Why, How Hampton Writes

Fictional Criticism: Howard Hampton, Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses (Harvard University Press, 2007)

Howard Hampton was born on November 22, 1958 at Riverside Community Hospital, in Riverside, California. His mother, Ann Hampton, is currently living in Apple Valley with her son; his father could not be identified. Although she’s never admitted it to anyone, Ann Hampton isn’t really sure who Howard’s father is, but she has narrowed down the possibilities over the years. So, little Howard was raised solely by a single, working-class mother. Unable to secure affordable daycare for him during his earliest years, Miss Hampton – who by that time was spending up to four hours a day commuting to and from her work as a garden manicurist in the posh neighborhoods of Laguna Canyon – was forced to take her son along with her on jobs. He didn’t socialize with other children his age until kindergarten, and so Howard suffered what is now understood as “attachment issues”; he cried whenever his mother wasn’t around.

Howard’s earliest memory is of his 5th birthday party, which only three other children attended. The Cowboys-and-Indians-themed celebration was interrupted, after only 30 minutes, by their television set and the subsequent crying of all their mothers (which caused the children to cry, which caused him to cry). And so his playmates were quickly whisked away, leaving him with nothing but four half-drawn kiddy doodles, melted ice cream, and a tail-less donkey. Only years later did he come to understand that it wasn’t his fault the President had been shot. But because he had been gripping his brand-new Johnny Eagle Red River™ cap-rifle all morning in anticipation of the party, and the fact that this toy bore such a strong resemblance to a Mannlicher-Carcano, Howard came to identify himself with Lee Harvey Oswald. This was but one of many childhood misunderstandings that have made Howard the man he is today.

Howard was eleven when his grandfather died, and was inconsolable when he heard the news. No one had ever told him he had a grandfather. As it turns out, he also had a grandmother alive enough to meet Howard and his mother at the Lincoln Municipal Airport, and drive them to his mother’s childhood home in a podunk Nebraska town called Malcolm. He didn’t wonder why his mother had left. Yet, it was during the week of his grandfather’s funeral that Howard first began to realize his own need for a father. He began to envy all those inane Boy Scouts in his classes; he wanted to play baseball just so he could have a father to play baseball with.

His time in Nebraska not only led him to the realization that he lacked a definite masculine presence in his life, but he also began to gain an understanding of the power of words. Howard inherited, from his grandfather’s library, two Ogden Nash books and an almost brand-new, unabridged masterpiece of descriptive lexicography, the Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary. While stuck in Malcolm for an entire week, Howard set out to read the entire dictionary, but only made it to “obiter dictum” before he had to return home. He still uses his grandfather’s fifteen-pound tome to this day, and has vowed to resume his reading at “obitual,” and continue uninterrupted until he reaches “zyzzogeton,” sometime in the near future. Howard read both of Nash’s books twice on the plane back to California, moving from beginning to end and immediately starting them over again. He would later repeat this process with just about everything else Ogden Nash ever published.

While doing some hands-on learning about alienation during high school, Howard met Lester Bangs, a writer who’d almost certainly endured a similar regime of being laughed at by girls, stuffed into trash cans and lockers by jocks, and generally ignored by everyone else. Though it was always a one-way conversation, Howard’s love of Lester’s writing led him to the Riverside Public Library in search of more. When he asked the queer, spracked librarian where he could find more of Bangs’s work, the speed freaky bookworm instead rattled off a long list of great cultural critics at him. Howard checked out a couple old copies of Creem and Rolling Stone magazines, along with what he could find of the work of Manny Farber. And, unsurprisingly, Manny soon became Daddy. After searching out other voices and consuming their work as voraciously as he consumed Tab (at least four cans a day), he began to fantasize about the lives of Nick Tosches, Mark Foster, and others. Pauline Kael became the mother who didn’t have to go to work all day and instead sat around with him discussing what things meant and how they looked and what people thought of them and why; she became the mother who took him on adventures in thought, language, feeling, and sensibility. Once, Howard even imagined that Kael was his real mother, that his biological father was Andrew Sarris, and that their every argument stemmed from the seething resentment they felt toward one another over Howard’s drunken conception, birth, and subsequent adoption.

Fantastic imaginings aside, this world of arguments and unanswered – but always explored – questions sustained him through four years of popularity contests, pep rallies, procrustean English teachers, and failed attempts at normality. He even used one of Bangs’s articles to work up the nerve to ask Mary Beard to the prom, planning to make the point that she was “out of this world.” But halfway through, the pick-up line became muddled, and ended up as an explanation of the etymology of the word “Oriental,” and a compliment of her Converse sneakers. It was fine, though; he didn’t want to go to the prom anyway.

Howard finally received his college acceptance letters in April, 1977: he received one small envelope from Scripps (three months passed before he realized why he’d been rejected), and three large ones from Hampshire, Evergreen State, and Pitzer. Applying to “alternative” colleges had been a priority for Howard, given the degree to which he had suffered after four years of high school English. Though his first choice had been Hampshire College, he decided against making the journey back East after envisioning his diploma and future resumes: “Hello, I’m Howard Hampton from Hampshire College.” Simply too alliterative. The deciding factor for Howard was the distance he’d be living from his mother, so he chose Pitzer, the closest to home, and matriculated that fall.

On the first day of a Neopatriarchal Narratives seminar, he met a hippie chick named Cordelia and they bonded after class over three coffees and two glasses of wine during a nine hour discussion of Gabriel García Márquez. She was skinny, with a slight overbite and the body of a twelve-year-old boy: little tits, no hips. She always wore her hemp belt high, squeezing her patched pants around her waist so they’d stay up. Her long brown hair was curly when he first met her, but when he awkwardly complimented her for it she promptly shaved her head, thus beginning her worship by half the Scripps campus as an unattainable goddess.

They soon spent entire weeks in one another’s presence without a single day apart, as Cordelia’s friends became Howard’s friends too. There was Susan, who was about 150 pounds overweight and smelled faintly of a two-week buildup of plaque, and Gregg, who always introduced himself along with the spelling of his name and often doubled as Cordelia’s fuck buddy. When Gregg disappeared halfway through sophomore year, leaving behind all of his stuff in his dorm room, the campus police opened a missing persons case. Given that a band of nomadic Hare Krishnas had just passed through the five college area – and that his typewriter contained a half-written paper about the “Paradigm of Consensus in the Bhagavata Purana” – it was ultimately decided that Gregg had left with them. Her friends were great, but it was with Cordelia that Howard felt as though he’d finally met someone who could understand him; finally he’d met someone who felt the way he did about the Mekons, Wire, and David Thomas. She read every paper he wrote for every class before he turned it in, and he did the same for her; they took classes together just so they could make fun of their fellow classmates, weaving their inside jokes through a perverse patois only they understood; she advised him on how he should approach women, while he listened to her never-ending complaints about the available men in the area; they even attended the infamous Claremont Halloween party as Andy Warhol and Valerie Solanas, (with Susan tagging along as a hauntingly apt Brigid Berlin). And although he was about 30 minutes away from maybe asking a woman dressed as Elvira to dance, he had willingly left early to carry Cordelia home after she’d downed about ten too many Mai Tais (at which point she might as well have been his Edie). But most of the time they just studied together and communicated in puns:

“Reading the news can be so frustrating sometimes Cordo,” he’d say. “I don’t understand why they can’t just let Saigons be Saigons over there.”

And she’d retort, without missing a beat:
“I know right? It’s just so Hanoing!”

After two years of friendship they decided to get an apartment together junior year, leaving Susan to live alone in the dorms with her cat Agnew. On the first day back from Summer break, he had already begun moving his things into their small two-room loft when Cordelia arrived. They hugged and welcomed one another back, but as she began to tell him about her life-altering vacation he looked into her eyes, and KaBOOM – just like that he realized he was in love with her, and began to cry. Her earnest attempts to comfort him only made him more hysterical. It was so unexpected a realization, it hurt to even think about it. Eventually he pulled himself together for an hour or so, but as they sat down to eat their first pizza together, and he looked at her through the smoke of her spliff, the tears began all over again. He couldn’t help it. His eyes became puffy and swollen, so he got up and without a word went to sleep on the floor of his room. The next morning his eyes were glued together with snot and dried tears, but Cordelia’s laugh pulled him out of bed and into their new kitchen. Not realizing, nor caring, that his already salt-and-peppered hair was so disheveled it was practically standing straight up, Cordelia entered with a man she introduced as Waldo, her boyfriend.

“Howard, meet Waldo. My boyfriend. We met in London in July, and he’s in the band Midnight Fulcrum,” she announced. “They’re playing at Claremont tonight, you should come.” Waldo was taller than Howard, with tan, toned arms, high cheek bones, serious eyes, light blond hair – cleanly askew, a cuttingly sexy British accent, and a mole just under his bottom lip on the right side. Howard threw a spatula at them, grabbed his toothbrush, and left. Briskly wandering around campus he ran into Susan, literally, knocking Agnew’s kitty carrier to the ground. As he was about to start yelling he recognized her, and collapsed, sobbing, into her arms. She took him in and listened to him cry, rubbing his arms and offering him comfort food every ten minutes.

“Listen, Howard,” she finally told him. “I know Cordelia had no idea you felt this way about her when she left for the summer.”

“I didn’t know until yesterday,” Howard replied.

“Well. Get over it, Howard. You have to realize what I realized years ago. That the few people you’re ever going to really fall for in life are going to disappoint you. Because lust will beat out intellect, discriminating taste, and meaningful emotion almost every time.” And he never forgot those words. Still, at the time he needed to let loose, so he found a nearly full bottle of warm Parrot Bay Coconut Rum – the only liquor in her dorm room – and chugged it.
It didn’t help.

He can’t write about her, even the thought eats away at him. So writing criticism has become his Cordelia, and it gives him the authority, the power to shake her and tell her, “I love you, I loved you. I hate you.” In his criticism, he can make her say that she loves him back. His criticism began on that smoggy hot Pomona day even though he didn’t start writing it for years afterwards. When the hole in his heart, begging for a father to hold him, was widened by his loss of her, he bled brooding all over pages that were then still trees, growing hundreds of miles away.

Wanting to revel in the numbness of his exclusion, Susan ended up getting drunk that night too, and they had ugly sex on her living room floor. They fucked one another’s pain away that night, then never talked about it again. He woke up with the worst headache of his life, his mouth feeling like it was full of cotton ashes, packed up what he’d left at Cordelia’s place, and moved in with Susan and Agnew. That was the first and last time he ever truly got drunk. He doesn’t let go anymore.

During his senior year at Pitzer, Howard completed his honors thesis in Philosophy and Semiotics an entire month early. Entitled The Vermillion Door: Prestructuralist Discourse and Posttextual Desituationism in the Works of Pynchon, it was 90 pages too long and – taking a stylistic cue from a new trend in academic literature – was completely unintelligible. Of the four professors he’d arranged to be “readers” for his work, only one actually read his entire thesis; none, however, understood a word of it past page fourteen. Upon graduation in May, 1981, Howard moved back in with his mother, who by that time was living in her current home in Apple Valley. He took a job as a host at the Victorville Denny’s off of Historic Route 66, but, subjected to musak during business hours, and Keith the dishwasher’s hair metal mix tapes and Carlos the busboy’s Ghost in the Machine album every night after closing, he didn’t last more than eight months. When he couldn’t take it any longer, he found a more relaxed job working the counter at a Chinese “market” down the road, selling smutty magazines, porn videos, and those little one-shot liquor bottles you usually only find on airplanes. Every Thursday night he worked the projector in the back room, screening classic Hong Kong cinema for three or four dedicated patrons; he did the same on Sunday nights except with hardcore porn films, playing for a dwindling audience of men who could not yet afford VCRs.

During college and his “post-graduate employment,” as he liked to call it, Howard remained fascinated by criticism, reading and re-reading Lester Bangs, Manny Farber, Greil Marcus, Pauline Kael, and that guy who wrote movie reviews for the Victorville Daily Press until 1984. He worked and read until one day, when all his feelings about music, Ronald Reagan, and the emotions Cordelia had left him with could not be contained in his then-eight-volume journal, he sat down at his typewriter and wrote. And wrote. And wrote. He was soon looking at a seven-page letter to a man he didn’t even know, but there were so many men in his life that he’d never known that he sent it off without a thought. When a reply arrived he sent another, and another; those letters soon became the one thing in his life he had to look forward to besides the newest Pere Ubu album. Though he never expected it, this led to a job as a freelance critic, but performance anxiety took over him. It was a curse. Unlike writing letters to his pen pal, he feared that it was Cordelia who would read his most personal thoughts, and so he became timid, reserved; he was impotent in the face of his own opinions.

Then one day the Village Voice asked him to review one or two of the more commercial albums they'd just received, and, scanning the list, Howard saw...Sting. He obtained the record – Nothing Like the Sun – and leaning the album cover against his wall played the music over and over, letting his rage gather inside him. He wasn’t hearing Sting, and he wasn’t staring at Sting’s face. His resentment of the trite, commercial music had turned Sting into Waldo, and so the words began to flow, uncensored, from his fingertips to the keys of his typewriter and onto the page. Soon he had produced a review so scathing that it gave his editor a start – finally Howard had lived up to what the Voice had been promised, finally he was a writer with real potential. “Bring Me The Head Of Gordon Sumner” had been published only three days when Howard got word from his editor that Sting had responded. At first he felt a pang of anxiety, but it quickly bounced off of his new, confident, critical shell. This is going to make me famous, he thought to himself as he read Sting’s misspellings and insults. But when he read the postscript, he felt a little cheated. “PS – I hope this makes you famous.”

And it did, Mr. Sumner. It did.

* * * * * * * *

Okay, listen, Mark, I can’t go any further. I understand the limitations of my critical ability, and I’ve reached a point where I’m simply not capable of going any further. I can write a decent record review, can’t I? And I can write a deep think-piece on the limits of the American conception of freedom. And didn’t I make you think critically about pornography when you refused to believe that anyone could? Come on, man.

I can’t write about myself, Mark. I can’t write anything autobiographical. I couldn’t even write a decent undergraduate thesis in college, or a simple high school English paper! The only thing that I’ve ever been able to write is criticism, and I do it well, don’t I? I know you think I could be even better, you tell me practically every fucking day. But making me write 4,000 words, about myself, because you think it will help me be “more comfortable” with writing from my own “personal experiences” – it just isn’t fair. I may never write from my heart, from my own life, from the places of my deepest scars and greatest successes. Or, I may do it tomorrow. I just know that I can’t do it now. So maybe one day I will learn to write that way, and will become “acclaimed,””renowned,” and whatever else as you said, but for now I’m content with my relative anonymity, authority, and distance. Please don’t make me do this anymore, I can’t write about myself – I’ve known me too well, for too long. And I don’t even fully understand who that “me” is yet.

Oh, one more thing. Please tell that asshole at Harvard UP that I’m going to kill his Art Director. The cover of my book is horrid – how will this ever sell?! Worst of all, it makes my work seem meaningless. Maybe it is. But I don’t know, Mark, if I can take your advice (and get assigned a better graphic designer), who knows…maybe my next book will make me…legendary.
--HH