Crank Prophet Bestride America, Grinning (Part Four)
from The Shape of Things to Come, 2006
With David Thomas’s death on April 24, I want to do what can to keep the work of someone I was lucky to know alive in the little corner of the public mind this newsletter might reach. I’ve written a lot about David’s work over the years; my piece from Artforum in December 1997, and this chapter from my 2006 book The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, is some of it. (Part One of this chapter is available here, Part Two is available here, and Part Three is available here.)
In 1953
In 1953, in an essay that grew out of a seminar he was teaching on the literature of the Civil War, Edmund Wilson seemed to argue that a prophet is someone who calls a people to their defining, truest, deepest, or most resistant values: that is, those values hardest, or least possible, to live up to. “It was as if he had not only forseen the drama but had even seen all around it, with a kind of poetic objectivity, aware of the various points of view that the world must take toward its protagonist,” Wilson wrote. “In the poem that Lincoln lived, Booth had been prepared for, too, and the tragic conclusion was necessary to justify all the rest. It was dramatically and morally inevitable that this prophet who had overruled opposition and sent thousands of men to their deaths should finally attest his good faith by laying down his life with theirs.” Bob Dylan, speaking of Peter Guralnick’s biography Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, catches the same sweep of history, the balance of wish and event, in a line: in Guralnick’s book, Dylan said, one would find a young “Elvis Presley as he walks the path between heaven and nature, in an America that was wide open, when anything was possible.”