THE HARD CROWD
Essays 2000-2020
By Rachel Kushner
Not long ago I met a Frenchwoman legendary for her youthful wildness. One story I’d heard involved her borrowing a motorcycle. She was living up a mountain, it was dead-winter, and she needed to go down into the village for cigarettes. The guy who lent her his motorcycle told her that the only way to make it down the icy hairpin bends to the bottom was never once to put your foot on the brake. She did as he said. I seem to remember that she smashed herself up and maybe the bike too, but she survived, and the guy was in awe. “You didn’t use the brakes? But I was just kidding!”
This woman, who now lives on a sheep farm with her partner and child, showed me a memoir she’d written about her hard-rocking youth. She didn’t know if it was any good, she said, but she’d needed to write it because of all her gang of friends, she was the only one who was still alive.
I was reminded of this Frenchwoman’s need to bear witness when reading Rachel Kushner’s collection of essays — not just because Kushner writes eloquently about being a girl who rides (and crashes) motorcycles, but because she keeps circling round this phenomenon of being the sole survivor of a scene, an era, a group of friends.
“I am the one who lived to tell,” Kushner writes in the title essay — a memoir about growing up in the Sunset, a working-class district of San Francisco where girls become strippers or cocktail waitresses and boys become skateboarders or skinheads, or work as bouncers “in between prison stints.” Kushner and her friends are “ratty delinquents” who cut school to hang out in gambling parlors and head shops or with a Hare Krishna who may or may not be a singer for the Cro-Mags; they sleep on the sidewalk outside the Oakland Coliseum to see the Clash, where they are given weed spiked with PCP by an unscrupulous adult: Partying with strangers “is what I spent a lot of my youth doing.” It’s territory covered glancingly by Joan Didion, but unlike Didion, Kushner is in the mosh pit, getting trampled. Of her school friends, or the people she meets racing motorcycles in the Cabo 1000 or bartending in the Tenderloin, a scary number are now dead, including a young hustler who kept her company on slow afternoons at the Blue Lamp whose severed head was later found in a dumpster.
“Sometimes I am boggled by the gallery of souls I’ve known. By the lore. The wild history, unsung. People crowd in and talk to me in dreams. People who died or disappeared or whose connection to my own life makes no logical sense, but exists as strong as ever, in a past that seeps and stains instead of fades.”
It’s complicated, being “the one who lived to tell,” not just a survivor but a memorialist tasked with cataloging the unlucky glamorous dead. To Kushner, it means that the narrative we are reading is to some extent “a conversion narrative,” that “the person who writes about her experience is not the same person who had the experience,” but I’m not so sure. I would say that a writer is someone who is always half-participant, half-observer, that even as you’re piling dead drunk into a stranger’s car, one cold eye is also noting that his tattoo is misspelled. In this “hard crowd,” Kushner writes, she was the “soft one,” but you might equally say the one dispassionate enough to watch — and to get out.
Kushner, the author of three novels and a collection of short stories, is the daughter of beatnik academics who lived part time in a converted school bus in Oregon, before moving to the Bay Area when Kushner was 10. Her parents’ bohemianism allowed Kushner an alarming freedom, but it also gave her a complex culture and the self-belief eventually to quit her bartending job, sell her Ninja, and escape into a world where people were turning their rackety youths into art.
“The Hard Crowd” — a collection of essays written over the last 20 years — is testimony to the breadth both of Kushner’s experience and of her intellectual convictions.
Many of these essays are offshoots of the research Kushner did for her previous two novels, “The Flamethrowers” and “The Mars Room” — ambitious works, the first, set in the 1970s, jumping between Red Brigade Italy and the New York art world, the second narrated by a stripper who’s serving two life sentences in a correctional facility in the Central Valley. (Kushner’s essay “Is Prison Necessary?,” included in this collection, is painstakingly unsensational, using a profile of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a prison abolitionist and professor of “carceral geography,” to explain why most arguments for abolition are based on faulty facts, and yet why we need nonetheless to build a society where incarceration isn’t an outcome.) Other essays pay tribute to writers from Marguerite Duras and Clarice Lispector to Denis Johnson — “totaled souls” who managed to find truth in the wreckage.
One of the most gallant and moving of the pieces included in “The Hard Crowd” is devoted to Nanni Balestrini, an Italian writer and political activist who translated Marx’s practice of the “inquest” — a questionnaire on workers’ lives distributed at the factory gates — into late-20th-century experimental fiction, producing slangy vivid novels of proletarian awakening and revolt that Kushner describes as coming close to the oral and heroic traditions of epic poetry.
Her attraction is to chivalrous gestures, physical daring (the fugitive Balestrini escapes Italy in 1979 by skiing down Mont Blanc into France, although it’s not certain whether he’s ever skied before) and maybe also to lost causes. Defunct political movements, disbanded rock groups are big in this book. Kushner is unusual in combining her taste for “the old, weird America” of desert highways, vintage cars, autodidact loners, with a grounding in 20th-century European thought, an interest in the ways in which working-class struggle on the Continent was filtered into industrial action, armed revolt or documentary art. These competing aesthetic/moral strands are what form the double whammy in Kushner’s prose: a narrative voice that’s hip, raspy, rich in caustic or deadpan one-liners, and an ethic of almost wide-eyed “permeability,” of feeling painfully responsible for history’s wrongs.
Kushner interviews Nanni Balestrini a few years before his death. He picks her up at the Rome airport, an old man wearing elegant “driving moccasins” who is more interested in enjoying their lunch, in choosing a nice wine, than in being questioned about Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power), the political group he helped found in 1968, but in the end, he relents and tells her what he sees as a continuing “imperative: that we need to change the world, and that this is possible, necessary and urgent.”
Like Balestrini, Kushner believes we need to change the world, and like Balestrini, she doesn’t see why she can’t get a good story out of it, too.
April 09, 2021 at 10:00PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/books/review/the-hard-crowd-rachel-kushner.html
Book Review: ‘The Hard Crowd,’ by Rachel Kushner - The New York Times
https://news.google.com/search?q=hard&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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