“What I’m trying to encapsulate with these mere words is the absolute utter charismatic hipness of Bernie Wolfe, a man who knows more about everything there is to know about than any other writer I’ve met.”
—HARLAN ELLISON
“Wolfe is best remembered for his novels of the late ‘50s; twenty years before that, just out of Yale where he was anything but a Yalie and hoping to become a wordsmith, he spent a year writing on consignment for someone called Barneybill Roster who was fronting (or was he) for a Tulsa oil millionaire. He completed his first ‘Eros-ive novel’ in two weeks; wrote four more, and then went on to pornographize the great books and quit after 11 months, 10,000 dollars richer. Wolfe is one of the more voluble sorts—believes in the ‘grand spatter business’ like Celine and Henry Miller (the latter appears here too) and he can soup up a line so that it comes out this way: ‘So the slobbered appetites of the cradle hang on undented and undaunted in the sophisticated eroticisms that infantile Libido ultimately gets channeled into.’”
—KIRKUS
“As to the books of Bernard Wolfe, his extraordinary imagination, his range of styles and genres, should alone qualify him for a conspicuous role in 20th century American literature.”
—THOMAS BERGER
“An autobiography such as was never seen before beneath the moon.”
—BEN RAY REDMAN
“His humor is uproarious . . . one is reminded of Ade or Leacock or Benchley (or all three).”
—BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE
“Wolfe writes in the mixture of the styles of Joyce and Runyon . . .”
—SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Text copyright © 1972 by Bernard Wolfe
Introduction copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Lethem
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First printed by Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1972
First Pharos Editions printing 2016
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Cover and interior design by Faceout Studio
Pharos Editions, an imprint of Counterpoint
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Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
e-book ISBN 978-1-94043-625-8
INTRODUCTION BY
JONATHAN LETHEM
Bernard Wolfe’s Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer comes into your hands as a book-out-of-time. Such republication efforts as these always collapse the shallow literary present into a more complicated shape, making a portal through history—who is this lost writer, we ask ourselves, and what is this lost book? But also: what views of a lost cultural landscape might be available through the portal this particular lost writer and lost book represents?
Make no mistake, the case of Bernard Wolfe is an especially interesting one, not least because, even in 1972, in the pages of his memoir when it rolled fresh off the presses into the hands of god-knows-how-few readers, Wolfe already presents himself as a man-out-of-time, in ways both helpless and defiant. Wolfe’s career was bizarrely rich: from time as Leon Trotsky’s personal secretary to stints in the Merchant Marine, as ghostwriter for Broadway columnist Billy Rose and author of early-TV-era teleplays, as editor of Mechanix Illustrated, and as exponent of the theories of dissident psychoanalytic guru Edmund Bergler (whose homophobia was obnoxious, but whose discarded theories strongly anticipate later thinking, and who could be seen as a kind of “lost American Lacan,” if anyone was digging for one), to his glancing participation in the realm of American science fiction, and his role as amanuensis, to jazzman Mezz Mezzrow, in writing a memoir depicting a prescient version of “hipsterdom” and which became a kind of bible of inner-urban American slang—Wolfe was practically everywhere in twentieth-century culture.
Yet Wolfe was also nowhere, in the sense that the present interest attaching to him doesn’t stem from the notion of “reviving” a writer with an earlier purchase on either popularity or the embrace of literary critics of his time. Wolfe had neither. A few of his books sold a bit; Limbo has kept an obscure reputation within science fiction and bobbed back into print a few times. Yet for his hyperactivity, Wolfe had little traction, and in 1972 was hardly a writer whose memoirs any publishers were likely to be clamoring for. Wolfe, restless, fast-producing, and seemingly impervious to indifference, wrote one anyway. When he did it was surely the “pornographer” of the title that drew Doubleday’s interest in publishing the result.
What the reader meets here is both fascinating and truly eccentric. The book is a writer’s-coming-of-age narrative, but a highly unsentimental one, describing Wolfe’s location of a habit and a craft and a discipline and a capacity, much more than it details his discovery of any definite sense of purpose as a writer. Wolfe’s vibrant intelligence, which picks up and turns over any number of vital subjects as if they were rocks concealing scuttling insect life, rarely settles on introspection, let alone seeks a tone of confession or remorse or self-doubt, such as we’d expect from nearly any memoir lately. Despite this, there’s a terrible poignancy to the material concerning his father’s spiraling mental illness, and the bizarre ironies attaching to Wolfe’s own role as a New Haven-townie-gone-to-Yale who gets a psychiatric fellowship at the same institution in nearby Middletown where his father is a semi-comatose inmate. Of course, a commissioning editor, nowadays, would have insisted that Wolfe punch this material up, goose it emotionally, and put it in the foreground (a contemporary point of comparison might be Nick Flynn’s fine Another Bullshit Night in Suck City). The same imaginary editor would surely, I think, have asked Wolfe to excise so much of the fading political context from the book, but for various reasons one can guess this book wasn’t so much edited as it was simply written and published. It’s in the politics that one can feel how deeply, and restlessly, Wolfe was, by 1972, testifying from an already-lost world. His passionate and still unresolved commitment to Marxism, a commitment betrayed (of course, and in so many different ways) by twentieth-century historical reality, remains the lens through which he views the “labor” of writing, and the social relations into which he projected himself as a hungry young writer in the wartime years.
Despite his engagement with history, there’s no attempt to make a wide-screen historical panorama of his book—what enters of political and cultural context does so through individual experience. Wolfe also doesn’t trouble much over the question of censorship, despite the great battles over Ulysses, Lolita, “Howl”, and others that he’d certainly be capable of drawing into the mix. Apart from Henry Miller, and one other generationally important writer who comes in as a bizarre punch line, late in the book, Wolfe doesn’t drop names. He doesn’t situate his writer’s life in terms of movements or generations, apart from