Pulphead
By John Jeremiah Sullivan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp.
Sullivan appears Tuesday, Oct. 25, at the Regulator Bookshop and Wednesday, Oct. 26, at Flyleaf Books. Both events begin at 7 p.m.
In “Lahwineski: Career of an Eccentric Naturalist,” one of the magazine essays collected in his new book, Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan writes about Constantine Rafinesque, a little-known 19th-century polymath who came to the United States from Europe, twice, and spent a bit of his life and times studying the historic Kentucky mounds: “the rain-smoothed earthen monuments raised on the landscape by hundreds of generations of Native American builders.”
Sullivan observes with amazement that Rafinesque “was the only researcher to work seriously on the Kentucky mounds who never harmed them. He did not excavate. He knew there were grave goods inside, but he felt that the most important thing was to describe the exterior as accurately as possible and then protect everything.”
In Pulphead‘s next essay, “Unnamed Caves,” Sullivan goes spelunking in the Cumberland Gap with a University of Tennessee scientist, marveling at ancient cave pictographs made by indigenous, vanished tribes. Sullivan’s descents are interlarded with accounts of how thoroughly the treasures of the subterranean worldpottery, tombs and so onhave been ransacked over the centuries since the first European settlers arrived. “The first thing the Pilgrims did,” Sullivan writes, “was loot a mound.” The pillaging is still going on today. In “Unnamed Caves,” published about three years ago in Ecotone, Sullivan visits a seasoned digger who shows off some of his haul.
Sullivan’s repeated visits to these mounds, and to their looting, are perhaps not coincidental. In the best pieces in Pulphead, he manages to go deep into his subjects while at the same time leaving them intact and, like Constantine Rafinesque before him, never harming them. He is full of wonder and reverence for what he unearths, from the ancient worlds of mound builders through Rafinesque’s Victorian adventures to modern phenomena like Christian-rock music festivals, reality TV (“interior auto-mediation,” he calls it) and the Indiana childhood of Axl Rose (Sullivan grew up not far from Rose, né William Bailey, in southern Indiana). In Sullivan’s hands, the former Guns N’ Roses frontman comes off no less mysterious, exciting and powerful than Rafinesque himself: a living myth. When writing about contemporary subjects, Sullivan is skilled at shoring up, with a few thousand words, what he calls “the time-lapse sands of pop-cultural oblivion.”
The wide-ranging subjects in Pulphead are unified into a coherent book by Sullivan’s fine prose and lively voice, which can be scholarly, snarky, lyrical or harsh as suits the occasion. There is some stylistic borrowing from gonzo journalism, such as, “It’s all there, all the old American grotesques, the test-tube babies of Whitman and Poe, a great gauntlet of doubtless eyes, big mouths spewing fantastic catchphrase fountains of impenetrable self-justification, muttering dark prayers, calling on God to strike down those who would fuck with their money, their cash, and always knowing, always preaching.” In the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson, Sullivanoften the protagonist of these collected piecesdepicts himself smoking ganja in Jamaica while interviewing Bunny Wailer, and elsewhere he gets drunk a couple of times, as we might, too, in his shoes.
Sullivan is a more reliable guide, however, into the American grotesque than his gonzo forebearshis presence in Pulphead feels stable and trustworthy, and I think I know why, at least from a local perspective: He’s a Tar Heel, like us. He now lives with his family in Wilmington, N.C.; you can see his house on reruns of One Tree Hill, and in Pulphead‘s concluding essay, “Peyton’s Place,” you can read about his experience letting out his home to the production. (Fans of One Tree Hill still show up at his front door, apparently, to gawk and take pictures.)
Reading Sullivan’s work, one is tempted to drive down to Wilmington and ring his doorbell, too, but only to see if Sullivan has a few spare hours to drink whiskey and talk. He probably doesn’t, but even so, it’s good to have him around, peering far and deep into the world and then bringing it all back home.
