Lou Reed
Some will protest that there never was such a time–that Reed has been a man of letters all along. The case for Reed the Highbrow invariably begins with mention of poet Delmore Schwartz, a pickled beat that Reed knew as a student at Syracuse University who’s often referred to as his “mentor.” But literary reputations are not usually won through personal acquaintance with writers, and even if the objection is waived, the Delmore hookup still doesn’t cut much ice, given that Schwartz is remembered today almost exclusively for his connection to the young Lou Reed.
Exhibit C: “Cathy was a bit surreal, she painted all her toes / And on her face she wore dentures clamped tightly to her nose / And when she finally spoke her twang her glasses broke / And no one else could smoke while she was in the room” (“Hanging Round”).
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Do song lyrics get more desultory? Considered as poetry, the best thing that can be said for this is that a lot of it rhymes. Take Exhibit A: a satellite has been sent to Mars. Once in orbit around that planet, it unaccountably fills up with parking cars. Compounding the mystery of its mission, the satellite in question is one “of love.” The entire proceedings are being televised, and the singer catches some of the broadcast, because, hey, he loves to watch things on TV. As for Exhibits B and C: how many other celebrated literary figures can you think of who have shared Reed’s intoxication with that “nose-toes” rhyme scheme? If this is ultraliterate rock, then the Ramones should have been called the Faulkners.
The Irish writer Flann O’Brien laid out the whole sick syndrome in 1940, the year that Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator was released. “Take it this way,” he wrote, “Charlie Chaplin was once a great clown. In the twenties I was laughing myself (sic) at his jerky funniness. He was good…but the lower-cases (‘film art: an international review of advance guard cinema’) found him out. One day some toad–some velveteen work-shy ‘marxist’ toad–sternly reproved people for laughing at Mr. Chaplin. ‘Do you not see, old boy, thet in Cheplin we hev an expression on the highest artistic plain of all our pathetic human striving. I mean pursuit of heppiness and all thet, our poor frustrated human nature. The little tremp, I mean, is you and I. Cheplin is a great artist, I mean. You musn’t loff, you now. Such pure, such exquisite sensibility!’ And poor Chaplin, a simple soul if ever there was one, gets to hear this chat and makes The Great Dictator. The end of The Great Dictator is also the end of what is possible in the sphere of human degradation. I remember blushing.”
Reed’s in his 60s now, so it’s understandable if he’s feeling the need to redefine and redesign, but where can he go? Turning country is not an option for a performer so closely identified with the Manhattan demimonde. And having built his house on a foundation of druggie nihilism, Reed would be hard-pressed to turn into a religious mystic like Dylan. Still, neither of these nonalternatives could be any less dignified than this egghead-artiste shtick. The one performer I can think of who might possibly be able to pull this shit off is Leonard Cohen, who has the rare advantage of actually having been a poet and a novelist. Reed was never a poet or a novelist–he was the Godfather of Punk. That’s a perfectly fine thing to be, but it precludes subsequent work as guest host on Masterpiece Theatre.
“To my mind,” continues the intrepid critic, moving further out to sea, “Poe is father to William Burroughs and Hubert Selby.” It’s funny that Reed should mention Burroughs, whose biographer Ted Morgan employed the words “bovine” and “moronic” to express that writer’s estimation of Reed. But that’s beside the point: the operative joke here is that Poe is so clearly not father to Burroughs and Selby, nor to any other brow-furrowing esoteric. Poe’s real children are Stephen King and Richard Matheson. I’m not saying that Poe isn’t great, but his greatness is not that of serious literature. You don’t go to Poe for insight into the human condition, you read him for shits and giggles. You read him for sustained hysteria that builds up to some outrageous money shot–like the hypnotized talking dead guy in “The Facts of the Case of M. Valdemar” begging to be dehypnotized and, when he is, instantly dissolving into “a nearly liquid mass of loathesome–of detestable putridity.” Yeah, baby! Poe, as critic Thomas Disch notes, “delighted in going over the top and grossing people out, and his readers delighted in this side of his work more than any other.” Poe’s a glorious progenitor of American trash culture, the inventor of two major dimestore genres–sci-fi and the murder mystery–and the patron saint of the drive-in.
