I Founded the Bad Books Club, so You Wouldn’t Have to Join! Please Support WEJB/NSU

I used to feel obligated to read terrible books that other people had praised from start to finish, so that I could credibly criticize them. I no longer feel that way. For one thing, you won’t get any respect from one’s enemies, anyway, and for another, life’s too short.

When I lived in Tübingen, West Germany (1980-1985), circa 1982 I read two awful novels through: William “Rusty” Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, and Margie Piercy’s Vida.

Each book violated, at great length, the old writing rule, “Show, don’t tell.”

Sophie’s Choice, at 500 pages, told the story of a Polish Catholic Holocaust survivor. Yeah, you read right. Sophie often was an emotional wreck, but instead of showing what she felt, Styron would write something like, “Sophie felt like crying.”

Vida, at 400 pages, was about the titular character, a leftwing terrorist who had been on the run for many years, and who was helped out by a terrorist network. Marge Piercy had no gift for drawing characters or writing dialogue, but she wanted the reader to like her terrorists, so she would inform you that each character was “charismatic,” and great in bed.

The desk at the Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut library, where I had borrowed both books, was unfortunately often manned by Patty, a tall, skinny, dark-haired American girl from a well-to-do family. Patty bragged of how the director of the Tufts (and later Oregon State, as well) exchange program had gotten her a practically free M.A. in art history from Tufts in one year’s time.

Patty was a feminist. She was also ethically challenged (pardon the redundancy). Once, when she was off-duty, I checked the wooden catalogue box containing cards for overdue books, and saw that she had amassed a collection of over 100 long overdue books of the Institut’s library at home.

When I returned Vida, I mentioned how bad it was, using the same language I used here. Patty was very angry, and decided to do something about it.

She sent me a bill with overdue charges of over $100.

When I called her up about it, she cursed me out. I had to stand there at the payphone and take it, because of the thinly veiled threat to cut off my borrowing privileges, if I countered her.

I ignored the bill.

Anytime an American female worked at the DAI, she was like that.

Well, that’s a feminist, for you. At least they didn’t accuse me of raping them.

Then again, a Puerto Rican neighbor the other day, who’s been a super for 20-odd years, and was cursing up a storm about #Metoo observed, “It’s never a porter or a super.” He argued, before I said a word, that these were all designing women who had slept with the big cheeses on the way up, and just charged them with rape, in order to put the big squeeze on them.

So, the other day, I’m checking out an hour-long Gary Cooper bio at youtube. It looks good, so far, but I made the mistake of reading the comments.

There were two groups of fanatical commenters: The one group cannot distinguish between Coop the man (who was a kiss-and-tell heel) and the characters he played, while the other group of two insisted that he was as queer as a three-dollar bill, and everyone knew it: “You don't know any of that?”

So, I google the story, and get a hit for a 2004 book, The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling and the MGM Publicity Machine, by E.J. Fleming, 2004.

Quite a bit is available to read at Amazon, so I “learned” that at least half of Hollywood’s performers were either homosexual or bisexual.

Fleming’s sources for these bold proclamations? Non-existent.

As one customer-reviewer observed, Mannix and Strickling may have covered up many an incipient scandal, but the many secrets they knew, they took with them to the grave.

As my favorite movie historian, Scott Eymann, once observed (possibly in his L.B. Mayer bio, Lion of Hollywood , which I recommend without qualification), people were much more discreet in those days.

Beginning in the late 1950s, a series of (often gay) literary hoaxers began publishing Hollywood “histories,” in which they claimed, ‘Everyone was gay!’ The first and most notorious was Hollywood Babylon, by Kenneth Anger, who just turned 93.

Anger spawned a whole cottage industry of fabulists. Eventually, big-name, “respectable” publishing houses, like Scribner and Knopf, both published “biographies” of Burt Lancaster, whose marketing hooks were that the man was bisexual, though neither author had any evidence to back up such a dramatic claim.

I plan on also writing on the occasional good, or great even book, and of course, pictures.

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I thank you, and your posterity will, too.

Sincerely,

Nicholas Stix