BOOKS

December 2004

Literary Samurai

Before parachute journalists, there were literary samurai: politically engaged writers who honed their convictions on the battlefield. Hemingway and Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War. André Malraux participated in the Chinese revolution. Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus aided the French resistance. Prolific Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima committed seppuku, ritual suicide, to protest the demise of his country’s imperial system.

If television has become war’s medium, and war itself psychologically unfathomable, the blame may lie partly with today’s novelists, few of whom have picked up the sword when the pen fails. One controversial exception is William Vollmann, who began his literary career twenty years ago in Afghanistan, fighting alongside the mujahideen to repel the Soviet invasion – “one of the clearest case of good versus evil” he ever saw, according to an essay he wrote for The New Yorker. Later, on assignment for Esquire, Spin, and Outside, he survived a rocket attack in Bosnia, rescued a child prostitute in Burma, and nearly died during a month-long solo Arctic expedition. To research his works on American street life, Vollmann has turned the participant-observation method into a game of Russian roulette, sleeping with prostitutes, smoking crack, riding boxcars, and befriending extremist groups of every persuasion.

A dozen novels and three collections of short stories later, the 45-year-old Sacramento writer has accomplished two more unlikely literary feats: prehumous anthologization in Expelled from Eden: A William Vollmann Reader (Thunder’s Mouth Press), and the publication of an abridged version of Rising Up and Rising Down (Harper’s Ecco), Vollmann’s impeccably timed 3000-plus page examination of the justification for violence, for which he was short-listed last year by the National Book Critics Circle. One might not expect aphorisms from a writer with such high page counts, but distilled here are Vollmann’s insights on guns, hookers, his moral calculus and suicidal gambits.

On security, private and public: I really feel a different mentality America than I used to feel as a child – parents so terrified their kids are going to be abducted by a child molester that they view every stranger as a pedophile, people who are increasingly passive and vulnerable to manipulation. Imagine if a few Americans had tried to hijack a plane going to Mecca with box cutters – all those Muslims would have jumped up and sacrificed their lives to stop it.

On the best means of altruism: It’s hard to do good one-on-one, but letting an aid organization do things for us is equivalent to letting someone else vote for us in an election. Let’s say an organization establishes refugee camps in a certain area, and its personnel invest in time learning the languages and customs – they’re not going to want to leave, are they?

On the recent expiration of the assault weapon ban and his admiration for the Second Amendment: Do you know what an assault weapon is? I don’t. Nobody does. Sometimes it’s too big, has too many rounds, or just looks too scary. On the other hand, Saturday Night specials are cheaper, so it keeps them out of the hands of poor people. To be democratic, shouldn’t we subsidize those weapons?

On the best of the worst: I thought all the various Nazi defendants at Nuremberg were evil and hate them, but I respect Goering more than the others because he stood fast for his intolerance. Someone evil who stands up for what he believes in is easier for us to deal with. He becomes a known quantity.

On his career-long interest in prostitutes: As my penis gets bigger, my interest only deepens.

On his vision of utopia: The ideal world is one where are there are many fewer people, and we could all go hunt and have great adventures.