Looking at Thirty Years’ Writing
by
Nick Tosches

             I write these words on a hot and humid morning toward the end of a dying century, some years after I myself  was written off  and left as dead. As they said, I was not expected to make it through the night. But they did not know that the night was mine.

             I remember the first time, thirty years before that night: cold-cocked unconscious by that bottle of rotgut across my skull, dumped into that city-park lake, and left for dead. I walked out of that dirty water, made it back to the poolroom; thirty years later, walked out of that dirty hospital, made it back to the bar. It was all one night.

 Somewhere, early on, in the course of that river of dark night, I became a writer. It seemed an unlikely thing. In my neighborhood, books were not read. There were few books, many bookies. I was discouraged from reading, on the grounds that it would “put ideas in your head.” There was, of course, a certain wisdom in that. Ideas and thought are wretched folly from which few escape. But, then again, one can only go beyond them by going through them. They are the passage that separates the wise guys from the men of wisdom. Sometimes they seemed so close, the wise guys and the men of wisdom. “I don’t do thoughts,” said Eddie D. from the projects. “The Great Tao,” said Ch’an Buddhist Master Niu-t’ou Fa-Yung thirteen centuries earlier, “is free from thought.” So close and yet so far.

 I wrote terrible things. One of my first pinches as a teenager was for stealing books. The sonnets of Shakespeare were in that batch, and it was to be a long time until I finally got to read them; and longer still until I came to perceive at its heart the one line that said it all: “O learn to read what silent love hath writ.” The greatest poetry is wordless. The greatest poets are those blest and humbled by this truth. “I have tried to write Paradise,” Ezra Pound would say near the end of his life’s work: “Let the wind speak / that is paradise.” To learn to read what silent love hath writ, to bow to the power of the breezes. To embrace these things is to live, and to know that what one can write is as nothing before that silence and that power is to begin to write. Fa-Yung again: “How can we obtain truth through words?”

 These were things I came to understand only after the long night yielded to light.

 But, anyway, there I was boosting books. I couldn’t tell the bad from the good. I kept trying to read and to like Moby Dick, but I never succeeded and felt that it was my failing. How could I become a writer if I didn’t “appreciate” the great American novel? If it was, as they used to say, over my head? So I pretended that I read and liked it, and, over the years, I may have even conned myself into believing it. In the end, I simply embraced the sad truth that it wasn’t much of a book at all. In 1829, aboard the whaling ship Susan, Frederick Myrick of Nantucket, the first scrimshander to sign and date his work, had etched into the tooth of a sperm whale all to which Melville had so beautifully aspired: “Death to the living,” reads the scrimshaw, “long life to the killers.” And that is that. Melville never escaped from the passway of thoughts and ideas; Myrick may never have entered it. As much as I admire Melville and his vision and what he wanted and tried to do, it is Myrick’s scrimshaw that speaks to the ages. And whence did Myrick steal those words? The true originators are lost to us. How many centuries, how many millennia, before Sappho did someone behold the dawn and see it “rosy-fingered”? As Qoheleth/Ecclesiastes had it: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” And who knows whence he stole that one from, and whence who before him.

Immature writers plagiarize, mature writers steal. Looking through the pieces that The Nick Tosches Reader comprises—and, believe me, that is all I can bear to do: look, and not read, through them—it strikes me that, while the former, I did the latter. Above all, I stole from myself. Words and phrases that enamored me, whether I had come upon them or they had come to me from within, were endlessly repeated, recycled, ridden like horses until they were dead. In periodicals published months apart, this modus operandi was not so obvious. Here, with early theft following early theft as page follows page, it is.

So, as I had been a thief in boyhood, I became, while learning to write, a fool of a thief who stole from himself. I wrote five books on a stolen typewriter.

Why did I want to become a writer? It was only a few years ago that the true answer, or what I believe to be the true answer, came to me. I thought of myself as a tough guy. That is to say, I pretended to be a tough guy. Writing, in this regard, seemed a respectable racket. Hemingway and others like him had rendered it so: a manly art. Only after I became a writer, did I come to see this lie for what it was.

I came to writing through cowardice and fear. Deep inside me, I needed to communicate my feelings, and there was no one to whom I could. In the old neighborhood, honest expression was, if not quite the equivalent of a death rap, a sure means to ostracism. Besides, it wasn’t in me. To look someone in the eyes and speak from the heart was beyond me. Writing was a way of communicating without looking anyone in the eyes. It was not a manly art. It was a cowardly art. Then again, maybe the two are the same.

But Hemingway, for all his ridiculous fraud, made money: a lot of it. One of the consummate bend-for-bucks boys, he followed The Old Man and the Sea with a series of similarly written advertisements for Ballantine ale (“I would rather have a bottle of Ballantine Ale than any other drink after fighting a really big fish...”). And that was something that I wanted to do. I’m not talking about writing ad copy or fighting really big fish; I’m talking about making money. I wanted to make money. It was something I needed to do. As I look at—not even through—the periodical pieces at hand, that need is as clear as my thievery. (It was even more clear in looking through the boxes of old tearsheets and yellowed photocopies from which these pieces were culled.) Perhaps the two, the thievery and the need to eat and drink and pay my rent, were entwined. This is said not as an excuse for the wretched writing that may, indeed will by all but the most pitiable, be discerned in the pages of this book. It is said rather as an excuse—granted, pitiable—for my persistence in it.

So there you have it: cowardice, theft, hard times. A true love for the sounds and colors of words, the rhythms and meters of  lines, the evocation through them of the ultimately inexpressible, came later. With it came the true love and awareness of that silence and that wind and the gods and demons they enlaced.

Strangely the presence of the demons seems to increase through this collection as the will to write transmutes into writing, as fear becomes exorcism, as darkness becomes light.

I have chosen to arrange the pieces of this book as time has arranged them, divided not by type—reviews, fiction, essays, poetry, and so on—but left to flow in their natural and telling chronology. Good, bad, poetry, prose, the lot of it, as it came out of me through the last thirty years. Sometimes the chronology is approximate, as I may know the publication date of a piece but have no precise idea of when the piece was written. Nothing has been fixed, nothing rewritten, but, where it has been desirable and possible, titles imposed on pieces by magazine editors have been replaced by the original, unpublished titles. I have decided, not without trepidation, to present an accurate picture of this writer’s journey, through the slum alleys as well as through the high places. I have annotated some pieces, when they brought memories or explications that I felt would illuminate that journey.

I was nineteen years old when I was first paid for writing. Before that, my friend Phil Verso was the only one with whom I shared all of what I wrote. We knew one another since the eighth grade, before the publication of the book that would deliver to me what Moby Dick had failed to do, the book that woke me and freed me and inspired me: Last Exit to Brooklyn, by Hubert Selby, Jr. I was fifteen then; and Selby, who is now a dear friend, continues these many years later to wake me and free me and inspire me in ways that have little or nothing to do with writing. Of the three living writers whom I consider to be great—Peter Matthiessen and Philip Roth are the others—it is Selby whose art and whose soul reach the highest, and it is he whom I most respect, as a writer and as a man.

But before there was Selby, there was Verso. Phil and I ran together, robbed together, got shot at together, drank and took dope together, laughed together. The laughter is what I remember and miss, for everything else seemed for us in those days to end in laughter. All of   what I wrote in those days is long vanished except as tantalizing shards of  half-buried memory; but the laughter of those wicked days still echoes clearly, and, though the echo is forlorn, it is more tantalizing than the shards.

The heart and holy place of our world was Hubert’s Museum on West Forty-second Street. At street level, Hubert’s was a faded pinball arcade and shooting gallery; downstairs there was a freakshow. Outside, in front of the joint, a man, or a boy, could connect with anything. Many of the twisted and surreal little things I wrote were inspired by the twisted and surreal spirit of that place. Phil loved them. I can still see his face, hear his open evil laughter as he read them. He was my conspirator and my first, and therefore most important, supporter. He remained so through the years. Even prison could not kill his laughter, and in later years the words and tales I stole from him were many. When he read my first novel, he recognized himself and exulted that he had “made it as a character in Nick’s book.” His kid brother told me this at Phil’s funeral, a month before what would have been Phil’s fortieth birthday, a few days after Phil went down in “one of those things,” as he used to say, on a hot summer night in Coney Island. I dedicate this book, for what it is worth, to the memory of him.

And here I am, alive, talking of heat and humidity: cut loose from the noose and bitching about the weather. I could go on here and bitch about the nature of the beast of publishing, a rather drab, unimaginative, and unsuccessful form of corporate salesmanship that grows every day more devastating in its mediocrity. But that is like forgetting the noose and dwelling on the weather, for I’ve been more fortunate than most as far as this racket, and life itself, are concerned.

The weather here is always better than it is six feet down. And while I can bitch and moan, the pay is, too.

I’ve spoken of the silence and the wind. But life does not always afford us the luxury of nobility, and there is another lesson that I should like to leave you with. It was taught me by Don Siegel, the movie director, who said that he himself had learned it early in life. If you’re going to be a whore, Siegel told me, be a high-priced whore. For money buys freedom from whoredom, as in ancient Rome it bought freedom from slavery. And without freedom, there is no doing what a writer should do, which is to share and give to others, through what poetry he or she can make, of whatever God has given of the gift of   entering the wisdom and the power of that silence and that wind.