilson spent a lifetime trying to outrun his association with the “Angry Young Man” tag with which he was saddled after his enfant terrible entre on existentialism, The Outsider, exploded on the literary scene in post-War England.
Speaking of Wilson, he was always quick to point out (accurately, I think) that writers from rougher backgrounds typically had stronger constitutions and a less bleak view of life than their more fortunate counterparts. It’s a curious assertion (made in The Books in my Life), but it’s one I find hard to argue. A homeless Colin Wilson who slept outside at night and toiled by day on his first manuscript inside the British Museum seemed to enjoy life a hell of a lot more than some feted, well-heeled, and well-pedigreed cocktail party attendees currently schmoozing in the stratosphere of a Manhattan or Brooklyn rooftop as I write this.
Maybe Ellis just needs to work as a forklift operator for a couple of years. Or, as Bukowski once said of James Thurber, “He would have made one hell of a coal miner.”