Review: Padgett Powell on Charles Willeford, Known Pulpist

The Willeford hero is not heroic, slick, cool, particularly smart. He is with-it only in a rather backhanded eschewing of with-itness.

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Charles Willeford began his long career in the fifties, I believe in California, publishing books that were openly called “psychopulp,” and he a master of it. On a jacket (The Woman Chaser, 1960): “Willeford’s best novel. Profound pulp with low sex and high energy.” —The Village Voice. The titles offer an idea: Proletarian Laughter, High Priest of California, The Burnt Orange Heresy, The Machine in Ward Eleven. It sounds like a zone that might include Barbary Shore, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, A Clockwork Orange. Some kind of hip, possibly para-political protest with sex in it; elitist-denying blue-collar elitism; anti-literary literature. Willeford drove a tank in World War II in Europe and seems to have done everything else hard and rough one can stumble into. At some point he decided to start writing it all down.

En route to Miami, where he would make his last stand, he seems to have moved through Jacksonville, Florida, or the idea of Jacksonville, with its weird literary recrudescences oozing out of it (James Merrill, Linda Blair, Lynyrd Skynyrd); one or two books are set there (The Black Mass of Brother Springer and parts, I think, of Cockfighter). There is perhaps not a more pulpy place on the planet.