The Birth of American Porn

Continuing excerpts from The Undressing of America. Many Americans like Tony Comstock were worried about the rise of mass print and its capacity for challenging current mores. And sure enough...

Obscenity laws were spotty and rarely enforced, and no one had time or resources to keep watch over everything that poured from the presses of New York. Just as the anonymity of city life allowed a greater personal freedom than the closeness of the village, the opportunities for transgression were much greater once publishers could expect their creations to go unnoticed in the clutter of the newsstand or the overstuffed shelves of downtown bookshops. And those voices spoke true. The cheaper newspapers increasingly took ads from the purveyors of products that couldn’t be displayed in stores: potions to aid male virility and rubber devices to prevent pregnancy and unmentionable diseases. Some book publishers brought out risqué stories, others guidebooks to local vice for the newcomer and visitor. And if one knew where to look, there was pornography.

     The pioneer of American mass-pornography was a surgeon from Ireland named William Haynes who found it difficult to establish a profitable practice in New York and thought he’d make a little money on the side through his private hobby. In 1846, taking advantage of the cheap printing in which his new city abounded, he put out a two-dollar edition of Fanny Hill, a bargain for the sort of book that had until then been circulated quietly among cognoscenti. The edition sold out. He printed another, that sold out too, and he decided to reprint other old works of pornography. Soon enough, he began hearing from customers who were seeking a publisher for their own erotic efforts. By the time war broke out, he had issued a catalog for all his wares.

     By then other publishers had jumped into the business too, all of them in New York, many of them cheek-by-jowl with the more mainstream publishers on Ann Street. The Civil War was good for business: lists of the effects of soldiers captured or killed show quite a few catalogs of dirty books, and both postal and military authorities expressed outrage at the quantity of smut being mailed to Union Army outposts. One captain wrote of lighting a large bonfire of all the obscene publications he had confiscated from his men.

     Many of these books aped the flowery style of Fanny Hill and its ancestors, some seemed to aspire to be romance novels of the type then bursting from the cheap publishers, and some expressed genuine points of view. One, The Secret History of a Votary of Pleasure, spent its first thirty pages excoriating Congregationalism—Tony Comstock’s own faith—and declaring that religious prohibition of sexual behavior was the greatest possible goad to prurient thinking, before the non-stop frotting began. Some of them danced about with euphemisms, but some did not, and left no doubt as to the techniques and pleasures of sex of many kinds, including oral and anal. Some took the guise of education, like Mysteries of the Wedding Night: Techniques for the Making of a Strong Marriage and Robust Children.

     Then, of course, there were the dirty lithographs and photographs. For photography had been making great technical advances in those years, too, and by the 1850s it became possible to reproduce unlimited paper prints of a single negative. The man with the big coat selling “French photographs” had become a fixture outside train stations and saloons by 1860. Nor were all such items hidden beneath coats. Among the ads in the cheaper newspapers were those for vaguely described books and photos. And a few careful questions at a well-stocked newsstand might turn up quite a few items hidden behind the counter.

     As citizens began to voice concern about some of what was finding its way to the newsstands, local governments began to pass more legislation concerning the content of publications. In 1860 Congress passed what was, essentially, the first federal censorship law, stating that newspapers containing “indecent” material could not be sent through the U.S. mail. The law was vague, however, and although its terms were explicated a bit more in an 1865 revision of the law (largely inspired by reports of the mountains of pornography being mailed to the soldiers), still it lacked teeth. With a great war and a volatile economy to worry about, few Americans paused to be concerned about the content of publications. But as the Civil War ended, that was about to change. A new war was about to be launched between a ragtag militia of smut mongers and yellow journalists—and the hale-bodied troops of the YMCA.

To be continued...

No Regrets

This was the most fun I've ever had at a literary event: Regreturature, a fund-raiser for LitQuake, in which about a dozen of us from the San Francisco Writers' Grotto read the most humiliating juvenilia, misfires, and bad ideas of our careers. We read high school poetry, first novels, ill-considered screenplays, and arrogantly stupid letters to editors. We made people laugh, we raised a ton of money for one of the country's best literary festivals, and we bonded in our shame. We're already talking about Regreturature II next spring. Here was my moment in the sun:

The First Mass Medium

Continuing excerpts from my book in progress, The Undressing of America. Having brought our Puritan hero Tony Comstock into contact with New York squalor, we take a section break and return with:

The story of mass culture in the 19th Century is largely the story of paper. In fact, it was paper that made possible a “mass culture.” Over the span of four or five decades, a tidal wave of cheap paper and printer’s ink surged across the cultural, social, and economic landscapes of Europe and North America. Industries were born, old trades were wiped out, hierarchies were toppled and the obscure were vaulted into power. Paper transformed the ways in which information was transmitted, children were taught, class identities were shaped, politics was conducted, morals and aspirations were shaped, literature and art were developed, and the whole shape of culture was formed. New York was one the cities most changed by paper, and in the years after the Civil War it became the center of the one first great cultural battles over paper’s new power.

        As the century began, little had changed in publishing, printing, or paper manufacturing since the Gutenberg revolution had settled down in the early 17th Century. Paper, hand-pressed from linen and other rags, was expensive as a raw commodity: middle-class letter writers developed the practice of “cross-writing,” completing a letter and then turning the page at a right angle in order to write perpendicularly on top of the earlier words, thus squeezing two sheets’ worth of words onto one precious slip of paper.

        Printing, conducted mainly by independent artisans with small staffs of journeymen, made published material more expensive still. Book prices were such that many writers lined up subscribers in advance to cover the costs. In 1796, the English novelist Fanny Burney filled the first thirty-six pages of her novel Camilla with a list of her subscribers; Camilla was a best-selling novel by the standards of the day, but it was aimed at a select and mostly affluent audience. Some books sold in the tens of thousands, a few may even have mounted toward a hundred thousand, but they were those that became required reading among the intelligentsia: Voltaire’s Candide, Goethe’s Faust, Rousseau’s Julie. A market for popular fiction was building, but its clientele remained well-to-do and even the more successful novels sold only to a few thousand readers. Burney’s Camilla was considered a tremendous success for having sold out its first print run of four thousand copies.

      Newspapers were circulated among the affluent and posted in public places for the less affluent. The “broadsheet,” the gigantic page that was becoming standard for news, was as much poster as reading material. Most newspapers, especially in the United States, were partisan political organs, supported by wide-ranging political networks more than by local readers and advertisers. Production and distribution were slow, often creating a lag of a few days between an event and its description in the journals, and most of them ignored the stories of crime and mishap that we think of as “news” today in favor of discourse on political developments. Circulation was primitive: copies were sold at the printing offices, delivered by hand or wagon to scattered general stores, or mailed to subscribers.

      All these publications consisted almost entirely of the typeset word. Pictures could only be reproduced by engraving, a slower and far more expensive process even than printing. The less costly and more widely circulated publications generally contained no pictures, and what pictures did reach print were mostly simple line drawings. Art and illustration remained the province of people who could see original pieces—which for most meant only what was displayed in churches and other public buildings—and those who could afford fine engravings. There was no such thing as a mass visual medium or a popular illustrative vocabulary. Fine art, precise representation, and pornography were all the provinces of the few.

       By the end of the 18th Century, however, it had become clear that the markets for all kinds of printed material were growing, and that a vast number of customers were eager to buy whatever they could afford. The populations of Western Europe and America were growing rapidly, and literacy was on the rise thanks to burgeoning industrial economies and a spreading doctrine of the value of education—even for the poor, in the United States and a few other countries. Urban populations were growing especially quickly, creating vast new markets for newspapers. In 1780, a French chemist named Aimé Argand, knowing how much this new urban, literate citizenry must crave more hours to read, developed a clever lamp that burned as much as ten times brighter than a candle. By the end of the century, the darkness of night had been driven back more violently than it had been in millennia, and the time taken from it was used mainly to consume the printed word.

      Soon other chemists, mechanics, and printers were devoting themselves to finding ways to lower the costs of producing those words. For generations, most printers had been able to press about one hundred pages in an hour, the fastest printers double that, scarcely enough to keep up with the growing market. An Englishman, Charles Stanhope, worked out a new press in 1800 that more than doubled that, but then a German outdid him: Friedrich Koenig developed a steam-powered press that put out over a thousand pages an hour. The Times of London, its circulation already the highest in the world, inaugurated the Koenig press in 1814; two years later Koenig sold them another press that could print on both sides of a sheet simultaneously, instantly doubling productivity. The Times instantly longer and come pouring out of the presses earlier in the morning, while its price dropped. The newspaper for the masses was born.

      During the same decades, paper production was being speeded through chemistry and steam-powered pressing machines, raising supplies and lowering prices. Some quality was sacrificed as the new methods of processing and bleaching rag-paper left it less supple, more likely to tear or to break with age. But the appetite for words and information far outweighed that for nice paper. Soon magazine and book printers were switching to steam printing and cheaper paper, discovering vast new markets for news, articles, and fiction. By the late 1820s, the prices of some English newspapers had dropped to a penny; where the earlier mass-produced newspapers had still aimed for a middle-class and reasonably well educated audience—those who had been interested in newspapers before but curtailed their purchases due to the price or were unable to find them easily enough—these went after an entirely new audience, one that not long before had read little but shop signs, pamphlets, and broadsheets pasted to building walls. Clerks, mechanics, and even those industrial workers who could read began to discover the pleasures of written information and diversion.

      In the span of just a few years, an entirely new reading public had been invented. As the material spread, so did literacy, for the arrival of this cornucopia of entertainment and information stoked a desire to read fluently among people who hadn’t seen much point in it before. Although news led the way, every other form of written diversion quickly followed: gossip, illuminating articles, editorials, humor, fiction, and everything else that had graced the expensive and rather exclusive magazines of the 18th Century, now targeted at broader and less sophisticated audiences. “Story papers” and “story magazines” proliferated, turning fiction from a haute-bourgeois amusement into an industry, a craze, a sweeping common denominator. Publishers quickly discovered the power of the serial to bring readers back, and soon great, sprawling novels began to wend their way like rivers through the magazines, pooling into fat books a few months later.

      This was something new: a mass medium. A new generation grew up on it, shaped by it, making from it a new kind of culture, a mass culture. It worked the way mass culture still works: new media arenas aren’t driven by artistic visions needing a venue. Machines make the arenas just as big as technology and market will allow and then the writers and artists fight to fill them, and to shape them. And as with every new medium since, the audience was in love with the medium itself. So Charles Dickens became its first hero in part because he was the cheap press, in his riverrine productivity, his relentless surge toward undetermined endings, his casts of characters as motley and restive as his still-evolving readership. A readership happy to slog through his swamps of page-filling dribble to reach those peaks of his from which they could scan this sprawling new world that paper and ink were making them part of.
       The flood of cheap publications rose first in England, but it quickly swept across the Atlantic to inundate America’s cities. The American belief in freedom of the press then extended to lax copyright laws, including a complete indifference to the copyrights of Europe. Anything published in London was likely to show up, often riddled with errors but dirt cheap, from pirate printers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore almost as quickly as a ship could cross the sea. British writers and publishers howled, but, as has been the case ever since, nothing could slow the American production of mass culture.

      The typeset word was not the only beneficiary of new technology. A clever young German actor named Alois Senefelder had devised limestone lithography in the last years of the previous century, and over the next few decades it had been refined by sundry hands to become a practical and inexpensive means of mechanically duplicating pictures in large numbers. Lithos were far more expensive than text, but they allowed illustrations in moderately priced books and pictorial covers even on cheap newspapers, making imagery an integral part of the new mass culture. Then, at the end of 1835 a twenty-two year old printmaker’s assistant in New York City named Nathaniel Currier published a lithograph of a dramatic fire that only days before had devoured most of Wall Street; he sold several thousand copies, and the litho became part of the news revolution.

      When two years later, a Frenchman patented “chromolithography”—the use of multiple plates to create an image in different colors—Currier jumped on it instantly with a lurid, two-colored litho of another fire, this one on steamboat. It sold so well that the New York Sun, one of the new generation of mass newspapers, contracted him to supply a chromolitho of some current event every Sunday. Now with a steady supply of capital, Currier turned his energies toward publishing “Cheap and Popular Prints” of whatever type the public wanted, and soon he became the leading figure in a “chromo” craze that swept the nation. He began hiring the most popular artists from the newspapers and magazines to turn out original images of American life and events, and soon was putting out as many as three new images a week and selling over ten thousand prints a year. Countless other printers followed him, plastering the nation with color posters, advertisements, novelty cards, bookplates, and home decorations.

      Meanwhile, the flood of mass print rose higher as inventors and capitalists competed to find ways to exploit a market for cheap publications that seemed to grow faster by the year. In the middle of the 1840s a German engineer named F. G. Keller developed a chemical process for making paper out of trees. Many others had tried before, but it was Keller who realized that wood contained fibers that, if extracted, could be chemically turned into pulp just as rag was. And that wood pulp, just like rag pulp, could be pressed and dried and bleached into paper. That paper was more brittle and easily torn paper than even the cheapest rag paper, and because of its high acidity it would quickly destroy itself in a “slow fire,” likely to turn yellow and fall apart within months. But it was cheaper than rag paper. And as the means of logging and transporting low-grade wood improved—especially in America, as canals were dug and railroads were built into the trackless forests of the hinterland—the price would drop still further. Keller sold his patent for almost nothing and ended his life in poverty; but he had given the world pulp—newsprint—the very stuff of mass culture, the fat, cheap, porous, ephemeral, and universally accessible foundation on which a new world of rapid information and disposable mythology would be erected.

      By the beginning of the Civil War, American publishing had become a giant industry. Fat, prosperous newspapers battled for circulation and political power. Fiction publishers began to organize the production of content along industrial lines. Story papers were increasingly replaced by “dime novels” and “five-cent novelettes” produced by in-house writers to fit a uniform format. A couple of New York printers still in their thirties, Francis Scott Smith and Francis Shubael Street, kept costs down and production smooth by developing a “fiction factory”: on the top floor, clever young men scribbling novels in pencil, every one a hodgepodge of formula and plagiarism; editors at neighboring desks, plowing rapidly through pages to catch the most incomprehensible passages and the most egregious violations of audience expectations; on the floor belong them the typists and typesetters; and on the ground floor the ceiling-high stacks of paper the ever-whirling presses, and the stitching machines that bound the books. No plot or word left the building between the time it left the writer’s brain and the time it went on sale. And so the American popular-culture factory was born.

      The largest audience for such products were young people, adolescents and yet-unmarried adults of that most broadly literate generation in history, that first generation raised on mass publications. They poured into the towns and cities, putting their rustic backgrounds behind them, filling the ranks of a fast-growing and volatile class: the skilled mechanics and semi-skilled laborers, the clerks and copyists, the  delivery boys, the seamstresses—and the newspaper and print-company employees. Literate and often ambitious, aware of greater economic and social possibilities through promotion or marriage, vastly more cosmopolitan and invested in the future and the greater world than the farmers and manual laborers who sired them, and yet still shut out from affluence, property, and social power, they were a complex and heterogeneous, an optimistic and restless bunch.

      They shared a vast appetite for news of social scandal and sensational crime, and for loud, simple fiction that could be ingested in a few gulps on ferry rides, during lunch breaks, and in the brief evenings after long, exhausting workdays. They liked stories of the criminal underworld and the wild west; they liked tales of lethal jeopardy and last-minute rescues, fistfights and wrestling matches with innocent lives at stake, death and tears offset by romantic awakenings, fires and raging rivers, depravity banished by virtue, occasionally the crack of a gun or the thunder of cannons. They liked their heroes young, brave, and forward-looking; in the wake of the Civil War they especially loved stories of young men coming to the city to seek their fortunes.

      So, as the children of American farms and the escapees of impoverished Europe flowed into the cities, as the city of New York surged like dirty floodwaters up the length of Manhattan, a great wave of printed words and images rose with them.  Booksellers sprang up everywhere. A new institution, the newsstand, peddling newspapers, magazines, and cheap books, began popping up on the street corners like mushrooms. A few voices rose in alarm, mostly the same voices that expressed fears of immigration, unbridled growth, epidemic disease, the growing armies of the poor, and moral decay, the voices of those invested in a more homogeneous and less volatile America. With sensation and titillation as selling points, they knew that much of what saw print must violate the bounds of decency.

To be continued...

The New Scourge

Another excerpt from the book in progress, The Undressing of America. Young Tony Comstock has just arrived in New York from small-town Connecticut in 1868.

Nothing in Comstock’s life had prepared him for New York City.

      The city was exploding in size, from half a million in 1850 to nearly nine hundred thousand by the late 1860s. And nearly a quarter of those nine hundred thousand people had been born in Ireland, most of them to the rural poor. Other foreigners were pouring in too, especially Germans, tens of thousands a year, most of them as Catholic as the Irish.

      The city grew rapidly, ruthless northward, but no amount of construction could keep up with the population. Vast shantytowns sprang up at the edges of the new neighborhoods and old neighborhoods were overbuilt by denser new dwellings, or old buildings were carved up into tenements. Wide swaths of the city fell prey to such overcrowding, neglect, and poverty that living conditions in them approached the unendurable: open sewers, backyard livestock pens and open-air slaughterhouses, hundreds of people living in windowless basements, defecating in the corners, falling prey to the waves of cholera, malaria, and tuberculosis that swept through the city. Descriptions of the city speak of filth in the streets—human feces, animal feces, sometimes the offal of slaughtered pigs—filth sometimes so thick that a man couldn’t walk through it without it slopping over his shoes. And they speak of a brutal, inescapable stench.

       Crime ran rampant. A growing army of abandoned and orphaned children survived largely by theft, and violent gangs grew up to run graft and extortion rings in the rougher neighborhoods. From those neighborhoods came political power, too. Just three years before Comstock arrived, immigrant workers had rioted violently against the draft, paralyzing the city for weeks. Fear of another insurrection haunted the established classes. Tammany Hall and its Democratic machine had been amassing more and more power through the decades of immigration, and the year after the draft riots it had cemented its power over the city’s politics by getting one of its own elected mayor. Boss Tweed became a hero to some and the embodiment of ruin to others. Political corruption became business as usual. Laws were increasingly enforced on a pay-as-you-go basis.

      Prostitutes lined some streets and bordellos others. Female poverty, official corruption, and a great number of unmarried workingmen guaranteed that prostitution would be a big business. Sophisticates considered prostitutes part of the local color, writers and artists—Walt Whitman among them—were fascinating by the figure of the whore, and guides to sporting houses were sold openly throughout the city. Other industries sold sex too: a great vogue in those years were the “pretty waiter girl saloons,” restaurants and watering holes that replaced the traditional male waiter with women hired for their looks whose job it was to bring men in and keep them buying. Theaters were popping up everywhere, and more and more entertainments advertised their beautiful actresses and dancers. Local gossip was filled with tales of rich men trolling the restaurants and theaters for women who were willing to be kept.

      Tony Comstock found all of it alarming, but at first he seemed most troubled by the ubiquitous saloons. New York had always been a hard-drinking city, but now whatever attempts the more upright city elders made to control the number of drinking establishments were swept aside by the rising political and cultural power of the Catholics. Young Comstock had known drinkers all his life, but in Connecticut he had been able to draw a clear line in his mind between the rude farmers and workers who thrived on cheap liquor and the teetotalers who dominated the social, religious, and political community. The mongrel world of the city, where Catholics and sophisticates of all classes and vocations imbibed without shame, made him worry for the fate of the city and the nation.

      He heard those fears echoed often among the people he knew. The idea that New York was in a catastrophic moral decline grew as the city grew; for not only were more Catholic foreigners arriving to change its mores, but more small-town Protestants were arriving to be horrified.

       Countervailing currents, though, surged through the city’s consciousness too. Talk of reformation, of cleansing and uplift and reconstruction, was everywhere. The tremendous growth of the city had brought tremendous challenges, including sanitation issues at a scale America had never before had to deal with. Sewer systems were overtaxed almost as soon as they were built. No aqueduct had been built capable of bringing adequate water to the burgeoning population, and so the island was dotted with pools and reservoirs that became breeding grounds for cholera and malaria.

      Now, with the war over and vast reserves of public money and manpower freed up for other ends, monumental public works were launched, most prominently a new, interrelated system of aqueducts and sewers. New York’s civic conversations were dominated by talk of bringing in clean, pure water and sweeping out filth. And as the resources dedicated to war were now turned to the physical improvement of urban life, so were the moral energies that had been devoted for years to abolition and the preservation of the republic now brought to bear on uplifting the city’s moral life. With slavery removed as the principle evil for ministers, reformers, and evangelical organizations to battle, new attention was brought to the evils of alcohol, sexual license, the exploitation of women, and the neglect of children.

      A movement to take care of children and young men who were left without resources by poverty, or by parental death or neglect, had spread from England to America in the 1840s and ‘50s, most notably in the form of the Children’s Aid Society. Tony Comstock approved of their work. The thrill of reform coursed through him as intensely as did his revulsion at vice.

      It was another English transplant, however, that spoke most to him: the Young Men’s Christian Association, dedicated to “Improving the spiritual, mental, social and physical condition of young men.” Its principal concerns were men like Tony and like the men he saw around him at work and in his boardinghouse, men who’d come alone to the big city and were especially vulnerable to its seductions. It was the New York branch of the YMCA that would give Tony Comstock his next mad dog to kill, and so doing give him his purpose in life.

      It was the YMCA that drew his attention to a new scourge threatening the young, a scourge that he found more alarming than alcohol, prostitution, crime, poverty, cholera, syphilis, Catholics, and rabies: publishing.

To be continued...

The Undressing of America: Opening

After months of diligently avoiding the blogosphere, having finally, actually finished a fairly polished draft of the first chapter of The Undressing of America, I've decided to start posting excerpts to see what people think. This is how it will begin, not counting whatever I write as an introduction... until either I or my editor decides that it has to change.

Although the great forces of history are most likely immune to the acts of any individual will, and most of what we like to see as turning points are probably, really, the first manifestations of movements already bound to happen, still it’s interesting to speculate on how the cultural history of America may have turned on the shooting of that rabid dog in Winnipauk, Connecticut in the late summer of 1862. There were other events to the south that had a more obvious impact on the nation’s course and no doubt deserve the much greater attention historians have given them—the Battle of Antietam and President Lincoln’s first Emancipation Proclamation to name a couple—but even so, what happened inside the soul of one young man when he leveled his gun, not at a Confederate soldier but at a drooling mastiff, would echo through the next five decades and beyond.

          

       Tony Comstock was eighteen years old. Just six months before he had left New Canaan, one of those Congregationalist communities scratched by sheer puritan zeal out of the thin New England soil over a hundred years before, now withering slowly as the wealth of America moved to more temperate, more southerly, and more secular climes, to seek better fortunes in the mill town of Winnipauk, burgeoning with the recent arrival of a railroad link to the coast and the rest of the world. Tony was less interested in worldly fortune than in serving the austere God whose spirit had informed every joy and sorrow of his childhood, every lowering winter sky and hard row of sod and tender spring shoot of barley on his now lost family farm; but he had obligations. His mother had died when he was ten, his father had vanished while chasing another of his financial pipe dreams, and his older brother had gone to war to end the evil of slavery; his younger sisters were living with relatives, and Tony’s income provided their keep.

          In those six months, Tony had already impressed his Winnipauk neighbors with his energy, industry, and earnestness. Tony was, above all things, earnest. His round face, nascent jowls, full chest, and thick legs made him look several years older than he was. His air of complete devotion to every task he undertook, the gravity he brought to discussions of morals and politics, his obvious love of little children, and his unquestioning willingness to lend his energies to anyone who needed help made him seem older still. So it was that when rumors shot through the town of a mad dog on the loose, Tony was among the first men asked to hunt it down.

          This was not a request made lightly. Rabies was one of the great terrors of nineteenth century American life. There was no cure, or any treatment known other than washing the wound (which many people dismissed as superstitious nonsense anyway), and the contracting of it was a sentence to agonizing death, inevitable from the appearance of the first symptom. Reported cases had been rising since early in the century; although to what extent that reflected the genuine spread of an epidemic as opposed to the rise of a terror within the national imagination is hard to ascertain. America’s canine population surged exponentially along with its human population, and the ever-quicker flow from farms to towns and towns to cities brought dogs, like their owners, into closer contact. So epidemics are spread.

          But times of change stir their own special nightmares, too. In communities like those of New England, where once-homogeneous societies found themselves increasingly disrupted by rapid economic and population shifts, where the moral and philosophical control of the founding churches was being steadily eroded by spreading secularism and free thinking, the idea of the loyal family dog turning suddenly into an agent of death was a compelling one. Common belief held that the first symptom of rabies was a sudden mania, a feverish energy, a frantic and directionless roaming: canine echoes of the unbridled human ecstasies that earlier generations of New Englanders had read as products of witchcraft. Many a cry of “mad dog” went up before the creature in question had a chance to show the insatiable thirst and foaming chops that would have proved it to be rabid; and many a dog surely died for no more than a bout of uncharacteristic energy or anxious restlessness.

      This dog, this Winnipauk mastiff, was doubly damned, because it belonged to a saloonkeeper. Tony Comstock was well aware of this particular saloonkeeper. He not only sold the Devil’s drink to mill workers and railroad men, preying like all saloonkeepers on the loneliness of men who had left behind their families, their home towns, and their native churches; he sold it also to women and children. Tony had heard stories of the man exchanging gin and cider for groceries, even with women, even with mothers of young children. Already the man spread dissolution and destruction through liquor, indifferent to the lives of the innocent. That he would do the same in an even viler manner by leaving his dog untethered and unwatched was only to be expected.

      Tony was one of two young men working at the general store when a neighbor burst through the door and cried for help. Both boys took guns from the store’s stock, poured powder into the muzzles, and rammed home bullets. One bullet per gun, and poor guns at that; every decent weapon in New England had gone south to the war. Facing a mad dog, a man could hope to kill it with his first shot or hope the beast didn’t charge him if he missed, because no man could reload faster than a dog could close a gunshot’s distance between them. Tony fell to his knees and prayed for courage. Then he stood and strode to the door. When he held the door open for his fellow worker, he saw the boy still standing at the counter. He’d lost his nerve. Tony stepped into the street alone.

      Finding the dog was not a complicated task: wherever other people ran from, Tony walked to. Soon enough he marched alone through the streets (or so he would always tell the story), watched from doorways and windows by terrified men, women, and children. He saw the dog at the end of a street. It turned toward him as he brought the gun to his shoulder. He fired his single shot, and the cur dropped. His fellow citizens began streaming toward him, thanking and praising him. He admitted later that he enjoyed their adulation. But his greatest pride, he said, was that “I killed it before a single child could be bitten.”

      Tony went straight back to work at the store, knowing that his Lord wanted a man to attend to his work as earnestly as to the protection of innocents, but not many hours had passed before he found his day interrupted again. Another dog had been seen racing through the schoolyard at the other end of town, and it too appeared to be rabid. Evidently the saloonkeeper’s dog had already begun to spread its illness before it could be killed. This time the townspeople turned to no one but young Comstock to deliver them.

      Again Tony loaded the gun. Again he tracked down the dog by forging upstream against the terror of his neighbors. Again he fired his single shot. But this time he missed. The dog wheeled and charged at him. Tony had no time even to hope to reload, but he did not run. He asked guidance of God as the beast bounded closer. Then God answered, in the sound of a gunshot. This time, one of the men watching from a window had his own rifle ready. The dog crumpled and fell at Tony’s feet.

      That evening, Tony hiked back to his small, bare room as a local hero. He had proved himself to be not just a young man who could track and kill a mad dog, but one who would stand steadfast, unarmed, as a mad dog charged him. But his was not the unfurrowed brow of the hero who knows his battle is won. He knelt and thanked his Lord for this opportunity to protect the women and children of Winnipauk from unimaginable horror. And yet, that mission seemed scarcely completed. For the first cause of the horror was not the saloonkeeper’s dog but the saloonkeeper himself. Even as the dog ran wild, spreading its madness and physical corruption, its master sat in his den spreading his own madness and corruption. His poison worked more slowly, but it would spread death among women and children even more widely and for far longer.

      Tony sought guidance from his own Master, and the truth came instantly clear: the dogs had been only his calls to arms. His true battle was against the man.

       The next morning, Tony went to the sheriff and told him everything he had heard about the saloon, including the rumor that the owner had no legal license. The sheriff didn’t deny the charge, but he also didn’t seem inclined to do anything about it. The saloon was a popular local service, and clearly there was no political gain to be had in shutting it down at the insistence of an outraged stockboy still years shy of voting age.

      Tony left him in a rage. He knew the damage wrought by men who would not do their duties: his own father had repeatedly abandoned his family to chase financial phantasms, leaving little Tony to be his mother’s support, until that neglected woman had died and left Tony with no one to look after him but God and the church. This man who would not use his authority against vice was as guilty as the purveyor himself. And if civil authority could not be trusted to do good, then a higher authority must be invoked.

      “I wish to buy some apples,” Tony boomed as he stepped through the saloon door. The owner told him that he didn’t sell fruit. But Tony paid no attention to his answer, because he was casing the saloon. He took note of the big, wooden, fauceted kegs that held nearly the man’s entire stock, and he took note of the windows nearest them.

      He stole back under the darkness of night. He waited to be sure that he was alone on the street and that no lamps burned in nearby windows. Then he grabbed one of the saloon’s window shutters and, with all the power of his solid torso and unblinking faith, he tore it free. He climbed through into an even deeper darkness. His memory led him to the kegs, where he felt along until he found a faucet. He opened it full, then groped his way to another. The air filled with the hiss and stench of cider, gin, and whiskey gushing to a dirt floor. When that sound subsided, and Tony could only hear the splash of his boots in the man’s foul stock, he wrenched the kegs off their struts and sent them rolling across the floor. He felt the walls until he found bottles and mugs, and he smashed those against the shelves. At last he found the counter and laid on it a note he had written earlier that day: if the man did not abandon this evil business, it warned, then next time the Lord may bring down the entire building.

      Such attacks were not yet established tactics of the religious battle with alcohol: Carry Nation was then just a sickly fifteen year old wheezing in bed in rural Missouri, still twenty years from her saloon-smashing days. This was simply what Tony Comstock knew God wanted. He went to bed that night with the “same consciousness of having done a good job completely that was felt when the first dog lay dead and harmless.”

      He had found the one thing that, for the rest of his life, would give him true pleasure and satisfaction: stopping mad beasts and moral disease before they could destroy the innocent.

        When his brother died at Gettysburg, Tony’s extended family  expected him to enlist to take his place—that’s what good New Englanders did—but for seven months Tony ignored the call. His brother’s death seems not to have affected him terribly; lifelong Tony would bond strongly with women, especially women like his mother and sisters, whom he could protect or depended on him, but he built no strong ties with other men. He also showed little interest in the war itself, or in any political or moral issues beyond his local battles. He finally went off to war in the spring of 1864, with the Confederacy already in retreat.

      Like any Congregationalist, the young Comstock saw slavery as an evil, but the battle for abolition seems to have been too abstract for him to care much about it. In the diary he kept during his year of service, he never mentioned the larger issues of the war and tripped lightly over the tiny bit of action he saw, instead writing mainly of his relentless efforts to organize prayer meetings and urge his fellow soldiers to attend. He was frequently “twitted” for lecturing his fellows on the evils of alcohol and nicotine, and once rather violently hazed, but he never stopped. Usually he enjoyed arguing and took a special satisfaction in calmly standing his ground when vastly outnumbered. He railed against his own weakness when he fell into wrath or self pity over the twits and insults of these men who knew not what they did.

      When the war ended, Tony returned to Connecticut, but there was little there now to hold him. His sisters were growing up, he was not close to his extended family, and he had no real friendships. His closest bond had always been with his mother Polly, the one person he believed had loved him truly and completely. When the judgment of New Canaan had descended on the family for his father’s inconstancy, it was Polly who had protected him. He often said that her memory was his most constant companion, and that when he fought to defend the innocent he wanted to give them the protection his mother had given him. But having let other relatives take over the family farm during the war, his last physical connection to her had been severed. A year after the war, jobless and nearly penniless, he asked a family friend for help.

      No young man with Tony’s energy should stay in Connecticut, the man said. In the wake of the war, too many men were competing for too few jobs. But a great boom was coming. Huge industries had been springing up before the war, and now they would be making up for lost time. The West about to be opened: the two ends of the transcontinental railroad had stretched to within a few hundred miles of one another. Any young with ambition should be heading for the center of the nation’s business and finance: New York City. The man even offered to give Tony money to stake him. He could only afford five dollars, but that was more than Tony had. And so, in the summer of 1866, the twenty-two year old Tony Comstock arrived in America’s biggest city with three dollars and forty cents in his pocket.

      Very quickly, he discovered that other young men had left Connecticut for New York, and countless others had left every other state in the union. There were jobs, but there were men lined up for every one. After days of dogged searching he secured a place as a shipping clerk at a dry goods company. Unable to afford to live in New York itself, he had to take a cheap room in the neighboring city of Brooklyn and commute by ferry.

      Nothing in Comstock’s life had prepared him for New York City.

To be continued...

 

This is not a blog post

Well, it worked. I finished that very rough draft of my book by my deadline, and I see three main ways I got it done:

1. I just got really, really sick of not getting it done.

2. I enlisted the encouragement and nagging of friends, including a set of high-stakes incentives with one of them.

3. I stayed off my blog, my Facebook page, Twitter, and every other "internet presence" I have.

      The last of those tools was so helpful than now that I'm technically free to come back to my blog and strut, I'm not going to. I want to keep my focus going into the rewrite, which will be a longer and no less demanding job.

      Hardly a week goes by that I don't hear or read someone telling me that a writer these days needs to be running a regular blog and keeping a lively presence on all the social media. Maybe that'll make sense when I have a book about to come out and not a book doing everything it can think of not to get written. But when I look around, most of the writers I admire for their productivity and quality don't keep up much of an "internet presence." I just looked at Michael Chabon's website: a caricature of his latest book's cover, a skeletal appearances calendar, a few goofy pictures, and three uncollected essays, complete with typos. Why does he have no blog, no news, no discussion? Why does he have no Facebook page or Twitter account? Because the little fucker's getting his work done, that's why.

      That's why I'm not posting today. And why I'll be back soon to tell you more about why I'm not posting then either.

Interview

Just making an exception to my no-blog policy to plug an interview with me about the new graphic novel and related social issues on Examiner.com by Sona Avakian. It was fun to do, and I like how she pulled it together. It's here.

What It Really Takes

Although it is undeniably true that in this competitive, interactive, media-driven era every writer who hopes to succeed must maintain a presence in the blogosphere, it is also undeniably true that in this competitive, interactive, media-driven era every writer who hopes to succeed has to get his goddamn work done. Which is an easy fact to ignore as the rationalizations to blog and tweet and facebook come thick and fast, and so we find ourselves in that rue-inducing cycle of never finishing our books because we're so busy promoting the books that we hope to sell once we finish them.

      Sometimes it takes an ultimatum to get us to open that internet-blocking application (MacFreedom for me) and withdraw from the constant fix of networking and stay buried deep in that Word file until the writing is done. Bringing with it relief and excitement and fear, such an ultimatum has come to me. Terms were offered and I've accepted: by the end of October I have to finish the first full draft of this book. It can be a brutally rough draft, but a draft of the whole thing it has to be.

      That's a lot of writing. It's not a sure thing. But if I succeed I'll rewarded by far more than a sense of accomplishment, and if I fail I'll miss an opportunity to pursue something that I very much want to pursue. It's what I needed, this combination of carrot and stick; they say rewards are more effective than punishment for creative motivation, but I know from experience that it's too easy to be philosophical about not getting something extra, and that what I also need to keep pushing me is the fear of losing something I truly value.

      I won't be blogging until it's done. Wish me luck.

The Romance of Junk

I was sitting at a bar and grill on Michigan Avenue, eating a blue-cheese loaded iceberg wedge and drinking a basil-infused gimlet, taking notes in my eating a blue-cheese loaded iceberg wedge and drinking a basil-infused gimlet, taking notes in my little Moleskine notebook while the guide to the Chicago Art Institute that I'd been using as a bookmark lay on the table next to it. In small-talking the waiter I said I was from San Francisco and I'd come to Chicago because my son was attending G-Fest, a convention for Godzilla fans. We shared a smile: oh, those crazy kids, ha ha ha. Overall, I was doing a very good impersonation of an adult.

      But ten days later I was at the San Diego Comic Con, and I wasn't with my son. True, I had a graphic novel to promote, one that sprang from a web comic commissioned by a nonprofit advocacy group. I could try to pretend that that's the only reason I was at Comic Con, but that wouldn't explain the twenty-six straight years I'd been there before this one.

      I get why my son loves Godzilla and all his fellow kaiju. And it's not just that he's huge and destructive and free of the constrictions of society and all those other virtues I wrote about in Killing Monsters. It's that he's junk. He's chuckled at by the rest of the world, and Nicky is part of a select group who understand that there's something valuable in that junk, who can tell you why the guy who directed Mothra is better than the guy who directed Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster and why YMSF makes more accurate vinyl monster toys (or "figures," if you will) than Bandai and how the composer of the best Godzilla soundtracks consciously combined Western symphonic music with Japanese folk ballads and why the American Godzilla movie really sucks.

      I was that way with comics before they had a cachet, when comic cons drew only a few thousand obsessive guys and a few dozen embarrassed girlfriends. I liked discovering artistry in a medium completely dismissed by the world at large. I liked being able to take one look at a comic book page and recognize the artist, and somehow it meant more that hardly anyone beyond the confines of that convention center would even know his name. It wasn't just about finding a community and setting myself apart, either, although those were both part of it. It was also about coming to rescue of the junk. It was about saving great junk from the garbage and telling those obscure artists and writers that someone noticed. And it was about discovering gems that lay right under the noses of the mavens of culture but that they could never recognize.

      That's part of what's drawn me to The Undressing of America. Because while comics have gone cool and even Godzilla has his conventions and fanzines, no one is championing the confessional magazines. No one is arguing for the importance of true crime magazines. No one tells the stories of the men who created the tabloids. It isn't even that I like the things as works. Far more even than in superhero comics and monster movies, the glimmers of artistry there are lost in a sea of hack work. Read ten True Story articles in a row and my brain goes numb.

      But as cultural forces they mattered. As historical capsules they're rich. As threads in the American story they deserve far more attention than they get. When cultural historians write about the history of magazines in the Twenties they wax about the New Yorker and Mencken and Time, with perhaps an obligatory nod to the Readers Digest and the Saturday Evening Post. But naive, tatty, neglected True Story reached more people than any of them and did at least as much to change the cultural and social landscape. I like digging them out from under the piles of better-respected magazines that have been stacked on top of them for decades. In comic-fan terms, I like discovering them at the back of the quarter box.

Hot Wind

Where am I? The Central Valley of California has a real geography, of farm roads and rivers and cities, but the the long, thin twilight zone of Interstate 5 has only its own reference points: about an hour downwind from the doomed, stinking cattle of Harris Ranch, between the two closed state rest areas, past the towering diesel sign, still a long way from Starbucks.

      I love driving through the valley for itself, but I may love this weird road more. I love the light and I love the wind. Coming out from under the cool, foggy July of San Francisco, I especially love the wind. Hot and solid, pushing on me and stirring me to push back. It makes me want to write, too. Notes on the book, a blog post typed in a parking lot and uploaded through a truck stop wi-fi.

      I know a lot of people who find that the gray calm of San Francisco makes them want to draw inside—inside their offices and their heads—to write. I have a hard time keeping my focus and energy in gray calm. It's in the noisiest and most public places and the most aggressive weather that I find myself wanting to work. Maybe it's because, when I was young and felt myself trapped in a chilly fog of a life, writing was the way I found to push my way out and engage with the world. As private an act as it is, in my gut it excites me most when it pulls me out of myself. When it knocks me around and agitates me like the valley wind.

Whirlwinds and Work

It's been a crazy stretch: London and Chicago, friends in from out of town, a film festival and more travel coming, a book coming out, multiple projects to juggle. In times like these, especially when I'm traveling, my mind seems to jump to a new level of nimbleness. I've had a series of insights into this book that I'm sure will make it better, that make me impatient to finish this thing so the world can see how brilliant it is.

      But hardly any writing gets done. And in the calmer stretches where the writing does get done, my emotions settle and my brain narrows its focus. The book becomes once again a series of truculent sentences that refuse to work quite the way I want and long narrative stretches that I already have well enough in mind that bright insights and new directions would be only distractions. In those times I'll settle for a paragraph that makes sense and don't ask any more of the book than that it be coherent and reasonably interesting.

      This is the constant paradox of this work, and I think much of the reason that books can take so much longer to write than I expected and so often seem in danger of not being finished at all. When I'm most in love with the book I don't actually move it forward. And the act of moving it forward is automatically a let down. It's so much easier to stay in the whirlwind, reveling in my epiphanies and looking forward to this book that will be so good when it's written someday.

      There are those times, of course, when the laying down of sentences is in itself exciting, when the discovery of solutions to small narrative problems is nearly as much fun as those flashes of inspiration and quickly scribbled notes on the London tube. Those are nice times, but they don't show up on command. Mostly I just have to keep a bit of that fire of inspiration burning like a little pilot light as I push forward, remember that there will come a point, after enough hard work, when the words on the page will actually live up to the excitement of those insights snatched from the whirlwind.

How Did I Get Into This?

My friend Meghan Ward wrote a post on her blog Writerland (one of my favorite blogs on writing and publishing) called "My Writing Journey," in which she describes how, starting at the age of six and proceeding through a series of adventures, misadventures, wrong turns and right turns, she ended up deciding to be a writer. Then she asked readers to share their own writing journeys, which got me thinking: how did I end up here?

      As a narrative, my story seemed pretty lacking compared to Meghan's. Hers is full of twists and turns, stabs at other careers, the recurrent siren call of writing, all the things you want in a good life journey. Mine had some build up, then one sharp moment and there I was. But it's a story I've never heard exactly from anyone else, and maybe that alone makes it worth telling.

      I was one of those kids who is compelled to tell stories from his earliest years. On family hikes I'd pour out inchoate adventures endlessly to anyone who would listen (which was always my dad; it must have been his military training that enabled him to endure what drove everyone else insane). I drew pictures on my Playskool blocks in narrative sequence, like comic strips, and then lined them up on the floor to see how long—physically long—I could make a story. And when I figured out how to use the alphabet, the first thing I did with it was add dialogue to my picture stories.

      I didn't read much, at least not as much as most writers say they did as kids. It was the pouring out, not the taking in, that drove me. Sometimes I'd love a book but read only until I got an idea for a story of my own, then drop it and start writing.

      Here the nature-nurture loop gets complicated, as it always does, because I was also enthusiastically supported in my writing by my mom. Her heroes were writers: poets and playwrights, mostly, but novelists too, even the better genre writers. Shakespeare was as close to a god as we had in our household, but Ray Bradbury got his share of veneration too. So I grew up with the idea that a writer was quite a noble thing to be.

      It was only later that I learned my mother had wanted to be a writer before I was born, and had even gotten a short story published, before she lost her drive and became an English teacher instead. We do pass on our unfulfilled dreams.

      By fifth grade I was already identifying myself partly by my ability to write longer and more elaborate short stories than any other kid in the class. But when adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I still had a wide range of answers. I carried the fantasy of illustrating nature books into my teens. I think, really, I saw writers as some other class of being, like kings and astronauts, who we admired from afar but could never become.

      Then, at fourteen, I read a book called A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. For the next year I experienced my first real literary infatuation, checking out and buying everything by him I could find. In the course of that I made a fateful mistake: I bought a book that said Edgar Rice Burroughs, Master of Adventure on the cover, thinking it was another novel. Instead, it was a biography of Burroughs written by Richard Lupoff.

      It was the first time I'd read a biography, and the first time I'd had a sense that these marvelous creatures called writers actually had lives, apart from the few dramatic events my mother had passed on (Christopher Marlowe being stabbed to death, Keats hiking all over Britain and then getting sick and dying). Realizing that this writer I loved had parents and a childhood, could have been other things but decided to write a book, had to send his book out to publishers and worked other jobs to pay the bills before he could write full time, made me think that maybe "being a writer" was an attainable human goal.

      Still, though, I didn't think of making a living as a writer, I think mostly because I didn't want to think about making a living. Really, I didn't want to think about being an adult at all. I was quite happy walking around lost in my own head and touching ground only long enough to eat the food that my parents put in front of me. That was an easy state to maintain for my fifteenth year, because I spent the whole year hanging around the house. I'd been unhappy in school and my mom, being a bit too averse to facing reality herself, just pulled me out.

      But reality does come calling. The summer I turned sixteen we were going to be moving to a new town and I'd be entering a new high school. Since the only school I'd been in since seventh grade was a tiny "free school" in the Santa Cruz Mountains with no classes or even classrooms, plunging into a public high school as a junior was a terrifying prospect. It got me thinking about the fact that there was, inevitably, an adulthood ahead of me. Which included, someday, having to earn my own living.

      One day in late spring, with my house being readied for sale and the onset of summer weather announcing that the great change was imminent, I was walking my dog along the creek behind our house—I could still find the exact spot—when I decided that I was going to write fiction for a living. I wouldn't have said this at the time, but that was the best way I could see to avoid reality forever.

      It helped that my role model had had a charmed career: Burroughs's first book sold extremely well, the sequels sold better, books flowed out of him like water from a spring and money fell on him like rain. It seemed to me that all I had to do was sit down and start writing fantasy stories with the intention of getting them published and everything would fall perfectly into place. I would never really have to leave my own head again.

      A few months later I entered Gilroy High School, nearly as out of place among normal American adolescents as if I'd just immigrated from another country. I was scared, but also eager to be liked or at least noticed somehow, so for my defense I used the fact that I was a writer. I was the only kid in school who announced that he wanted to write for a living, the only one who used his spare time to write stories. It didn't take long for my whole identity to solidify around Being a Writer. By the end of high school the idea of Not Being a Writer looked more perilous than anything the writer's life could hold.

      I'd already finished the journey to writing and started the journey I'm still on. And even now when I wonder if I picked the right journey and toy with the idea of ending it to try something new, I know deep down that I never will.

Fathers' Day

My dad lives in a series of old moments, endlessly looping. At the nursing home we talk about sneaking into the Foothill Theater in Oakland, Sea School at the San Diego Marine Base, shenanigans at Waikiki before the war, driving the length of old Highway 61 with an injured dog in the back seat, memories pretty much all recorded by 1950.

      My dad also exists in my own mind a series of old moments. Responding with a genial "Oh yeah?" as I retold funny Bullwinkle lines through the bathroom door, hiking silently up the endless slope to Swiftcurrent Pass as I babbled out some inchoate tale of high adventure I'd just thought of, driving me to see King Kong at a revival house in the depressed heart of San Jose and telling me how he first started noticing that directors had personal styles watching Warner Brothers movies in the '30s (probably at the Foothill Theater he'd just snuck into).

      He was emotionally pretty remote but physically present when I needed him and mentally present when I'd talk about something he cared about. He taught me a lot of little things and two big ones. A certain toughness, an ability to guard yourself just enough so you could keep taking punches until the other guy wore down (there was a Marine Corps story about about that too, the day he earned the nicknamed "Rugged Jones"). And how to see things critically but with affection: why good stories work, how characters come to life, when passions turn phony, how to love what you love no matter what it is. Bullwinkle, King Kong, Gunga Din, Benny Goodman, Ernie Kovacs, Mel Brooks, Moby Dick.

      The first one has gotten me through a lot, although I learned it only half way; because I also picked up my mom's tendency toward self pity and drama, and, really, because I usually learn more by getting hurt than by not. The second, though, that's still central to me. It's what makes me write and how I look at my own writing.

      My dad and I can't share any thoughts about that anymore. We still have Gunga Din, though. That brilliant scene where Cary Grant struts alone into a temple full of murderous Thuggees and calls, "You're all under arrest!" Watching that together, and him making me notice it, is still in his loop of moments and mine.