Pick Up
If I could write one book as good as Charles Willeford’s Pick Up I’d put down my pen and feel fulfilled. I could retire to my garden and family or buy an old tobacco shop and slowly desiccate among the shelves of borkum riff and Virginia shag. But I have no talent for the perfect pulp novel (or the perfect novel of any kind). I am incorrigibly literary. I am like a classically trained violinist and composer who wants more than anything in the world to be a guitarist in a garage band.
This aspiration of mine is the opposite of the rock musician who wants to prove that he’s really a talented musician by composing a symphony or playing jazz. I’m the opposite of Frank Zappa say. Even jazz musicians, who are generally more secure about this kind of thing, will play as soloists with a symphony. The jazz fans find their work to be more interesting and the classical fans are generally unimpressed. So it always goes. Context is everything. If you are going to alter a traditional performance practice and have it go over you have to be immersed in expectations, engaged with the struggle within yourself. Someone like Mondrian for instance is received in the context of evolving abstraction. Moreover his grids and squares are apparent to people in the world around them. The grids of city streets and the lighted windows of sky scrapers or even blocks and blocks of tenements. The urban landscape is formal and vertical. Mondrian saw the beauty of this and I respond. Even the worst of post modernism is related to the context of a hideous, stupid, and degrading post war society and culture. If our art is shallow and uninteresting we need only look around us to see why. Post modernism is also burdened with theoretical beliefs that reject out of hand any opposition to the situation as being reactionary. And it is a problem. The usual Romantic and Modernist solution, the solution of the counter culture, is to go back to some distant time, the middle ages, Rome or the stone age.
The stone age ain’t an option. Even if it were, there are too many of us. And even if there weren’t, we wouldn’t like it. You have to be far removed indeed to find the stone age attractive. No agriculturalist living side by side with paleolithic forest folk would want to go back to hunting and gathering. They would piss themselves laughing at the prospect.
I think if I keep trying to write Pick Up I might write something good, but it won’t be genuine pulp. It might be hard boiled and it certainly can be noir. These are strong currents in American writing. They are our three chords, 4/4 beat and syncopation. They are in the literary DNA. But it is hard to build a big novel on that slim basis, just as it is hard, maybe impossible, to write a traditional symphony based on a pop song form or compose an epic poem using the metrical tools and sensibility of the lyric poem.
Pick Up does do two things though that Tolstoy and Dante knew, it reminds one that economy and momentum are essential even to extended works. The whole can be complex but every little piece must be a hook, spurring the reader on. Those steps going down to hell are spiral and subject to an increasing and harrowing gravity that will not let you stop or go back and you will need the momentum to carry you through purgatory to Eden.
