Trying to write a book review about essays in which one of our preeminent social critics, Greil Marcus, explores why he writes criticism … well, I’ve already mirrored myself into infinity or oblivion. But perhaps that’s a worthy task. Marcus's short in pages (87) if long in contemplation What Nails It — part of the Why I Write series from Yale University Press, based on the annual Windham-Campbell Lectures — makes an immediate claim for the ineffable dropping into a writer’s noggin. He writes, “I live for those moments when something appears on the page as if of its own volition — as if I had nothing to do with what is now looking me in the face.”
Of course, what stares Marcus in the face during his writing process leads to classics like his debut (not counting — or discounting — his journalism in Rolling Stone, Creem, etc.), Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music and his second book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. Both drew musical murder boards that looped lines connecting unlikely persons and traditions, upending any sense of high and low culture; for just one example, 16th century insurrectionist and self-proclaimed King of New Jerusalem John of Leiden meets Sex Pistol punk Johnny (Lydon) Rotten.
In What Nails It, Marcus explains his method this way: “What I ended up doing with my life: rewriting the past, pursuing an obsession with secret histories, with stories untold — with what, to me, were deep, fraternal connections between people who never met or even heard of each other.” He has a very personal reason to think/act/live in such a way, as this book makes clear, for his own origin story was long clouded. His bio father, Greil Gerstley, died during WWII (of all things, Herman Wouk based The Caine Mutiny on the incident) and Marcus was born six months later. It’s a story that took him years to piece together, and so memory becomes a construct. As he so concretely phrases it, “We all have memories of things we didn’t experience: cultural memories that have taken up residence in our minds, built houses, filled them with furniture and appliances, and commanded that we live in them.”