From "The Rag Blog"- On 15th United States President James Buchanan's "Gayness"

Markin comment:

This article by Harvey Wasserman makes an interesting presentation on the question of Buchanan’s “gayness,” although there was also some to-do about his successor, Abraham Lincoln’s like “condition” a few years back, as well. However, and let’s keep our eyes on the prize here, whether Buchanan is a candidate for what W.H. Auden called the “Homintern” or not, he has much to answer for from history, from our left-wing, pro-Unionist, anti-slavery history, in letting the on-coming Southern Confederacy take wing in the period before Abraham Lincoln took office. There is a very good reason why he is almost universally rated at the bottom of the list for presidential efficacy, and it has nothing to do with his sexual orientation.

*****
Harvey Wasserman : Our Gay Commander-in-Chief

President James Buchanan. Image from Encyclopedia Dickensonia.

'Mister Fancy' James Buchanan:
Our gay Commander-in-Chief

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / December 20, 2010

As “conservatives” scream and yell about gays in the military, they might remember that in all likelihood we have already had a gay Commander-in-Chief.

His name was James Buchanan. He was the 15th President of the United States.

A Democrat from Pennsylvania, Buchanan is discreetly referred to in official texts as “our only bachelor president.”

In fact, many historians believe that he may well have been “married” to William Rufus King, a pro-slavery Democrat from Alabama who was our only bachelor Vice President.

The two men lived together for years. Andrew Jackson, never one to shy from bullhorn bigotry, was among those who variously referred to them as “Aunt Nancy” and “Mr. Fancy.” Other Washington wags called them “Mr. and Mrs. Buchanan,” and the like.

The nature of their relationship was never officially confirmed or proclaimed in public. They were widely referred to as “Siamese twins,” slang at the time for a gay couple. But there was no incriminating gap dress or heartfelt double-ring ceremony, civil or otherwise. It was not uncommon at the time for men and women of the same gender to live together and even share a bed while remaining sexually uninvolved.

Buchanan was once engaged to marry a wealthy young woman named Ann Coleman. But the complex affair ended with her mysterious, untimely death. When King became ambassador to France in 1844, Buchanan complained that “I have gone wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any of them.”

With no Moral Majority or Bible thumping fundamentalists to plague them, the King-Buchanan liaison was generally embraced as a political and personal fact of life in a nation consumed with real issues of life and death, freedom and slavery.

In 1852 King was elected as Franklin Pierce’s Vice President. But on an official mission, King contracted a fever and died, leaving Buchanan alone and deeply distraught.

In 1856, Buchanan defeated John C. Fremont, the first presidential candidate from the new Republican Party. Buchanan did not run for reelection in 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was the victor.

Buchanan’s presidency was plagued by economic and sectional disaster. He was a “doughface” northerner with sympathies for southern slavery. Devoted to consensus and compromise, he was swept away by the intense polarization that led to Civil War.

Through his entire time in the White House, President Buchanan lived alone. His niece served as “First Lady.” He stayed unmarried, and had his personal letters burned upon his death, prompting further speculation on his sexual orientation.

Maybe it’s time those legislators who have been so fiercely opposed to gays in the military face the high likelihood that at least one Commander in Chief would probably be among them.

[Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States S is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with Passions of the Potsmoking Patriots “Thomas Paine,” which portrays George Washington as a gay potsmoker.]

The Rag Blog

Posted by thorne dreyer at 8:07 AM
Labels: American History, American Presidents, Gay, Harvey Wasserman, Homosexuality, Rag Bloggers

***Poet’s Corner-Young America’s Walt Whitman’s “Leaves Of Grass”

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for poet Walt Whitman.

DVD Review

American Experience: Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman and various modern commentators, PBS Productions, 2008

Sure, it is always appropriate to thumb through the pages of the 19th century poet laureate of democracy Walt Whitman’s “Leaves Of Grass”. After wading through Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier and the other Brahmin and Brahmin wannabe poets who dominated the 19th century ‘aristocratic’ European-influenced American poetic academy old white-bearded Walt is like a breath of fresh air. And let’s put it this way, while everyone has, and should, take a peek at those other 19th century poets, if no other reason that to compare work, it is old Walt that those of us in the 21st century WANT to read. Therefore, it is appropriate that PBS’s “American Experience" in 2008 produce a documentary that is, while filled with biographic information, centered on Whitman’s long struggle to produce his masterpiece, “Leaves Of Grass”.

This documentary does yeoman’s service in setting the context in which Walt Whitman had to work, including the trials and tribulations of his long suffering over his troubled working class family affairs; his free-wheeling experiences in breaking out of the family and establishing himself as a newspaper writer in New York City in the pre-Civil War period; his invention of himself as a 'proto-hippie' in that city’s bohemian milieu: his various, mainly homosexual, romantic experiences that eventually find themselves noted heavily throughout his master work; his dramatic and traumatic Civil War time nursing services to the Union wounded; the shock of Lincoln’s death; and, his post-war struggles to expand and deepen his poetic works. That sets the pace for the many ‘talking head’ academic commentaries about the meaning of Whitman’s work, his place as the poetic, warts and all, 19th century democratic champion of the fragile American republican experience, and the breakthrough nature of the more or less explicit sexual, erotic and homoerotic passages in his work.

Finally, poets like other types of writers, run through period of fashion and neglect. My recent road back to an appreciation of Whitman is a case in point. I have been running through (for the nth time) and reviewing the work of the 1950s “beat” writer Jack Kerouac (himself the subject of the vicissitudes of fashion) in this space. Kerouac makes clear (as do many other writers and poets) that Whitman’s poems, his lifestyle and his championship of the “common man” deeply influenced him in his early formative days as he struggled to write. That is a very common story when the name Walt Whitman comes up. So if you need a little refresher on Whitman this well-done documentary fills the bill. But, really, go read some of his poems


Walt Whitman - One’s-Self I Sing.

ONE’S-SELF I sing—a simple, separate Person;
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-masse.

Of Physiology from top to toe I sing;
Not physiognomy alone, nor brain alone, is worthy for the muse—I say the
Form complete is worthier far;
The Female equally with the male I sing.

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful—for freest action form’d, under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.

Walt Whitman - To a Historian.

YOU who celebrate bygones!
Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the races—the life that has
exhibited itself;
Who have treated of man as the creature of politics, aggregates, rulers and
priests;
I, habitan of the Alleghanies, treating of him as he is in himself, in his own
rights,
Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited itself, (the great
pride of man in himself;)
Chanter of Personality, outlining what is yet to be,
I project the history of the future.

Walt Whitman - Pioneers! O Pioneers!


1
COME, my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready;
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp edged axes? Pioneers! O pioneers!

2
For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We, the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!

3
O you youths, western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you, western youths, see you tramping with the foremost, Pioneers! O
pioneers!

4
Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied, over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden, and the lesson, Pioneers! O pioneers!

5
All the past we leave behind;
We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O pioneers!

6
We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing, as we go, the unknown ways, Pioneers! O pioneers!


7
We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we, and piercing deep the mines within;
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving, Pioneers! O pioneers!

8
Colorado men are we,
From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,
From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come, Pioneers! O pioneers!

9
From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental blood intervein’d;
All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern, Pioneers! O
pioneers!


10
O resistless, restless race!
O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all!
O I mourn and yet exult—I am rapt with love for all, Pioneers! O pioneers!

11
Raise the mighty mother mistress,
Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress, (bend your heads all,)
Raise the fang’d and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon’d mistress, Pioneers! O
pioneers!

12
See, my children, resolute children,
By those swarms upon our rear, we must never yield or falter,
Ages back in ghostly millions, frowning there behind us urging, Pioneers! O pioneers!

13
On and on, the compact ranks,
With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill’d,
Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping, Pioneers! O pioneers!


14
O to die advancing on!
Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come?
Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill’d, Pioneers! O
pioneers!

15
All the pulses of the world,
Falling in, they beat for us, with the western movement beat;
Holding single or together, steady moving, to the front, all for us, Pioneers! O
pioneers!

16
Life’s involv’d and varied pageants,
All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work,
All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with their slaves, Pioneers! O pioneers!


17
All the hapless silent lovers,
All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,
All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying, Pioneers! O pioneers!

18
I too with my soul and body,
We, a curious trio, picking, wandering on our way,
Through these shores, amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing, Pioneers! O
pioneers!

19

Lo! the darting bowling orb!
Lo! the brother orbs around! all the clustering suns and planets,
All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams, Pioneers! O pioneers!

20
These are of us, they are with us,
All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind,
We to-day’s procession heading, we the route for travel clearing, Pioneers! O pioneers!

21
O you daughters of the west!
O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives!
Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united, Pioneers! O pioneers!

22
Minstrels latent on the prairies!
(Shrouded bards of other lands! you may sleep—you have done your work;)
Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us, Pioneers! O pioneers!

23
Not for delectations sweet;
Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious;
Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment, Pioneers! O pioneers!

24
Do the feasters gluttonous feast?
Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock’d and bolted doors?
Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground, Pioneers! O pioneers!

25
Has the night descended?
Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged, nodding on our way?
Yet a passing hour I yield you, in your tracks to pause oblivious, Pioneers! O pioneers!


26
Till with sound of trumpet,
Far, far off the day-break call—hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind;
Swift! to the head of the army!—swift! spring to your places, Pioneers! O pioneers.

The Fire This Time-In Honor Of James Baldwin Whose Time Has Come Again-From The Archives- *Books To While Away The Class Struggle By-James Baldwin's "Another Country"

The Fire This Time-In Honor Of James Baldwin Whose Time Has Come Again-From The Archives-   *Books To While Away The Class Struggle By-James Baldwin's "Another Country"

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for James Baldwin's Another Country


Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin


Book Review

Another Country, James Baldwin, Dial Press, New York, 1962


Recently, in a blog entry, I went on my “soap box” to speak about those now seemingly endless references, by black and white liberals alike, to the ‘good old days' of the black civil rights movement and how far the black liberation struggle has come here in America so that even one (harried and vilified) black man can be President of the United States. This sentiment is codified by the ‘post-racial’ aura (or rather, in truth, the ‘benign neglect’ aura) that surrounds the subject of race lately. By reference to the the good old days these liberals have simply appropriated the catch words of Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, names, forever, associated with the high-water marks of resistance to black segregation back in the early 1960s to their own uses. Moreover, to embellish the myth they have created a Martin Luther King who apparently was nothing short of the black ‘messiah’ rather than a man made of clay, a great deal of clay, and in turn have emasculated Malcolm X, the real “truth to power” speaker on race of the era, into a harmless icon suitable for framing.

The author under review, James Baldwin, fortunately, would have none of that. He, in a less overtly inflammatory and more literary but nevertheless powerful way, was in that Malcolm X “truth to power” mode. And, my friends, some of his books, including Another Country make my case, and his case, far more eloquently than this writer ever could. Here is a man hard, hard church-brought up as only fundamentalist churches can distort a child, preacher father-raised and beaten-down for doing things, right or wrong, racially put upon incessantly whenever he stepped outside the Harlem prison-ghetto where he was sentenced yet who did not duck the hard, hard truth that native son he might be but ‘invisible’ native son was the real program for those with black skin.

Another Country is another of those multi-themed Baldwin efforts, the now familiar ones of interracial marriage, adultery, bi- and homosexuality, the blindness of white racism, and the hard, hard fact of trying to be seen while black, poor, and gay in America (and elsewhere, for that matter). The sexual and interracial scenes center on the relationships of various black and white characters of various sexual preferences who inhabit New York's 1950s bohemian Greenwich Village (with a little Left Bank, Paris vignette thrown in), or who want to. The most impressive aspect of this piece is the very strong sense that one gets that while the white characters are sympathetic to the blacks, in their own narrow way, they were clueless to the "another country" aspect of black existence. I have , repeatedly, made the point that that "invisibleness", except now in certain high profile quarters, afflicts the perceptions of whites today as well. Thus, one can well afford to read this work with that continuing premise in mind rather than read it comfortably as some pre-"post-racial" screed. Thanks, James.

The Fire This Time-In Honor Of James Baldwin Whose Time Has Come Again-From The Archives- ***Books To While Away The Class Struggle By- The Works Of James Baldwin-"Go Tell It On The Mountain"

The Fire This Time-In Honor Of James Baldwin Whose Time Has Come Again-From The Archives-   ***Books To While Away The Class Struggle By- The Works Of James Baldwin-"Go Tell It On The Mountain"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for James Baldwin's novel, "Go Tell It On The Mountain".

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin

Book Review

Go Tell It On The Mountain, James Baldwin, Dell Publishing Co., New York, 1952

One of the side events of the 2008 American presidential elections, the one that resulted in the election of the first black president, was the widespread exposure of the role of the black church as a central social, political and religious institution in the black community, for good or evil. That centrality, the subject matter of black writer James Baldwin’s first novel back in the early 1950s and from there carried back by him to his youth in the 1930s, is longstanding. Moreover, the black church and its activist clergy, despite it long role as adhesive, healer, protector and face of the black community is not an unambiguous legacy as Baldwin, very wickedly, and profoundly demonstrates here.

Baldwin uses the old tried and true novelistic devise of using a two-tier plot structure to delve into the lives, the loves, the likes and lies of two generations of a black family, a family that although it found itself in the North, in the black metropolis of Harlem, had deep and continuing roots in the old worn-out land of the South that most of the characters fled, willingly or unwillingly, at some point. The first tier discusses the present status of most of the main figures, including the transparently autobiographical John and his “father”, Gabriel, a born-again Christian preacher, a character not unknown in the black community. The second takes place through personal recollections in a store front, primitive Christian church, also not an unknown phenomenon in the black community, or the white one for that matter.

The details of the various relationships of the very mixed clan can best be appreciated by the reader. What I would note here, as I have noted elsewhere when discussing James Baldwin’s work, is his ear for the various voices of the black community even though he himself seemed, by the facts of his biography to have been fairly removed from the mainstream of the black community. He clearly knows “religion” and the role it plays in the community. Also of the teutonic struggle between the old ways of the de jure segregated South and the de facto segregated North. While I am more devoted to the works of Langston Hughes as an exemplar of black literary blues, James too knows that condition. James can sing those chords. And the late Norman Mailer was not wrong when he noted that his contemporary, Baldwin, in 1950s America was “one of our few writers”. I will say amen to that.

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of The "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac- In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)- “The Drugstore Cowboy”, William Burroughs’-“Naked Lunch”

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of The "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac- 

“Advertisements for Myself”-Introduction by Allan Jackson, a founding member of the American Left History publication back in 1974 when it was a hard copy journal and until 2017 site manager of the on-line edition.      

[He’s back. Jack Kerouac, as described in the headline, “the king of the beats” and maybe the last true beat standing. That is the basis of this introduction by me as we commemorate the 50^th anniversary of his untimely death at 47. But before we go down and dirty with the legendary writer I stand before you, the regular reader, and those who have not been around for a while to know that I was relieved of my site manage duties in 2017 in what amounted to a coup by the younger writers who resented the direction I was taking the publication in and replaced me with Greg Green who I had brought on board from American Film Gazette to run the day to day operations while I oversaw the whole operation and planned my retirement. Over the past year or so a million rumors have, had mostly now, swirled around this publication and the industry in general about what had happened and I will get to that in a minute before dealing with Jack Kerouac’s role in the whole mess.

What you need to know first, if you don’t know already is that Greg Green took me back to do the introductions to an encore presentation of a long-term history of rock and roll series that I edited and essentially created after an unnamed older writer who had not been part of the project balled it all up, got catch flat-footed talking bullshit and other assorted nonsense since he knew nada, nada nunca and, about the subject having been apparently asleep when the late Peter Markin “took us to school” that history. Since then Greg and I have had an “armed truce,” meaning I could contribute as here to introductions of some encore and some origin material as long as I didn’t go crazy, his term, for what he called so-called nostalgia stuff from the 1950s and 1960s and meaning as well that Greg will not go crazy, my term, and will refrain from his ill-advised attempt to reach a younger audience by “dumbing down” the publication with odd-ball comic book character reviews of films, graphic novels and strange musical interludes. Fair is fair.

What I need to mention, alluded to above, is those rumors that ran amok while I was on the ropes, when I had lost that decisive vote of no confidence by one sullen vote. People here, and my enemies in the industry as well, seeing a wounded Allan Jackson went for the kill, went for the jugular that the seedy always thrive on and began a raggedy-ass trail on noise you would not believe. In the interest of elementary hygiene, and to frankly clear the air, a little, since there will always be those who have evil, and worse in their hearts when “the mighty have fallen.”  Kick when somebody is down their main interest in life.

I won’t go through the horrible rumors like I was panhandling down in Washington, D.C., I was homeless in Olde Saco, Maine (how could that be when old friend and writer here Josh Breslin lives there and would have provided alms to me so at least get an approximation of the facts before spinning the wild woolly tale), I had become a male prostitute in New York City (presumably after forces here and in that city hostile to me put in the fatal “hard to work with” tag on me ruining any chances on the East Coast of getting work, getting enough dough to keep the wolves from my door, my three ex-wives and that bevy of kids, nice kids, who nevertheless were sucking me dry with alimony and college tuitions), writing press releases under the name Leonard Bloom for a Madison Avenue ad agency. On a lesser scale of disbelief I had taken a job as a ticket-taker in a multi-plex in Nashua, New Hampshire, had been a line dishwasher at the Ritz in Philadelphia when they needed day labor for parties and convention banquets, had been kicking kids out of their newspaper routes and taking that task on myself, and to finish off although I have not given a complete rundown rummaging through trash barrels looking for bottles with deposits. Christ.

Needless to say, how does one actually answer such idiocies, and why. A couple of others stick out about me and some surfer girl out in Carlsbad in California who I was pimping while getting my sack time with her and  this one hurt because it hurt a dear friend and former “hippie girl” lover of mine, Madame La Rue, back in the day that I was running a whorehouse with her in Luna Bay for rich Asian businessmen with a taste for kinky stuff. I did stop off there and Madame does run a high-end brothel in Luna Bay but I had nothing to do with it. The reason Madame was hurt was because I had lent her the money to buy the place when it was a rundown hotel and built it up from there with periodic additional funds from me so she could not understand why my act of kindness would create such degenerate noise from my enemies who were clueless about the relationship between us.

I will, must deal with two big lies which also center of my reluctant journey west (caused remember by that smear campaign which ruined by job opportunities in the East, particularly New York City. The first which is really unbelievable on its face is that I hightailed it directly to Utah, to Salt Lake City, when I busted out in NYC looking for one Mitt Romney, “Mr. Flip-Flop,” former Governor of Massachusetts, Presidential candidate against Barack Obama then planning on running for U.S. Senator from Utah (now successful ready to take office in January) to “get well.” The premise for this big lie was supposedly that since I have skewered the guy while he was governor and running for president with stuff like the Mormon fetish for white underwear and the old time polygamy of his great-grand-father who had five wives (and who showed great executive skill I think in keeping the peace in that extended family situation. The unbelievable part is that those Mormon folk, who have long memories and have pitchforks at the ready to rumble with the damned, would let a sinner like me, a non-Mormon for one thing anywhere the Romney press operation. Christ, I must be some part latter day saint since I barely got out of that damn state alive if the real truth were known after I applied for a job with the Salt Lake Sentinel not knowing the rag was totally linked to the Mormons. Pitchforks, indeed.    

The biggest lie though is the one that had me as the M.C. in complete “drag” as Elsa Maxwell at the “notorious” KitKat Club in San Francisco which has been run for about the past thirty years or so by Miss Judy Garland, at one time and maybe still is in some quarters the “drag queen” Queen of that city. This will show you how ignorant, or blinded by hate, some people are. Miss Judy Garland is none other that one of our old corner boys from the Acre section of North Adamsville, Timmy Riley. Timmy who like the rest of us on the corner used to “fag bait” and beat up anybody, any guy who seemed effeminate, at what cost to Timmy’s real feelings we will never really know although he was always the leader in the gay-bashing orgy. Finally between his own feeling and Stonewall in New York in 1969 which did a great deal to make gays, with or with the drag queen orientation, a little less timid Timmy fled the Acre (and his hateful family and friends) to go to friendlier Frisco. He was in deep personal financial trouble before I was able to arrange some loans from myself and some of his other old corner boys (a few still hate Timmy for what he has become, his true self) to buy the El Lobo Club, his first drag queen club, and when that went under, the now thriving tourist trap KitKat Club. So yes, yes, indeed, I stayed with my old friend at his place and that was that. Nothing more than I had done many times before while I ran the publication.                   

But enough of this tiresome business because I want to introduce this series dedicated to the memory of Jack Kerouac who had a lot of influence on me for a long time, mostly after he died in 1969 

******

All roads about Jack Kerouac, about who was the king of the beats, about what were the “beats” lead back to the late Pete Markin who, one way or another, taught the working poor Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville corner boys what was up with that movement. Funny, because we young guys were a serious generation removed from that scene, really our fathers’ contemporaries and you know how far removed fathers were from kids in those days especially among the working poor trying to avoid going  “under water” and not just about mortgages but food on tables and clothing on backs, were children of rock and roll, not jazz, the beat musical medium, and later the core of the “Generation of ‘68” which took off, at least partially, with the “hippie” scene, where the dying embers of the beat scene left off. Those dying embers exactly the way to put it since most of our knowledge or interest came from the stereotypes-beards before beards were cool and before grandfather times -for guys, okay, berets, black and beaten down looks. Ditto on black for the gals, including black nylons which no Acre girl would have dreamed of wearing, not in the early 1960s anyway. Our “model” beatnik really came, as we were also children of television, from sitcom stories like Dobie Gillis with stick character Maynard G. Krebs standing in for all be-bop-dom.        

So it is easy to see where except to ostracize, meaning harass, maybe beat up if that was our wont that day, we would have passed by the “beat” scene, passed by Jack Kerouac too without the good offices, not a term we would have used then, if not for nerdish, goof, wild and woolly in the idea world Markin (always called Scribe for obvious reasons but we will keep with Markin here). He was the guy who always looked for some secret meaning to the universe, that certain breezes, winds, metaphorical breezes and winds, were going to turn things around, were going to make the world a place where Markin could thrive. Markin was the one who first read Kerouac’s breakthrough travelogue of a different sort novel On The Road.

Now Markin was the kind of guy, and sometimes we let him go on and sometimes stopped him in his tracks, who when he was on to something would bear down on us to pay attention. Christ some weekend nights he would read passages from the book like it was the Bible (which it turned out to be in a way later) when all we basically cared about is which girls were going to show up at our hang-out spot, the well-known Tonio’s Pizza Parlor and play the jukebox and we would go from there. Most of us, including me, kind of yawned at the whole thing even when Markin made a big deal that Kerouac was a working-class guy like us from up in Lowell cut right along the Merrimac River. The whole thing seemed way too exotic and moreover there was too much homosexual stuff implied which in our strict Irish-Italian Catholic neighborhood did not go down well at all -made us dismiss the whole thing and want to if I recall correctly “beat up” that Allan Ginsberg character. Even Dean Moriarty, the Neal Cassidy character, didn’t move us since although we were as larcenous and “clip” crazy as any character in that book we kind of took Dean as a tough car crazy guide like Sonny Jones from our neighborhood who was nothing but a hood in Red Riley’s bad ass motorcycle gang which hung out at Harry’s Variety Store. We avoided him and more so Red like the plague. Both wound up dead, very dead, in separate attempted armed robberies in broad daylight if you can believe that.    

Our first run through of our experiences with Kerouac and through him the beat movement was therefore kind of marginal-even as Markin touted for a while that whole scene he agreed with us that jazz-be-bop jazz always associated with the beat-ness was not our music, was grating to our rock and roll-refined and defined ears. Here is where Markin was always on to something though, always had some idea percolating in his head. There was a point where he, we as well I think, got tired of rock and roll, a time when it had run out of steam for a while and along with his crazy home life which really was bad drove him to go to Harvard Square and check out what he had heard was a lot of stuff going on. Harvard Square was, is still to the extent that any have survived like Club Passim, the home of the coffeehouse. A place that kind of went with the times first as the extension of the beat generation hang-out where poetry and jazz would be read and played. But in Markin’s time, our time there was the beginnings of a switch because when he went to the old long gone Café Nana he heard folk music and not jazz, although some poetry was still being read. I remember Markin telling me how he figured the change when I think it was the late Dave Von Ronk performed at some club and mentioned that when he started out in the mid-1950s in the heat of beat time folk singers were hired at the coffeehouses in Greenwich Village to “clear the house” for the next set of poetry performers but that now folk-singing eclipsed poetry in the clubs. Markin loved it, loved the whole scene of which he was an early devotee. Me, well, strangely considering where I wound up and what I did as a career, I always, still do, hated the music. Thought it was too whinny and boring. Enough said though.                   

Let’s fast forward to see where Kerouac really affected us in a way that when Markin was spouting forth early on we could not appreciate. As Markin sensed in his own otherworldly way a new breeze was coming down the cultural highway, a breeze push forward by the beats I will confess, by the folk music scene, by the search for roots which the previous generation, our parents’ generation, spent their adulthoods attempting to banish and become part of the great American vanilla melt, and by a struggling desire to question everything that had come before, had been part of what we had had no say in creating, weren’t even asked about. Heady stuff and Markin before he made a very bad decision to quit college in his sophomore years and “find himself,” my expression not his, spent many of his waking hours figuring out how to make his world a place where he could thrive.

That is when one night, this is when we were well out of high school, some of us corner boys had gone our separate ways and those who remained in contact with the brethren spent less time hanging out at Tonio’s, Markin once again pulled out On The Road, pulled out Jack’s exotic travelogue. The difference is we were all ears then and some of us after that night brought our own copies or went to the Thomas Murphy Public Library and took out the book. This was the spring of the historic year 1967 when the first buds of the Summer of Love which wracked San Francisco and the Bay Area to its core and once Markin started working on us, started to make us see his vision of what he would later called, culling from Tennyson if I am not mistaken a “newer world.” Pulling us all in his train, even as with Bart Webber and if I recall Si Lannon a little, he had to pull out all the stops to have them, us, join him in the Summer of Love experience. Maybe the whole thing with Jack Kerouac was a pipe dream I remember reading about him in the Literary Gazette when he was down in Florida living with his ancient mother and he was seriously critical of the “hippies,” kind of banged on his own beat roots explaining that he was talking about something almost Catholic beatitude spiritual and not personal freedom, of the road or anything else. A lot of guys and not just writing junkies looking for some way to alleviate their inner pains have repudiated their pasts but all I know is that when Jack was king of the hill, when he spoke to us those were the days all roads to Kerouac were led by Markin. Got it. Allan Jackson    

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)-“The Drugstore Cowboy”, William Burroughs’-“Naked Lunch”

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just kicks, stuff, important stuff has happened or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation.  Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my older brother Alex thy called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner coffees and cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well. So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind. The kind that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother Alex’s name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967 just mentioned.  Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before (and which nobody in the crowd paid attention to, or dismissed out of hand what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie  and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had caused a big splash in 1957, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.    

Like I said above Alex was out two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely end. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly from hunger working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some   hot chick’s pants as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.

What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan that was for smooth as silk Frankie to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.

The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)

Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like he wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll. So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.          

Book Review

Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs, Olympia Press, 1959

As I have explained in another entry in this space in reviewing the DVD of “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I mentioned there, as well, and I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on Jack Kerouac’s ‘mentor’ William S. Burroughs and his famous (or infamous) work “Naked Lunch”, that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space.

Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell’s “bad boy”, the “king of the 1950s beat writers”, Jack Kerouac. And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady and a whole ragtag assortment of poets, hangers-on, groupies and genuine madmen and madwomen come to mind. They all showed up, one way or another (under fictional names of course- Burroughs as Bull Lee), in Kerouac’s “On The Road”. So that is why we today, fifty years after its original publication (and only after much literary and governmental controversy), are under the sign of Burroughs’ minor classic “Naked Lunch”.

Minor classic? Well, yes. The various sketches, pieces and partials that make up the commentary in this science fiction-like exposition is filled with “weird " characters and likewise is filled with future prophecies that became, in some cases like AIDS-type diseases, realities at a later time. No question this is a difficult book to get through cold sober. In fact I put it down a few times before I completed it back in the days. But look at it this way, if Kerouac represented a different way of telling a story through his use of spontaneous writing Burroughs also showed innovation by taking the haphazard, the derelict and the off-beat and made literary music out of it.

Maybe not your music, or for that matter mine, but surely music nevertheless. This “novel”, moreover, extols thing that today are rather taken for granted like personal (and in the book and in Burroughs personal seemingly excessive) drug use, homosexuality, the use of ‘obscene language’, the dehumanization of modern society. Sound familiar? Of course, but Burroughs said it when it was not fashionable to do so. No wonder he was the ‘mentor’ for those young kids, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, etc. when they hit New York in the mid-1940s looking for “something”.

***"Man and Superman"-The Immoralist, Andre Gide

"Man and Superman"-The Immoralist, Andre Gide-A Book Review 

BOOK REVIEW

The Immoralist, Andre Gide, Penguin Classics, New York, 2001

Andre Gide was always justly famous for writing tight little novels that presented unusual moral dilemmas that did not, as in real life, necessarily get resolved or resolved in a way that one would think.  That is the case here with one of his early and perhaps most famous offerings. The story line centers on the bedraggled life of a consummate French bourgeois scholar who is going through a personal crisis after the death of his father and his unsought `shot gun' marriage in the early part of the 20th century. The newly weds travel to various exotic outposts of French imperialism, including the dry Northern African coast. Along the way he becomes sick with a life-threatening illness but by an act of will, and the extraordinary care of his new wife, overcomes that crisis. As a result of her loving efforts she in turn gets sick (during her pregnancy). He is decidedly inattentive to her illness. The scholar, in the final analysis, permits her to die by his self-centered actions.

Now, after his illness, and as a result of overcoming that experience the scholar begins to believes that he is `superman' a la Nietzsche and therefore consciously or unconsciously becomes the agent of his wife's descend into greater illness and eventually death. Quite a dilemma, to be sure, but he is not crying over it. The real question here is whether, in a hard and unforgiving world where each person is his or her own agent, that it was his duty to thoughtfully care for his wife or whether his need to take actions to `understand' himself was paramount.

Some other moral questions concerning his role as landlord in his inherited rural estate pop up along the way, as well. Also, just a hint of homosexual tension in his dealings with the young Arab boys in the neighborhood hovers in the background. This is a subject that then was almost always covered in discreet language so it is hard to tell the full extent of the attraction. And whether he did anything about it. This is a question that concerned Gide personally, as well.

I would note that this theme (and the sub theme of homosexuality) and the book itself at the start of the 20th century may have been somewhat scandalous but reading it after some of the harrowing events done by humankind in the last century has cut deeply into the impact that it was intended to have. Still it is a great book and a quick read. Any lessons to be drawn about the dark side of human nature, as it has evolved thus far, take a lot longer.

*Playwright's Corner- From The Pen Of Jean Genet-"The Maids"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the French playwright Jean Genet.

Book Review

The Maids, Jean Genet, 1947

There was a time when I would read anything the playwright Jean Genet wrote, especially his plays. The reason? Well, for one thing, the political thing that has been the core of my existence since I was a kid, his relationship to the Black Panthers when they were being systematically lionized by the international white left as the “real” revolutionaries and systematically liquidated by the American state police apparatus that was hell-bend on putting every young black man with a black beret behind bars, or better, as with Fred Hampton, Mark Clark and long list of others, dead. Genet, as his autobiographical “Our Lady Of The Flowers” details came from deep within a white, French version of that same lumpen “street” milieu from which the Panthers were recruiting. Thus, kindred spirits.

That kindred “street” smart relationship, of course, was like catnip for a kid like me who came from that same American societal intersection, the place where the white lumpen thug elements meet the working poor. I knew the American prototype of Jean Genet, up close and personal, except, perhaps, for his own well-publicized homosexuality and that of others among the dock-side toughs that he hung around with. So I was ready for a literary man who was no stranger to life’s seamy side. His play “The Maids” was the first one I grabbed (and I believe the first of his plays that I saw performed).

Fortunately, by the time that I got around to then reading (and seeing) such seemingly avant-garde material I had shed my prissy Catholic ignorance about the great varieties of human sexual expression, for good and evil. Otherwise, I would not have appreciated this play as either a perverse form of class struggle (the story line centers on the plot of two interchangeable maids, sisters, although the performance that I saw had the two maids played by men) to “murder” their mistress. Or as a ritualistic sadomasochistic sexual exercise. Either way this play still holds up today as a very well thought through literary effort, at a time when seemingly every offbeat sexual expression has been ground to bits through banal exploitation. See this one, the next time it is revived, if you get a change. In the meantime read the text.

***Playwright's Corner- Tennessee Williams’ Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for American playwright Tennessee Williams' "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof."

Play/DVD Reviews

Enough Mendacity To Sink A Ship

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, The Theater of Tennessee Williams, Volume Three, New Directions Books, New York, 1955

The first couple of paragraphs here have been used as introduction to other plays written by Tennessee Williams and reviewed in this space. This review applies to both the stage play and the film versions with differences noted as part of the review

Perhaps, as is the case with this reviewer, if you have come to the works of the excellent American playwright Tennessee Williams through adaptations of his plays to commercially distributed films you too will have missed some of the more controversial and intriguing aspects of his plays that had placed him at that time along with Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller as America’s finest serious playwrights. Although some of the films have their own charms I want to address the written plays in this entry first (along with, when appropriate, commentary about Williams’ extensive and detailed directing instructions).

That said, there are certain limitations for a political commentator like this reviewer on the works of Williams. Although his plays, at least his best and most well-known ones, take place in the steamy South or its environs, there is virtually no acknowledgement of the race question that dominated Southern life during the period of the plays; and, for that matter was beginning to dominate national life. Thus, although it is possible to pay homage to his work on its artistic merits, I am very, very tentative about giving fulsome praise to that work on its political merits. With that proviso Williams nevertheless has created a very modern stage on which to address social questions at the personal level, like homosexuality, incest and the dysfunctional family that only began to get addressed widely well after his ground-breaking work hit the stage.

“Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” is a prime example of the contradiction that a radical commentator is placed in. The themes of duplicity, latent homosexuality, adultery and dysfunctional families topped off by more than enough mendacity to sink a ship are the stuff of social drama that NEED to be addressed as outcomes in the modern capitalist cultural sphere. However, in the end nothing really gets resolved truthfully here. Old 1950’s-style All-American boy Brick, the ‘great white hope’ of the family, may or may not sober up after the ‘lost’ of his dear friend and fellow football player, Skipper. Saucy and sexy wife Maggie (the cat) may or may not really get pregnant by Brick and save the family heritage for him, or die trying. The only certainty, despite all that above-mentioned mendacity, is that Big Daddy is going to die and that 28,000 acres of the finest land in the Delta is going to need new management, either by Brick, brother Goober (along with his scheming wife and their ‘lovely' brood of children) or some upstart. Off of these possible outcomes, however, I would not get too worked up about the final outcome.

In the movie version, done in the 1950’s as well, which starred the recently departed excellent actor Paul Newman as Brick and a fetching Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the question of Brick’s possible homosexual relationship with Skipper is far more muted than in the play. The implicit question seems to concern Brick’s fading youth, his search for perfect meaning to life in Mississippi and that one’s existential crisis can be eliminated by reliance on the bottle. The relationship between the dying Big Daddy and his ever suffering wife, Big Mama, is less dastardly than in the play as well. The scheming Goober and wife and family and those ‘lovely’ children, however, run true to form. My sense of the movie, unlike the deeper issues of the play, is that a few therapy sessions would put old Brick back on the right track. The play was far less hopeful in that regard.

On The Centenary Of Tennessee Williams' Birth- Playwright's Corner- "A Streetcar Named Desire"

Thursday, September 23, 2010
*Playwright's Corner- Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire"

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for American playwright Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.

Book/Play Review

A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams, Harper, 2006

Tennessee Williams rightfully takes his place as one of the premier playwrights in the history of the American theater. The relentless turning out of high quality pieces (and other short literary expositions) on subjects that in an earlier day before the late 1940s and early 1950s would have not found nearly so receptive an audience.

I saw the movie version of Streetcar long before I read the original play so that, of necessity, the role of Stanley Kowalski on the page evokes the powerfully strong, sexual and primitive role performed by Marlon Brando and the equally powerful performance by Vivian Leigh as the coquettish, down-on-her-heels, blatantly feminine-wiles wielding Blanche Dubois. There are however, important differences between the story line presented in the movie and in the original play version. Some of the more explicit graphically sexual scenes and latent homosexual allusions did not pass muster with the movie censors of the times. For one familiar with the story from the stage or theater it is well worth going back and reading the original play to get a feel for the tensions that remain unexplored in the other media.

A reading of the play also makes clear something is missing from the film productions and that is the sense that the characters (including Blanche's sister Stella, Stanley's wife)are sleepwalking through life with their own private illusions that prevent them each, in the final analysis, from having more than a surface understanding of the others in the claustrophobic little "home" they inhabit. Blanche will pay, and pay dearly, for not understanding Stanley better as she tries to live the illusion of a fallen, aging Southern Belle. In any case, whether on stage on the screen or on the page this is a great American classic.

On The Centenary Of Tennessee Williams' Birth-Playwright’s Corner-“Suddenly, Last Summer”

Thursday, January 15, 2009
*Playwright’s Corner- Tennessee Williams’ “Suddenly, Last Summer”

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for American playwright Tennessee Williams' "Suddenly, Last Summer."

Play/DVD Reviews

The Sweet Bird Of Youth Gone Awry

Suddenly Last Summer, The Theater of Tennessee Williams, Volume Three, New Directions Books, New York, 1955

“Suddenly, Last Summer" is an odd little beauty of a play. Odd in that the appetites of the main (unseen in the play) character, Sebastian, seem to be both beyond the pale and obsessive. Odd, also that his protective monster of a mother is determined to keep the truth about her “genius” son from the world even after his ‘untimely’ death in the play's ...last summer. As if to add fuel to the fire of an already bizarre tale of exploitation, sexual and otherwise, Sebastian’s beautiful lure of a cousin used as bait for Sebastian’s appetites (some form of pedophilia) is to be permanently taken out of the picture (via institutionalization in a mental hospital) in order to keep this world beautiful. Nobody believes the sordid tale she has to tell about dear cousin Sebastian. The play ends with the ‘hope’ that there may actually be someone to believe the girl’s story before she becomes one more sacrifice to ‘beauty’ in the world. Frankly, old Sebastian got what was coming to him over in the islands.

In the movie version, the stories that have to be told verbally in the play get told as cinematic flashbacks as well. Katherine Hepburn is in high dudgeon as Sebastian’s mother and ‘keeper of the flame’. Montgomery Clift is a more sober, somber and searcher for the truth psychiatrist than the one in the play and Elizabeth Taylor as the beautiful lure cousin is a mass of confusions whose memories of last summer have to be erased ….some way. Old Sebastian and his twisted sense of life and his place in history is still a guy who had it coming to him. Well, he did, didn’t he?

***From The Archives (2011)- On The Centenary Of Tennessee Williams' Birthday-Homage To The Outsider- Some Of The Work Of Playwright Tennessee Williams

Play/DVD Reviews

Enough Mendacity To Sink A Ship

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, The Theater of Tennessee Williams, Volume Three, New Directions Books, New York, 1955

The first couple of paragraphs here have been used as introduction to other plays written by Tennessee Williams and reviewed in this space. This review applies to both the stage play and the film versions with differences noted as part of the review

Perhaps, as is the case with this reviewer, if you have come to the works of the excellent American playwright Tennessee Williams through adaptations of his plays to commercially distributed film you too will have missed some of the more controversial and intriguing aspects of his plays that had placed him at that time along with Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller as America’s finest serious playwrights. Although some of the films have their own charms I want to address the written plays in this entry first (along with, when appropriate, commentary about Williams’ extensive and detailed directing instructions).

That said, there are certain limitations for a political commentator like this reviewer on the works of Williams. Although his plays, at least his best and most well-known ones, take place in the steamy South or its environs, there is virtually no acknowledgement of the race question that dominated Southern life during the period of the plays; and, for that matter was beginning to dominate national life. Thus, although it is possible to pay homage to his work on its artistic merits, I am very, very tentative about giving fulsome praise to that work on its political merits. With that proviso Williams nevertheless has created a very modern stage on which to address social questions at the personal level, like homosexuality, incest and the dysfunctional family that only began to get addressed widely well after his ground-breaking work hit the stage.

“Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” is a prime example of the contradiction that a radical commentator is placed in. The themes of duplicity, latent homosexuality, adultery and dysfunctional families topped off by more than enough mendacity to sink a ship are the stuff of social drama that NEED to be addressed as outcomes in the modern capitalist cultural sphere. However, in the end nothing really gets resolved truthfully here. Old 1950’s-style All-American boy Brick, the ‘great white hope’ of the family, may or may not sober up after the ‘lost’ of his dear friend and fellow football player, Skipper. Saucy and sexy wife Maggie (the cat) may or may not really get pregnant by Brick and save the family heritage for him, or die trying. The only certainty, despite all that above-mentioned mendacity, is that Big Daddy is going to die and that 28,000 acres of the finest land in the Delta is going to need new management, either Brick, brother Goober (along with his scheming wife and their ‘lovely brood’ of children) or some upstart. Off of these possible outcomes, however, I would not get too worked up about the final outcome.

In the movie version, done in the 1950’s as well, which starred the recently departed excellent actor Paul Newman as Brick and a fetching Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the question of Brick’s possible homosexual relationship with Skipper is far more muted than in the play. The implicit question seems to concern Brick’s fading youth, his search for perfect meaning to life in Mississippi and that one’s existential crisis can be eliminated by reliance on the bottle. The relationship between the dying Big Daddy and his ever suffering wife, Big Mama, is less dastardly than in the play as well. The scheming Goober and wife and family and those ‘lovely’ children, however, run true to form. My sense of the movie, unlike the deeper issues of the play, is that a few therapy sessions would put old Brick back on the right track. The play was far less hopeful in that regard.

The Fickle Bird Of Youth

The Sweet Bird Of Youth, Three Plays of Tennessee Williams, New Directions Books, New York, 1959

“Sweet Bird Of Youth” is a case in point. Not for the first time, a seemingly 1950’s style All- American boy Chance who has left his hometown, his home town girl and his roots behind to drift in that endless spiral toward fame- Hollywood and the movies, naturally- comes back to claim what is his by right. On this little hometown reunion Chance is in the service of one aging and fretful actress who has her own issues with that elusive ‘bird of youth’. On return to town it appears that Chance has stirred up a hornet’s nest with the local political establishment in the person of one red-neck preacher turned politician in order to better do “god’s work”, old Tom Findley. The object of this dispute is one Heavenly Findley, old Ton’s daughter and Chance’s left behind paramour who is now the subject of some scandal (due to the amorphously stated need for female-related medical treatment due to Chance’s irresponsibility). Along the way we get to see how political power is distributed in a small Southern town as well as the inevitable tempting of the fates by Chance in order to win the ‘brass ring’ before it is too late (apparently somewhere over thirty, by my reckoning). At play’s end though, where he is between a rock and a hard place, Chance may not get the chance to be Chance at thirty. Oh, that fickle bird of youth. Still, Chance, go for it.

In the movie version the recently departed excellent actor Paul Newman, a classic example of a 1950’s All-American boy type (among his other acting talents), as the movie star ‘wannabe’ and Geraldine Page as the aging actress recreated their stage performances although with a greater screen presence for Ms. Page. Moreover, Chance’s strivings to reconnect with Heavenly are more central to the plot. More importantly, the endings differ in that, despite some mauling by Tom Findley’s boys Chance takes my advice from the play version and runs, with Heavenly, just as far and as fast as his now aging legs can carry him.

Waiting For A Sign

The Rose Tattoo, Three Plays of Tennessee Williams, New Directions Books, New York, 1959


“The Rose Tattoo” is a little different look at the family. Although the geography of the play is still the American South this play is not peopled with Williams’ usually WASPy characters but rather a little conclave of immigrant Italians who have somehow made a beachhead in the Gulf Coast area. The central character is a previously abandoned but now widowed Italian seamstress trying to survive, mainly through her hopes for her daughter, on her wits, her memories of youth, her integrity and her fierce instinct to survive in alien territory. A philandering husband the obsessive subject of her adoration, a daughter trying to learn to fly on her own in the love game, and an incidental encounter with a fellow, younger Italian truck driver come together to give her the sign she needs to start over. Maybe. This play, more than most of Williams’ efforts, depends on the strength of the dialogue and not the plot line. That is what gives its dramatic edge as Williams explores yet another tangled up dream gone awry story.

In the movie version, the role of the young Italian truck driver as played by Burt Lancaster and the seamstress as played by the fabulous Anna Magnini is more central to the unfolding story from the beginning. The dramatic tensions between this pair and the ‘waiting for a sign’ by the seamstress are still fairly similar. It is however Lancaster’s enhanced role that really makes this a visual treat and gives one hope that this new family ‘aborning’ can survive.

Take A Walk On The Wild Side

Orpheus Descending, The Theater of Tennessee Williams, Volume Three, New Directions Books, New York, 1955

On reading “Orpheus Descending”, Williams’ take on the old Greek legend in modern grab I was struck by the similarity in the character of the Orpheus figure, Val ,and Nelson Algren’s Dove Linkhorn in “ A Walk On The Wild Side. Both are loners, outsiders, have checkered pasts and are ready for anything from deep romantic love to murder and mayhem. And because they are capacity of that range of emotions and reactions they are also as capable of getting burned by a complacent society that does not take kindly to those that it cannot control. Val drifts into town, gets a job at a store by the enigmatic Lady and then the wheels begin to turn and to deal out his fate. Could he have stopped and turned away? Although that is a question that drives many dramatic efforts it is not always resolvable in a play- or in life. Lady’s terminally ill husband lurks in the background with nothing to lose, once the romantic sparks start to fly. I do not understand why this play was not more successful in its earlier manifestations as was pointed out in the introduction, especially as this is a culture that has made space, if only grudgingly, to for the outsider to tempt the fates if only symbolically.

The Sweet Bird Of Youth Gone Awry

Suddenly Last Summer, The Theater of Tennessee Williams, Volume Three, New Directions Books, New York, 1955

“Suddenly Last Summer is an odd little beauty of a play. Odd in that the appetites of the main (unseen in the play) character Sebastian seem to be both beyond the pale and obsessive. Odd, also that his protective monster of a mother is determined to keep the truth about her “genius” son from the world even after his ‘untimely’ death ……last summer. As if to add fuel to the fire of an already bizarre tale of exploitation, sexual and otherwise, Sebastian’s beautiful lure of a cousin used as bait for Sebastian’s appetites is to be permanently taken out of the picture in order to keep this world beautiful. Nobody believes the sordid tale she has to tell about dear cousin Sebastian. The play ends with the ‘hope’ that there may actually be someone to believe the girl’s story before she becomes one more sacrifice to ‘beauty’ in the world. Frankly, old Sebastian got what was coming to him over in the islands.

In the movie version, the stories that have to be told verbally in the play get told as flashbacks as well. Katherine Hepburn is in high dudgeon as Sebastian’s mother and ‘keeper of the flame’. Montgomery Clift is a more sober, somber and searcher for the truth psychiatrist than the one in the play and Elizabeth Taylor is the beautiful lure cousin is a mass of confusions whose memories of last summer have to be erased ….some way. Old Sebastian and his twisted sense of life and his place in history is still a guy who had it coming to him. Well, he did, didn’t he?

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future- The Spartacus Youth's Fight Now (2010) And Then (1971)-On Gay Oppression

Markin comment:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Workers Vanguard No. 969
19 November 2010

Gay Oppression and the Suicide of Tyler Clementi

(Young Spartacus pages)

NEW YORK CITY—On September 22, 18-year-old Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi committed suicide by jumping from the George Washington Bridge. Earlier that week, his college roommate had secretly streamed video over the Internet of him making out with another man. Following Clementi’s death, reports of suicides of gay youth around the country came trickling out in the press. The next month saw the kidnapping and torture of three young men in the Bronx because they were suspected of engaging in homosexual sex. These terrible events are not anomalies; they speak to the ongoing oppression of gays, and of all those who diverge from the deeply entrenched gender roles inherent to the institution of the family in capitalist society.

Homosexual youth are up to four times more likely than straight youth to attempt suicide. Almost two-thirds report feeling unsafe at school. The growth of religious backwardness and the reactionary “family values” campaigns pushed by both Democrats and Republicans have further intensified anti-gay bigotry and violence, at the same time that state-sponsored “abstinence only” campaigns and the rollback of abortion rights have aimed to repress every expression of young people’s sexuality.

Confronted by the events of the last several months, everyone from the New York Times, the bourgeoisie’s newspaper of record, to the reformist International Socialist Organization has responded with calls for anti-bullying measures. For public school and campus administrations, the capitalist rulers’ watchdogs, anti-bullying policies are a pretext for further snooping into the private affairs of youth, who are already subject to anti-drug witchhunts. Black and minority students, who especially are branded as criminals by cops and security guards and subject to discriminatory “zero tolerance” policies in their schools, would be among the first targets.

We oppose school administrators having stronger disciplinary powers, and we also oppose “hate crime” legislation. Hate crime legislation strengthens the capitalist state’s repressive powers while promoting the absurd idea that the state will defend the interests of those oppressed and exploited under capitalism. In practice, such laws have been used to persecute anarchist protesters and pro-Palestinian activists while gays, immigrants and black people continue to face cop and vigilante terror in the streets.

We seek to win youth to building a revolutionary workers party that will act as a champion of the oppressed against the barbarism of capitalist society. Only socialist revolution will open the way to an egalitarian, communist society where the institution of the family, the source of women’s and gay oppression, can be replaced because its economic and social functions will be fulfilled by society as a whole.

We print below a Spartacus Youth Club speaker’s remarks at the New York Spartacist League’s October 9 forum, slightly edited for publication.

* * *

What I wanted to talk about is what, probably, you have been reading in the papers, this recent wave of attacks against gays in New York and the surrounding areas. There is the case of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student, a tragic suicide. There are also the cases of the brutalized gays in the Bronx that were on the front page of the New York Times, and the attack on a gay man at the landmark of the gay rights movement, Stonewall, in the Village.

It is a vital task of the workers revolutionary vanguard to fight for full democratic rights for gays. In the United States, which is one of the most politically backward advanced capitalist countries on Earth, we see an infestation of Puritanism and religious fundamentalism.

The monogamous family remains the legally enforced social model for the organization of private life in its most intimate aspects, such as love, sex, bearing and raising children. It is the central institution oppressing women, and anti-gay bigotry flows from the need to punish any “deviations” from this patriarchal model.

So what is our program? You can, of course, read more in the Women and Revolution pages of our newspaper, or come to one of our youth classes at City College this semester. To give you a snapshot of our program for women’s liberation and for the complete end to this system of oppression, I would like to quote Leon Trotsky.

We had this in our article “For the Right of Gay Marriage...and Divorce” [WV No. 824, 16 April 2004]. Leon Trotsky wrote a response to the magazine Liberty in January 1933. They were asking him, “Is Bolshevism deliberately destroying the family?” This is Trotsky’s answer:

“If one understands by ‘family’ a compulsory union based on the marriage contract, the blessing of the church, property rights, and the single passport, then Bolshevism has destroyed this policed family from the roots up.

“If one understands by ‘family’ the unbounded domination of parents over children, and absence of legal rights for the wife, then Bolshevism has, unfortunately, not yet completely destroyed this carryover of society’s old barbarism.

“If one understands by ‘family’ ideal monogamy—not in the legal but in the actual sense—then the Bolsheviks could not destroy what never was nor is on earth, barring fortunate exceptions.”
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From The Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter (forebear of the Spartacus Youth Clubs), Number 7, April 1971

Homosexuals have long been accustomed to the charge of "crimes against nature" by the spokesmen of official morality. Much of the radical movement, however, accuses them of crimes against the revolution be¬sides. If the cops don't get them, maybe the revolution will-if some "revolutionary" organizations are taken at their word.

PL—PROGRESSIVE LEGION OF DECENCY

Progressive Labor is one organization doing its best to convince sexually oppressed groups that if PL could make the American revolution, their social oppression could be even more systematic than what they endure now. PL has done it before— witness the WSA-SDS position at the time of the June '69 SDS split on the family as an instrument of revolutionary struggle, and their long opposition within SDS to raising the demand for free and legal abortion. A variation on the same pseudo-proletarian Victorianism is their line on homosexuality expressed in the February issue of PL, as a disease of capitalism like dope addiction which is damn well not going to exist under socialism. Here PL marshals its ignorance in the service of an opportunistic con¬ception of reaching workers with their politics (lots of workers don't like homosexuals).

FOR MARXIST SCIENCE, NOT SUPERSTITION

PL is trying to "fight male chauvinism" in strange fashion. It should be obvious to anyone that homosexuality is encouraged by no dominant capitalist institution (except negatively by the horrors of bourgeois mar¬riage and family life). The most effective means for discouraging homosexuality (besides direct persecution) are the same means used to oppress women and youth. Central among these are the institutions of bourgeois marriage, the family, and religion. Here people receive the conditioning which includes a taboo against homosexual feelings and practices-a fear which for many people is probably stronger than positive response to either sex. That the conditioning process is not uniformly successful means only that no social order succeeds completely, always, in molding individuals exactly according to a certain pattern—if it did, there would be no homosexuals, no women's liberation movement, no communists, no nonconformists 'of any sort. Those who do opt for noncon¬formity, of course, pay a big price-ask any independent women or homosexuals.

SEXUAL FREEDOM ANTI-COMMUNIST PROGRAM

It is one thing to recognize the Marxist truth that the struggle for social revolution cannot center around issues of special social oppression, sexual or otherwise (most sections of the women's, black and "gay" movements have yet to realize this). But another matter entirely is the utterly retrograde belief that the prejudices and chauvinist practices among workers under capitalism, such as those concerning women and homosexuals, represent a progressive aspect of their consciousness. Obviously a homosexual communist is duty-bound to take backwardness into account, and not invite isolation before obtaining a hearing for his (her) class program, just as no communist woman should seek to win the sympathy of socially conservative workingwomen on the basis of some libertarian personal life style. But these important tactical considerations do not mean that absolute sexual freedom is not part of a communist program. The Bolsheviks (before Stalin) struck all the oppressive laws off the books regarding women and homosexuals. They also rejected the back¬door oppression of "rehabilitation” of anybody's brand of consenting sexual behavior. (For documentation of the Bolshevik policy on various aspects of sexual oppression, and the policy reversals under Stalin, see the Socialist Workshop pamphlet available from the RMC for 50 cents)

But avoiding stupidities like the cliché "Do you want your daughter to marry a black and why not?" is very different from elevating backwardness into revolutionary virtue. For every worker alienated by "Gay Liberation" there are plenty who are driven to frenzy by Women's Liberation—because psychologically it seems to threaten most of them more directly. The hollow "satisfaction" of male supremacy in personal relations (provided one is confident of "masculinity" of course) is one of the few "satisfactions" which capitalism promises the male worker. We take this backwardness into account tactically in order better to defeat it in the long run, not because we endorse it.

What does PL propose? If they believe that "movements which unite with drug addicts and homosexuals a defamatory and baseless analogy close the door to workers" how do they propose to implement this insight? Consistency would demand that PL expose and root out such carriers of capitalist corruption within the workers’ and radical student movements. The right wing can root out the communists and PL can expose the sexual "deviants" of all political stripes. PL partly backs away from this logical implication of their medievalism by not proposing to catch and "cure" the "deviants" now under capitalism-that will be done humanely but oh so effectivey under socialism. Yet PL knows that other "evils of capitalism" must be fought here and now, every day. Is PL just afraid to talk now of purging society of homosexuality in the way they talk of smashing racism?

We think so. We suspect that PL does not undertake the line of action outlined above because they realize that every decent element would despise them for it. And they may know better than what they print in PL. Perhaps some "aversion therapy" from the radical sections of Women's Liberation will help the editors of PL be "rehabilitated into useful roles"(PL's "socialist" formula for the homosexual cure)-in the fight against sexual oppression.

Probably the Maoists will be undismayed to learn that homosexuals are indeed persecuted as undesirables in China; they are already acquainted with the concepts of the "socialist family" and bureaucratic vacillations on abortion. And in Cuba (SWP-YSA, recently enthusiastic about "Gay Liberation", take note). The allegedly capitalist Soviet Union still persecutes the "capitalist sickness" of homosexuality; according to PL's and Mao¬ist logic, some shred of revolutionary moral¬ity must therefore persist there.

We have reserved our sharpest criticism for Progressive Labor, because as self-proclaimed vanguard party, they deserve it most. (Less significant "Marxist" organizations have outdone PL; when PL has been opportunist, ignorant, and wrong, they have been obscenely wrong. The National Caucus of Labor Committees in a recent leaflet against the SWP-YSA compared homosexuals, and by implication all specially oppressed groups, to dogs.) But while criticizing "vanguard" groups which mouth idiocies in the name of revolutionary leadership, we must not spare the various movements against special oppression, whose leaderships reinforce PL's prejudices. It is more than a mood of pseudo-revolutionary Puritanism which makes PL vilify homosexuals. In part PL is reacting impressionistically to the fact that the exist¬ing movement against homosexual oppression (like most of Women's and Black Liberation) lacks anything resembling a program for socialist revolution, the only permanent solution to their oppression.

The best of "Gay Liberation" is the Red Butterfly group. A main arena of their work seems to be winning recognition for their struggle through work in the SWP-YSA-dominated SMC. Participation in the SMC, notorious for its class-collaboration (denounced regularly and essentially correctly by PL and its sections of SDS), is an excellent way for homosexuals to win tem¬porary acceptance from liberals and their confused student following. It is also an excellent way to reinforce the prejudices of groups like PL, which, although dead wrong on many vital issues, nonetheless do seriously desire to reach the working class to make a revolution. The SMC also alienates all sections of the work¬ing class, which correctly hate their liberal enemies repeatedly featured at SMC rallies, and which will hate them more, not less, as they lose widespread illusions about the capitalist system in struggle. The Red Butterflies, despite their evident desire to bring a radical perspective to homosexuals, remain a centrist group according to the classic short definition: revolutionary in words, opportunist in deeds. Their desire to be part of the "mainstream" (read SMC) of the "movement" is not in itself unhealthy. But the mainstream of the "movement" happens to be led by class-collaborationist garbage—and only a bitter struggle can change that.
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From opposite poles, PL and the various "liberation" movements make symmetrical errors. PL, in backward sectarian fashion, refuses to intervene actively in important movements once it has recognized the rottenness of their leaderships. Perhaps PL feels that its own politics and cadre are not tough or sophisticated enough to win people away from their misleaders when more than the simplest issues are involved. (Through the low-level politics of the CWSA strategy in SDS, concentrating mostly on unorganized workers, PL overcame its past opportunism in union work of "left-center coalitions" with "progressive bureaucrats, etc., by simply avoiding unions.).

A REVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE

The existing "liberation" movements universally share a lack of working-class revolutionary perspective. What PL fails to recognize is that nowhere has any movement, including movements of the working class itself, been anything but bourgeois in leadership and pro¬gram in the absence of Marxist leadership. No spontaneous movement against any form of oppression, even against the economic exploitation upon which capitalism is based, can main¬tain a revolutionary program unless it is linked through its most conscious cadres with a Bolshevik communist party. The various movements do not recognize this either, the more left among them seeing their particular struggles as somehow "inherently revolutionary" without a revolutionary program. For homosexuals, and for all the specially oppressed, liberation can be wan only by struggle alongside the working class armed with Marxist program for the destruction of class society, the basis for all oppression.