by BJW Nashe
William T. Vollmann never ceases to amaze those of us who have eagerly followed his career since he first stormed onto the literary scene during the early 1990s. The indefatigable Vollmann, arguably the most prolific and provocative American writer working today, earned lasting fame when he won the National Book Award in 2005 for his epic World War Two novel, Europe Central. Still barely into his mid-fifties, and working at the peak of his powers despite certain health setbacks (including a series of minor strokes), he is considered a leading candidate for a future Nobel Prize. During the past few months, he has provided us with a couple of brand new revelations.
In a characteristically brilliant essay in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine, Vollmann revealed that he has been under FBI surveillance for many years. In fact, he was once considered a suspect in two high profile criminal investigations — first in the case of the Unabomber killings, and second in regard to the deadly anthrax mailings that occurred shortly after the 9-11 attacks.
Hot on the heels of reviewing his FBI file, Vollmann has now come out with a new book of photography, featuring a series of self-portraits of the author posing in the guise of his female alter-ego, who he refers to as “Dolores.” Vollmann explains that he has been exploring this transvestite persona for some time now, with considerable passion and fervor. The Book of Dolores, which was released on October 29, is a visual record of these explorations. Often garish and bizarre, other times rather demure, Vollmann photographed as “Dolores” appears in various moods and settings. We see her perched on a stool, grinning widely, wearing a rather conservative dress and wig. We see her in a leather corset, brandishing a whip. We see her glaring through a mask of smeared makeup, as if she just walked off the set of Pink Flamingos. We see him/her in mid-transformation, sitting in front of a mirror applying eyeliner.
Now, for those of us who know Vollmann’s work, none of this is altogether surprising. It is merely a continuation of the sort of edgy, obsessive, and non-compromising artistic engagement that has propelled his entire career. It makes perfect sense to us that Vollmann — who has written so widely about topics such as sex, drugs, prostitution, poverty, and war — should be out on the streets challenging official notions of gender and identity. And it seems to be an odd indication of the current state of the American nation, that one of our greatest writers is wandering around late at night in his current hometown of Sacramento, California dressed up as a transvestite, sloshed on bourbon and various other substances, cavorting with the homeless addicts and whores and alcoholics he tends to befriend — all the while being tracked by FBI agents who think he may be a “dangerous subversive” possibly linked to terrorist activities.
So it goes with William T. Vollmann these days. If any other writer began publishing photos of themselves in drag, they might be criticized as posers involved in a publicity stunt. Not so with Vollmann. He has been way out there on the edge for over three decades now, exploring some of the most treacherous areas in the world. The cross-dressing excursions are among his tamer exploits — probably best seen as a way for him to settle down a bit and get in touch with his feminine side. Still, it’s rough out there. Vollmann has indicated that he often gets harassed when he goes out in public as “Dolores.” But the author is known to carry guns. Anyone who gets too carried away will be in for a bit of shock to find that this particular drag queen is packing heat.
Vollmann’s literary credibility is unimpeachable. He first gained wide recognition with The Rainbow Stories, a series of documentary fictions (or creative reporting) taken directly from the front lines of urban American life. They are based on Vollmann’s experiences with San Francisco’s street culture, where he spent much of the 1980s living in the Haight-Ashbury and Tenderloin districts. Few other writers at the time were willing to spend time with street drunks and prostitutes and drug addicts and Nazi skinheads, as well as hospital x-ray technicians and industrial performance artists such as Survival Research Labs. Here was an author eager to show us a side of contemporary American life that rarely makes it onto the pages of quality literature.
Vollmann was just getting started. He has gone on to publish twenty books or so, many of them 700-1000 pages in length. This incredible output includes four volumes of his “Seven Dreams” project — a cycle of visionary novels delving into problematic encounters of European imperialists with Native American populations throughout North America’s tumultuous history. Vollmann’s infamous “Prostitution Trilogy,” consisting of Whores for Gloria, The Butterfly Stories, and The Royal Family, is based on the author’s personal experiences (sexual, social, psychological) with prostitutes in the San Francisco Tenderloin, as well as in Southeast Asian locales such as Thailand and Cambodia. Some readers are troubled by Vollmann’s obsession with prostitutes, yet he writes about them with compassion and tenderness, and claims that he admires them as much as any other human beings he encounters. As for their exploitation, he states that we are all basically prostitutes, who must render certain services for money. The real problem for sex workers, he insists, is their illegal status, which keeps them unprotected on dangerous city streets.
Vollmann’s most ambitious undertaking by far is his seven volume, 3,300 page treatise on violence called Rising Up and Rising Down. This text, written over a period of 25 years, analyzes a multitude of historical conflicts and regimes in order to develop a “moral calculus” that can be used to evaluate the uses and abuses of warfare in various circumstances.
Vollmann has also published nonfiction works on American social issues, including a personal inquiry into poverty, Poor People, as well as Riding the Rails, an account of his adventures hopping freight trains with our dwindling hobo population. Most recently, he has produced a sprawling study of the Mexican-American borderlands, called Imperial. Plus he has branched out into aesthetics with a moving appreciation of Japanese Noh Theater, called Kissing the Mask.
Less visible, but nonetheless significant, is Vollmann’s growing body of the artwork. He is an accomplished photographer who has amassed a large archive based on his wide-ranging travels and obsessions. He also produces hand drawings and paintings, and has become a proficient engraver. He uses these self-taught skills to produce hand-made, illuminated books (a la William Blake) that are sold to private collectors. Alternately blasphemous and devotional, frequently erotic in nature, these assemblages, like most of his writing, tend to focus on the beauty of raw carnality as a way of striving for spiritual wisdom.
So much for “writer’s block” or “artistic paralysis.” This resume is enough to make even the most hard-working among us feel like slackers. Vollmann is a rare creative dynamo, a volcanic eruption of talent and ambition. Yet he remains a humble man who is not driven primarily by ego, and who seems unconcerned with his image or his sales figures. He is also willing to put his own safety on the line in order to get close to the story he wants to tell. At times he has worked as a journalist and correspondent, writing articles from a mind-boggling array of dangerous, forbidding places. There is an ongoing joke that if you can point to a war-torn hell-hole or disaster zone anywhere on the map, Vollmann is willing to go there and write about it. He is as fearless as Hemingway, without the macho posturing. Sir Richard Burton, the great Victorian writer and explorer (and translator of The Kama Sutra and The Thousand and One Nights) might be seen as Vollmann’s nearest ancestor. Yet Vollmann shares none of Burton’s imperial loyalties. He has roamed Afghanistan with mujahideen freedom fighters. He has nearly frozen to death at the North Pole. He has smoked crack with the denizens of the Tenderloin. He has nearly been killed, and seen two of his colleagues die, when the jeep they were driving in Bosnia struck a land mine. He has rescued an underage prostitute from a gangster pimp in Cambodia. He has paddled down the toxic, poisonous New River in Imperial Valley. He has risked radiation poisoning in post-quake Fukushima. He has had thugs in New York assault him and hold him down on the ground to put cigarettes out on his bare arms.
Vollmann is not your typical literary genius, holed up in his study in Brooklyn, crafting careful pieces for The New Yorker by day, then venturing out in the evening to dine in trendy bistros around town. When Vollmann does go out for a meal with other novelists, he tends to shock them with explicit descriptions of sex and violence. Would you care for a ten-minute discourse on cunnilingus to go along with your appetizer? Not that Vollmann wholly eschews the “famous author” game. He might torment his publishers by refusing to make substantial cuts to his lengthy manuscripts, but he dutifully heads off on the obligatory book reading tours. He used to start off his readings by pulling out a gun and firing it (loaded with blanks) up at the ceiling. Then he would launch into a passage from Fathers and Crows about the art of torture among the Iroquois, or a true tale from The Rainbow Stories about SF skinheads killing a sheep. One well-known photograph of Vollmann from this time period shows a young man with thick glasses, a cheap haircut, and a sad expression on his face, holding a pistol up to his head. By comparison, the recent transvestite photos are rather quaint, and almost happy.
So there is much to discuss about William T. Vollmann’s life as a great American writer — more than we can begin to tackle in a single blog post, or even an entire book, for that matter. He is controversial. He challenges us to confront the truth about violence and addiction and death and injustice in the world. He is a master stylist, a virtuoso with the English language. He is a tireless researcher and a fearless traveler. He is committed to telling us the truth about the invisible class of people out there — the poor and downtrodden and addicted — we’d often rather not be bothered with. And now we learn that for the past two decades he has been investigated by the FBI as a potential terrorist suspect.
In the essay for Harper’s Magazine, called “Life as a Terrorist,” Vollmann refers to the people who have been investigating him as “the Unamericans.” He had good reason to assume he had been under surveillance. To prove his assumption correct involved filing a Freedom of Information Act request, an appeal, and a lawsuit. Finally, he was able to see his FBI file — or at least, 294 pages out of the 785 total pages reviewed by the Bureau per his request. The Bureau decided to keep roughly 500 pages out of his reach. In any case, Vollmann’s FBI file allowed him him to make a number of witty and trenchant observations about the absurdities of our current security state.
Vollman first showed up on the Unamerican radar screen back in 1990, when Jock Sturges, a well-known photographer in San Francisco, was raided because he was known to take photos of nude subjects, including children. Ken Miller, a street photographer who was a good friend and frequent collaborator with Vollmann, was also raided, since he was renting a flat downstairs from Sturges. The Unamericans located a draft of Vollmann’s introduction to one of Sturges’s photography books saved on Sturges’s computer. Both Sturges and Miller were eventually exonerated, but Vollmann was drawn into the whole “kiddie porn” investigation, which bothered him enough to show up voluntarily at FBI offices armed with French Impressionist nudes, which he used to help make the case for the innocence of him and his friends.
In 2002, Vollmann was detained by agents at the Mexican-American border, and held for a couple of hours until he could be “checked out.” This happened again in 2005. This time he was detained for seven hours. His belongings were searched, and he was interrogated and fingerprinted and made to sit in silence facing a wall for long stretches of time.
The recent review of his FBI file showed Vollmann that he had been “turned in” to the FBI as a Unabomber suspect by an “anonymous source” whom Vollmann refers to as Ratfink. The reason for this? Simply a sense that “anti-growth and anti-progress themes persist throughout each Vollmann work.” Evidently that’s all it takes for the FBI to decide that you are worth investigating for the next several decades of your life. Ratfink told the FBI that Vollmann might be the Unabomber strictly based on literary criticism, and because Vollmann’s books might be seen as “Anti-American.” Even if the literary criticism were accurate, the resulting investigation would still be problematic. But Vollmann never takes an anti-America stance in any of his work. He expresses no overt political messages at all.
Vollmann’s FBI file largely consists of agents combing through his dense books for “clues,” and trying to make sense of his dizzying travels. Here is an example Vollmann quotes to illustrate the absurd results:
“UNABOMBER’s moniker FC may correlate with title of VOLLMANN’s largest work, novel Fathers and Crows. That novel reportedly best exemplifies VOLLMANN’s anti-progress, anti-industrialist themes/beliefs/value systems and VOLLMANN, himself, has described it as his most difficult work.”
To think that while Al Qaeda was setting up functioning cells on U.S. soil, we had FBI agents busying themselves with an 800 page novel set in 17th century Canada dealing with conflicts between Catholic priests and Native American tribes… Well, it boggles the mind. The agents somehow seized on the fact that “[characters] in this book resort to terrorist activity and torture to drive out the French missionaries.”
This investigation would be merely funny, except for the fact that any time an innocent citizen is placed under surveillance, the reality of the situation is no joke. Vollmann’e entire life ended up being scrutinized (and the scrutiny is still ongoing). His movements have been tracked, his mail opened, his past explored, his privacy violated, all for no reason other than loose interpretations of his books. The Unamericans have been running Social Security traces and credit checks. They have listed him as “armed and dangerous.” They have even staked out his house, which he shares with his wife, who works as an oncologist, and their young daughter. They have interrogated people who’ve known Vollmann. They have most likely bugged his phone.
The real Unabomber, Ted Kaczinski, was captured in April 1996. The Vollmann investigation, however, churned on. Once they’ve got you in their sights, the Unamericans are not going to let you simply slip away. Vollmann notes that his FBI file, following his 2005 border detention, indicates a pending terrorist investigation. Vollmann discovers that several years after Ratfink denounced him, another individual phoned the TV show “America’s Most Wanted” to do the same thing. This “source” evidently thought Vollmann’s handwriting “resembled the anthrax letters” that were being mailed around after 9-11.
Even now, Vollmann observes that his mail is still tampered with. Sometimes it does not arrive at all. People have told him that his refusal to use the Internet, or credit cards, or a cell phone, probably only makes him seem more suspicious to the Unamericans. Vollmann pokes fun at the whole investigation, but he is deeply concerned about what it means for American liberty. Yet he is never mean-spirited in his essay, and he doesn’t paint himself as a victim. He even hopes that the agents studying him will somehow become endeared to him. He writes:
“I hereby imagine an attractive, thoughtful G-woman who from painstaking study of my Homeland Security file has come to realize that I love America; like her, I am a patriot and I am loyal; therefore she begs my forgiveness and comes to love me.”
This great rapprochement is not likely to happen. Now the FBI have The Book of Dolores to peruse at length. But then, the FBI is no doubt already well aware of Vollmann’s transvestite vision quests, often undertaken with the aid of alcohol and drugs. Agents have probably been following Vollmann around Sacramento on his cross-dressing jaunts. (Somewhere J. Edgar Hoover is smiling.) The authorities in that town are already irked by the fact that Vollmann owns an art studio downtown, a former Mexican restaurant with a large parking lot where he allows homeless people to camp out.
Currently touring with his new book, Vollmann announces to crowds, “I am a happy heterosexual male.” He goes on to explain that he was interested in writing about a transgender prostitute named Dolores, so he decided to try and live like the character for a while. Think of it as method acting applied to writing. But this has by no means been his first time in drag. Some 20-30 years ago, back in the Tenderloin, Vollmann was letting transvestite prostitutes dress him up just for fun. Adopting the “Dolores” alter-ego was a more sustained exercise, however:
“I, who have loved and admired women,” says Vollmann, “and who wished to know what a woman feels, have learned much from wearing women’s clothes… I know that femininity is in part a performance. The woman who makes up her face before going out into the world, who holds her handbag in a certain way, and takes mincing, echoing steps in her high heels is expressing one category of femininity.”
Vollmann has never fit into any established stereotypes of the “handsome male.” Put him in a dress and a wig and makeup, and he does not turn into a supermodel. Yet Vollmann’s “Dolores” persona functions much the same way as his writing does. Both challenge us to rethink our notions of ”gender” and “beauty,” and to understand that the people and places that society considers ugly and repulsive and profane are often precisely where we need to look for that which is profoundly beautiful and even sacred.
Whether the Unamericans at the FBI or Homeland Security can ever comprehend such a thing is highly doubtful.