Yale
Review by George Yatchisin
Trying to write a book review about essays in which one of our preeminent social critics, Greil Marcus, explores why he writes criticism…well, I’ve already mirrored myself into infinity or oblivion. But perhaps that’s a worthy task. For Marcus’s short in pages (87) if long in contemplation What Nails It—part of the Why I Write series from Yale University Press, based on the annual Windham-Campbell Lectures—makes an immediate claim for the ineffable dropping into a writer’s noggin. He writes, “I live for those moments when something appears on the page as it of its own volition—as if I had nothing to do with what is now looking me in the face.”
Of course, what stares Marcus in the face during his writing process leads to classics like his debut (not counting—or discounting—his journalism in Rolling Stone, Creem, etc.), Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music and second book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. Both drew musical murder boards that looped lines connecting unlikely persons and traditions, upending any sense of high and low culture; for just one example, 16th century insurrectionist and self-proclaimed King of New Jerusalem John of Leiden meet Sex Pistol punk Johhny (Lydon) Rotten.
In What Nails It, Marcus explains his method this way: “What I ended up doing with my life: rewriting the past, pursuing an obsession with secret histories, with stories untold—with what, to me, were deep, fraternal connections between people who never met or even heard of each other.” He has a very personal reason to think/act/live in such a way, as this book makes clear, for his own origin story was long clouded. His bio father, Greil Gerstley, died during WWII (of all things, Herman Wouk based The Caine Mutiny on the incident) and Marcus was born six months later. It’s a story that took him years to piece together, and so memory becomes a construct. As he so concretely phrases it: “We all have memories of things we didn’t experience: cultural memories that have taken up residence in our minds, built houses, filled them with furniture and appliances, and commanded that we live in them.”
We are fortunate as his readers that his house is so well-appointed. And that his gut mainlines to his mind, for he asserts, “I was a fan, writing out of fandom, out of love and betrayal.” In this he is like Pauline Kael, esteemed long-time New Yorker film critic, one of his great influences, and the titular hero of the second of this book’s three chapters. Marcus writes, “Kael made prissy critics like [Andrew] Sarris [with whom she had a very public pissing match] uncomfortable because she demanded more out of movies, out of life, than they did. She demanded everything—that is how I learned that there were no limits to what a movie or a novel or a song could say.” But, in typical fashion, Marcus pushes this consideration, and his sentence, for another telling twitch, adding, “and no limits on what you could say about it.” That’s just one more time he refuses to rest on merely a good observation; his nature is always to question further. That he has taken pop music as his subject still can shock in a world where entertainment too often equates with not having to think a whit.
Instead, his career of “thinking in public” has left him writing out of love for a range of culture, perhaps most trenchantly about Bob Dylan, but also numerous other times he was struck by that in that moment experience of art: the blandly satiric opening of Blue Velvet, the paintings of Titian (another chapter title) and Pollock, the surrealist comedy of Firesign Theater, the power of The Great Gatsby, the magical montages of Murnau’s Sunrise, the ever-absolutely new “Gimme Shelter.” And few writers can take the inchoate felt and mold it into such visceral language. “I had to broaden the context of music as far as I could,” he writes (in this case specifically about the Rolling Stones). “I had to write about photography and movies and fiction and every from of cultural speech that was feeding into the album and bleeding out of it.” Note how physically he grounds this easily off into the ether idea—feeding and bleeding—essentials of living and dying.
Near the book’s end he claims, “What art does, maybe what it does most completely, is to tell us, make us feel, that what we think we know we don’t.” Fortunately for us, Marcus eloquently sifts through all the best next questions. To do the work until he gets to the point of “That feeling of no, I didn’t think that, I didn’t write that, where did that come from?”—something in this book he never reductively refers to as the muse even once—and then realizes, “Alright, here it is, what are you going to make of this?”
