In Praise of Trash

Put aside the literature of your American school upbringing for just a moment...

When I read posts and essays referencing 20th century literature in the English language on this platform, they are inevitably rehashes of the writer’s high school and college English courses. For young people, this is natural enough. But not for the precocious youngster. An English teacher I had at school used to say, go down to the libe (library), go into the fiction section and read your way this summer through the alphabet. Pick whatever book you wish, only finish it. One could go through 50 novels in one summer this way easily.

But what do Substack writers take as their literature-bibles? Gatsby, Woolf, To Kill a Mockingbird, Hemingway (they love him because he shot himself after a drunk, how romantic), Animal Farm and 1984 (both of which ought not to be read as literature, but as polemic camouflaged as fiction), Holden Caulfield (yes, teenager, you are a loser, all of us are losers, God, what a wretched book), Conrad (a slog through a petrified forest!), the usual encomia about the unreadable door-stop of Joyce and occasionally giddy praise for the interminable Proust, which no one has read in its entirety, certainly not in French, for a century, except its translators (I don’t care who otherwise claims to have done so), etc.

All of these titles were lovingly assigned programmatically by innocent, eager and unthinking teacher’s college graduates who began populating the burgeoning American government school system in the 1960s.

My recollection of these young teachers is that every one of them desperately wanted to prove themselves relevant to youngsters. But sadly, they were young and didn’t know any better.

They followed without question the anti-literary, de(con)structing, truth-denying relativists in the Ivy League English Departments: prestigious pseudo-intellectuals whose closely harbored goals were to poison the minds of the kids against their parents’ generation, the “middle-class,” the term used to denigrate and belittle them, even as they took their tuition money as their salaries.

Be like us, they claimed, read of our vaunted emptiness and you, too, can be Holier Than Thou. Uniformity, thy name is the Teacher’s Union. Generations of the similarly mind-numbed, that is what Americans have become. Sad. So disappointing. But this can change!

Hearst’s Swimming Pool. Photograph Copyright © 2003 Richard Kuslan. All Rights Reserved.

There is a wealth of literature easily discovered and well worth reading for one’s own edification and delight — almost all of it poo-poo’d and deliberately neglected by reason of Marx and his destructive acolytes this past century.

It was trash in the eyes of the Leftist in search always for his theoretical enemy to stab at; to the contrary, I have found that it is inevitably of excellent quality. I have been reading deeply in this excellent, thoughtful, well-written, imaginative material over the past few years and I’ve come to the conclusion that I was robbed. You may come to that conclusion as well. Perhaps you already have. But you can do something about that.

Hergesheimer, Ferber, Bromfield, Galsworthy, Tomlinson, Marquand, Deeping, Steen, Norris, my goodness, the list could go on and on. Just take three of these names and sample a few pages of each. See if you want to read them. They will surprise you with their ideas, methods, vocabulary, storylines. Take off the old ball and chain for a night and venture out for a little excitement, eh?