literature: January 2008 Archives
The literary form called the character novel has had an immense impact on my intellectual as well as everyday life, ever since I first discovered at the tender age of 15, Willard Motley's prize winning novel, Knock On Any Door. This was the story of Nick Romano growing up in the Chicago slums. He was an alter boy at 12 and dead in the electric chair at 21.
The story of Nick Romano exposed me to a part of the life struggle that was unknown to me at that time. This composite story of a troubled street youth fired up my imagination and left me wanting to read more of the same. I was fortunate enough to have had a sympathetic English teacher at the time who recognized my passion for stories about people, and further exposed me to what he referred to as "protest literature." He gave me a short list to work from and at the top of that list was the novel, Down These Mean Streets by Pere Thomas. Also on the list was the play, Westside Story. From there I jumped into nonfiction literary treats such as Blood In My Eye by George Jackson.
This literature of troubled youth had such a poignant impact on me that I ended up with the unintentional result of working with these same kind of troubled kids later in life. From 1984 until 1988 I worked as an outreach worker and emergency services coordinator for Outside In's street youth program. At the time Outside In was one of Portland, Oregon's premier socio-medical aid stations which provided free counseling, referrals, emergency services, and a medical clinic for the down and out. It was here at Outside In that I met many Nick Romano's with their own unique and passionate stories. One lad went on to spend five years in prison for first degree arson, another committed suicide, while yet another died so very young of A.I.D.S. The lives and stories of these street kids eventually became too overwhelming and I had to leave that part of my life behind for other things.
My fascination with troubled souls is still alive and well today. I have collected around 25 character novels which I consider keepers, to be read and re-read many times over. The characters in these novels are most often dubbed anti-hero's by the mainstream literary establishment, and often referred to in negative terms as: lonely oddballs, self-absorbed individualists, mental cases, contrarians, non-conformists, deviants, as well as many other names too numerous to list here. The better label for these colorful characters would be heretic. Whether these character's heretical lifestyle and thinking patterns are merely self-made protective barriers against normal society, or a way of accessing the ultimate truth about existence, they have one thing in common: they were born heretics, held hostage by their genetics, social culture, and family upbringing and had no choice but to be who they were.
The best of these character novels that truly represents the heretic in my humble opinion is Against Nature by J. K. Huysmans. The copy I own is a translation (and one of the best methinks) by Robert Baldick. The book hit the literary scene of 1884 like a cosmic big bang. Oscar Wilde found this the "strangest book that he had ever read" and it became a key text for his own writings. Zola called the book "a terrible blow to Naturalism." The general public condemned it as a work of depravity. In colorful and flowery prose the book tells about the strange, exotic and perverse pleasures and practices of one Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, a composite character of several "gorgeous dandies of the time."
Some have accused Huysmans of writing about himself in the thinnest of disguises. As Robert Baldick writes in his introduction: "Des Esseintes is more than his creator's alter ego and the quintessential Decadent. He is also, and above all else, the modern man par excellence, tortured by that vague longing for an elusive ideal which we used to call the mal du siecle; torn between desire and satiety, hope and disillusionment; painfully conscious that his pleasures are finite, his needs infinite."
As the charcter Des Esseintes was the epitome of the heretic during his time of the 1880's, so Nick Romano was the epitome of the heretic during his time of the 1950's. Both of these characters in their own uniquely tragic way captured Baldick's "the modern man par excellence." Both Romano and Des Esseintes were very painfully aware that their pleasures were indeed finite and their needs infinite. And I have come to the conclusion that the street youth I worked with and cared so deeply about in the 1980's suffered the same fate. Heretics young or old, from all ages of history and well into the future, will always be who they are and no matter how much we have sympathy for them, or even try to help protect them from themselves, they will continue to follow the path that fate has bestowed upon them.
