Honesty

No doubt Art Pepper was, in many ways a terrible human being – Straight Life, his autobiography attests to that. But he is also a peculiarly honest one – not because he faces himself, admits to his shortcomings and tells us all about himself; rather, he is honest despite himself, as though honesty were a faculty separate from conscious will, intention and all that.

Honesty, in Straight Life, dictated to and transcribed by his wife of his later years, is no longer a moral category. It's as though the act of speaking were more honest than Pepper. He spoke and – this book came out, this book that counts against him in every way, that speaks, more readily in some sense than he could, of his massive shortcomings and failures and self-delusions.

It's as though it allowed one whole part of him to become transparent. You can see through him; can see - what? A pathetic soul. A despicable one. And the power of an honesty than seems to have nothing to do with him.

Whence the strange power of Straight Life … a book written against its author – a book written (spoken) against everything that was good and life-preserving about him. Written against himself? He died before he was completed. As though it wouldn't allow him to remain in a world in which it was. It took up his room, pushed him out …

And isn't there something that ought to be said here about Pepper's heroin addiction? About what it gave him? Confidence instead of desperate inadequacy. A warm, settled feeling instead of ceaseless stress. And doesn't he say from the first that he knew it would lead to his arrest and imprisonment, knew it would draw him into utter degradation, but knew, too, that it was fate, it was made for him, that he'd found what he'd wanted all along?

Perhaps it was heroin that made his prose (dictated) gossamer thin, pretty much see-through. That it turned his life into a sheet of glass through which something could be seen, but what? The murmur of speech that rolls on without you. The murmur of speech (of writing) that says everything about you, everything you can say and more than that, much more. Even as it wears away its referent, even as it leaves the world behind and seems to wander in its own corridors, fascinated with nothing, lost …