During his worldwide travels of the past three decades, William Vollman, acclaimed author of the National Book Award-winning Europe Central, observed, photographed and talked to many poor people. Regrettably, the 314-page result of his inquiries, Poor People, reveals that Vollman was mostly listening to the noises, preconceived notions, and precious aesthetic theories banging around in his postmodern little head.
Vollman — whose reputation as a demi-god among a few litcrit academicians is only topped by his view of himself — sets out to examine the lives of the poor, but, he tells us, under certain self-imposed conditions. He won’t condescend by living the life of a poor person, he announces, nor will he pull at the non-poor’s heartstrings a la James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which he condemns, in an elitist way, as “elitist.” Vollman’s study, rendered in a collection of essays, is to be a purely aesthetic venture — one in which he “conceive(s) of poverty as a series of perceptual categories.” That’s because, as he blithely reports, “poverty is never political.” I had to read that last statement a few times, just to be sure I wasn’t missing some deeply camouflaged irony. Unfortunately, I wasn’t. He’s serious.
So what does Vollman do? He shows us, in coarse detail, how he met the poor people he writes about, then asks them why they’re poor. That’s the sum total of his reportorial “technique.” Oh, and then he constructs intellectual categories for their condition, such as “Invisibility,” “Deformity,” “Unwantedness,” etc. That’s where Vollman bares his real talent: a knack for turning the obvious into dry abstractions. I can see why he’s popular within current literary academia.
Vollman does include more than 100 photographs of his subjects, many of them beautifully rendered, but he just doesn’t seem able to see the poor people he presents as much more than fodder for his fevered mental wheel-turning — the poor are such “a mystery,” don’t you know? It’s not that he’s never empathetic — after all, he generously concludes that “Poor people are no more and no less human than I” — he’s just not empathetic enough to feel he should do anything for his subjects other than have ideas about them.
Too bad they’re not particularly useful ideas. Not once does Vollman acknowledge the possibility that many people may be poor because of their circumstances of birth, nor does he consider that, for many, those circumstances may be next to impossible to rise above. And since “poverty is never political” (what world is this guy in?), it’s no surprise, either, that he never addresses the issue of what might be done to alleviate his subjects’ situations.
Under the guise of attempting to understand “the poor,” Vollman, in the end, treats them as if he’s reviewing performance art. The result is a dry, unfeeling work masquerading as a serious look at one of humanity’s ongoing dilemmas. I suggest that the next time Vollman wants to over-intellectualize human tragedy, he needn’t produce a puffed up travelogue like Poor People. He can simply stay where he is, his head firmly installed up his dusty butt, and look around.
Finally there’s a good biography of one of the most interesting men to have graced the music business, Doc Pomus. Born Jerry Felder, Pomus wrote hit songs, some with Mort Shuman (“Lonely Avenue,” “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “Little Sister,” “Young Blood,” “Viva Las Vegas,” “This Magic Moment,” “Suspicion,” and lots more), for artists ranging from Dion and Presley to the Drifters, Led Zeppelin and Lou Reed. (Reed’s album Magic and Loss was inspired by Pomus’ death in 1991.)
Pomus’ life makes for a great story. He contracted polio at age seven and needed leg braces and/or crutches to get around the rest of his life, a life that was always about music. He wrote songs, he played in clubs with jazz great Lester Young, and he advised artists as varied as Reed and Shawn Colvin till his death. His life included international fame and wealth, obscurity and poverty, domestic life in the ‘burbs, and a role at the center of New York’s musical underworld, filled with slimebag promoters, geniuses on pills, and ragged nights in smoky clubs. A garrulous man of raging ambitions and lifelong melancholy, Pomus created a life story that should rightfully be part of pop culture legend. Halberstadt’s biography includes terrific passages from Pomus’ diaries, and lots of rare photos. Pomus, almost needless to say, went on to become a member of both the Rock & Roll and the Songwriters Halls of Fame.
This article appears in Apr 11-17, 2007.
