ABOUT History of America

First published by The Coach House Press in 1968 in an edition of 1000 copies. Designed and illustrated by Ken Coupland. Typeset in linotype Helvetica by Victor Coleman. History of America was, in fact, Bill Hutton's second book, following The Artists' Workshop mimeo edition of The Strange Odyssey of Howard Pow and other stories (Detroit 1967).

After years of harassment by the Buffalo, New York police narcotics squad - chronicled in Leslie Fiedler's Being Busted (Secker & Warburg, London,1970 ) - Bill Hutton succumbed to mental illness, was institutionalized by his family in the mid Seventies, and has not been heard of since.

"I think Bill Hutton moves me especially because he seems the first writer I have ever encountered whose basic sensibility has been totally remade by television, as that of my own generation was remade by movies. He further suggests to me that the most widely shared experience of ordinary Americans, including that of many protesters against addiction to 'hard drugs,' the whole enterprise of falling into TV is quite as delirious, disruptive and dangerous as any trip on LSD, even the particularly bad trip of Bill Hutton. But that bad trip, Hutton has also taught me, taken us all to the same place at which Mark Twain arrived, without the aid of television and on no psychedelic stronger than thirty Cuban cigars a day, which is to say, to the true, the authentic America: that nightmare from which we cannot awake, but which we would gladly forget if there were no writers who insist, like Bill Hutton, on taking us with them a little way at least toward that ultimate terror of reality from which there is always the possibility of never returning at all."

"In History of America what we are given in the strange fragmentary chapters, half-essay, half-poem, is a vision of the past and future of the United States ... its character and destiny as might be portrayed if a fifth-grade public-school text book had first been turned into a low-budget TV series, and then been passed through the mind of a beholder high on acid."

"Hutton might have been, I suppose, in an age where it was simpler to be both funny and bitter, no hybrid, but exclusively - let's say - Mark Twain. He comes out of the same central America where Samuel Clemens achieved his magical transformation, and speaks the same colloquial tongue - half apologetic, half proud of itself. But the shadow of Ernest Hemingway had already fallen across that world before Hutton began to write; and many of the stories in Strange Odyssey sound therefore like Twain via Hemingway ... His angle of vision always remains that of a small boy sitting as close to the TV screen as he can possibly get without falling through to the other side."

"Drugs are, in fact, very much a part of Bill Hutton's magic' world; but they operate inside that world's other parameters: the threat of jail, the shadow of death, and the joys of released sound and movement. At the point when he was putting The Strange Odyssey of Howard Pow together, Bill Hutton was moved to cry out in protest, 'Billy Ziegfeld* is not my name!' But in a certain sense that is precisely his name: because he has always operated out of a peculiarly contemporary pop-consciousness into which everything for which Flo Ziegfeld once stood has entered in hallucinated and comic form. Bill Hutton is also Billy Ziegfeld and Billy Twain and Billy Hemingway."

- Leslie Fiedler in Esquire, Aug.1972

*For a little more than a year, circa 1965-66, Bill Hutton ran a weekend dance club in Buffalo, New York called Billy Ziegfeld's Heaven, which was ultimately harassed out of business by the Buffalo constabulary.

Introduction to Bill Hutton's The Strange Odyssey of Howard Pow and other stories

I first met Bill Hutton in the spring of 1964, my first few weeks in Detroit, through the painter Jim McCracken, who had grown up with Billy in Birmingham, Michigan. "He's a writer," Mac had said, "and he's crazy as hell." So Mac brought him by my place, we all got stoned together time and time again, and Hutton would flip everybody out with his instant improvisations, beating his foot on the floor for measure and rattling off clumpy lines of ridiculous unrhymed silly song-verse. Everything Hutton did in those days was funny. One day he bought a motorcycle, an old Indian model, and in the week before he gave up on it completely he walked around covered with grease and dirt from head to toe, muttering about that fucking bike.' The first day he had it he got hit by a car on Prentis, the car traveling at 10 mph and Hutton not much faster.

He brought me over some stories to look at just before he left for Nantucket Island for the summer, to work on the Nantucket Light and learn the trade of novelists: journalism. The stories were straight Hemingway choppy prose, and very serious,' - but not at all a representation of Bill Hutton' or anyone else of flesh and blood. They showed the mark of college writing classes and the innocence of a young I-want-to-be-a-writer' consciousness, and finally weren't very interesting. I was pretty disappointed in the work and told Billy that, but he was gone too soon for us to get together and talk about the writing.

When Hutton returned to Detroit from Nantucket in the fall, he enrolled at Wayne State University as a journalism student, still believing that that was how you learned to be a writer, just like old Papa. He came by looking for something to read, and I laid a copy of Richard Brautigan's Confederate General at Big Sur and some Brautigan stories on him, thinking to make him aware of a new possibility for expressing himself as he was. I think that did it - Hutton came back the next week with "My Father. Joe Burns," a reworking of one of the old stories but now very much what Bill Hutton was all about. "Saloon" (not included in this collection) came next I think, and after that Hutton could not be stopped. By the time he moved to Buffalo at the end of the summer of 1965, Bill Hutton was a writer, we had published two of his stories in The Journal (Wayne State's undergrad magazine) and the first issue of WORK, he had read (and cracked people up) a number of times at [Artist Workshop] readings, and he was writing me from Buffalo that he was excited to get the chance to write a lot there.

The point of these remarks is that Bill Hutton has developed into a supremely intelligent and funny writer - his stories are particularly interesting for me because they are so true to what the writer is as a human being. I hear Billy's voice throughout these stories, his own voice, and the writing is certainly clean enough to make that sense come straight through it. Some of the stories in the first half of [Strange Odyssey] (including some real masterpieces, e.g. the "Joe Burns" story and the tale of Homegenize Dextros) are not as together as the others - I think it's evident that Hutton was working his way through a number of various approaches to writing and had, by the second half, found the stance and method he had been working toward. "This is a book of innocence," he says in the dedication, and these stories work with a peculiar American innocence, and a particularly contemporary innocence, that has received no similar treatment from other young writers. The stories are honest stories, they are not cynical like the 'pop art' they seem close to, and what makes them convincing is that Hutton really believed in America before his disillusionment set in.

Older people want to know now what's gone wrong, why are the kids so disrespectful of them, why don't they want to be just like us,' and I think Hutton demonstrates in this book exactly what's gone wrong, exactly what kind of bullshit people have tried to pass off on their kids, and exactly why the whole green deal' isn't working any more. American culture has swiftly been made into a huge garbage heap, reeking of greed and exploitation and inhumanity, and as soon as kids now can get away from the spell of their parents and their parents' television sets they begin to see just how much they've been lied to. But up to that point they believe in America, they don't even question what they're told, and when they finally come to see, with their eyes, what has happened to the dream land they were led to believe in, they want nothing more to do with it. Howard Pow and Homogenize Dextros represent exaggerations of the innocent youth, but the basic sense of their predicament is given accurate expression in this book.

I could go on with this at great length, but I don't feel that I need to now - I mean Hutton has done a job here that is more convincing, and much more interesting, than anything more I could say. Good fiction is always more interesting than any kind of explication, anyway, and I would use this book to say whatever it is I would be moved to say about America now. And, more than that, it's the funniest thing I've read in a long time. We need that - like the blues people say, "It's laughin' to keep from cryin', and cryin' just don't get you nowhere at all."

John Sinclair
Detroit
April 17th, 1967

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ISBN 1-55245-977-2

Coach House Books, 1998