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A Taste for Trash
by Jacob L. Warner
FOR SOME forty years I have been a faithful and avid reader of trash. Actually, I will read anything, including catsup labels and cereal boxes, but I read more trash than anything else. Of course, I could claim that since about ninety per cent of everything published is trash that this only shows my catholicity, but actually it is more than that. I actively seek trashy reading matter, look for it in bookstores, buy it at newsstands, and check it out of the library.
I guess I ought to define what I mean by trashy reading. It’s not very easy to define; it’s a work in which the writer is practicing artifice and not art. How can one distinguish one from the other? In The Decline of Pleasure, Walter Kerr says art happens when a person speaks sincerely to you. If you hear the true voice of an author, it is art. Obviously that’s not an easy decision either. It is similar to the problem that occurs when a person tells you that he regrets being unable to come to dinner. The person will use the same words whether he is sincere or not, but we do make a judgment about whether he means it or not, and we will continue to invite him even after several refusals if we are sure he means his regrets.
We are very sensitive to false notes although we are unable to pin down precisely what leads us to the judgment. All of us have learned to be wary of snap judgments about people yet they frequently turn out to be sound. We use clues that we are not aware of.
A WORK OF TRASH, then, is a work in which the author is not speaking directly, honestly, and sincerely to the reader.
The best analogy I can think of is a TV commercial. Note that even though the actors are chosen for their ability to look and sound sincere, and the writers are highly skilled, and the commercial receives more concentrated effort than anything else on TV; it does not, for a moment, fool the viewer. Turn the sound down and watch the announcer explain how your friendly oil company has only your welfare at heart. You don’t even need sound to disbelieve him.
The commercial may well cause the viewer to buy the product for some other reason, but he certainly will not believe that the announcer really meant what he so sincerely said. I once overheard a person ask a young man who was acting as a barker for a “topless” joint in North Beach, San Francisco, if he was being paid for his job. The young man said, “You bet I’m being paid, you don’t think I’d say this —- with my own mouth, do you? Trash results when a writer does not speak with his own mouth. At the very minimum, the artist must speak directly to us with his own mouth.
THE TV COMMERCIAL is a good analogy to trashy literature to illustrate another point. Just as it requires a high level of skill to write a successful TV commercial (we all know from books and movies how tough the advertising game is), it is a rare skill that can turn out successful trash reading material. I want to emphasize that there’s nothing easy about writing trash. That’s almost self-evident because really fine trash is a path to instant fame and fortune and that has never been easy.
Also, anyone who has tried writing anything becomes quickly aware that all writing is hard to do. Good or bad, it is a difficult matter. Carol Rinzler in the Washington Post claimed that a great piece of garbage (her name for trash) is as hard to write as a fine first novel, and as much fun to read, and maybe harder to find.
On the other hand, I don’t want to overdo the praise of trash writers. Recently in reading Rabbit Redux, which I rather disliked, I was several times struck by the incredible skill of John Updike. The writers of fine books are better writers than the writers of trash.
You might suppose that incompetence could produce trash, but that’s generally not so. Trash reading material is not a fine book that failed. The boundary between trash and art may be slightly vague and a bit blurry, but usually a book is clearly one or the other, and it must be judged by the standards of its own category. A few fine novelists deliberately invade the trash market for greater fame, more money, or, I often suspect, for the pleasure of writing it.
Graham Greene calls his attempts “entertainments” to distinguish them from his novels. He is, however, one of the few whose lighter attempts blur the boundary between trash and art. There are writers whose trash output I like much better than their serious ones. I much prefer Gore Vidal when he is writing under his Edgar Box pseudonym, although I do not understand why a man who would put his own name on such trash as Myra Brekinridge and Myron would need to use a pseudonym.
ONE OF MY all-time favorite short stories appeared in an advertisement in a women’s magazine. It’s only a hundred words or so and I’d reproduce it here except for copyright difficulties. It’s entitled “Post-Partum Blues” and goes something like this: Marcia, our heroine, a brunette of some young but indeterminate age, finds in the weeks after having her first baby that in spite of her joy in caring for her baby and in spite of her husband’s devoted attention to her, she feels forlorn and blue. Fortunately she has a close neighbor, also a young brunette, who duplicates her experiences and her feelings. One day these two troubled young wives hit upon the very thing to lift them out of the doldrums – they bleach their hair and, to the delight of their husbands, became blondes. Thus does Clairol, or some such, bring well-deserved happiness to people (or at least to young brunettes) in distress.
I OFTEN THINK of this beautiful story as the distilled quintessence of trashy reading. Often the trashy elements of a story are obscured by the action. In this story we see the characters, the conflict, and the denouement very clearly because of classic simplicity of the story. It may not be as exciting as some stories, but it is absolutely perfect in its own way.
Perhaps it would be clearer if I at once specify four whole kinds of reading as trash: (1) whodunits, (2) adventure or romantic adventure, (3) historical novels, and (4) science fiction. Ninety-eight times out of ninety-nine any of the above will be trash. If a work emphasizes things, plots, or situations rather than people, it is likely to be trash.
The first books I remember reading were Ivanhoe and In His Steps. I can’t remember anything about In His Steps except the title, and I found Ivanhoe so tedious and incomprehensible that I’ve always had an antipathy for Scott. The last time I tried to read him must have been thirty years ago; he was then comprehensible but still tedious. For some reason I had no children’s books at all until later when I discovered Tom Swift, Tarzan, and the Hopalong Cassidy westerns. (The latter were quite different from the later movie version.) Then the main difficulty was getting my hands on a sufficient number of these kinds of books. There was neither a public nor a school library, nor was there a bookstore. Not that a bookstore would have done me any good.
I DID KNOW A boy whose parents had bought him a number of Tom Swift and Tarzan books. I read them at a gulp. Not only did I admire the stories of the Tom Swift books, but I can remember consciously admiring the style. A test of good writing was whether one skipped the descriptions (where nothing happened). I would skip these in Zane Grey’s books but never in a Tom Swift. For all I know this may have been because the descriptions of locales and people were about twenty words long. I was, in those days, very impatient with any interruption of the action. Speaking of Zane Grey, was there ever a more myth-evoking title than Riders of the Purple Sage?
Sometime in the mid-1930’s I discovered pulp magazines. I can actually pinpoint the occasion. I was visiting relatives and found a stack of Shadow magazines. For many days I could hardly spare the time to eat. In fact, I was immersed for years in pulps.
Pulps are, or were, the bottom of the trash heap; the only lower reading is comic books. I’m afraid the public’s taste can be judged from the fact that the advent of the comic book was a factor in the demise of the pulps. This is an indication that TV is not responsible for our taste; we’ve always had it. TV is merely the most skillful and effective panderer to appear thus far.
Anyway, when the pulps became unavailable, I was freed to devote myself to higher level trash.
An example of medium-level trash is Erich Segal’s Love Story. I was amused at the indignation expressed by more serious and less successful writers at the success of that book. Segal was not the first to write a medium-level-trash best-seller. In fact most best-sellers are in what I judge to be the medium to top-level trash category. Gone With the Wind is, for instance, a prime example of top-level trash.
WHAT IS THE appeal of trash? Why is it so popular? One good reason is that people have always been fond of stories. That is not to say that non-trash literature does not contain stories, but in trash the emphasis is always on the story, itself, and there is little other reason to read it. Few people intentionally reread a whodunit. They are so imminently forgettable that it is not unusual to be reading one and after a chapter or so gradually realize you’ve been through it before.
If it weren’t trash, your memory of it would likely not be so uncertain. If I ask if you’ve read Lolita, Rabbit Redux, or Breakfast of Champions, it is extremely unlikely that you will be uncertain whether you have read them. Whether you like them or not, you cannot dismiss good books from your memory. Some trash is memorable, but most of it is not.
If someone asks if I’ve read Ellery Queen’s The Murderer is a Fox, I’m likely to answer that I probably have, since, so far as I know, I’ve read all of his books but I can’t recall anything about that specific one. Curiously, even a few hours after reading trash you may be unable to remember any real detail from it. It’s one of the earmarks of trash.
TRASH HAS A definite place in recreational reading. If one is overwhelmed by problems, even temporarily, he may not need the additional problems a good book will inevitably bring. What he may need is completely absorbing trash – science fiction or a whodunit – that leaves no residual emotions or thoughts. The instant he opens the book he sheds his problems for those of the characters in the book, but the moment he closes the book the characters and their problems, neither of which had substance, are forgotten. That’s probably using books as if they were dope, but at least there’s no law against it, and many of us are addicted.
There are times when under mental or physical stress one simply has no stomach for serious thinking. A literal example is afforded by a sea voyage in rough weather. Even if one does not get seasick, he is almost sure to find himself in a state that precludes more than superficial thought. I have wondered if some peculiar shipboard decisions were not the result of this semi-dazed mental state.
It is surely reasonable to argue that the only true recreation (re-creation) can come from works of art and that trash provides only palliatives. The needs of a person, however, are quite diverse, and in a society that tries to measure everything by its utility (we even believe that listening to good music and looking at pictures in an art gallery somehow improves our minds), we need some pursuits that are patently worthless. Reading trash is surely that.
An addiction to trash does not mean that one can not come to read and appreciate good books. Parents mistakenly try to prevent children from what the parents consider excessive reading of comic books by some form of rationing that simply elevates and emphasizes their desirability. The only satisfactory way to overcome bad taste is by surfeit. It may take months or years, but if bad taste is satiated, one may be able to advance, at least temporarily, to better things. If that doesn’t work, nothing will, and one may as well be left, in peace, to wallow.
Long ago I reached the point where almost all science fiction bores me, and in the last few years, whodunits are beginning to pall badly. I still try to read them but if anything else is available I often quit in the middle of one. There was never a time when I cared for historical novels except to scan through them for the predictable sexy parts. It may now be hard to believe that some of the episodes in Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse, for example, were considered to be very hot stuff, indeed. Progress.
The only science fiction I’ve read recently that I’ve been able to finish was Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. Even when I think I’m going to like a science fiction novel, it normally wears thin before midpoint in the story. In fact, it is typical of a science fiction novel to begin strongly and end poorly. It is easier to post a good problem than to find an interesting solution. Clarke’s movie, 2001, is a good example of a story that gradually turns to mush.
IN THE WHODUNIT field I can still read Dick Francis, Nicholas Freeling, Per Wahloo, and Maj Sjowall, H. R. F. Keating, and a few others. Donald Westlake can amuse me with his wackier stories (Bankshot, The Mark) but I can’t stand his anti-hero (Tobin?) stories. For years when traveling on airplanes, I have read the paperbacks of John D. McDonald. His Travis McGee stories are fine examples of trash. The great difficulty is to keep from buying the same ones over and over. Actually, his stories are so similar one would think it might not matter, but once one realizes that he has read a trash book before, all interest immediately vanishes even though he remembers almost nothing about the story.
Walter Coslet, in response to my article on Vonnegut, suggested that I read the science fiction of Roger Zelazny. I have just finished a book of his short stories. I found them to be clever, ingenious, and surprising. But they are low-level trash, and like a sweet table wine soon cloy and overwhelm the appetite. By chance I happened at the same time (approximately, you understand) to be reading a book of short stories, Marriages and Infidelities, by Joyce Carol Oates. What’s the difference? His stories are gimmicks.
They have clever plots, unexpected situations, and a certain dazzle, but there are no real people in them. In the usual science fiction, and in Roger Zelazny’s, people are merely accessories to the plot. In Joyce Carol Oates’s stories the plots are often primitive, but, oh, the people – we’re put into their skins to know, to enjoy, and to suffer with them. The contrast between the two books is so great, it makes me wonder why I bother with trash. Her stories also make me wonder why I bother to try to write stories.
I recently reread Ivan Tergenev’s Fathers and Sons. It also makes a good contrast to trash. I’m not a Turgenev fan, his plot is not so great, the action is of little interest, and the anarchist philosophy seems dull and antique, but if I had to choose between Turgenev’s book and Zelazny’s book for retention for rereading, I would certainly have to choose Turgenev’s. My point is that even for works one doesn’t especially like, art gives a lasting pleasure while artifice is quickly consumed and left empty.
I have always read a few of the good books as well as the ubiquitous trash and simply through long term satiation the ration of good books to trashy books is increasing. In time I may become weaned completely from trashy reading though I rather doubt if it will go that far.
Colophon
Hand set in Deepdene. Display type is Mademoiselle. Initials are Fournier. Published by Jake Warner and 465 copies printed by him on a 10×15 C&P at the Boxwood Press, Greenbelt, Maryland 20770