JOURNALISM: Pulphead: Dispatches from the Other Side of America, By John Jeremiah Sullivan Vintage, 391pp. £9.99
JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN is of the South: born in Kentucky, educated in Tennessee, now living in North Carolina. Of his forebears, he writes: “My people were those strange Southerners you don’t often read about in histories of the Civil War: white landowners who owned slaves but fought for the North on Republican principles. Kentucky cracked down the middle this way . . . My ancestors freed their slaves with a kind of ‘Fine, run off, then’ attitude – seeing no other course, maybe in the noblest cases relieved to be doing the right thing at last, to be on the side of furthering the great experiment, not holding it back.”
The South is less an explicit subject in Pulphead than it is an informing presence; ditto the great experiment, the “never-ending American project”. The essays in Pulphead – all previously published, in different form, in GQ, the Paris Review, and elsewhere (Sullivan is Southern editor of the Paris Review and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine) – have earned their author floods of praise in the US. Often compared to David Foster Wallace, Sullivan’s work is devoid of dread, less knotty; the neurosis is of a far lighter variety.
Sullivan’s strengths as an essayist are many. There is an intellect capable of digesting facts and currents, and conveying, in conversational tones, what they really tell us; he can do workmanlike journalism and he can do goofy. There’s a laid-back warmth, infused with humour. There is the sense of shared discovery – a kind of you’ll-never-guess-what-Bunny-Wailer-
did-next sort of thing – and a refreshing refusal to sneer. There are all those pleasurably spot-on lines (“music that sounded like a rabbit’s heartbeat in the core of your brain”), and there is always – whether he is writing about Native American cave art or Axl Rose’s “package” – a sense of fun.
Music is a passion, and while the essays on Rose, Bunny Wailer, Michael Jackson and the early blues are compelling, the best in the collection are those that are both personally engaged and that explore the question of why the US is the way it is.
American Grotesque deals with the healthcare debate, by way of a Tea Party march; the racism underlying much opposition to Obama; Sullivan’s lobbyist cousin; and the grisly death in 2009 in Kentucky of the census worker Bill Sparkman, found near-naked and tied to a tree. (Sparkman’s death was ruled a suicide, motivated by ill-health, debt, and the hope of an insurance policy payout for his son.) The essay flashes back to Benjamin Franklin and his involvement with healthcare: Franklin lobbied the Pennsylvania assembly to fund what was to become, in 1751, the nation’s first hospital, providing, free of charge, the best healthcare to everyone, including the “sick-poor” and “diseased foreigners”.
“At moments like this one,” Sullivan writes, returning to the present, “we remember that we still exist inside the matrix of an 18th-century experiment in Enlightenment political thought . . .
What Would the Founding Fathers Do? becomes not an academic question but in some ways the most relevant one. Is America a place that does this, that cares for everybody? Or is that not our way?”
In Upon this Rock, Sullivan attends the largest Christian rock festival in the US. The story devolves into an engaging account of his own three-year, high-
school “Jesus phase”, which – despite his unpacking of the “illogic” of Christian belief – he refuses to write off as mere youthful naivete.
Mr Lytle concerns the period when Sullivan, wavering between college student and college dropout, was caretaker to the 92-year-old writer Andrew Lytle – friend of Robert Penn Warren, mentor to Flannery O’Connor and James Dickey, and one of the first to publish Cormac McCarthy. Sullivan and Lytle spend their time drinking bourbon and reading Flaubert, Joyce, James, the Russians, and Sullivan’s own first stories. (“He was trying to show me how to solve problems I hadn’t learned existed.”) As Lytle’s dementia progresses, the arrangement grows complicated, souring finally when Lytle summons “Beloved” to his bed and gropes him.
Sullivan’s attitude to his subject here is one that runs through his writing: “I found him exotic; it may be accurate to say that I found him beautiful. The manner in which I related to him was essentially anthropological. Taking offence, for instance, to his more or less daily outbursts of racism, chauvinism, anti-Semitism, class snobbery, and what I can only describe as medieval nostalgia, seemed as absurd as debating these things with a caveman. Shut up and ask him what the cave art means.”
Sullivan has a particular fondness for the difficult, the misunderstood, the freakish and the obsessive, and another strong piece is the strangely moving La-hwi-ne-ski, a biographical account of Constantine Rafinesque, the 19th-century French naturalist, polymath and forerunner of Darwin, who cut a bizarre swathe through scientific circles and who, coincidentally, lived for a time with Sullivan’s ancestors.
If Sullivan has a weakness, it may be the occasional reluctance to shed a certain glibness when doing so could allow something richer to emerge. In the piece on the long-running reality show The Real World, he hangs with some of the show’s stars, and appears to be setting up an incisive analysis of reality TV, of questions such as whether “all those years spent being themselves for a living had left them with selves to be”. But he gets distracted by how much fun he’s having, and we never quite get to the heart of the matter. Meanwhile, Violence of the Lambs, concerning possible stress-related changes in animal behaviour (due to climate change and human encroachment on territory), gets ramped up to the point of caricature.
But it is virtually impossible not to love this collection. Informed by both gonzo and immersion journalism, the essays are somehow gentler and more modest in their bearing, less self-
involved than what one might expect from long-form journalism written by someone with comic and literary sensibilities. If one can say so, they wear their author’s presence lightly, ferrying the reader along, charming, erudite.
Molly McCloskey’s latest book is the memoir Circles Around the Sun, concerning her brother’s descent into schizophrenia
