Lust for Life: German Expressionism Before, During and After

AT THE HEIGHT of German hyperinflation in 1923 and 1924, people would sit on the streets ready to barter with crates of paper money. It was sold by weight and worth more than old bones but less than rags.

This was a hell of a year to be alive in Berlin: Franz Kafka was an obscure figure, ill with tuberculosis and consulting the Talmud, preparing a retreat home to Prague where he would soon die; Vladimir Nabokov was arriving as a young student, returning to his Russian emigre family from London; Joseph Roth was surviving, hand-to-mouth, describing city life in newspaper columns known as feuilletons, a model he defined as "saying true things on half a page".

Roth would eventually write a tart letter in 1926 explaining his approach to an editor: "I don't write 'witty columns'. I paint the portrait of the age. That's what great newspapers are there for. I'm not a reporter, I'm a journalist. I'm not an editorial writer, I'm a poet."

Almost 100 years on his journalism is collected in book form as What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33. It is a testament to his abilities and to the fact the capital of Weimar Germany thrilled as much as it appalled. Certainly there was a harshness and inhumanity to the city that would cause Roth to observe: "Berlin is freezing even when it's 60 degrees."

Two-dozen daily newspapers quickened the pulse of the city, a fever of communications. Pamphlets, periodicals and street posters were also rife. Artists embraced this new "age of mechanical reproduction" - to use German philosopher Walter Benjamin's phrase - with limited-edition portfolios and printmaking techniques, lithographs, etchings.

A part of this activity had sprung out of the immediate post-war period when political advocacy and social instability engaged artists in street-level protests. Every party and cause under the sun needed a rallying image. Later, when money proved to be worthless, their drawings, prints and portfolios were as a good a currency as any to enable artists' survival, while easily reproducible works were publishable as well as capable of reaching a larger audience.

It was a trend that connected to a graphic impulse deeply embedded in the woodcut experiments of early 20th-century expressionism, and a latent national pride that associated these craft-oriented forms with 15th-century gothic masters such as Albert Durer; a venerable German tradition. In a defeated and indeed crushed country such processes offered up their own vague consolations for cultural identity.

Those following the Communist Party-influenced 1919 manifestos of the Berlin dada group saw it rather differently. For the dadaists, satire and protest emerged out of collage and photomontage - then a radically new technique - the necessary pathways to confront the mass media developing around them. By rearranging imagery, a suppressed reality could be made manifest; lies could be exploded.

If such applied cultural theories seem dated now, they were then as radical as shooting a feature film on an iPhone appears today. It had not been done before, it had not been seen. In any case, oils and canvas had come to cost more than most artists could afford. The new way was also the cheap way.

Bouncing back rapidly from the economic insanity of the early 1920s, Berlin would re-establish itself as the third largest city in Europe after London and Paris, a metropolis thrumming with corruption and opportunity.

It was not just the capital of the Weimar Republic of Germany; it was the most exciting city in the world, its sins and sorrows visible to anyone who cared to see. Suitably inspired, Berlin's trinity of hyper-realist art - George Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann - would depict disfigured war veterans, corpulent businessmen, the sex trade and acts of suicide with an illustrative, almost sinister relish.

Two million German soldiers had been killed during World War I; another four million were wounded. Amputees and beggars were everywhere, shell shock and nervous breakdowns part of the social disorder. About 700,000 people had died of malnutrition and starvation between 1914 and 1918, many of them towards the war's end.

The assassination of Jewish foreign minister Walter Rathenau by right-wing extremists in 1922 added to the grim tidings. An urbane and brilliantly conciliatory figure, he had personified hopes for the fledgling democracy. The year of hyperinflation then smashed whatever slender economic security people - especially the old - thought they still had.

After all this, it is hardly surprising anything like good times should be grasped with a desperate, almost manic lust for life, and everything else be damned.

Inevitably painters, writers, musicians, dancers and bohemians of all stripes were drawn into the vortex. Almost 20 per cent of the German population was composed of  foreigners by the mid-1920s. Berlin was the cosmopolitan capital, a doorway to revolutionary Russia, whose changes shook Europe in seismic waves. Refugees flooded in from across the border; so did ideas about art and design, such as were seen in constructivism. The reality of homelessness and unemployment made itself felt as a countervailing force to any internationalist spirit among the bohemians.

As history would prove, Berlin was on the edge of the most important existential and political struggles of the 20th century. Zeal and antipathy, hedonism and repulsion, would drive the bipolar character of the city's inhabitants regularly to the brink.

The Weimar's unsteady life - racked by punitive war debts and 20 government cabinets in 14 years - was ultimately destroyed by the worldwide Depression that began in 1929, paving the way for the National Socialists to seize power in 1933.

Grosz, Dix and Beckmann, photomontage artist John Heartfield and playwright Bertolt Brecht were among those who recognised what was happening.

Inevitably their work put them on a collision path with the Nazis. They weren't just making art; they were fighting for their lives and for their world as it staggered out of one cataclysm and back into another in the interval of barely more than decade. Everybody was up to their necks in it.

WITH AN EXHIBITION at the Art Gallery of NSW entitled The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910-1937, curator Jacqueline Strecker tries to stretch beyond the 14-year measure of the Weimar Republic from 1918 to 1933 to examine the pre-war years and World War I itself as part of the deeper cultural force that led to so much great art.

Along with this exhibition there will be a concurrent production of Brecht's The Threepenny Opera - the Malthouse and Victorian Opera production from Melbourne is being presented by Sydney Theatre Company - and a screening at the Opera House of Fritz Lang's Metropolis with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. The print of Metropolis, the most expensive silent movie made, is yet again improved with 30 additional minutes of footage discovered in 2008 and never seen before in Australia.

Numerous other events and talks will feature across the city, with gallerists Rex Irwin and Ray Hughes presenting subsidiary shows.

A below-the-radar highlight will be a screening of Walter Ruttmann's experimental film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, essentially a visual poem filmed from morning until night in 1927. Jazz pianist Stu Hunter will play a live score to it with fellow musicians at the AGNSW's Domain Theatre.

The intent of all this is to re-create the ambience of a city ignited by art across myriad disciplines, a hopeless cause for present-day Sydney, but an admirable feast for those who want to immerse themselves in Weimar life.

Ironically the "metropolis" of Berlin, as Lang's futuristic parable suggests, was an inherently frightening development in a country that had been far more rural before industrialisation and World War I.

Words and phrases such as nerves, nervy and nervous energy crop up frequently in the catalogue to The Mad Square. The title of the exhibition puns on the name of a Felix Nussbaum painting from 1931 to look at what the "mad square" might have been: be it insanity in a public place, or rage within the frame of a painting, or something else as the Nazis loomed closer to power and artists responded in a frenzy amid a newly urbanised life.

We peer now into the abyss of the Weimar Republic through the prism of its phenomenal art, literature, design and theatre with strange longing nonetheless. It is a revealing feeling, and not so far from Otto Dix's accounts of his experiences as a machine-gunner during World War I: "The war was a horrible thing, but still something powerful," he wrote. "Under no circumstances could I miss it! You need to have experienced men in this unbridled state to really learn something about man."

Black-and-white works from Dix's portfolio War (1924) provide a salutary and gruesome rebuff to simple-minded voyeurism. Neither a pacifist nor a warmonger, Dix lays out the facts like a deck of cards, a fractured nightmare that enters fully into a bloody domestic painting such as The Felixmuller Family (1919).

This is a world stained by war that soon enough will stampede its way towards another, despite the artist's best efforts to disillusion people.

As usual the AGNSW will also run a program of films to parallel The Mad Square. Modern-day classics such as Cabaret will help to re-create the dark vibrancy of the era, a bridge to arguably even darker experiences such as Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930), with Marlene Dietrich as the archetypal nightclub femme fatale.

The latter explored a common theme: desire and anxiety, focused on the Neue Frau (New Woman), urban, independent and granted voting rights for the first time with the advent of the Weimar Republic in 1919. Hannah Hoch, who was reluctantly accepted into the dada group, would question this stereotype in her freakish collages, reaching a more melancholy high point with her painting Imaginary Bridge (1926), an exploration of a failed relationship and her two terminated pregnancies.

The convergence of sex and death, explicit or implicit in so much of the work, inevitably leads to a detached eroticisation of the era, and much of its magnetism. Christian Schad's Self Portrait(1927), with a naked woman on a bed behind him, a scar on her face, while he stares out at the viewer as if glancing into a mirror, sets the tone. It is one of the key works in a Berlin painting movement of the mid-1920s known as the Neue Sachlichkeit (translated as New Objectivity or, more correctly, New Matter-of-Factness).

One ultimately has to ask how much beauty there is to be experienced at an exhibition such as this, or if it is all one long slide into the approaching darkness.

"I don't subscribe to the view that these works are culturally pessimistic," Strecker says. "I don't see that as the overwhelming quality. The artists were acutely aware of what was around them, of course. The extraordinary thing was the artists were responding so quickly to so many dramatic changes, and even though they existed on the fringes there was a feeling what they were doing could change things or influence society.

"And it was that belief in creative expression and the role of the artist in revealing and even changing things that was unique to this period. I think that idealism has actually gone now from a lot of contemporary work."

She admits: "There is a lot of resistance in Australia to this kind of art. It's edgy. For some people it will be ugly and too political. But it's that edge and that engagement with society that I find more satisfying as a brand of modernism than 'art for art's sake'. You look at some of the works now and you can see that they could only be created in that place and time."

Strecker fingers the pages of the exhibition catalogue and even wonders if the work will have the same impact for a modern audience inured to images of violence and pornography as part of their casual entertainment. Rudolf Schlicter's The Embrace (1927-28), for example, shows two women in tight sexual coupling. Strecker says: "The overwhelming quality of it is the way it has been drawn. The subject matter has almost become secondary."

The same, perhaps, may be said for the early Grosz lithograph Murder in Ackerstrasse (1916-17), which depicts a beheaded prostitute on her bed while her goonish killer washes his hands. A cartoon grotesque, it shows the influence of children's illustrations and toilet graffiti that Grosz turned to in rejecting bourgeois ideas about art. Not so oddly, the image feels as if it has grown out of a tabloid newspaper report: part horror story, part grind-house amusement.

Despite her mixed thoughts on how people may respond - aesthetically, morally or emotionally - Strecker is intrigued by "the power of the work in the exhibition and how much of it does still speaks to us so directly".

She senses "that quality of embracing the new and being excited by modern life, but also fearful of it. We're in a similar period in a way with technology transforming things at such a rapid pace".

As if it is so obvious it barely needs saying, she shrugs and says, "Artists were facing similar changes back then."

BRECHT WAS RIGHT. In a 1930 film version of The Threepenny Opera he adds a final verse to Mack the Knife to explicate his interest in the lives of the rich and poor in Germany:

There are some who are in darkness
And the others are in light
And you see the ones in brightness
Those in darkness drop from sight.

The verse serves just as well as a eulogy for the artists of the Weimar Republic. The Nazis, who favoured neoclassical Roman and Greek art as their ideal, began a savage rollback against anything remotely tainted by modernism as they rose to power. By the time the National Socialists were burning books and artworks in 1933, many artists had wisely left.

Jews, communists, homosexuals and "degenerates", they were the un-Germanic filth that would form part of a great cultural exodus that transformed the West in theatre and music (Brecht and Kurt Weill), film (Lang), photojournalism (August Sander), political satire (Grosz), philosophy (Benjamin) and painting (Wassily Kandinsky). All of them had made Berlin their focus, a generation it is hard to imagine gathering in one place again.

Those left behind would enter into a state of internal exile to survive, or kill themselves if they weren't already being shipped off to concentration camps.

These suicides were not simply a matter of historical defeat, they were also the logical conclusion to a nihilism that was born in the trenches of World War I, then cultivated as a political and psychological aesthetic that left them nowhere else to go. People had been hanging themselves and jumping out of windows since the war. Things had gone from bad to worse. The lucky ones cringed behind doors, working in watercolours rather than oils so no one could smell what they were up to.

To see this exhibition is to be excited nontheless by the artistic project of social engagement. It is not all murder, sex and protest either, as the beauty and elegance of the Bauhaus school in everything from architecture and furniture design to teacups painted by Kandinsky make clear.

Indeed it's a surprise to realise Paul Klee and Kandinsky were both teaching at the Bauhaus school during the 20s, and to see their interest in "other worlds" of colour and form were as much a part of the era as more obviously intense social commentary. Eventually the Bauhaus was closed down by the Nazis for its supposed communist sympathies, a little too much talk of affordable design serving the working masses.

This elegance and beauty and, yes, this spirituality noted, there is still something about most of the works that calls to mind film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's phrase, "fear eats the soul". For The Mad Square is ultimately about a culture squeezed between two apocalyptic dramas, World War I and the coming of the Nazis. It cannot be denied.

It's instructive, therefore, to dwell again on the end of World War I. After the ruling kaiser had fled in defeat, a series of spasmodic and violent upheavals occurred, all of which were brutally suppressed. Thousands were injured and killed in street fighting and the jostling for power from late 1918 well into 1919.

A moderate Social Democratic Party, propped up by the same generals who had prosecuted the war, was able to establish the basis for a parliamentary democracy. It was this that would become known as the Weimar Republic, but there was always a feeling the SDP never washed the blood of these associations off its hands. The murder in custody of communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by a paramilitary unit nominally controlled by the SDP in 1919 had such symbolic freight all public signs of grief were immediately banned. In the longer run it would prevent the political left from ever forging a united opposition to the Nazis.

Among the many standout works in the exhibition is a black-and-white woodcut, Memorial for Karl Liebknecht 1919-20.

Invited by the Liebknecht family to sketch him at the mortuary, artist Kathe Kollwitz would note in her diary how "he was lying there in a coffin in the hall beside other coffins, with red flowers around his bullet-holed head. His face was proud, his mouth slightly opened and twisted in pain."

Her woodcut emanates a religious grief of near medieval darkness, intensified by an empathy that had grown out of the death of Kollwitz's own son during the war. The work is stark, powerful and, in the context of the times, an act of humane bravery.

It may sound grand, but there is a larger feeling of bravery running through much of the work: for its aesthetic boldness, its ecstatic principles in the pre-war years and later challenges to the bourgeois order and corruption of the Weimar period that saw right-wing nationalism fester and triumph.

The Mad Square culminates in a documentation of The Degenerate Art show of 1937, an event critic Uwe Fleckner flags as "a defamatory exhibition" by the Nazis.

Paintings, sculptures, collages and other works were hung in a purposely slap-dash and ramshackle fashion, crammed into a few rooms and surrounded by numerous, shrill signs declaring things such as: "Revelation of the Jewish racial soul"; "The ideal - cretin and whore"; "Madness become method"; and "The Jewish longing for
the wilderness reveals itself - in Germany the Negro becomes the racial ideal of degenerate art".

Much earlier Joseph Roth had written in fury and pain from Paris in 1933 as the Nazis threw books and artworks into great bonfires: "We have sung Germany, the real Germany! And that is why today we are being burned by Germany!" Called The Auto-da-Fe of the Mind, it is actually one of his least controlled pieces, as if Roth's own writing is breaking apart before the horror.

By the time of The Degenerate Art show it was all over for them. In bearing witness to the art still with us in The Mad Square, we're strangely fortunate to see the ones in brightness that survived. Those in darkness drop from sight. Burned.

- Mark Mordue

* This article was first published under the title 'Lust for Life' in The Weekend Australian Review, July 30, 2011. It was inspired by the exhibition, 'The Mad Square', held at the Art Gallery of NSW August 6 - November 6, 2011.

Hank Williams - On the Lost Highway

DAMNED COLD. An ice storm over Nashville has closed down flights across the state of Tennessee.

Driving is just as treacherous, but despite the weather a startling 1952 powder-blue Cadillac convertible hurries on through the night along a rising, twisting road marred by patches of ice, fog and flurries of snow.

A teenager looks into the rear-vision mirror as oncoming headlights flare into the vehicle to reveal a figure on the back seat, sedated and asleep at last. There is a blanket over the dozing man, one arm across his chest holding it in place. A white Stetson cowboy hat sits beside him.

Charles Carr, the 17-year-old driver, and his 29-year-old passenger, country music phenomenon Hank Williams, had started their journey well, just two young men on the road and having fun as they got to know each other. Sure, Williams had taken the usual hit of morphine from his doctor to ease any back pain that might worry him over the journey ahead. But he was otherwise sober and ready to sing his heart out.

The pair left their home town of Montgomery, Tennessee on December 29, 1952, for a trek of several hundred kilometres across three states. Carr was ferrying Williams towards two big shows booked for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day 1953. They were getting on so well the boy even dared to tease Williams about his latest song, Jambalaya (On the Bayou), saying he could not understand what the singer was going on about.

Named after a Creole dish, the song involved unusually abstract lyrics from Williams that suggested a Louisiana wedding feast and, perhaps, the groom relishing the consummation of his marriage. Heightened and blurred by Williams's colloquial mix of Cajun French and English, and his vowel-bending singing style, Jambalaya conveyed a good-natured, sensual joy rarely heard on radio outside of blues music stations.

Despite his claims of confusion, Carr must have grasped the innuendos behind the song. He reports they both laughed when Williams called him "a son-of-bitch" for criticising it, further declaring the teenage boy's French to be just as good as his ever was.

In a recording career of only six years, running from 1947 until the end of 1952 -- a year of which was mostly scuttled by the musicians' union strike of 1948 -- Williams notches up 30 hit singles in a row. Another five songs of his will be released posthumously. All 35 singles register in the Top 10 of the Billboard country & western best sellers chart. Eleven go straight to the No 1 spot, including instant classics Cold, Cold Heart, Hey, Good Lookin', and, as of this New Year's Eve, Jambalaya.

In 1951 crooner Tony Bennett had turned Cold, Cold Heart into an even bigger international pop success, backed by a lavish string arrangement from Percy Faith. Soporific and overdone, Bennett's version nonetheless thrills Williams. "This is a song that has kept us in a lot of beans and biscuits," he says when he introduces it in his own show.

Williams himself is considered too primitive for the mainstream, but the figure who will become known as "the hillbilly Shakespeare" is still the artist of choice on Wurlitzer jukeboxes across the nation. If you're drinking in a bar, or live anywhere in the American south, Williams is the king.

Any wildness or bleakness that makes it difficult for the industry to digest him only feeds into a catalogue of great songs that more conventionally smooth pop singers can re-interpret for mass consumption. Bennett wants more; Bing Crosby is sniffing around. An earlier Williams hit, 1948's rollicking Move It On Over, will later provide the musical template for Bill Haley and the Comets' Rock Around the Clock in 1954, opening the door for rock 'n' roll. It will not be until the likes of Bob Dylan in the early 60s that a white crossover artist of Williams's songwriting calibre and revolutionary influence emerges again.

He should be in an untouchable situation as he heads across the Appalachian Mountains, as luminous as the white Nudie cowboy suits he wears on stage with their embossed blue musical notes strewn across him. Instead, Williams has been sacked from the Grand Ole Opry, the live Saturday evening WSM-AM radio broadcast that goes out from Nashville's Ryman Auditorium to the entire nation. Though integral to the Grand Ole Opry's popularity, Williams's boozing has made him insufferable. The impression is Williams is glad to escape the "family values" the program imposes on his image and behaviour.

Unfortunately, producer and mentor Fred Rose has also told Williams he can't work with him any more after the pair recorded Your Cheatin' Heart the past August. The rift with a father figure such as Rose is a much deeper wound. Williams's regular band, the Drifting Cowboys, have just about had their fill too, and these days prefer to tour with his more amenable drinking buddy and imitator, singer Ray Price. A reputation for unreliability sees Williams scrabbling to book shows on a club circuit that should be desperate to have a radio and recording star of his magnitude.

This past year he has also reluctantly divorced his wife, sometime manager and greatest muse, Audrey Sheppard, for the second and final time, swearing if she cut him loose him he'd be dead within a year.

He then marries 18-year-old Billy Jean Jones Eshlimar, memorably described as the type of girl who causes a car wreck every time she walks down the street. Williams reputedly steals her away from fellow country artist Faron Young by waving a gun at his head and letting him know the gal is now his.

Between his divorce from Audrey and his marriage to Billy Jean just a few months after meeting her in 1952 -- a marriage performed three times, twice in public for paying audiences at shows in New Orleans (done, it is said, to repeatedly spite Audrey) -- Williams has managed to get another lover, Bobbie Jett, pregnant.

If that weren't enough, he has fallen deeper into a ferocious dependency on chloral hydrate and morphine prescribed to alleviate lifelong back problems that have reached an excruciating pitch after a botched spinal fusion operation the previous Christmas, 1951. A rumoured loss of control over one of his legs, incurred by the back operation, sometimes causes Williams to fall on stage, only worsening the nonetheless accurate impression of him drinking and pill popping to grand excess.

Nicknamed "Bones", Williams has always been a lean 1.88m tall, prone to hunch over a microphone and mesmerise an audience with his black stare. But lately people say it is as if his face is being sucked inwards. The dark spark in his eyes is going, leaving only a weepy glaze from drinking. He weighs in at just under 60kg, lives on a diet of eggs and tomato sauce when he eats at all. There are tales of his gaunt figure staggering across the stage gobbling a fistful of chloral hydrate tablets to kill the pain. Those who see him in this final year variously speak of his shows as either a tragic shambles or the best he has ever sung.

The word haunted springs to mind to describe Williams, but it is too romantic. He is more frightening than that. A few days before his last car journey he wakes from a nightmare and jumps up, frenziedly shadowboxing around the bedroom. Billy Jean calms him down and asks what is the matter? He tells her he saw Jesus coming down the road to take his soul away.

While Williams and his young driver are joking in their sky-coloured Cadillac about the meaning behind Jambalaya, the fast-moving singer knows he has another song being pressed for delivery into the stores. It too will hit the No 1 spot the moment it is announced he has come to the end of his journey. Its title has Williams's fatal, frog-like smile underlining every word: I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive.

THE LOST NOTEBOOKS of Hank Williams is an album of new Williams songs put together under the direction of Bob Dylan. It features artists such as Jack White, Lucinda Williams (no relation), Levon Helm, Norah Jones, Sheryl Crow and Merle Haggard, along with Dylan himself, completing lyrics and ideas left behind by Williams in a set of four notebooks, one of which was with him on the night he died. The content has been speculated on for some time, a Turin shroud of sorts within the country music fraternity. There's certainly no doubting the devotional intensity behind the project now.

In his memoir Chronicles, Volume 1, Dylan wrote of being a young man when the sound of Williams's voice "went through me like an electric rod". It is hard to capture that specific jolt, but country singer Rodney Crowell articulates the right spirit for the Notebooks project when he explains how Williams "provided something that was a really big part of my family and the culture from whence I came, which was Saturday night sinning and Sunday morning redemption -- that's what Hank Williams's music always sounded like to me." Within days of the release of The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams, Time-Life will put out a 3-CD box set, Hank Williams: The Legend Begins, featuring rare radio material known as "the Health and Happiness recordings".

These are big steps in a renaissance of the singer's life and work, sparked by a long-running exhibition at Nashville's Country Music Hall of Fame entitled Family Tradition: The Williams Family Legacy. Beginning in March 2008 the exhibition has become the most popular in its history and will not close until December 31. In addition, a film entitled The Last Ride in the USA is making appearances on the festival circuit. While it does not name Williams, or feature any of his music, it is clearly based on Carr's account of their last journey together.

Earlier this year, singer-songwriter Steve Earle released a debut novel inspired by Williams. Titled I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive, it imagines the life of the shonky doctor who regularly shot up the country singer with morphine, prescribing chloral hydrate tablets as a cure for his alcoholism, pain and sleeping problems. In Earle's novel, Williams's one-time doctor has become a heroin addict haunted by the singer's ghost.

There are other convergences that are simply the by-product of a great songwriter's material never going out of fashion. In Australia, Kasey Chambers has just recorded a cover of the Williams classic I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry for her Storybook album. On it she duets with Paul Kelly, who plays guitar. She says they did the song in one take, with one microphone, live, "no layering, just the way we thought Hank would have done it and liked it".

"It is my most favourite country song ever," she says. "It's totally heartbreaking but you don't want to stop listening to it. Oh God, it just makes you want to crawl into a hole," she says with a laugh. "It has that combination of making you feel good and bad at the same time, which is what all great country music does."

Kelly says, "Hank Williams songs were some of the first songs I learned. Your Cheatin' Heart, Hey Good Lookin', Rambling Man, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry. Lovesick Blues still floors me. The music is so rambunctious in contrast to the lovelorn lyrics. Hank was on to something there.

"Many people have covered I'm So Lonesome and every cover I've heard is slower than the original. The lyrics are so desolate singers want to wallow in the emotion. Hank's version is lonesome all right, but listen to the bounce in the music. There's a perk in it. He always had that, even at his saddest. A good lesson for songwriters."

On the Lost Notebooks recording, Holly Williams, Hank's granddaughter, nonetheless delivers a plaintive ballad called Blue is My Heart. Bone simple, it circles around the words "blue is my heart, blue as the sky". She says this simplicity is the hardest thing to recapture and transform into something great. In many ways Blue is My Heart is her attempt, she admits, "to get to know him". With backing vocals from Hank Williams Jr, the son of Hank and Holly's father, it's possible to hear the ruptured intimacy of three generations in a matter of a few lines.

RAISED POOR in Montgomery, Alabama, Williams had a childhood clouded by his father's nervous breakdown after injuries sustained in World War I, leading to his early departure from the family. To make ends meet Williams's dominating mother ran boarding houses that some claimed were really bordellos. Her life motto was "take no crap", and Williams would tell band members "there ain't no one I'd rather have backing me in a fight than my mother with a broken bottle in her hand".

Helping to support his family by selling newspapers and peanuts, Williams learned the knack of selling a song too, inducted into the trade by a black street musician named Rufus Payne. Williams would badger him for lessons in blues songs. Payne tended to play hillbilly music on the street because it made him more money. It's often said country music is just the white man's blues anyway. It was always a mongrel experience to survive, and every musician knew it. Years later Williams would have a smash hit with a traditional song Payne taught, My Bucket's Got a Hole in It.

Payne was known around town as "Tee-Tot", a pun on teetotaller. Williams may have tried alcohol with him, and he was certainly drinking moonshine liquor with his cousins by the time was 11, getting so drunk, the locals joke, they'd lay down on the earth and fall off it. It's now well-established Williams suffered from an undiagnosed case of spina bifida occulta, a congenital disorder of the vertebrae. A look into his teenage notebooks reveals one of his first original songs was titled Back Pain Blues.

By the time Williams was 14 he was winning talent contests, appearing on local radio and putting a band together. He'd soon be touring a honky tonk circuit known as the blood bucket. As a matter of routine Williams kitted his band out with blackjacks for defence, preferring the use of his steel guitar as an argument settler when under threat.

It was in this kind of environment Williams's songs had to work. And yet their emotional vulnerability is exceedingly unusual for men of that era to express, one reason why his songs were equally as popular with women.

With the looks of a movie-star blonde, Sheppard would hardly be the first female to find Williams charming, but it's fair to say she was by far the most important, however stormy their marriage proved to be. It was for her most of his lovelorn songs were written.

There's a saying that when it comes to life in the American south, "William Faulkner wrote it, Hank Williams sang it". Williams was barely literate, of course, his favoured reading being comic books and romance magazines to fuel song-writing ideas.

Most of the Memphis Sun Studio artists who would lay down the foundations for the birth of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s were raw Southern boys just like him -- Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley. Not for nothing is the wall of Vince Everett's cell in Presley's 1957 film Jailhouse Rock decorated with a photo of Williams.

But by then the traditional country music Williams had once represented was being swept away by the new musical tide, while a refined and orchestrated Nashville sound was evolving to secure whatever parts of the popular market were left.

WILLIAMS'S UNEXPECTED DEATH from what an autopsy declared as "insufficiency of the right ventricle to the heart" (prosaically, a broken heart) made no mention of drugs. But as his road journey unravelled and bad weather caused Williams to miss his New Year's Eve show, the singer did begin drinking. At a brief hotel stopover he is reported to have been wracked by coughing fits and hiccupping, and unable to walk.

A doctor called to the scene gave him two shots of vitamin B-12, laced with morphine. He was in such bad shape he had to be taken back to the car in a wheelchair before he and Carr set off again into the night. Whether or not he also took his tablets is not known, but Williams always had a prescription of chloral hydrate on hand to ease the ride.

In the movies of that time chloral hydrate and alcohol were the deadly cocktail used to slip people what was called a Micky. It is essentially the same type of combination cited these days in date-rape cases. One of the drug's by-products when taken with alcohol is psychosis. That combination with morphine can only be imagined, but back in the 40s and 50s it was a mixture favoured for euthanasing terminally ill patients.

Carr had been driving for almost 19 hours total without sleep when he pulled over for gas in Oak Hill, West Virginia. "He [Williams] had his blue overcoat on and had a blanket over him that had fallen off," Carr said. "I reached back to put the blanket back over him and I felt a little unnatural resistance from his arm."

People still take Williams's last backwoods journey by car as if it were a stations-of-the cross experience, listening to his slyly sexy hillbilly music and lovesick blues as they ride along. It can be a spooky business. As Carr has recalled, "It's a tough drive, I can promise you that."

On New Year's Eve, 1952, before or after midnight, no one knows, Williams scratched away in his thin, spidery hand on a piece of paper, then closed his eyes. The outline of a song slipped from his hand and came to rest amid a few Falstaff Winter Beer bottles clinking at his feet with every turn the car took as it travelled northwards.

by Mark Mordue

·    
       *  First published in The Weekend Australian Review, October 22, 2011. Then in The Word, UK, February 2012. Images of Hank Snow courtesy of Wikipedia Commons. Top solo shot a publicity photo for WSM. Group shot of Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys features Audrey Sheppard Williams. Both photos taken in 1951. Hank Wlliams' death car is Creative Commons courtesy of www.angelfire.com. Final image is the entrance to the Hank William Memorial at Oakwood Cemetery, Montgomery, Alabama.

American Frankenstein: Bret Easton Ellis and Imperial Bedrooms

If I were to have a nervous breakdown and come apart, I can see how reading too much Bret Easton Ellis would help me along.

I've spent the past few weeks wandering through his novels, alternately amused by his wit (there is never enough emphasis by critics on how funny he can be), depressed by his detachment, and ultimately disgusted, somehow soiled, by the violence he elaborates with such clinical precision. More than once it crossed my mind that the body of his work is a preparation for suicide: of an individual, and of a culture. His message is simple: either we pull the plug or someone should do it for us.

American Psycho (1991) remains the most famous expression of this bleak and relentless ethos. There's still a "Category One: Restricted" sticker on my copy, which I had to buy shrinkwrapped from over the bookshop counter when it came out, as if it were hardcore pornography. No doubt this arcane process gave the item a degree of groovy cultural voodoo all its own: a marketing triumph in the age of appearances.

In Ellis's books there's certainly an overarching notion that identity is nothing more than a role we adopt to move across the surface of this world. Or, more truly, an interchangeable set of roles we change, masks we wear, as we pass from place to place, scene to scene. Until it's clear we are not anything at all. Which may be why the star of his first novel, Less than Zero (1985), and its much-heralded, just-published sequel, Imperial Bedrooms, is named Clay.

To reinforce its veracity as a saturnine midlife return, Imperial Bedrooms builds on references to Less than Zero. From the start of Imperial Bedrooms there's an emphasis this is Clay's monologue for real and not some secondhand author's version or Hollywood homogenisation. With that in mind, best run for the Hollywood Hills, everybody, because the truth is the Harold Robbins of postmodern oblivion is back in town, as this superb Ellisian opening declares:

They had made a movie about us. The movie was based on a book by someone we knew. The book was a simple thing about four weeks in the city we grew up in and for the most part it was an accurate portrayal. It was labelled fiction but only a few details had been altered and our names weren't changed and there was nothing in it that hadn't happened. For example, there actually had been a screening of a snuff film in that bedroom in Malibu on a January afternoon, and yes, I had walked out onto the deck overlooking the Pacific where the author tried to console me, assuring me that the screams of the children being tortured were faked, but he was smiling as he said this and I had to turn away . . .

As for the morality Ellis espouses -- the antagonism to materialism and narcissism that obsesses him to the point of a fetish (what an irony) -- it once again climaxes in self-dispersing acts of violence, momentary ecstasies that allow us to bathe in a sex-and-death abyss where we finally recognise ourselves. Maybe.

Which means that although Imperial Bedrooms is promoted as a sequel to Less than Zero, what it feels like is a prequel to American Psycho, and part of some larger meta-novel that Ellis has been weaving for an entire career. When this larger vision is glimpsed, it's possible to sense genius in Ellis, however flawed and inconsistent his writing can sometimes be.

The author has been toying with postmodern games that link all his books for some time, culminating in Lunar Park (2005), his mock celebrity memoir. Blurring fact and fiction altogether, the novel is an hallucination of what an autobiography can be. This could be incredibly tiresome, yet another hall of mirrors project that numbs us as we are taken for a wildly distorting turn through literary puns and cross-references. But Ellis saves himself by being amusing, then eerie if overly inclined towards a Stephen King pastiche, and finally distressingly poetic as he reaches out futilely for an imaginary son he has lost.

As a work of self-criticism, Lunar Park begins dutifully enough with an analysis of the opening passages to Ellis's novels up to that point. This also makes Ellis difficult to review since there doesn't seem much left to say about him that he that hasn't already said. I had, for instance, also considered beginning this review with a comparative analysis of the openings to Less than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms. It's the type of comparison that not only seemed obvious but necessary, given Less than Zero has one of the most brilliant openings in modern American fiction: "People are afraid to merge on the freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city . . ." Of course, it's a young Dante wearily entering hell. Once that journey was taken, the been-there, done-that feeling would cast a foreboding over all his novels. Rereading Less than Zero, it's all the more amazing to witness the consistency of it, something Ellis has had trouble repeating as his books have swollen in length and complexity, then bloated into failure with Glamorama (1998), a ramped-up tale of fashion models who become terrorists.

Despite this misstep, it is nonetheless possible to argue Ellis's greatest progress until now has been as a comic writer, as evidenced by his return to form in Lunar Park. But the fact remains Ellis burst out of the box with Less than Zero in a fully formed state and he remains little changed as an American existential stylist whenever he leans toward tragedy. That's devastating to see from the outside; it must be tough to negotiate from his perspective. In some ways you can read Imperial Bedrooms as an attempt to shut the door on that forever.

For all its notoriety American Psycho isn't Ellis's best novel, largely because it's too epic, teeming with everything he has to offer as a writer. The Ellis aesthetic here is more, and more again. To the point where you wish an editor had cut the book in half instead of letting Ellis's Armani-clad serial killer Patrick Bateman dismember yet another body.

Until the torture and murder really set in, however, the biggest shock was how hilarious that book was for the first 100 pages. Rather than blood and guts it featured stockbrokers one-upping each other with the quality of their business cards (fretting over the merits of bone, eggshell and off-white backgrounds), as well as drolly written chapters focused on Bateman's appreciative album reviews of Genesis and Whitney Houston. This is one of Ellis's favourite techniques, placing the comic-book mundane beside the vicious. A running gag where an advertisement for the stage show Les Miserables keeps cropping up is another sardonic example in American Psycho. Ellis loves working off this accumulated detail, until the funny becomes nasty and he buries you.

Like all of Ellis's narrators, Clay included, Bateman is unreliable. In his discussion of American Psycho in Lunar Park, the equally unreliable Ellis observes:

If you actually read the book you could come away doubting that these crimes had occurred. There were large hints that they existed only in Bateman's mind. The murders and torture were in fact fantasies fuelled by his rage and fury about how American life was structured and this had -- no matter the size of his wealth -- trapped him. The fantasies were an escape. This was the book's thesis. It was about society and manners and mores, and not about cutting up women. How could anyone read the book and not see this?

To call American Psycho a pure satire, though, is a little kind, as it's never been clear what Ellis attacks and what he celebrates.

The author plays the complicity card so closely to his chest my suspicion is he's not really sure where he stands. Maybe that's the necessary truth of his oeuvre as he lacerates everything and everyone, including himself.

The rage and fury, the wit that can curdle into something so black-humoured you wonder what the hell you are laughing at; it's not just satirical, it's brutalising.

That Ellis admits having based Patrick Bateman on his own abusive, status-obsessed father just makes this fury all the more palpable.

Imperial Bedrooms once again confirms that rage in Ellis's typically leached pulp-fiction style. It's especially notable in Ellis's commanding grasp of minimalist dialogue, with blankly counterpointing, single-line riffs of conversation that carry on like something out of an Albert Camus novel, then slide off into the scripted camp of an episode of The Young and the Restless (a soapie tone Ellis only seems half in control of). Together with Clay's point of view and alienated scenes that tend to run for barely more than a page at most -- and which Ellis has rightly called "controlled cinematic haiku" -- the amount of white space on the page adds to a deserted feeling, an LA emptiness. Like everything else in Less than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms, this is a highly visual quality, movie-like, voyeuristic, floating.

Unfortunately, the book does not sustain its opening rush, and its plot devices, featuring drug debts, elite prostitution, threatening text messages and a blue Jeep that follows Clay around, seem contrived and false, an over-loud echo of Less than Zero's more muted and believable voids. Ellis has got the voice right in the sequel, but he can't quite catch the old scene's pointless momentum.

And yet there is something strangely spiritual permeating the edges of Ellis's writing in Imperial Bedrooms, a shimmer, spooky and beautiful -- and available in only the slenderest of his passages -- that implies some regard for the haunted and even the transcendent that has always been present in his work.

Indeed, if one were to select a genre for Ellis, modern horror would seem most appropriate, conjuring as it does the attendant clash between technology and spirit, surface and soul. Which of course makes Ellis an essentially romantic artist, and typically death obsessed at that. It's just instead of the mechanistic, Industrial Age clash with science the likes of Mary Shelley originally dealt with in Frankenstein, Ellis is wrestling with late-stage American empire capitalism, television, celebrity, modern drugs, communication and identity itself as products.

It's even possible to say that Ellis's Frankenstein is himself. Which is not so far away from the original theme of Shelley's novel, if you think about it, given that she based her monster on Lord Byron and his tormented image of himself.

Very late in Imperial Bedrooms and flowing on from a deeply disturbing scene featuring a young male and female paid to be beaten and sexually violated at a desert ranch house outside LA, a scene so disturbing I'm not sure I am happy I read it at all, this reverie emerges:

The sky looked scoured, remarkable, a cylinder of light formed at the base of the mountains, rising upward. At the end of the weekend the girl admitted to me she had become a believer as we sat in the shade of the towering hills -- "the crossing place" is what the girl called them, and when I asked her what she meant she said, "this is where the devil lives," and she was pointing at the mountains with a trembling hand but she was smiling now as the boy kept diving into the pool and the welts glistened on his tan back from where I had beaten him. The devil was calling out to her but it didn't scare her any more because she wanted to talk to him now, and in the house was a copy of the book that had been written about us twenty years ago and its neon cover glared from where it rested on the glass coffee table until it was found floating in the pool in the house in the movie colony beneath the towering mountains, water bloated, and then the camera tracks across the desert until we start fading out on the yellowing sky.

Within this strange luminescence one senses another realm that Ellis might enter. A dream world rather than a nightmare, although it is couched in seductively evil terms above and so hardly light yet. The tone of initiation and ritual is similarly hard to miss. One might extend this to the act of writing and reading itself. And ask if Ellis is indeed his father's son, or someone else.

-         -  Mark Mordue

* First published in the Australian Literary Review, August 4^th 2010.

New York Am I

Kenneth Branagh at a You Am I gig?! I had to look twice. It turned out to be an ostrich-like version, but that's New York for you: imitations, echoes, shadows ... of fame, fatal fame. It's been styled into people's DNA.

The Mercury Lounge sings with those dreams, with bar-land ambitions and grungy possibilities. Welcome to New York: the font of opportunity, the home of lost souls.

This is the last night of You Am I's American tour to promote their new RCA release #4 Record. Back home in Australia this group shimmer with critical and commercial success. But when singer-guitarist Tim Rogers, drummer Russell Hopkinson and bassist Andy Kent hit the stage it's a shock to see this much-vaunted group (their admirers include Sonic Youth, the former Soundgarden, Oasis and silverchair). They look battered, ragged, puffy, greasy, pale, just plain unwell and messed up by the road.

A full house of some 200 people, 50/50 American/Australian, greets them enthusiastically. I've made the mistake of saying to Andy Kent earlier at the bar that it's great to hear so many Australian accents. The comment seems to trouble him - why grind away here for an audience they already have back home?

Tim Rogers may have answers to that. He comes on as if James Brown has possessed his spastic, skinny white-boy body, thrusting his arse out, jutting his chin, giving a declarative rap about "showtime". A moustached Russell Hopkinson has a look best described as bottleshop Spanish, with a drumming action indebted to a loopy Keith Moon sensibility that seems to push the songs forward into the audience. Andy Kent's huge bass chords cable the whole beast together.

This is a great three-piece down on its luck. And it takes a few songs before You Am I really start to burn. During that build-up it's interesting to watch how utterly driven Tim Rogers is - the increasing intensity of his physical performance.

From the by-now-standard windmill fury of his guitar style to the gravelly, throaty envelope around the sweeter thinness of his recorded voice ... to the spitting, the wisecracks, the sense of danger that underlines him at every turn, most explicable in a ferocious version of Junk where he almost eats the microphone in two or three gestures that are strangely chilling.

Rogers's energy is phenomenal. He appears to have literally worn Hopkinson and Kent out with his drive, to have chewed up their existential energy and to push on the ghosts of what is left of them.

Rogers tries to use humour to cover or mask what is an extraordinarily angry performance. But it continues to pour out of him.

Trike has much more power than the recorded version but it doesn't shine as a song. It also hints at a wrong turn in Rogers's writing - the '60s affectations, The Who meets The Jam fandom that has taken the band away from the direct and raw muscularity of their Sound As Ever debut.

It is as if he has gotten too smart, too embroiled in his love of pop history. He's still a brilliant songwriter, of course - studious, encyclopedic, ruthless as a craftsman, but he seems to be commenting all the time, pointing and observing rather than feeling. He's losing the centre of the music, himself.

Perhaps that's the source of the inexplicable rage that has always been a part of Rogers's mocking stage persona. After the show I see him sitting alone downstairs with a black glass of Guinness in hand, looking morose. I ask him, "What's the matter - you look down in the mouth?"

Rogers tells me and repels me at the same time with the comment, "Everybody has their problems, you know." I can't tell if it's an appeal for intimacy or a snarl.

It's been a great night. Powerful, intelligent music from a band quite clearly injured by their own quest to make it in America.

Tim Rogers must wonder where it's going to end.

- Mark Mordue

* First published Sydney Morning Herald/The Age, December 24, 1998
+ Image of You Am I taken from a promotional poster for You Am I's #4 record. More images and details at http://www.posterlane.com/?page_id=140