WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN, A Problem

William T. Vollmann is a big problem. Even people who are unintimidated by Tim (so to speak) are pretty wary of Vollmann. Incredibly gifted in an accessible way, Vollmann is both an artist and a writer who is on the surface a journalist in the purest sense of reporting on life. He produces huge books that are supposed to be impossible to publish and yet are, to great acclaim, each written in a clear beautiful way about subjects that are so nasty and taboo -- like killing street people with Drano -- that most people will have nothing to do with them. Yet he is as morally direct, as careful in what he does (which also includes breaking taboos), as some religious ascetic of long practice. Maybe that’s what he is.

Originally I was attracted by reviews of his seven-part (incomplete) series on American (the continent, not the country) authochthonous people, partly because instead of imposing himself on some poor reservation people in all the dangerous glamour of their lives, he went up to the arctic and camped in a most risky manner. He went “under” today’s proprietary tribes. He’s an eater of suffering. Then I read “Rainbow Stories” which is more about his real life and it stood my hair on end. I read “Rising Up and Rising Down,” the abridged version, because I worry about violence. (Thank you, Interlibrary Loan. There was one borrowable copy in the state.) I just finished reading “Poor People,” which is a straightforward bricolage of interviews and visits around the world, aided by an army of sometimes scandalized and sometimes terrified interpreters, and which is bound with 128 photos he took.

Reading Vollmann doesn’t change me, but it sharpens my own issues and challenges whether I’m really rising to what I believe. This is the opposite of being in the ministry, where many things are pre-determined and the denomination tries to guide and protect. Solitary tap-dancing on the ice is quite different and only a few people understand. In particular they don’t “get” how I can stay in one place to write, fairly secluded, but maybe they don’t understand that I’ve been packratting experience all my life, which is also like Vollmann. He was born the year I was a junior in college, doing what my family and teachers expected by living in a gothic stone dorm with high income people and taking conventional classes. But the contents of some of those classes -- moral and artistic -- are what make Vollmann so interesting to me.

“Poor People” is quite accessible. He’s talking about rock-bottom poverty, bare survival that is just slipping over the edge into death. I would guess there is no one around here that poor, but I haven’t looked. Maybe “street people” in Browning, though most of them could step out of their lives if they would accept help. Like Vollmann, I’ve asked them why they live drifting around those alleys. They say they love the freedom and the camaraderie. When the weather is fairly warm and they can get their fav numbing drug, it’s an okay life. There’s a shelter they can go to, run by a former employee of ours, a man I worked alongside for a decade.

Portland had a LOT of poor people and I intersected with them now and then. Street kids with puppies on a piece of twine. People with nonfunctional minds packing cats and garbage into an SRO hotel room. Then there was the bag lady who managed to live most of the winter in the ground floor ladies’ room of the Portlandia Building. She wrapped herself and her shopping cart in sheets of white plastic, so people called her “The Bride.” The security guard told me he let her stay at night because he felt sorry for her.

I was cashiering in the Permit Center and used that bathroom. I didn’t mind her until she began to intrude on employee conversations and advise us about how to run the city. Then I turned her in because she bugged me. Two belligerent old women -- that was us. I saw her getting on a bus once. They told me she had a daughter who was always trying to recapture her and make her live properly. She had money. She just liked her life on the street. As my mother was fond of saying, “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.” (She owned her house, had a good pension and lived to 89 with no major health crisis.)

Vollmann confronts poor people and minimal living -- or maybe totally different and highly intricate cultural developments like his current book on femininity and Noh theatre -- with a formidable mind, a shuttling loom of ideas and patterns that he is happy to share because there’s always plenty more where that came from. One of Tim’s boys is of the opinion that good writing is when you can look up the writer’s ass and see his or her tonsils. (Mine were removed long ago -- I don’t know what that means.) This is true of Vollmann in one way except that for all his veracity and detail, he is curiously opaque. Maybe you see past his tonsils and out his mouth: he is a tube.

You can ask about Vollman’s biography and consider what it means to be raised around universities and move all the time, but I’m not sure what good it would do you. You can know he has a young daughter whom he takes to his art studio, an old commercial site where rough floaters camp and defecate against his walls, and he asks her to shake hands with these campers, whom he insists are welcome or at least will not be evicted, but then he and his daughter go inside and both scrub their hands well. I’d love to hear that daughter and Tim’s daughter talking together. The daughters, like their fathers, have an age gap of about a decade.

The publishing world that is collapsing across the continent, dominated by six “heritage” Manhattan firms mostly owned by conglomerates, has little or nothing to do with this kind of writing and does not publish it. The closest the media comes to this kind of work is the simplified versions that we get in those TV series based on extraordinary men who have some problematic gift that makes them never settle. To the people around them, they are often a big problem.