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Maynard meanders…

This one’s only for my core fans (if any). Otherwise, don’t bother.

Anybody know who Jack Woodford was? No, you don’t. And no reason why you should. He was a prolific author of pulp sex novels in the middle of the 20th century. They sold well enough to keep Woodford in the middle class. I doubt they’re worth reading, and Woodford wouldn’t tell you otherwise.

However, Jack Woodford was a vital inspiration to a fair number of truly important writers. He wrote a book titled “Trial and Error” which was a practical guide to writing and selling fiction. It has been praised by such luminaries as Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Jerry Pournelle, Upton Sinclair, Donald Henderson Clark, etc. etc. etc. (Since Bradbury is a particular favorite of Tammy, I’ll post his quote: “Jack Woodford’s ‘Trial and Error’ was the first book on writing I ever read, at the age of fifteen. He said all the right things and said them clearly. I stayed afloat and got my work done because of him.”)

Thus it was that Woodford came on my radar. And when I learned he had written an autobiography, I knew I had to get a copy. I found someone had reprinted the autobiography, along with “Trial and Error” and some other Woodford work.

So now I’m about halfway through the autobiography, and I’m completely fascinated. Woodford is one of the most disagreeable curmudgeons I’ve ever been exposed to. He was born in 1894, and he wrote this autobiography in 1962, and he’s seen enough of the world to be disgusted. And he expresses his disgust most delightfully.

I appreciate the concept of an autobiography as an indulgent manner of trying to make sense of one’s stupid life. A worthwhile autobiography offers an outlook that transcends its indulgence and gives the rest of us food for thought. Woodford has done that.

Although he hasn’t used the word “libertarian” (at least, not yet), that’s pretty much where Woodford is coming from. Maybe that’s why I’m sympathetic. He recognizes a world in which people seek political power so they can control others. It’s a political trend he’s observed as ascendant over the course of his lifetime. Woodford’s tale is, among other things, a timely reminder that the cancerous toxicity of today’s stupid and invasive politics are nothing new.

Let me quote from a bit of controversial text. You may not agree with Woodford’s position in this passage. I’m not sure that I agree. I can easily tell you why he’s “wrong”. On the other hand, I see his dream. Rightly or wrongly, I want to agree.

Cutting back, to avoid the monotony of continuity in the writing of memorabilia, I am constantly intimidated against writing freely of ye olde tyme. I am intimidated because in order to do this I must picture a country that was once free; and only very old people alive today will believe that this country, now to brow-beaten with brainwashing and hedged in with malum-prohibitum laws, was ever free.

How am I going to make you younger people believe, for instance, that in my teens you got heroin like this-a-way.

I went to a drugstore on North Clark Street [in Chicago]. I asked for some heroin. The man gave me a little brown bottle with uncut heroin tablets in it, direct from the pharmaceutical company. He had no idea who I was, nor did he care. North Clark Street in those days, down near the Loop, on the north side of the river, was catch-as-catch-can. A secondary sporting-house district about a third the size of the main one around Twenty-second and Armour. Most drugstores would have refused to sell it to a person in his teens. They would have sold it only on prescription, and to doctors. The cost of the bottle: fifty cents. Uncut heroin. Absolutely pure heroin. That was just previous, almost immediately previous, to the passing of the Harrison Anti-narcotics Act [of 1914], which enormously increased the use of heroin, as the passing of laws against prostitution made prostitutes of the entire female population.

I got the same bottle for the same price there on numerous occasions afterward, and later in Racine, Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and elsewhere. I do wish I could remember how many pills were in the bottle, but I cannot. There were not less than twenty-five, and there may have been fifty. There could have been more. I remember that the bottles lasted some time.

One cent for a fix of heroin, in its pure state. That is what it would cost today, approximately a cent a tablet, except for the police-state antics and the reformers. The police-state antics touching it are pitiful. A narcotics bureau so understaffed that it couldn’t possibly do anything but knock off some chiselers in the racket once in a while to make things look good, while anyone who wants it can anywhere in the United States get heroin from the big operators without the top operators ever being bothered; only those who chisel on the biggest get rapped over the knuckles;. Like all other law enforcement, it is a complete fake.

(In the wake of the Harrison Act, the Feds, among other things, started jailing doctors for prescribing opiates. One doctor who was convicted appealed to the Supreme Court, in Linder v. United States. The Court unamimously overturned his conviction, noting that the government had overstepped its Constitutional limitations. The opinion of the court states, “Obviously, direct control of medical practice in the states is beyond the power of the federal government.” This was a time, you understand, that the Constitution was still respected as defining a government of limited powers.)

Woodford goes on to speak of the decrepit aspects of the red-light district. The low-life hookers, the bar fights. The filth. No, he doesn’t romanticize the era as a Garden of Eden. But in contrast to today (“today” being 1962)…

…it was free…gorgeously, humanly, realistically free. The jewel without price long gone from us now.

…You lousy sheep, do you realize you voted freedom out of this country?

He continues on in some detail about the effect of heroin on his life, and the lives of others he witnessed. And he asks the reasonable question: Have we, on the whole, made the world a better place with our war on drugs? Have we solved more problems than we created? Have we forfeited out liberties and invited the power of government into our lives, and at the end of the day we’re no better off for what we lost? I think you can make a powerful argument.

Woodford’s work here is not a political diatribe per se. It’s a rambling, meandering autobiography. But it covers a lot of life philosophy, some of which is political.

Woodford is describing a world that, I admit, I would like to live in. Or at least to visit, so that I might understand it better. But it’s a world that moves ever-farther away. For better or worse, reading books like this is as close to a visit as I’m likely to get.

There are ideals herein that should be, if not embraced, at least remembered. This book is almost unknown, and will remain so. In posting this, I aspire to share it with one person out there in the void. If I manage that, maybe I’ll have justified my existence for another day.