WORK & WORKING PEOPLE IN POPULAR CULTURE
Russell Harrison: Work and Words By Neil Donahue
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ussell Harrison began teaching at Hofstra University in 1984. Over the next several decades, he taught in several programs and departments. Before completing his Ph.D. at SUNY-Buffalo, he had graduated from City College with a degree in English and minors in German and Classics, then got an M.A. in Comparative Literature from SUNY-Binghamton, all of which might explain why he found his way back then over to the Comparative Literatur department to hang out with me and George Greaney – the Germanist and the Classicist. It was part of what he trained to do!
a rising middle-class and ‘economic miracle,’ when the rather fantastical notion of a post-ideological, post-class society gained currency, so to speak. Russ’ interests ran ‘against the grain’ of his own contemporaries, and the title of his book on Bukowski “Against the American Dream” reflects the contrary stance of both the author Bukowski and the scholar Harrison. Though I didn’t know it at the time, our last meeting took place at a restaurant he was fond of in Brooklyn called Werkstatt, which literally means workshop or workplace, with an Austro-Czech menu and good beer, obviously. Though he was rather infirm in fall 2019, we ate and drank, talked and laughed, and he was in his element.
During his time at Hofstra, before I arrived in 1988, Russ had also lived abroad twice, both times for a year or more as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer on American literature, first at Palacky University in Olomouc in the Czech Republic (at the center of a Central European triangle of Prague, Kracow and Vienna), and then in Minsk, Belarus. His view from abroad gave him an unusually broad perspective on American literature, his main field, and led to his books on internationally popular American authors who were/are avidly read all over the world, but less often taught and researched, if at all, at American universities, like Charles Bukowski and Patricia Highsmith. In fact Russ wrote the very first scholarly-critical studies of their work. But his interests also ran toward German-language literature.
In his daily life, his bookish braininess seemed offset at times by a certain endearing obtuseness in practical matters [which I never quite understood, since he had grown up around a hardware store]; yet before his academic career, he had in fact also worked as a taxi driver in NYC and in a municipal bureaucracy. He sometimes seemed to combine a Candide-like sense of wonder at the world with a sophisticated theoretical acuity honed on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, on Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. But also with the political convictions of Bernie Sanders, whose progressive politics he supported wholeheartedly – perhaps with an additional degree of conviction because his name was Bernie from Brooklyn and Burlington! For all his theoretical, political, economic and literary sophistication, Russ cultivated a kind of bemused analytical detachment even from his own circumstances, which makes in his autobiographical writings for wonderful and evocative reading, but also an edgy wit. Once early on in our friendship, when he first came to meet me at the German office I shared with several faculty at the time in Calkins Hall, he looked in and spotted on the wall a couple of pictures that had hung there for years and that I had studiously learned to ignore: the German flag and a boot with kittens in it. He saw at once a connection between kitty-cat kitsch and naïve nationalism, and commented: “Ah, unintellected emotion.” It was a funny and incisive remark, and I loved his use of the word intellect as an active transitive verb, indicating an action, -thought-, on an object, on life, as an inflection, not a reflection, and not just in scholarship, but all the time, and for Russ, especially through conversation. He was not against emotion, but I think he meant that it had to be fully formed and informed through understanding, and vice versa. For Russ, I think, the act of intellection elevated emotion; thought elevated feeling (and, conversely, feeling would animate and redeem abstract conceptual thinking); this dialectical interaction reinforced the core of human dignity and solidarity against whatever tried to diminish it, at work or in politics. In
Thus, shortly after I started at Hofstra 32 years ago, Russ came to one of my classes and asked to sit in as I taught post-World War II German-language literature, including Thomas Bernhard. Little did I know that he knew much more about that particular author than I did, and later would write an excellent book on Bernhard’s work. But that visit to my class started a conversation about German literature, language, politics and culture, and far beyond, that continued over the next 30 years. Among his favorite authors were American writer Charles Bukowski (born in Germany), Thomas Bernhard (Austrian), Bertolt Brecht, B. Traven, Walter Benjamin or even Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932, on Evolutionary Socialism). He seemed to have a preference for authors whose names started with B, perhaps only after studying in Binghamton and Buffalo and moving to Brooklyn, but seriously he read very widely, all over the alphabet and in all directions, even in German, with an eye toward relations of labor and the conditions of consciousness, and social class, and their economic underpinnings, especially in the workplace. That topic of labor relations, of economic relations, of work, had animated literature in the U.S. and Europe in the first decades of the 20th century up to WWII, but then also quickly faded to large extent in the postwar period of 20
other words, critical consciousness labors to protect that core in the Self and Others: criticism, literary and social critique, was in itself class-conscious labor, artisanal craft, for the sake of understanding and for the sake of others, but also as its own reward. And for Russ that included conversation, which explains why it was so enduringly fun and rewarding, interesting and enlightening to talk with him, and so unending. Thoughtful conversation about ideas was his mode of existence, an ongoing act of shared intellection, which now continues in his absence, while his voice remains alive and lively in his writing. Russ’ book on Charles Bukowski Against the American Dream (1994) was a landmark publication, as the first scholarly study of that popular American author with a readership in the U.S. and around the world, though not at American universities, where Buk, as he was known, never fit the genteel and formal models of postWWII literary consumption and criticism. Bukowski’s deadbeat anti-heroes of the dive bar and dead-end job pretty much deflate all high-minded pretensions of moral, spiritual, idealistic or humanistic uplift and edification with their crass concentration on labor and wages (or the refusal of both) in the work-a-day world. Bukowski’s carefully constructed but sparse sentences make him a sort of nextgeneration Hemingway of the workplace, that is, not of manly adventurism in exotic places, but rather of slacker detachment, of getting by and getting high on the margins of society between lousy jobs. When I once worked in the 8th St Barnes & Noble in Greenwich Village, while hanging out with wannabe writers and artists in the East Village and in Hoboken, we all knew that Bukowski enjoyed the status of the most shoplifted of all authors, which seemed to suggest that the books were both read and taken to heart. However, Bukowski’s apparently simple and unadorned prose gave rise to widespread half-baked imitations, which only underscored how deceptively difficult and disciplined it would be to actually write like Bukowski. Russ’s study demonstrated that fact at length for the first time and showed the critical depths beneath the assertive and insistent shallowness of Bukowski’s characters, and it’s no wonder that Bukowski’s own publisher, the famous Black Sparrow Press, agreed to publish Russ’ work, even though they as a rule did not -ever - publish literary criticism or scholarship. Russ’s meticulous close readings of Bukowski’s poetry and novels incorporate smoothly, even elegantly, broad literaryhistorical perspectives into far-reaching theoretical reflections and socio-historical contexts. Russ might telescope into his discussion of a scene in a mailroom at the post office or in a bar after work, apt citations of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse in order to develop an analysis of Bukowski’s implicit critiques of Taylorism, Fordism and post-WWII corporate management practices while advancing at the same time a comparison to Henry Miller’s sexism and the emerging contexts in the 1970s of the Vietnam War, civil rights protests and gender politics in Los Angeles. Through such adroit contextualizations, Russ opens depths of implication in the apparently empty egotistical behaviors and hapless interactions of Bukowski’s characters. If you look at some of the random online reviews of Russ’s study, it quickly becomes clear that Bukowski’s readership, in the tradition of
Russell Harrison. Photo credit: David Friedkin.
American anti-intellectualism, does not necessarily want or appreciate such depths of erudite interpretation applied to their favorite deadbeat anti-heroes! The desire for easy identification and superficial validation often, paradoxically, runs deep and runs counter to the demands of critical thinking or intellection (in Russ’s term). Yet precisely there, where the dynamics of class, of labor and compensation, of contestation and negotiation, are least apparent and most invisible, is where such abstractly theoretical and historical analysis is most required. In his book on Thomas Bernhard’s Comic Materialism: Class, Art and ‘Socialism’ in Post-War Austria (2012), Russ writes again against the grain of prior scholarship to reveal new depths of interpretation. The work of this brilliant Austrian satirist, with minimal plot or action, consists of extremely long, intricately imbricated and masterfully overwrought syntactical cascades of tirade and invective (usually against all things Austrian) that flow on for pages in compounding cadences that combine hilarious hyperbole with withering insights. In translation Bernhard’s work loses its main feature of Germanic syntax, always a challenge, but for Bernhard syntax figures as an extreme sport, like Alpine hanggliding in a sentence diagram. Yet even in the original, Bernhard’s relentless style of endless amplifications and interpolations, the very opposite of Bukowski’s laconic style, likewise conceals or distracts from the actual socio-historical contexts that the tirades address, and most scholarship on Bernhard has simply taken (or mistaken) that stunning style for the content. In contrast, Russ’s book excavates and illuminates the underlying political, historical and economic contexts, reading and delving between the lines, to explicate Bernhard’s commentary upon Austria’s Nazi past, its protracted failure to confront its fascist complicity, and then the convenient compromises of the so-called ‘democracy deficit’ in its postwar governments. Yet for all of his breadth of reading, and awareness of Central European authors and socio-economic thought, I don’t recall ever 21
