C’mom, man, put your ass into this Mustang of mine and tell me what you feel when I let this clutch pop. I’m riding a six-point-four-liter FE engine, three hundred twenty horses, three hundred ninety cubic inches. It’s motherfucking big, my friend, Tell you what, so you can get an idea of what I’ve put into this baby, get in, and lay coin on the dash. You got a half-buck?
No.
Okay, here’s one. Now shut the fucking door. Put the coin on the dash in front of you. Okay, right. Don’t reach for it till we get moving. But as soon as we’re moving, you try and pick up that fucking coin off the fucking dashboard just by grabbing it. Wait till I pop the clutch. Okay! Now! Now! Go on, get it! Get It! Get It![1]
Fife is thrown back against the seat, unable to reach forward and pick up the coin. The brutal g-forced accelerations and decelerations, the hard-edged roar of the engine, tires tearing at the asphalt, squealing and moaning as the Mustang whips around curves, runs lights, flashes through stop signs, are terrifying…
Russell Banks hasn’t tried to write the next Bullitt, yet the pacey passage above from his new novel, Forgone, isn’t atypical. The book locks on dramas of a dying man—famed Canadian-American leftist documentary filmmaker, Leonard Fife, who’s out to blow up his own goodie persona in public. Home from the hospital, having stopped treatment for his cancer, Fife has arranged for a final confessional interview. To come clean about his own past he must fight against a shaky memory, torpor induced by pain meds and “confabulation” caused by his withdrawal from alcohol. Fife’s rush through his past feels provisional yet inevitable. Thanks to Banks’ skill as a psychologist—we seem to take in Fife from within. And thanks to Banks’ skill as a plot-twister, his protagonist’s movement of mind moves. Fife keeps going and going and going until he’s gone. (I started the book one afternoon last month and stayed up until dawn to find out how Fife’s tune ended.)
Fife’s truth attack on himself is being filmed by an acolyte-director and a crew who are all admirers of Fife. He insists on using this setup to demythologize a life shot through with episodes of betrayal and deception. His idolater has his own agenda: “I just sort of want to get on to the stuff about your career as a Canadian filmmaker,” but Fife means to leave careerism to the dust. “For forty-five years, all my years in Canada, from the day I went out and bought my first sixteen-millimeter camera, I exposed corruption, mendacity, and hypocrisy in government and business,” Fife tells the director. “Now, with your camera, I’m exposing myself. My corruption, my mendacity, my hypocrisy.”
He’s doing this because he needs his wife to know him. He’s got to be real with/for “the beloved” before he’s Out. He’s sure her forbearance is his only path to redemption. “His cancer had freed him…There’s no longer any undone future work to protect and promote,” Banks writes, “This is his last chance to stop lying to Emma.” His revelations entail artful craft talk about how he came to his vocation—a process that had zip to do with righteous leftism others (including his wife, author of a dissertation on his work) have ascribed to him. Fife forces her to hear his raps, though she’s resistant. “In the rages of a sick old man,” per a wise blurber, “profound questions arise: ‘What is a life? A Self? And what is lost when truth destroys the fabrications that sustains other lives?’” Those questions, though, stretch past borders of a self or a marriage or projections linking artist-and-audience. They go to the heart of the heart of this country since Fife’s biggest lie involved his choice to leave it in 1968. For fifty years Fife had let Canadians believe he’d been one of the young men who’d fled America to avoid being sent to Viet Nam. That’s what he claimed on the day he crossed the border from Vermont to Canada and asked for asylum. But, as we find out from his confession, he was an immigrant not a refugee. It wasn’t war abroad or at home that made his skip out on America. He had his own unlovely reasons (even if they remained opaque to him).
His confession amounts to an inventory of smaller and larger betrayals that preceded his choice to go into exile. His look back in shame on his own American nightmare reminded me of Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies, which hurtles through Trumpery toward Akhtar’s immigrant father’s decision to go back to Pakistan, giving up on an America life defined by flush times and bankruptcies, professionalism and addiction, fatherhood and adultery. Both novels seem licensed to wander, thanks to the g-force of their unputdownable narratives. Both draw pretty directly from personal stories and art-lives of their authors [2](though Akhtar’s Elegies comes closer to memoir and to our own time). It was this passage in Foregone that first connected the books in my mind.
[Fife] was a calculating man. He still is. Not an appraising man. An appraisal is a judgment of the worth of something based on a thorough examination of that thing in the context of things that resemble it. It’s how one determines value, whether it’s the value of a house, a crop, an ounce of a gold, or a man’s life.
Akhtar construes America as a nation of rapacious calculators on his first page, attributing this definition to his favorite college prof:
[She] looked up and remarked almost offhandedly that America had begun as a colony and that a colony it remained, that is, a place still defined by its plunder, where enrichment was paramount and civil order always an afterthought. The fatherland in whose name—and for whose benefit—the predation continued was no longer a physical fatherland but a spiritual one: the American Self. Long trained to worship its desires—however discreet, however banal—rather than question them, as the classical tradition taught, ever-tumescent American self-regard was the pillaging patria…
Banks places Fife’s choice to run from his country in this tradition of American Selfhood, even as his anti-hero had pretended to be resisting a pillaging patria.
OTOH, Banks’ own stance toward his homeland (to the extent it can be adduced from musings of his ex-American dreamer), isn’t as nego as Akhtar’s. Elegies echoes and amplifies that prof’s line on America, adding a plot-scream against Islamophobia (which seems a little over-the-top since Akhtar tends to underplay—by ironizing or comprehending—horrors committed by his fanatical co-religionists). Elegies amounts to a brilliantly cynical take-down of American exceptionalism, which leaves you hanging since the author’s alter-ego is still here, “for better, for worse and it’s always a bit of both.” Having returned to Islam (though he’s anti-Islamist), he IDs more with the ummah than with his country of origin, but his vocation seems to require that he stay in America where at least he knows he’s free to publish and stage his plays (even as Elegies brings home his fear of cancel cultures on both ends of the spectrum). The book leaves off with him underscoring how he’s a sort of internal exile.
Fife’s gloss of his own trip peaks with a homier insight. As he thinks through what distanced him from ditched American friends whom he judges to have been the “real deal,” he affirms the value of a duty he shirked: “military service.” Fife (and Banks?) imply vets get something worth more than money once they give serious time to their country. Time that’s lost on Akhtar’s mentor, by the way, since nobody in the service is trained in self-regard or taught to worship their own desires.
Banks cleverly brings home the counter-cultural side of military service in a cash nexus society through Fife’s memory of hanging out with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan at a Cambridge folk club. (This may be one of Fife’s confabulations since Dylan was still Zimmerman in his story and, as Banks probably knows, Baez didn’t run with Bob until after he’d become Dylan.) Fife flirts with Baez who ends up wearing his army surplus coat for a hot second—a fashion statement that spells out unobvious links between the counter-culture of the 60s and a more enduring military one where young people may still find a locus of value that doesn’t square perfectly with American greed. Fife amuses Baez and “Zimmerman,” telling them how he beat the draft by acting like a fool and a “homo.” What’s odd is that he went for his 4F before the escalation of war in Viet Nam sparked mass resistance to the draft. Zimmerman tells Fife he did a “righteous thing.” Baez “doesn’t agree”:
The way she sees it, Fife’s place in that line was filled by someone who otherwise would not have been drafted. Good for Fife, who avoids being drafted and gets to stay a civilian. But what about the poor kid standing at the cutoff point behind him? Number forty-one or whatever. He moves up one notch, and now he’s stuck in the army for two years and is more likely to end up dead or killing people in some African or Asian cold war hotspot or invading Russia…
I’m not a Baez partisan but Banks’ idealized image works for me when I recall how she broke with former comrades on the left by speaking up for hundreds of thousands of Boat People who risked drowning as they fled Viet Nam in 1979.[3] It’s possible Dylan would’ve cheered a draft-dodger in 1961 as Banks imagines. Dylan surely wrote anti-war songs in the early 60s that still make it into his set-lists.[4] His presence in Foregone reminds me another all-American artist once dubbed Dylan “the father of my country:” Per Bruce Springsteen, “Bob pointed true north and served as a beacon to assist you in making your way through the new wilderness America had become.” Springsteen cited Dylan’s mid-60s albums, which exposed him “to a truthful vision of the place I lived”:
He asked the questions everyone else was too frightened to ask, especially to a fifteen-year-old: ‘How does it feel… to be on your own?’ A seismic gap had opened up between generations and you suddenly felt orphaned, abandoned amid the flow of history, your compass spinning, internally homeless.
Forgone’s Fife once shared that 60s’ sense of orphanhood, but Zimmerman/Dylan didn’t give him vision (or politics). Dylan, of course, never saw himself as a thought-leader (even when his mid-60s mastery made him a kind of cultural commander). His own compass hasn’t always worked right, yet, as he’s grown older, he’s become one of our best guides to America’s roots musics (and their offshoots). The father of Bruce’s country knows there really isn’t much point in living in America if you’re not hearing our music.
Not that I always keep up myself. I felt like a laggard last month when I heard Alan Jackson’s “Gone Before You Met Me” years after he released it (on his 2015 album, Angels and Alcohol). The song’s compactions seemed to presage Banks’ Foregone. Its echt American dreamer floats on the Mississippi with Tom Sawyer [I know, I know! He should’ve been rolling with Huck.] “who gets restless round about Memphis.” Then he hitches a ride with this beatnik guy:
Said looks like you read me
My name is Jack Kerouac
I was gone before you met me
It’s a hoot to hear Kerouac make it into a Country song. He’s there in spirit in Foregone too. Fife recalls how he and his best bud drove cross-country in a stolen car when they were sixteen. This all went down a couple years before he read On the Road. (Fife was gone before…) Am Stud references, though, aren’t the only ties that bind “Gone Before You Met Me’s” country logic to Foregone. Both rest on a deep structure of longing, though the song’s dreamer teases you before getting needful. He mocks tamer “homeboys…You fix that roof put your roots to the ground-boys.” He won’t miss “pink house, white fence…two point five kids.”
With boys like me your bound to run the wild side
Like the restless wind you’ll never catch me
I was gone before you met me
Alan Jackson, though, sings Country, not Rock ‘n’ Roll, and that boast isn’t him. The song’s final verses flip the dreamer’s transcript. His freedom ride turns into a nightmare. Stuck on some lost highway, he’s doubly bereft since he’s lost his woman. But the beloved returns when he wakes up…
Then I smelled that coffee
I heard you singing in the kitchen
Walked in, got a kiss, you said the sink still dripping
Thank God I’m still driven
You got your homeboys, your hang-around-boys
You fix that sink put your roots in the ground-boys
It turns out Alan is glad to be one of them in his “blue house” with “the sweet little woman.”
His restless heart found a heart I can call mine
I was smart enough to let love catch me
So Tom and Jack just ramble on without me
‘Cause I was gone before you met me
Jackson sings the track with his customary cool brio. The arrangement puts rock guitars in the mix but it follows the formula that’s given Jackson dozens of hits, melding traditional honky-tonk with more mainstream pop sounds. It’s not rebel music.
Jackson pushed himself further beyond Country’s fun zone twenty years ago when he wrote and sang “Drive,” which may be his finest add-on to the American songbook. The Southerner in “Drive” recalls how he learned from “Daddy Gene” to pilot a boat and drive a car (as a harmonica hums like a dream-engine). He switches gears from a recitative delivery to full-out singing that conveys physical sensation – “And I would turn her sharp/ And I’d make it whine” – The song seems to be headed in a familiar though undeniable country direction – “Just a little lake past the Alabama line but I was king of the ocean, when Daddy let me drive…Just a dirt road with trash on both sides but I was Mario Andretti, when Daddy let me drive.” Until Jackson’s voice opens up his life-study class to the women in his world…
I’m grown up now
3 daughters of my own
I let them drive my old jeep
Across the pasture at our home
Maybe one day they’ll reach back in their file
And pull out that old memory
And think of me and smile
And say
It was just an old worn out jeep
Rusty old floor boards
Hot on my feet
A young girl two hands on the wheel
I can’t replace the way it made me feel
And he’d say
Turn it left, and steer it right
Straighten up girl now, you’re doing just fine
Just a little valley by the river where we’d ride
But I was high on a mountain
When Daddy let me drive
Jackson famously wrote “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” in the aftermath of 9/11, but “Drive’s” momentum belongs to that moment too. The bad example of Islamist misogynists helped this country gentleman write a song that sound-tracked actual progress made in America over his lifetime. (Back in that day, I bet “Drive” went right by Akhtar and his mentor. Doubt they’ve caught up with it yet.)
Jackson is in his sixties and his music isn’t likely to take in what feels new about Now (though it’s pretty fresh to have Jack Kerouac turn up in a country song). There’s a younger country singer, Sam Hunt, who’s more punctual. Hunt broke out in 2017 with “Body Like a Back Road.” It was a Sister who steered me to the song and that’s apt since Stone’s lyrics leave room for a black woman to imagine she might be in this country boy’s mind: “Got a girl from the Southside, got braids in her hair.”[5] Other lyrics in this song (about lips and hips) and throughout Hunt’s corpus hint at his instinct to cross color lines, but it’s his whole sound that makes his Country seem like something other than music made by (per Alan Jackson) a “small town southern man.”[6] While Hunt bows to honky-tonk legends, his vocals have an R&B tinge. He samples Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass,” but he steals R. Kelly’s stutter. His version of country melds Nashville licks with pop reggae grooves and other urban beats. Hunt’s hybrids appeal to Dwight Yoakam—a Country-first singer who went pop in the 80s and 90s without sounding phony. Yoakam has talked up Hunt’s blend comparing it with “the infusion of soul and southern R&B, with the album that Ray Charles put out—the very historic album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music back in the early ’60s.”
The most novel thing Hunt’s written might be “Cop Car,” which was first recorded by Keith Urban back in 2014. This song doesn’t walk the thin blue line. It starts with a trespass that puts Sam and his date on the wild side. He’s not thrilled—“Man ain’t this some shhhh.” Yet the scene ends up highlighting his good bad girl’s sassy attitude, which slays him.
But there was something ’bout the way
The blue lights were shining
Bringing out the freedom in your eyes
I was too busy watching you going wild child
To be worried about going to jail
You were thinking that running for it would make a good story
I was thinking you were crazy as hell
And you were so innocent, but you were stealing my heart
I fell in love in the back of a cop car
This is a song about, sorry, “white privilege.” Hunt isn’t at ease around cops—“Man they weren’t playing/They sure threw those cuffs on quick”—but his run-in with them doesn’t feel full of peril. Hunt’s yen for that “wild child” who talks back to cops never seems on the verge of becoming a fatal attraction. In the era of Black Lives Matter, “Cop Car,” which is based on a real event, can’t help but make you think about what might have happened if it had been a black couple acting “crazy as hell” in that back seat. The frisson of those blue lights, which serve as stimulus and antithesis to free love, is a white thing.
Sam Hunt was a philosophy major in college (as well as a jock) but I doubt he’s down with critical race theory. I don’t know how much distance he has on facts of feeling he evokes in “Cop Car,” but he’s been clocking black culture for a long time.[7] I’m sure he’s aware his song picks up new resonances every time an African American pays for driving while black. I hope the song’s ambivalence toward cops hints Hunt may be open to BLM’s angles on policing. OTOH, I’m reminded the Capitol Riot proved there’s a portion of Trump’s base who no longer bow to men in uniform. In the back seat of that cop car, Hunt places his crazy love “on the left” while he was “on the right”—a line that may map his own politics.
Given Country’s fan base, Hunt probably wouldn’t rush to disavow Trump. Still, I hear regrets in “2016”—a song he released in the spring of 2020. I might be projecting since “2016” isn’t a protest song. It’s an apology to a once-and-future lover. (Maybe the one on the left?!) Still, this done-somebody-wrong-song seems alive to something larger than love wars. After all, it’s hard to divorce 2016 from Trumpery. And I think the Don might be folded into the point made at the top of the song:
I’d put the whiskey back in the bottle
Put the smoke back in the joint
Look up at the sky and say
“Okay, okay, okay, think you made your point”
Hunt goes on to recall how he left the night on in 2016 before vowing to:
Give the nightlife back to Nashville
One night at a time ’til all the regret’s gone
The chorus brings his shame back home:
And I’d drive a thousand miles to your house
Walk in like I walked out
Put the tears back in your eyes
‘Cause all my lies could still come true
I’d tell you everything was alright
And hold you, baby, all night
When your heart was all patched up
And our love was good as new
I’d take 2016
And give it back to you.
Hunt goes home to his personal quandaries but he also goes big.
I thought I wanted my freedom
I told myself I’d have a ball
But it turns out going out and chasing
Dreams and lonely women
Ain’t freedom after all
He keeps wishing for a do-over and as he tries to sing himself back to 2016 it becomes harder (for me anyway) to de-link Trump’s election from the license Hunt once longed for. I’d guess his retro view of 2016—“If I could wrangle all my sins/Take ’em back and make amends”—signals he senses it was a very bad year.
Though who knows if he had second thoughts? Or if they stuck? A few days after 1/6, Hunt tweeted a suite of “holiday” pictures. In three of the images he’s shown dressed up in camo, training in the woods with a bunch of white guys. I’m reminded of the title of a prescient piece Russell Banks wrote in the fall of 2020, which anticipated the coming insurrection, “Who Let the Demons Out?” Here’s hoping Hunt’s not at the mercy of a militia-mindset. I was relieved (somewhat) to see that a week after his post-insurrection photo-bomb, he’d tweeted a pic of an integrated group with a couple black guys who are in his band.
I’ve heard Russell Banks is currently working on a triptych of “stories in which all the characters are Trump voters, sympathetically portrayed.” He should give Sam Hunt a listen if those stories need a soundtrack. And Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s epic, seven-foot-square painting of the insurrection, Don’t You See That I Am Burning, might help him squeeze out sparks too. Dupuy-Spencer, like Banks, has a history of sympathetically portraying figures from America’s working class. Her painting of the Trumpist crowd at the Capitol isn’t soft on them, but she doesn’t paint down. Instead of viewing the rioters from on high in some blue yonder, she’s willed herself into the mob’s red fugue state.
Dupuy-Spencer’s imagination has been shaped by her love for Country music, so it was no surprise she was responsive when I linked her to Sam Hunt’s hybrids last month. His stuff seemed iffy to her at first—“Woah crossover!”—but he won her over: “I’m torn. But also it’s for real still the truth, so I guess it’s got to be country haha. (By the time I finished writing this email I decided I love it).”
Last word Celeste!
Notes
1 A sequence that sings like Jerry Lee Lewis’s high praise of the “greatest rock ’n’ roll fiddle player in the world” who can “get it, get it, get it, and then turn around and get it again. Musically speaking.” Pace Peter Guranick.)
2 Akhtar is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright as is his namesake in Homeland Elegies.
3 The event that led to the founding of Doctors Without Borders.
4 Dylan cited All Quiet on the Western Front as one template for his own sensibility in his Nobel prize lecture.
5 H/T Sequoia Millen-El.
6 I suppose the Aryan nation might cotton to the video. Fuck ‘em! They can’t have this song!
7 Hunt was a major college quarterback who had an NFL tryout. No doubt he’s partied as well as played with a lot of black athletes and he seems to know more about their worlds than most white folks.