Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer

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Bernard Wolfe. Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer

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“What I’m trying to encapsulate with these mere words is the absolute utter charismatic hipness of Bernie Wolfe, a man who knows more about everything there is to know about than any other writer I’ve met.”

—HARLAN ELLISON

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Unwilling to compromise on quality, I undertook to fill the pages of the literary magazine with the best prose around, my own. My first appearances in print were in this annual. One item was an essay entitled “On Being Lazy,” a treatise elaborating on all the delights of not working, designed, clearly, to annoy the many Yankee partisans of the work ethic who presided over the school. Another contribution was a short story about a gifted young student who has to work nights in a factory. He’s in a state of exhaustion. One night he sinks down on a comfortable leather belt to take a catnap, whereupon the belt is somehow activated to feed him into a grinding machine. The factory was pretty much modeled after the one my father worked in, and the high-potential young student had a variety of things in common with me, indicating, I suppose, how far back my paranoia about American industrialization took hold.

This story was by all standards a piece of proletarian literature, though the term had not yet come into currency. Two short years later writers by the hundreds had shed their Brooks Brothers gabardines for blue denim work shirts and the Proletarian Novel was swamping the American literary scene. Nowhere, however, in that massive body of workingclass literature will you find one word acknowledging the highschool junior who sparked the movement. But that’s always the fate of the frontrunner. No prophet is so scorned in his own country as the one whose pioneering work is taken over lock, stock and barrel by his plagiaristic countrymen.

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