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"Pre-Code Hollywood" by Thomas Doherty and "Sin in Soft Focus" by Mark A. Vieira
A fascinating and important study details the "moral anarchy" of the early, pre-censorship talkies; a volume of classic photographs covers the same era.
By Peter Kurth
[10/21/99]

Old Bhagwan, new bottles
A "new" spiritual guru turns out to have a past that includes lavish spending, orgies and bacterial terrorism.
By Dennis McCafferty
[10/20/99]

Reviews
"Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette" by Judith Thurman
A superb literary biographer offers a satisfying life of the great French sensualist.
By Pam Rosenthal
[10/20/99]

Ivory Tower
Thriving on the edge of tolerance
Events surrounding Yale's National Coming Out Day show that even in an enclave of gay acceptance, bigotry can survive quietly.
By Simon Rodberg
[10/20/99]

Interview
Celebrity junkie
Jerry Stahl made a name for himself with "Permanent Midnight." Now he's got to live it down.
By Erik Himmelsbach
[10/19/99]

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Just a few years ago, I found myself reconsidering Brautigan's '60s works, pre-venereal warts. There is something valuable and incredibly vulnerable about true innocence, even to someone whose innocence is long gone. Brautigan was at his best when he was Percival with a typewriter. In his goofy version of Americana, pain and death did exist, but they were as substantial as a cartoon. So when I heard about the publication of "Edna," I was looking forward to it. Yuck. The poems are as terribly precious as the stuff we all wrote in high school English class. An example:

A door
in Death's heart
will open wide
and I will go
inside
and find
seven rooms
each as big
as God.

But a brief series of poems, "A Love Letter From State Insane Asylum," did deepen my insight into Brautigan. Actually, it wasn't the poems themselves -- terse messages like: "I want to write. I want to write and write and write." It was the tale of what inspired them. In the book's forward, Keith Abbott (the same Abbott of the California magazine article) relates that after a girlfriend dissed young Brautigan's poetry, he was so distressed to think that he had failed as a poet that he went to a police station and demanded to be arrested. "What for?" the cops said. "You haven't broken any laws." Brautigan responded by taking a rock and smashing a glass partition. That act earned him a short stay in the bughouse. It's no surprise that a kid so emotionally volatile would end up killing himself before he reached 50.

Dashiell Hammett killed himself with the time-honored method of too much drink and cigarettes, but then Hammett was a generation older than Brautigan. The only other biographical similarity between the two is that they both lived in San Francisco, albeit during different decades. Hammett also lived in New York -- the burg I moved to myself in the late 1970s. New York has always been a hard-edged town. In the late 1970s, it was also a punk rock town. But instead of embracing the nihilistic frenzy of the club culture at CBGB's, I chose to devour Hammett's tough-guy prose. It was the writerly equivalent of punk rock -- nihilism cracking into art.

Hammett could describe a gunsel getting gutshot with the spare grace of a haiku. There are several tasty, violent set pieces in the new collection of his stories, "Nightmare Town." In the title story, a tough drifter engages in homicidal fisticuffs in the back seat of a speeding convertible:

The car moved. One of the girl's hands came up to grasp the wheel, holding the car straight along a street she could not see. A man fell on her. Steve pulled him off -- tore pieces from him -- tore hair and flesh. The car swerved, scraped a building; scraped one side clear of men. The hands that held Steve fell away from him, taking most of his clothing with them. He picked a man off the back of the seat, and pushed him down into the street that was flowing past them ... Pistols exploded behind them. From a house a little ahead a bitter-voiced rifle emptied itself at them, sieving a mudguard. Then the desert -- white and smooth as a gigantic hospital bed -- was around them. Whatever pursuit there had been was left far behind.

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